Well it seems like forever since I last wrote a blog…

…and so to mark the end of the mountain snow season and celebrate the rapidly arriving summer here in California, the selection of this week’s installment of Image of the Week; A Critique is very apt.  Already, to some readers, I may have given the game away to the location of the image How Long?; anyone familiar with California highway 395 no doubt can probably place the rough locale of the shot.

Taken from the gallery Yes! I am a long way from home!, How Long? was shot on the move whilst driving South from Mammoth Mountain in late January 2011. While the precise location is not known, it is somewhere between Lone Pine and Bishop, California, and at a best guess, close to Big Pine or south thereof. Looking Southwestwards, the imposing peaks of the Sierra Nevada are clearly visible, but also the scrub of the high desert that fills the valley in which highway 395 passes through.

The contrast between alpine and desert environments is stark; the Sierra are infamous for big snows in winter, but also cause a huge rain shadow effect upon the land to the east, as the Pacific storms dump all of their precipitation due to Orographic Lift over the Sierra as they pass West to East. Orographic Lift and the resulting katabatic winds (in layman’s terms, winds that warm and dry as they descend from altitude) mean that to the East of the Sierra lies some of North America’s hottest and driest land, most prominently represented by the famous and nearby Death Valley, where temperatures commonly and easily exceed 50c (120degF) in summertime. Death Valley, as many people know is North America’s lowest altitude, some −86 m (−282 ft) below sea level, whilst the Sierra Nevada holds the highest land in the whole contiguous United States, Mount Whitney at 4,421 m (14,505 feet), with only 136.2 km (84.6 miles) separating the two locations. This huge difference in land type separated by such a short distance gives lie to an amazingly rich and varied landscape offering an interesting juxtaposition, particularly during wintertime.

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Yes! I am a long way from home! is a gallery of images all taken whilst on the move. The emphasis and meaning of this selection of work is not on carefully composed images, but a raw innocent feeling evoked by the feel and spontaneity of the split second vision of something seen whilst traveling. In this case, How Long? was taken from a moving vehicle, easily seen by the blurred foreground of the image. Whilst not a perfect image by any means (orthodox landscape photographers would scoff at the capture of an ‘accidentally’ blurred foreground), I feel this sense of movement in the photograph evokes a certain amount of dynamism which gives life to the clouds and otherwise static landscape. This feeling of change lends to the storminess of the sky, and the masking of the sun and asks of the viewer, when will the storm hit? Am I outrunning the storm? Consequently the question “How Long?” is born.

On a technical level, the image is very basic, after all, that is the meaning of the series of work it falls into; it is all about the feeling created by the visible motion. To give that indication of looking through a window whilst traveling, some vignette was added in post-processing, best seen around the edges of the photograph in the lighter foreground. The stormy clouds over the imposing peaks of the Sierra required little editing; there was enough drama created by their structure and darkness. However, to provide a better balance between the mountains and clouds, slight dodging and burning was applied to various parts of the image, which served to add to the visible structure of the clouds and reduce the pin-point over-exposure where the sun poked through the clouds.

For me, the biggest draw of How Long? is it’s shoot-from-the-hip quality, and for that reason itself, I would not change anything about it. Although not a classic or favourite to everyone, it conveys much more emotion than many of my more technically better pieces of work. As a photographer, emotion is one of the key attributes I like to carry over in my work. By trying to see my work as the viewer, this can only help achieve that goal.

Your comments and criticisms are, as always, much appreciated and I would love to hear from you You can leave a comment below or contact me through the Contact page of the website. And, don’t forget to like PdAPhoto on Facebook here!

Technical Details:
Aperture: f/8
Exposure Time: 1/125 sec
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 13mm (21mm equivalent)
Post-process: levels, dodge, burn, curves, noise-reduction, vignette