Creating Depth and Drama
Using objects, people, even the weather to create depth and to help illustrate whatever story you’re trying to convey toward your images, can be powerful tools. Words often times are never enough to describe what you saw at a given moment because the words you use are usually not interpreted the same from one listener to the next. When you provide imagery to back-up your words, then can the listener fully prescribe to what your words actually mean. Let’s take a look at what I mean.
So a few things about this photo reinforce my words. I created drama by turning the photo infrared, in post-processing, so that the blue in the sky turns from light gray to dark gray, the clouds themselves, and their elongated look, also help with depth as well as the train tracks and how they disappear around a bend. So the photo is all about depth but with an element of drama with the sky and clouds. The color version of this photo I put on as the title shot for this week’s posting. You can see the difference in tone from the color to the infrared and the drama it creates, the infrared that is.
Even though, in the right circumstance, infrared can add all sorts of drama to your images. Color shots are not without their depth and drama. This shot I took, while traveling with my lovely bride, in The Lake District, England, is one of my favorite landscape shots I’ve ever shot. All of the shades of green, the road demonstrating depth, the livestock demonstrating the size of the area and the foreboding clouds adding drama to the region. Infrared would rob the color of the farm land and, in this case, farmland needed to be represented.
Ratios in size can also add to drama in an image. Wide, open spaces containing objects, of various sizes, including humans. You’re heard me before stating that I don’t often include humans in my photographs unless they help bring the thought of the image to light. In this case, this shot taken on the Southern Oregon Coast, people add to the expanse of the coast line and the immense size of the rock formations. This shot is also void of drama that might have indicated stormy weather. Circumstances have to be different to convey that and I wanted to demonstrate the drama of sizes, as it turns out, on a beautifully sunny day!
Once again, people within an image help demonstrate size differences in dramatic fashion. The Grand Prismatic Pool, pictured to the right, is located in Yellowstone Nat’l Park, Montana. And, again, weather was not what I wanted to convey for the drama of the image. Size differences is what I wanted to indicate. To turn this photo infrared would have robbed the viewer of all the color this spot is know for.
Lastly, and once again I utilize people to assist in portraying size as drama, this shot of The Domo, in Florence, Italy. My wife and I, because of the lengthiness of the line for it, chose to not make the hike to the top of the dome. Instead, the line was much shorter for the ascent to the top of the bell tower that’s attached to The Domo. I’m glad we did as this shot clearly demonstrates the dramatic size of this structure in relation to the rest of the city. For this place I say, with all fortitude and earnestness, RUN, don’t walk to this structure and the city that it resides in! Well, fly first, then RUN!
That does it for me! I hope you were able to garner some helpful knowledge of depth and drama in your images. I look forward to the next time and I will say that, in 2 upcoming dates, I have some trips scheduled that will afford some new images of places you may, or may not have, been to previously. One domestic trip and one international. I’ll drop some hints as we get closer to each event. See if you can guess where my lovely bride and I are trotting off to next. Until such time, I will look forward to the next posting, take care of yourselves and each other, be kind to one another, be and travel well!
