I recently had the pleasure of leading a photography backpack into the Catskill Mountains for the Appalachian Mountain Club. These are always interesting trips, because in addition to hauling food, shelter, and clothing up the mountain trails, we also strap tripods and cameras to our packs, making for very heavy loads. The reward for this work is being in position at remote places for the yummy light that sometime happens around sunrise and sunset. I had timed the trip for a time of year that, weather permitting, the direction of the sun at both sunrise ans sunset would be optimal for adding dimensionality to the surrounding mountain ranges (given their geographic orientation).
This photo is one of my favorites from the trip. When reviewing the set of “keepers” from the trip, this photo is not the one that leaps out at you – it does not have flashy colors or spectacular light. But it can sometimes be more satisfying making a compelling photograph from otherwise rather pedestrian elements. The light is nice but not amazing and the colors are also nice but certainly not jaw dropping. What I think really makes this photograph is the repeating shapes and patterns. The image includes several groups of round top peaks, and as well as several triangles and diagonal lines in the mountain ridges and cloud formations. The trick was to frame it all to make the patterns complement each other. My philosophy of photography being an art of subtraction (compared to most other 2D arts like painting and drawing that are arts of addition) leads me to always eliminate elements in the scene until the composition is distilled down to only those elements that are necessary to convey what I see to the end viewer of the photograph.
This photo was taken with a short telephoto lens, which helps compress the scene and brings the elements together. I selected an aperture of f8 – because all of the scene was relatively far away, depth of field was not an issue; I chose f8 because that is the sharpest aperture for my lens and provided more than enough depth of field for the photo. I used a 2 stop graduated neutral density filter to balance the exposure differences between the sky and land. Time of capture was 6:30 AM – about an hour after sunrise. The direction and intensity of the sun were just right to reveal the undulations of the mountains with swaths of soft sunlight and shadows, as well as imparting an alternating series of dark and light from front to back .
The mountains in the scene, from left to right, are: Indian Head, Thomas Cole, Black Dome, Blackhead, and Round Top.
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