Dave Hinton, one of my tour participants this September, sent me this photograph. Apparently the two people in it (click to enlarge) are one of the other tour participants and myself.
I really enjoyed looking at this photo as it helps convey the scale of the Icelandic interior. You won’t bump into other photographic tourists or tours here for sure, and even if you did, it would be rather silly if you were all trying to photograph the same thing. There’s more than enough to go round.
Myself and a participant on my recent Iceland interior tour
Image © Dave Hinton, tour participant September 2023.
Scale is one of the most difficult things to convey in a photograph. I remember on a workshop in Skye, one of my participants asked me if we would be photographing ‘the island’ rather than compositions of parts of a landscape. I asked him what he meant, and he told me his wife had asked him ‘yes this is all very good darling, but what does the island look like?’.
It was a valid point.
How do we convey the sense of a vast place, or an entire island in just one photo? Can it be done? (I think if it can, it would be very hard). Vista shots rarely work because although everything is in the shot, all of it is too far away, and there is no one single focal point of the shot. Everything is there, yet everything is lost. Similarly with arial shots of an entire island. You might get a sense of the shape of the island, but you can’t really make out specific aspects of it.
I sometimes think we wish to be all-seeing, all-present. We wish to capture ‘all’, and convey ‘all’. Yet, this is too much to attempt, and if we did accomplish it, the viewer would be unable to process it. I think that is why generally speaking, successful landscape are often a subset of a place.
I think trying to convey scale in photographs only works on a cerebral level and not on an emotional level at first glance. The picture above is beautiful for the general composition of the peaked hill side and the horizontal tones flowing through the panorama. The small figures in the centre are what I would call ‘easter eggs’ - features you see secondly. Therefore, this photo is first accepted and taken on an emotional level by enjoying the sweeping tones and atmosphere of the landscape. It is then taken on a cerebral level when we notice the two figures. That is when we context switch from emotional to cerebral. We are now analysing the size of the figures against the backdrop of the vast Icelandic landscape, and we cannot help but compute spacial distances and figure out that this landscape is huge.
But there always has to be that context switch from emotional to cerebral. We cannot enjoy scale and beauty at the same time. Beauty is emotional. Scale is a cerebral effort.
I believe that ‘reading’ (looking at) photographs sometimes requires a mixture of the two : sometimes we are emotionally reading while other times we are cerebral in our reading. We move between the two as we continue to look at a photograph that has beauty and scale in it.
I suppose what I’m driving at, is that emotional and cerebral viewing are independent of each other, and never shall they meet. When we have to shift gears to look at the picture another way, any emotional spell that was cast upon us is now in danger of being thrown aside, or at the very least interrupted, in the pursuit of understanding scale.
More a rhetorical question than anything, I wonder which is best? A photograph that keeps us rooted in the emotional at all times, or one that allows us to find a second underlying theme, such as scale?
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Many thanks to Dave Hinton for allowing me to reproduce his thought provoking image on this blog.