The Ones That Didn't Make It #28

Sorry I’m late. Been pretty busy recently.

—

While wandering around Grand Prismatic, I was continuously looking for dominant subjects to frame, as well as classic tried-and-true landscape compositions.

While the other guys were audibly struggling to figure out what and how to shoot this landscape, I was set up fro probably my eighth photo of the morning. I saw this triangular form near the edge of one of the nearby pools and set up shop. Having the delta-like form leading into the middle of the frame with the pool in the top third.

However, my timing was a little off. There wasn’t quite enough fog to abstract the background as it did in my other photos from Grand Prismatic. This photo has a bit too much background distraction for my liking. On top of that, the texture of the ground in the bottom of the frame is a bit distracting and loud.

This falls into the category of a photo that shouldn’t have even been made. While i did learn something from it, it was unfortunate that I wasted a shutter count on a photo that was lackluster. Alas, time goes on, and we learn from the failed photographs.

The Ones That Didn't Make It #29 (#27 Reprise)

Sorry for the delay again, school can be a pain.

—

#27 was an attempt with failure, while #29 is another attempt with failure. I walked back over to the same loop-like form of water to try and re-compose the image I had shot before. The fog in this area of Grand Prismatic was still holding strong and stuck around for a while, keeping a beautifully abstracted background.

However, if my memory serves, I used a polarizer on this photo. I could be wrong, but it could explain why the loop-of-water doesn’t stick out very much.

Now, I don’t really process my landscape photos all that much. I do the usual color adjustments and I typically desaturate ever-so slightly to make the scene look more natural and less stylized. I could have dodged or burned the loop-of-water in the middle to bring it out more (dodging would have been the move), but it would have taken away from the naturalistic idea I strive for.

Much like the slanted panorama, it’s a bit of stubbornness that comes out. I’ve found that many landscape photographers tend to be pretty stubborn in their ways. Rightfully so, but sometimes it could harm them in the long-run. I can’t even get myself to do a content-aware fill on that panorama, even though it will look perfectly fine. It just feels wrong as a straight-photographer. All of my studies of landscape and of the “greats” of the f64 group have put me into the mentality — while not a bad mentality, it can affect how I approach image-making.