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Moro rock
is situated in Sequoia Nat’l Park, California.
It sticks up and offers great views any time of day.
There is a hiking trail where I’m standing so you don’t need to
scale the slope! I was on the
trail for a couple of hours and saw the developing sunset so decided to
hang around. I used my scene
previewer to locate a couple of vantage points and settled on this one for
the sunset.
What I
wanted was the feeling of being on a precipice and build on the depth in
the scene. It would have been
a fine picture with just the receding ridges and sunset but by including
the foreground rock, it brings the viewer into an intimate relationship
with the scene. You are no
longer looking out a picture window but are transported right on the rock
and you don’t know how you are hanging on!
Placing
the rock on the left leads into the whole scene.
Seeing the texture of the included snow really sets how close you
are to the rock. I used a
35mm wide angle lens on a 35mm camera and was about 2ft from the snow.
Deciding
how much of the scene should be rock and the rest background was very
important. Adjusting my
position by 6 inches and rotating the camera position on the vertical axis
by a few degrees made profound changes in the composition.
You don’t have long to decide as the lighting is changing very
fast. As the sun dips into
the haze layer the wondrous golden glow on Moro rock dropped dramatically.
Exposure
time was a bit long for this handheld shot, especially at f/16 which gave
me the depth-of-field needed to keep everything relatively sharp.
I couldn’t put a tripod where the camera needed to be but I could
use it to help hold my arms steady.
This is
not a straight print but I had to dodge (hold back some of the light)
print areas that correspond to roughly each type of ridge to bring those
areas up to a level I feel depicts the visual nature of the scene.
Needless to say I think this is a real wall-hanger!
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