Heavily manipulated in PS and Painter:
Heavily manipulated in PS and Painter:
I had seen pictures of this place before I visited it.
I now know that photography is completely useless in conveying the actual visceral feeling you get when coming upon a scene such as this, which reveals itself at the final moment, as you approach the edge. If you haven't been there, then any photograph will allow you be blasé in your reaction to it. If you don't believe me, do an image search on google for Horseshoe Bend.
Too many frames, stitched.
HorseshoeBendjb77200 by joseph - jb7, on Flickr
two 4X5's.
No, no HDR on this. I saw this rather imposing thunderstorm rolling in and ran down the street with the only camera I had ready to go (cell phone camera, that is) to find something to put with the clouds, this is an abandoned school about a block from where I live. This is actually kind of tame compared to what it really looked like, it was pretty dramatic.
Jb7, original or not, you made a very fine image of Horseshoe Bend. IMHO, we have to record images that resonate with us, even if they are well-known images. In my own case, I couldn't visit White House Ruins in Canyon de Chelly, or Rancho de Taos, without making my own images, even though I am well aware of the already existing classic images, let alone all the "amateur" images. You were in a spectacular place, and made a wonderful image.
Thank you Nana, Peter-
There is a thread, current now in 'On Photography', with the premise that 'All our photos are the same' -
surely this image must be one that might offer some proof of that.
To make pictures is a compulsion; the question is, now that so many people have the unprecedented ability easily to travel further than the next village, with a pocket sized tool for making thousands of images, (theoretically approaching infinite resolution, if using a stitching technique) are the images devalued by their ubiquity? A reading of economics might suggest this to be the case. Although, perhaps they mean 'images' and not prints. A print can occupy a unique point in space and time, and perhaps can be seen as the fetishisation on an image...
I took this on my honeymoon, when I travelled with a single DSLR, because to bring a bigger camera might have been unnecessarily selfish. My wife was scared of the drop, so took one look over the edge, then retired to a nearby boulder, no more than three feet off the ground, while I stood on the edge to be buffeted by the surprisingly strong winds. I took the pictures hand held; although I had brought a pano head, it tends to be unnecessary for distant views, and I didn't have the rigging to extend the camera over the rim anyway.
This is an extremely wide vista, I would be surprised if it could be taken in on a 47XL on 4x5; even if that were to be possible, then I'm sure the signature of a 120º lens would have made itself apparent around the edges of the picture. I do like wide lenses, but dislike the attention they can draw to themselves if they're called on to represent any kind of geometry on the periphery of their view. Stitching helps...
Thanks again for the nice comments...
First, let me add to the chorus of what a great image this is!
As to originality, who's to say if originality even exists? Depak Chopra pointed out in a lecture I attended that the central nervous system, if laid out flat, would look exceptionally like an antenna. He then asked, and I paraphrase, "What if we don't have original ideas? What if each of our antennae is tuned to a slightly different frequency so we each pick up slightly different versions of universal ideas from the cosmos?"
A question as timeless as the scene you so eloquently photographed.
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