PhotoPlay: Undress Your Landscape

He would always miss my class on a Friday. At first this weekly habit annoyed me and then one day he invited me to visit his nursery in the forest. He wanted to show me how to comb a mountain for a wild orchid. “You need to learn to undress the landscape without leaving a trace,” he said.

I never took the trip but his wild orchid now grows in my mother’s fern tree: “a gift to the only lecturer who understood my deep love of plants and why my nursery was more important than business management.”

Now, three years later I see what it means to “undress the landscape.” It means, metaphorically, that you search the layers of any given setting until you find the bloom.

This undressing, is it important? Photographer Colin Prior writes about it in similar terms: "Disassembling a landscape and then reassembling the pieces helps me to understand my place in it."

High Calling network photographers Cecily and Emily have undressed their own landscapes well.

From Cecily:

From Emily:

For April's PhotoPlay challenge:

• Take two images. If your camera has the manual function, try shooting in manual mode.*
• First, capture a scene in its entirety. Since we are in Lent, this generic view may represent a period of darkness you have experienced when you couldn't see clearly.
• Second, "undress the landscape" by capturing a layer of the scene that represents clarity; a period of renewal and light in your life. This is the bloom you found. Communicate the mood of these two images through darkness and light.
• Load your images into the High Calling Focus Flickr group by Wednesday, April 27 (Note, you have an extra week this time).
• Tag them with "photoplay 14" and "The High Calling" and give a brief description about why you chose them.

*Reminders if you use the manual mode:

• By setting your f-stop at a higher value, e.g. f8.0,  you allow less light  to enter. By setting it at a lower value, e.g. f3.5, you allow a lot of light to enter.
• By setting your shutter speed on a fast setting, eg. 1/250th of a second, you allow less light to enter. By setting your shutter speed slower, e.g. 1 second, you allow more light to enter. (Just remember to keep the camera steady with slow shutter speeds.)  

Join us back here next Friday, April 29, to enjoy the gallery and to see if your images have been featured.

Image by Cecily. Used by permission via Flickr. PhotoPlay hosted by Claire Burge.

For more photo fun, visit Claire and Kelly at High Calling Focus. There you can get a regular dose of their expertise and encouragement.

• Tags:  
• culture
• lent
• photography
• photoplay

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