Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: RSL on March 01, 2017, 02:00:38 pm
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I'm taking some flak over in The Coffee Corner because I suggested that the best use of a camera is for interactions between people. Okay. I do landscape too. Just ran across this one from three or so years ago. I didn't shoot this one over my back fence, but Goldfield, Colorado wasn't all that far from my back fence.
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Great clouds!
Jeremy
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Very nice.
And the "hand of man" structure adds a lot, without taking up much real estate in the image.
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Very dramatic Russ. Worth trying a BW version?
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Very dramatic Russ. Worth trying a BW version?
+1
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Big Sky country… Well done, even without people in the frame!
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Very dramatic Russ. Worth trying a BW version?
I converted to B&W long ago and decided the picture lost too much separation between elements. Here's the conversion. See what you think.
The hand of man is in that headstand you see out there in the field. Actually, they're very old hands. Gold mining by digging holes in the ground and in the hills pretty much came to a halt in the sixties, and I'd guess that stand you can see in the background probably wasn't used after the early forties. Nowadays gold mining is done by simply removing hills and segments of the earth and processing them.
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Colorado is on my mind--heading out there next week. No plans to ski or reach a summit. ... I agree about the color version. You must have has a 20mm lens or there about.
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Have fun, Bob. I love Colorado, especially Manitou Springs, next city up the mountain from Colorado Springs. I lived there for a total of about 35 years and I was mayor of the city for six of those years, plus two more on the city council. I still have four sons living there and a bunch of grands and great-grands.
The lens on the D800 was a 24 -120 at 35mm, f/16 -- on a tripod. Here's a closeup of the headstand out there in the field. You can see the mostly destroyed shack next to it.
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I converted to B&W long ago and decided the picture lost too much separation between elements. Here's the conversion. See what you think.
The hand of man is in that headstand you see out there in the field. Actually, they're very old hands. Gold mining by digging holes in the ground and in the hills pretty much came to a halt in the sixties, and I'd guess that stand you can see in the background probably wasn't used after the early forties. Nowadays gold mining is done by simply removing hills and segments of the earth and processing them.
I see what you mean about the separation although that might be less of a problem in a large print ( & the sky does look great in BW ). Thanks for posting it.
I've never visited the States ( I'm not much of a traveller - I haven't been abroad this century & haven't even had a passport for over a decade ) but I'm fascinated by the artefacts left by mining / prospecting. I found this book in a charity shop a few years ago:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1689768.Ghost_Towns_of_the_West
The photo reproduction isn't great & the author's writing isn't to my taste but the stories are fascinating.
Re the modern mining operation you posted an image of, nature will start reclaiming it as soon as the mining stops. Deb & I had a studio in the Ironbridge Gorge, Shropshire, UK for a couple of years in the mid 90's. 200 years previously the place had been the epicentre of the Industrial Revolution & had looked like a scene from Hell. It was all green & lovely when we were there, but if you paid attention there were remnants of furnaces & bits of industrial architecture underneath the greenery.
Used to walk past this place most days & sometimes stop to draw it:
http://www.ironbridge.org.uk/support-us/appeals-and-projects/bedlam-furnace/
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Hi Graeme,
Bedlam Furnace looks fascinating. I love stuff like that. The ghost towns book looks interesting too. There are several ghost town books available here in the U.S.
I've done a bit of ghost-towning myself -- in addition to what's included in Voices on the Prairie. If you go to http://www.russ-lewis.com/photo_gallery/selector.html you find an index that includes a bunch of picture categories. Western Ruins of the Sixties has a bunch of ghost town stuff in it, as does the Colorado category, though both are combined with other things. In 2006 I made a couple several-day trips through southern Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, and Texas, and produced a collection of pictures I titled "For the Wind Passeth Over It." Between the shooting I did in the sixties and the 2006 trips, I managed to capture a lot of the dying history of the West just before it disappeared.
Altogether I've spent many, many days in the Colorado gold camps: towns of Cripple Creek and Victor, and the almost vanished town of Goldfield, which is across the road from Vindicator Valley, where the Vindicator mine was located -- one of the early mining bonanzas. My youngest son, Tom, did a video on Vindicator Valley -- at least part of it -- with a drone. His video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HND5PbQ1ods.