Bethulie Landscapes

At 789km's...

Just before we reached our final destination for the day we saw, from afar, on the horizon a symmetrical 'koppie' or hill . . .








I stopped to take some photographs, which wasn't easy as we were close to our last stop for the day and having travelled almost 800km since we left Centurion early that morning, we were very tired to say the least, and just wanted to complete those last few km's as quickly as possible

This post is really an exercise in 'variation'. All the photographs in this post are of the same subject matter, the symmetrical koppie. I only had to slightly change my point of view to incorporate all the different elements I found around the koppie

There was a road marker, telephone pole and lines, a tar road and markings on the road.

By walking around I could change the foreground completely with the background, the koppie, staying the same.

In all the photographs I placed the koppie in the middle of my photograph. I know this is a 'no no' but I like to break rules and the 'golden ratio' or 'rule of thirds' regarding composition doesn't mean much to me and I would never consciously use these rules while looking and composing through the viewfinder. In fact I more often than not like to put the centre of attention smack bang in the middle of my photographs,....but that's just me....

click on images to enlarge...

The solarized images were processed with Nik Color Efex 3.0. The actions are rather straight forward and there is not much to explain except to play around a bit and stop when what you see on the screen, looks pleasant to your eye. One can get carried away a bit with all these actions and one has to guard against silliness.

I used the Leica X1 for all these photographs and the exposure was automatic with the aperture set to F11 for maximum depth of field. I almost always use the hyper focal distance to get maximum depth of field.

regards, Ivan...