Three Trees with Ellis Vener

Words and Photos by Ellis Vener, A Platypod Pro
Edited by Eryka Bagwell

"For me, being outdoors in an unfamiliar place is all about exploring and seeing what I find. The same is true for landscape photography. When making landscape photos, I find that I am automatically drawn to compose the photo a certain way, looking for what to leave out as much as what to leave in."

"But when I feel like I’ve gotten that, I push myself to see if I can make something else out of what is in front of me by reframing the photo. When in this mode, I’ll start by staying in the same place - honoring what in that place and moment, inspired me to stop and pull out the camera in the first place - but changing the focal length and sometimes pointing the camera in a different direction."

"For these three photos, I started with the trees and the roll of the hills. With the second photo, I chose a wider focal length, panned the camera to the left, and lowered the horizon to bring in more of the sky, recognizing that the asymmetric relationship of the clouds mirrored the relationship of the trees to each other but in reverse tonality."

"For the third photo, I recomposed by zooming the lens to its widest point, panning further to the left, and tilting the camera slightly more up so the horizon line moved down further to let the sky dominate the composition. Together, the cloud formation and trees now make a larger triangle, a left-pointing arrow, and using the darker tones of the open sky, the arrowhead shape of clouds and trees, and the roll of the hill to dynamically move the viewer’s eye across in a subtle trick of false perspective. This also brought in more of the underlying rocky geology of the hillside."

"For this series, and the time-lapse series I shot immediately afterward, I mounted my Nikon Z 8 camera and Nikkor Z 24-70mm f/4 S lens on a Platypod Platyball Elite ballhead and Platypod eXtreme tripod. I angled the spiked ends of the legs inward to secure the Platypod to the wooden fence post it rested on."

Thank you,
Ellis