Telephoto landscapes

If you think that my posts often seem a little random - telephoto post one day, wide-angle the next - well that's because they are! :)

How do I choose which picture I'm going to blog about? It all depends on what country I feel like going to.

Today I felt like going to Nepal so that's where we are. Nobody ever accused me of being an over-thinker!

This was taken from a tiny little town called Bupsa, in the Himalayan foothills. You get there after walking for a few days from another little village 12 hours or so on a rickety bus from Kathmandu. Most of the walking in this part of the Himalayas is done up and down really steep paths, and most of the really spectacular scenery always seems to be on the opposite side of the valley!

Often the only way of getting a photograph of it is to use your longest telephoto lens. Compositionally though this works out really well. As we've talked about before, the telephoto lens compresses the perspective so that things that are actually quite far apart look close together.

In this particular image, the compressed perspective places the undulating hills close to each other to increse the sense of the patterns stretching across the landscape. The one thing I always try to look for when I have a viewfinder full of a pattern is a break. Something to give the eye a bit of a resting place before it continues on its journey around the frame.

In this image the resting place is the little stone cottage. There is actually a second cottage in the top right hand third, but it's quite hard to notice because it is in shadow. Our main house, though, has bright sunlight shining off it which leads the eye straight to it. Remember that your eye is often drawn to the brightest part of the composition.

Stay tuned for more randomness tomorrow! I've been playing Salif Keita on my MP3 player lately so I feel a Mali post coming on. :)