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Depth Perception

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Original pioneer log cabin amidst brilliant autumn colors in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN.

As you may have noticed, we live in a three dimensional world. With apologies to Albert Einstein and his work on time as the fourth dimension, let’s keep it simple and just stick with height, width and depth for now. 

Hovenweep Tower of the vanished Anasazi near the Utah-Colorado state line.

Sculptors always take advantage of their chosen medium to express their vision while employing all three of these dimensions. But we two dimensional artists including photographers, painters, etc. do not have that luxury. We are confined to our flat media having just height and width. (Nope, canvas wraps don’t really count here.) 

Caribou antlers on the Alaskan tundra in front of Denali (Mt. McKinley), highest mountain in all of North America, Denali National Park, Alaska.

Alas! What to do? Use the foibles of the human visual system to enable it to trick us into seeing depth that, while present in real life, does not actually exist in our prints or on a screen. 
And just how do we do that? 
I’m glad you asked.
With a little creative forethought and some effort, we can often add a feeling of depth to our images by providing a visual cue or two to be interpreted by our somewhat gullible brains as depth. 

Cathedral Rocks and a rushing creek in Red Rock Crossing State Park, Sedona, AZ.

This is a skill that has been known to painters for centuries, but with the birth of photography in the nineteenth century someone had to be the first to apply the idea to this fledgling medium. 

A few decades ago, well after photographic pioneers such as Ansel Adams and his contemporaries had made their major contributions to the photographic arts, legendary landscape photographer David Muench grappled with the challenge of creating depth while lugging his 4×5 cameras, lenses and film holders into just about every nook and cranny of the American West. With lots of hard work and a considerable amount of out-of-the-box thinking, he came up with his now trademark “near-far” concept. 

Flaming sunset over the Pacific Ocean at Second Beach in Olympic National Park, WA.

In essence, he began using an extremely strong foreground ahead of what is often his main subject well behind. Not only did this technique make for some really stunning photographs, but his use of perspective in this way led the eye to see the third dimension – depth! 

A lone hiker enters ancient Machu Picchu, last refuge of the vanished Inca civilization in the Andes Mountains, Peru.

If you look through some of the 50+ large format books of his work that have been published over the last half century, you will see and perhaps learn from the many photographs that so effectively employ this technique.

Yes, it sometimes looks a little exaggerated, but that’s his imagination at work. We can borrow from this concept and use it as the starting point for our own unique artistic creations. 

 

Historic Bass Harbor Lighthouse still shines in Acadia National Park, Maine.

Let’s not forget depth of field, or more correctly, depth of sharpness. In point of fact, no matter what we do, the very sharpest spot in any image is going to be the actual distance at which the lens is focused. Everything else falls into the realm of “acceptable sharpness” which is a relative term. Much has been written about the falloff in optical performance when using very small apertures such as F/22 and 32. I concede that at these small openings there may be a reduction in the performance of most lenses, but it is largely theoretical and not readily apparent to the naked eye.

More importantly, if your aperture is too large to deliver adequate sharpness throughout your composition, selective focus excepted, the final image will simply not work.

My solution has always been to simply stop down and not worry. I’ve never had a problem using that solution. As a matter of fact, I often close down an additional stop for insurance and a little extra buffer to the normal mathematical formulas.

My advice is – F/32 and full speed ahead!

Sea stacks through a driftwood window on Ruby Beach, Olympic National Park, WA, Sept., 2008

 

  • Latest Articles
  • Author Bio
Jerome Ginsberg

Latest articles by Jerome Ginsberg (see all articles)

  • High Dynamic Range – HDR - June 12, 2017
  • The First Time - May 18, 2017
  • Depth Perception - May 10, 2017
Jerome Ginsberg

Jerome Ginsberg

Jerry Ginsberg is a freelance photographer whose landscape and travel images have graced the pages and covers of hundreds of books, magazines and travel catalogs and have been exhibited throughout North and South America. He is the only person to have photographed each and every one of America's National Parks with medium format cameras and has been a National Parks artist-in-residence.
Jerry's photographic archive spans virtually the entire Western Hemisphere.
More of his images are on display at www.JerryGinsberg.com
Or e mail him at jerry@jerryginsberg.com


See All Articles by Jerome Ginsberg
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