The Road Less Traveled

I absolutely love road trips. Especially the ones where you are out on an open stretch of road with plenty of time to arrive at your nest destination. This particular one is somewhere in Utah. The neat thing about this photo is that I stopped along the winding road I was traveling on as it descended steeply, giving me a moment to collect my thoughts and visualize the route ahead on the desert floor below.

Specific Feedback Requested

Just any particular thoughts and feelings about this image.

Technical Details

Image details: f/8.0, 1/500 sec, ISO 400
Processed in Adobe Lightroom

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This is quite the view of the road about to be traveled, Ted. The colors, shapes and textures in the distance are very attractive. Your placement of the shrub and road in the center emphasizes those two elements but makes for static viewing. I’m wondering how the view would look if you had taken two or three steps to the right to move the shrub (looks like a flower about to bloom) towards the left corner and let the road angle more left to right across the frame.

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Thanks Mark. That’s a good suggestion for me to think about in the future before clicking the shutter. All it takes is a couple of steps in one direction or another to change things a lot.

This is a very nice expansive landscape that shows clearly that it’s about travel, Ted! Nice job with the exposure and sharp detail throughout. I have to agree with Mark that the centered tree is too prominent and takes away from the landscape plus it obscures part of the road. When confronted by this type of scene I always take multiple shots from different locations, angles and different zooms so that I have lots of choices when I have the opportunity to process them. Another thing I typically do when the expanse is so huge as in this scene, is shoot multiple frame panoramas so that I can include as much as possible and if the frames are shot vertically you can include more of the sky in the scene. Another benefit of the stitched panoramas is that you can print much larger and you can also do arm chair landscape photography by cropping out smaller parts of the large scene!

Thanks for your advice Gary. I do a fair share of panorama work and enjoy seeing the results in post processing. I guess at the time I shot this image I did not take the time to do this or consider moving a little in one direction or the other. Just things to think about in the future.