My entry this week for the Alive for 365 project is this enigmatic landscape.

While on a hike in Magoebaskloof in South Africa (Dec ’89), I wanted to portray some of the eeriness of walking through the misty forest that morning.  I remember it being very quiet. I kept looking for *something* to photograph .. something that I could focus my attention on.  But there wasn’t anything specific.  Just the trees and the sloping mountainside fading away into nothing as your gaze wandered further.  Then I realized that that is exactly what I wanted to encapsulate in a photograph.

So instead of trying to find a specific “thing” or a specific part of the landscape, or geometry or pattern or composition … this was just how it was … stark trees in the mist.  Nothing else.

This is why this particular image appeals to me.  I felt that this simple lateral movement in my mindset, got me closer to photographing the essential aspect of this particular landscape.

In finishing the image for the Alive for 365 site, I simplified the original image slightly …

Here is the original image:

I felt that those sticks in the foreground blocked the movement of my eyes as I looked around the image.  I wanted the landscape even more uncomplicated.  I therefore cloned out the sticks that I felt intruded on the view.

As for other Photoshop finessing, I only added a Soft Light layer at 20% opacity to punch up the colors and contrast slightly.  Anything more that I tried with the image in Photoshop, just revealed more of the texture and added too much clarity to the image.  And that worked against the feel that I felt the landscape portrayed.  So I kept it simple.

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