Landscape Assignment

This picture is a favorite of mine because it captures the essence of Pittsburgh so well: bridges over top of bridges, over top of yet more bridges. The most prominent bridge in the photo also helps give the picture some flow, guiding one's eyes from the foreground to the background.

This quaint riverside photo is by far my favorite landscape taken for this assignment. Not only do the tracks sweep your eyes over the photo into the distance, but the presence of the train cars validate the subject matter, giving the train tracks some sense of life or purpose. Also, the river to the right edge makes the picture seem more open, by implying a vast expanse of possibility to the left of the photo.

With this picture, I tried my hand at the "rule of thirds:" by positioning the horizon along the bottom horizontal axis of the photo, and the church spire along rightmost vertical axis, I think this photo comes to life more than it would without this positioning. Other interesting features include the latticework-like clouds above a view of downtown in the background with the South Side in the fore.

Although I'm not including this last picture as part of my assignment, as I took it over a year ago, it is my all-time favorite landscape I have ever taken. I was taking a ferry across the Walensee, a 10-mile-long lake that runs along a valley between the Alps in northeastern Switzerland, when I took this photo. I'd like to live here more than anywhere in the world.