Contrasts - part 1

In late afternoon on the first day in Oman, we took a motor boat for a "sunset cruise" along the coast. I hoped to take some photographs of the old forts which stand on headlands guarding Muscat harbor in the afternoon sun or in a sunset. I imagined that the forts would be a suitable subject for the "strong", "solid" etc characteristics.

Unfortunately, we could not get far along the coast as the sea was too rough. I nevertheless took a few potential pictures.

We started within the bay where the hotel was situated. on top of one of the cliffs, there was a group of people: I understand they were a Bollywood film crew.

I shot a couple of pictures of the figures on top of the cliff in both landscape and portrait framing. In my preparation, I had decided that in order to convey the impression of smallness, I would need a subject that was small in the frame together with something else that was much bigger. Depending on the subject I could use wide angle or zoom to make the relative sizes clear.

In both pictures, the figures are highly visible on the skyline, even though they are so small in the frame as a whole. The cliff provides the sense of scale to the figures, but the figures remain a the point of attention.

The impression of their small size seems stronger in the horizontal framed image which has a wider angle of view including more of the cliffs and the sky. The edge of the cliffs seems to attract the eye towards the figures. In the vertical framed image, the impression of small size is still strong, but the narrower angle of view leaves a picture with less sense of place.

A short distance away, there was a beach with a group of local women walking along in afternoon sunshine.

Using roughly a standard zoom setting, I composed the picture so that the sea filled the bottom quarter of the frame, with the cliff filling the top three quarters. The figures in their dark garments stand out well against the light colored beach. I placed them roughly on the one-third line from the left, so that they are walking into empty space. This is another picture conveying the characteristic "small".

On the way out of the bay, I noticed a large pyramid shaped rock which appeared to have fallen out of a pyramid shaped hole in the adjacent cliff. As we were relatively far away, I zoomed out to 70mm and used a vertical format as I wanted to include only the pyramid rock and adjacent cliff in the frame. I have now cropped the image to an almost square frame:

To my mind, the angular shape, the harsh shadows and the nature of the subject represent the characteristic of "solid" most strongly. The square frame also emphasises solidity. Furthermore, the setting in a seascape contrasts suitably with the "liquid" sea and movement of the waves. Whilst rock could represent "large", "rough", "heavy" etc, this particular location and and composition does not bring out these characteristics to any degree.

Due to the rough weather, we headed for a marina just along the coast shortly after leaving the bay where we started. I wanted to visit the marina looking for subjects that I could use to portray "pointed", "rounded","diagonal" and other typical boat shapes. In fact, I obtained only one picture that I liked:

The outboard motors caught my eye as the low sunlight was catching the sloping angles of the motors lined up against the jetty. When I took the picture, I envisaged that the repeat pattern would be a good subject to represent "diagonal". However, I now doubt whether the streamlined shapes of the engines are linear enough to create a strong enough contrast with "rounded" as a characteristic. I still like the picture, but not as a candidate for this assignment.