This week, Erica V. asks us to reflect upon scale and a measure of relative size in a photo. She writes about the “… opportunities throughout the day to remember your place in our big, big world.” You can read the entire challenge post here. The photo above, captured at the Very Large Array (VLA) at Socorro, New Mexico features only one of the over 20 dish antennas that make up one of the world’s largest radio telescopes built to give us a glimpse, a small window of time and space in the universe. To capture even a part of something as big as the universe, it takes a large telescope. If you look carefully near the bottom of the dish, there’s a wooden fence. The person standing by that fence is a great reference to help the viewer get a perspective as to the size of the dish.

At the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the large outcroppings of rock are an invitation to rock climbers from all over the world. Again, the person in the image helps the viewer put a reference to the size of the rock being scaled.

In my final shot, it’s the environment that is designed to trick our senses. The photo above features a walkway at the Denver Botanic Garden in Colorado. From the viewer’s perspective, the walk appears to be a long one with a very long row of trees. The walk is not as long as it seems. You see, the trees are trimmed shorter at the far end. The grounds are tapered, wide at this end, narrower at the other. This part of the garden is a giant optical illusion.

John Steiner