Fargo, North Dakota.

This week Ann-Christine asks us to look at photography from different angles. As a landscape photographer, I often go to a “new-to-me” place and take oodles of images of the subjects at different angles. The goal of trying different compositions is that something in one of the angles captured adds a little extra something to make it a more interesting photograph. As her contribution to the challenge, she features a couple of fascinating sand sculptures captured from different angles. You can read her entire challenge post here.

I literally have hundreds of examples I could choose, but I decided to share some images from my newest camera. I’m just learning the operating features of the camera, so the example photos I’ve chosen are somewhat mundane. At this point, they are for practice as I have only just recently added the camera to my toolkit. The camera is quite simple having only a fixed f/2.8 lens with a 35 mm equivalent 24 mm lens. Though it has an Auto mode, I leave the camera in manual and adjust the shutter speed as necessary. By the way, the camera is made by DJI and mounted into a Mavic Air remote piloted aircraft (drone).

Since the opening photo features the western skies as a subject, I really couldn’t “fly around” it for angles from different “sides” or choosing high or low viewing angles, something that would be easy to do with a smaller ground based subject. To demonstrate, I include below two “selfies” captured from different angles with my flying camera. My wife, Lynn, is my visual observer. She ensures that the drone doesn’t stray too close to any objects like trees or light poles while I concentrate on positioning and composition. For those who might be exploring this avenue for your work, be sure to acquire the FAA Part 107 license and register your drone. Commercial use of a remotely piloted aircraft requires such a license and in many instances, posting on a social media platform is considered a commercial application even if no “money changes hands.”

For the sunset image, I feature a small collection of images captured near sunset at a park near our house and near the junction of I-29 and I-94 in Fargo. The final image I chose is featured at the top of the post. The gallery of images below are basically unprocessed. I ended up creating a final image by using the Pano function in Lightroom to merge two images that happened to have overlapping scenery. Basic processing was completed in Lightroom with final edits done in Luminar Flex. As with all my galleries, if your browser supports the function, you can click on an image to enlarge it and scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner