The two photos below were taken yesterday from directly above my house. You can just see the roof through the chaos of the forest.
I say “above” because the house is stuck on the top of the lower end of a ridge that rises very steeply behind it. And, no, I didn’t use a telephoto to compress all those branches. The pictures were made with a 60mm lens on my little Rebel XTi.
If I climb further up the ridge and try to shoot the view, there are always trees in the way.
There is a very cool rock cliff on one side of the valley in which I live. But just try to get a picture of it. In the series below, the one on the left and the one in center were taken from the far side of the valley. The one on the right was taken from the ridge closest to the cliff. You’ll have to take my word for it — there is a rock cliff there in all that underbrush.
If I hike up to High Top Mountain, which takes me about a half hour, I can get panoramas, but that’s only because the top has been cleared and is kept clear by yearly bush-hogging.
In the aerial photo below (taken a while ago), my house is at the red arrow. The rock slide is about at the blue arrow, though it’s hidden from view in a ravine. The green arrow points to High Top Mountain. I am the only human being living in all of the area shown by this photo (the house you see on center is abandoned). But if you go out the front/bottom of the photo, you will find a rural community. I’m only 10 minutes from the post office and a grocery store. We even have a stop light!
It’s rare to see really good wilderness landscapes of the mid-Atlantic (US) states. Eliot Porter did some nice work in the Smokies, if I remember correctly, but most of his stuff is from New England, which is not the same. The forest is just too dense.
-Julie
