This group of people stopped to talk at the crest of a sand dune, giving me a perfectly backlighted wideangle shot. Once again, we have an image with a dual subject/context relationship. We can look at the strikingly abstract landscape itself as our subject, using the people for scale and context. Or we can view this image in human terms – humans using nature as an arena for their pleasure and relaxation. In that case, the people become the subject, and the dunes the context. By abstracting both subject and context, I leave it up to the imaginations of my viewers to process this image as they will.

Multnomah Falls, just outside Portland in the Columbia River Gorge, plunges 611 feet, making it the most visited site in Oregon. A young woman viewing the falls from Benson Bridge spontaneously strikes a joyful pose for the many photographers gathered below. She made my day. I was originally shooting the scene with the falls as my subject. But when she appeared, she turned the tables, making her incongruously flamboyant gesture the subject, and pushing the falls into the role of a spectacular context. When I look at the earlier pictures I had made of the falls, they look lonely and descriptive. They lacked what this image gives us – scale incongruity and a touch of spontaneous, teen-age whimsy. And that is why she becomes the subject, and turns the falls into context.