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Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Twenty Nine: The Layered Image – accumulating meaning > Early morning, Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2005
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15-JUL-2005

Early morning, Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2005

It is too early for the bumper-to-bumper traffic to converge on Santa Fe’s central plaza only a few feet from this intersection. The street is empty, save for a sole figure walking below one of the historic buildings that surround the plaza. The point of the image is the scale incongruity of the very small figure surrounded by an empty street and dwarfed by the building. I insert a foreground layer of overhead leaves to frame the image and point directly down at the man from the sky. Still another foreground layer is the crosswalk, leading the eye directly to the man as well. The leaves are closer to us than anything else in the image, and appear larger than the man in the distance, an optical illusion that makes the man seem much smaller than he really is. The man, the focal point of the image, is the middle, or subject, layer of this image. The fourth layer, the building, provides the background. The wideangle lens embraces all four layers and creates the appearance of depth to give this image its sense of dimensionality.

Canon PowerShot G6
1/1000s f/4.0 at 7.2mm full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
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Phil Douglis05-Feb-2008 19:55
I am glad that you mention framing here, Vera. Be very careful when using framing devices such as leaves, etc., to create a layer that adds meaning to the picture. Avoid using such layers as "aesthetic" devices for their own sake -- they can make the image into a cliche. As you note, the leaves that frame the scene here create an illusion -- by encouraging the viewer to compare near to far, they create scale incongruity and seem to reduce the size of the man and make him insignificant, which was my point here.
Guest 05-Feb-2008 02:27
This image caught my eye because of the leaves at the top. I have often heard to look for a tree to help frame and image but struggle when to include it and when it is adding unnecessary clutter to the picture. In your picture, I am trying to imagine what the photo would look like without the leaves and I can see what you mean by the optical illusion. In this case the leaves serve a purpose. Without them the photo would not have the same impact.
Phil Douglis25-Jul-2005 05:08
It does indeed. Thanks for pointing it out.
Guest 25-Jul-2005 04:18
Neat! The building on the left looks like an upright piano!
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