Look up.
Waaay up.
If this brings to mind the view panning up from the Friendly Giant’s boots, you might be as high in age as he was (supposed to be) in feet and inches. I don’t know why they never filmed that view like this. Maybe they didn’t yet have a wide-angle lens on their phone cameras.
Anyway, in the absence of giant humans, friendly or otherwise, it’s fun to look more-or-less straight up the trunk of giant trees: a Carolina pine, in the photo above; a Phoenix palm tree, in the one below.
Just a minute. What’s that light standard doing, photo-bombing my masterpiece? Let’s try again.
Better, although ideally I’d have more of the trunk at the bottom and less of the (presumed) cottonwood peaking in from the right.
I’ve made decent progress on thinking about where I’m standing before I tap the screen. I’ve made some progress on accepting the results afterwards: There just is not always a place to stand and a lens angle to choose that will recreate what I see, dagnab it, in a photo that you can see.
You have captured the point of view of Jack, in Jack and the Beanstalk. The sky’s the limit and the imagination runs wild. That may be why one wants the light standard out of sight: it throws an unimaginative element into the “story.”
Laurna – It surely does. 🙂
One of my favourite “visualizations” is the view I see when I lay in the swimming pool in Palm Springs, looking up at the palm trees . Very relaxing!
Alison – 🙂 Palm trees *are* very calming, I find. Maybe because they speak of warmer places?
That reminds me of the movie “Don’t Look Up.”
You never know how tall you need to be! Sigh.
Tom
Tom – Connections abound!
Jack in the Beanstalk came to my mind, as well. And “Up” is one of my favourite cartoons. Thanks for your views of up.
Judith – 🙂 Thanks! It’s interesting what connections a given image will “trigger” for people – hopefully in a good way, as in your case.
I contend that the camera cannot capture the view that you-and-I see from the base of the tree. The camera is a realist; it reveals the perspective, the progressive shrinking of the trunk as it tapers to the top. Emotions, by contrast, extend the thickness of the trunk up and up and up; we sense the majesty of this giant reaching for the heavens.
Jim T – Maybe that’s partly why we have to learn to draw realistically – it doesn’t just come naturally to limit our view to what we can actually see. We’re caught up with how we feel. And that reminds me of the advice from a professional photographer/videographer on our trip to Utah. He said, “Don’t try to take photos that show how it looks. Try to take photos that show what it feels like to be here.”
John says palm trees were from a time with trees didn’t know how they were supposed to look. Ha!
Barbara – 🙂 Ha, indeed. They do look like an ancient pattern. For me, they’re inextricably tied to the Holy Land – after all, as a kid I only saw them in drawings of Bible stories.