Photo Tip: Never Pass Up An ‘S’ Curve!

I couldn’t pass up this scene in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains because it offered one of the best compositional features in landscape photography – an ‘S’ curve. Never pass up an ‘S’ curve when you see one in a landscape scene. It’s value is in its ability and inherent energy to draw a viewer’s eye into the photograph. They can be hard to find sometime, but when you do find one, do your best to construct an image around it.

In this image, the clean mountain river winds out of sight and towards the foot of the mountain range in back, which is also happens to be lit up nicely by the late afternoon sun.

A secondary challenge here for the photographer is balancing a high contrast scene where the river and treeline is in shade and the mountain range in back is thoroughly illuminated by the sun. The solution to balancing the scene is to utilize a neutral density filter.