In Brittany, Saint-Malo. This sky screamed strength, power, and destruction. It seems as though the sky is being torn by a fire started somewhere far in the horizon.
The idea
This is the best example of how much a vision can change a view.
When I saw this, everything screamed a baroque painting depicting Tartarus. A fire coming from the bowels of the ground, where civilization seems to be, as if it was being torn open by the anger of the Gods.
The power of this view is amazingly terrifying. It reminds us of how small we are in the grand scheme of things. We are so little, so vulnerable, so fragile; it's incredibly impressive to see the great vast sky above our head, as if it could crush us at any moment.
The colors in this piece are so surreal, the gradient of blues seems dreamlike, and the orange hue of the sun hitting the clouds quite impossible. A painting would not do half of what this composition does because not only is it fantastical, but the fact that it is real gives a greater impact to what we see : this is reality.
The fact that such a beautiful imagery of the sky can be randomly created by the turning of the wind, the condensation of the environing bodies of water, and the placement of the sun goes to show that, however much skill, knowledge, or tools we have at our hands, humans and AI will never surmount the incredibly fragile and pure art created everyday around us by nature.
Again, you'll have noticed that the "fire" is born from the only place in the picture that seems to bear human life. Almost like an organ it rejects, the image it transpires is the one we've been confronted with for the past 50 years and more. The burning and crashing of our home at the expense of the creatures living on it, including humans, because the maniacal need for us to constantly build, expand, and grow is more tragic than all the Greek tragedies out there. Whether because of our intrinsic nature, or the mechanism of capitalism (or rather both), we've been dealing with a fight we are bound to lose. The fire of the bowels of our ground will end up burning us down.
The technique
The composition is the main substance of this photo. Although, I never established anything in terms of subject and angle, what I did bring in to the photo was a frame. As a photographer, your main tool of creation is framing, its your power. You frame the world with your tools, your vision, your creativity.
It would be pretentious to mention Fibonacci's sequence, but there is a sort of sequential flow to the picture when you look at the way it all unravels itself from the source of light. There is appeal in the mathematics of nature.
More than that, the composition uses the principle of empty space to create the feeling of immensity the sky conveys. Only a small proportion of the view is taken up by the "fire". In doing so, you give meaning to the contrast between the vastness and the subject, and you build the relationship between both. Had I not reached for that, the beauty would have only been in the colors and the shape of the light bouncing off and being absorbed by the clouds. As mentioned in a previous post, no one will accuse you of having a bad subject, but a bad composition can destroy a piece.
It's all about storytelling.
Tools
Camera: Canon 1300D
Lens: 18-55 mm
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