This week, says WordPress, we should post photos that play around with the idea of “scale“.
Well, okay. I’ll see what I can do. But scale can be tricky in photographs, where you don’t have the kind of built-in clues to size that the real, physical world gives us automatically.
For example, let’s think about the waterfall above. What size is it? Is it a trickle as high as the length of your hand? Maybe it’s a torrent racing down half a mountainside. How could you tell? There’s nothing in the photo to give you a sense of scale; rocks, yes, and a few plants, but good luck identifying them. When I look at the plants in the picture, I’m not sure what they are – and I was there to take the photo.
No, we need something for reference. Something that comes in a range of sizes that everyone is familiar with; something – well, someone – that actually was right next to that waterfall. (Yes, the picture above is pretty tightly cropped.)
Let’s show a little more of the original image. And now – if we look at the lower right corner – we can judge the scale.
Problem solved 🙂