On a Monday morning that promised to be warm I headed out for a short hike along a ridge towering a small town. I brought with me the trusty Zeiss 28 mm adapted to a Sony mirrorless camera and originally planned to shoot in black and white. After a drive through some particularly winding mountain roads I reached the ridge and started walking.

Luckily the air was fresh thanks to the relative altitude and I took the first photo right after stepping out of the car. I liked the gentle lines of the hills, the scattered trees, the blue sky, the warm touch of the cut grass and the contrasting lush green of the meadow. I opted for a square format because it balances the layers in the image particularly well. The only element I find disharmonious in this photo is the dense cloud on the sky that adds a lot of weight to the top right corner. Some clouds more distant apart from one another would have been more balanced.

After crossing the first hill I reached another meadow full of bright flowers at the foot of a small peak. However the 42mm equivalent field of view of the lens was a bit too tight for the image I wanted to capture so I took 3 different photos starting from the foreground making sure to lock the exposure and stitched them together in Lightroom. The result turned out pretty well: the out of focus flowers in the foreground add a touch of color and depth and the sinuous slopes of the pyramid-shaped hill are framed beautifully by the blue sky. The square format works well also in this composition.

Even though I wasn’t able to capture other meaningful images for the rest of the hike I’m still very pleased with how these to photos turned out, especially the stitching together in the second image.

Square Format Summer Day

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Waterfalls Exploration