Oregon’s Painted Hills are located in one of the scattered units of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in the dry, central part of the state. They are a long way from anywhere, and the nearest town, Mitchell, is the epitome of life in the slow lane: a bed and breakfast, a sad looking cafe, an even sadder general store, and people walking down the middle of a dusty main street that literally seemed to lead nowhere. Sitting on the porch of the B&B eating lunch from our cooler, the place was charming in a way rarely seen in the US anymore.
I’d seen photographs of the Painted Hills, and given that they are part of a National Monument, I had always assumed they were pretty extensive. Quite the opposite, in fact. Although there are small colorful outcrops here and there, the main area is rather diminutive, and because it is so fragile, it is fenced off. Or fenced in. In any case, you can walk around much of the perimeter, but not within the formation itself. And that meant, for my work, using the longest lens I had with me.
This was one of my first attempts to use motion-blur on a more expansive landscape. It took me quite a while to find a way to make it work. The problem is that large landscapes like this one have dominant lines that converge, cross, diverge, go all over the place — so moving the camera can blur some parts of the image beyond recognition. The trick, for me at any rate, is to make sure that at least one dominant line, or one element of the landscape, is sharp and not blurred. That way, the viewer has something to hold on to, a strong reference point within the image. In this case, I wanted those two bright red areas to remain well-defined, and eventually I found a way to move my camera so that they did. In the near future, I’ll be adding more images from this series to my impressionist landscape photography Motion|Pictures gallery.
Technical Data:
Body: Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM at 200mm
Exposure: ISO 50, f/22, 0.7 second
