"...But now you're here, brighten my northern sky..."

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Friday, September 24, 2010 | 5 photos

Having finished an Advanced Biology degree last year at Macquarie Uni, Sydney, and not being sure of what to do next, it occurred to me that it's now or never if I am to pursue my love for taking photos. I get a real buzz out of capturing an image that brings peoples' attention to the beauty of the natural world. For some reason, when I take a good shot, my first reaction is to laugh. I decided to travel to see if I could capture something unique. One place I visited was Saskatchewan, Canada.

Saskatchewan is known for two things: its flatness and its skies. Whilst working for a couple of weeks on a friend’s ranch I witnessed the dramatically changing tension between these two factors constantly, depending on the weather and the time of day. The prairies, being so far from light pollution, also display the stars in magnificent fashion. My series of photos have tried to capture the ever changing nature of Saskatchewan skies.

Lots of people talk of being a ‘fly on a wall’. By keeping my camera in the same location over a 24 hour period, the sky could be captured changing from a single vantage point, in relation to an unchanging foreground. These photographs try to tell the observer a story of a single day working the land, from the perspective of that fly on the wall (or rather that locust on the fence post). The horizon dissecting at roughly ¼ frame, rather than the standard 1/3 ‘formula’, was chosen so that the viewer’s focus lies predominantly on the sky. The 5 images, starting from the stars of the night, through first light and progressing to the twilight of the following evening display both the relative flatness of the land and the dynamic nature of the sky.