The right angle

It was a day filled with surprises, and Johan Nortjé from Midrand also got a beautiful photo out of it.

“We visited Namibia and for my 60th birthday my family planned a few surprises for me. That morning we took a trip in a hot-air balloon and later that day we drove to Sossusvlei. At about 3 pm I saw this dune and with all the pretty lines and textures I couldn’t help but enjoy the breathtaking scenery”.

You really have to take an exceptional photo of a dune because it generally tends to be a bit boring. If, however, the dune’s colour stands out against the rest of the environment, and it looks like a triangle, you’ll want to look and relook.

The photo has a subtle “theme”, which is unnatural iPhone 7 Plus; 6,6 mm (59 mm in 35 mm format); 1/1 100th of a second; f2,8; ISO 20 for a nature scene: geometric shapes with straight lines. The dune makes a triangle and the dark sand on the right a trapezium. There’s also a straight line running through the middle of the photo (between these two shapes). Even the smaller dune to the right at the back looks like an upside-down triangle. The informal shapes of the trees, the uneven clouds, as well as the stumps on the left (which are in a slightly skew line) balances the rigid geometric lines.

Even though the dune is the main focus, the big tree on the far left draws your eye first. There’s a road on the left that ends at the tree and from there you look at the rest of the photo.