My goal in the mountains of central Turkey was to convey both a sense of scale and a sense of place. I am drawn to places where big skies light up the big amphitheaters below - like Amboseli in Kenya and Monument Valley in Utah. These days I find myself increasingly leaning towards more cinematic work and deliberately seek locations that allow for this. The more obscure the location, the more I am energized. Monument Valley is a little too mainstream these days, whereas the mountains of Turkey sounded a little more intrepid.
Throughout my career I have always tried to use natural landscapes as part of a wider story - just as legendary filmmakers such as John Ford and David Lean did to such great effect and more recently Roger Deakins in his Coen Brothers collaborations. I have rarely worked in a studio and find sweeping vistas a far more helpful accomplice backdrop than a green screen. There is no doubt I find inspiration in film.
The balance between the layers of a story in a single frame is not a science and sometimes negative space can work very well where the subject matter is dwarfed by the enormity of the vista. It is a deliberate leveraging of scale.
On this occasion, however, there is some parity as the scale of the vista is matched by the size of the horse herd. For that to happen with this backdrop, I needed an army of horses and that was exactly what I got.
There were some pretty horses in that herd, but it is all about the size of the unit, not the individual. There is a pleasing amount of detail in the image given the low light and the dust and I like the dog overseeing the action in the background.
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