Scale in landscape photography is often more complicated than it appears. In this blog, I explore the different ways photographers use people within a scene, sometimes to reveal the immense size of a landscape, and other times to intentionally confuse the viewer’s sense of proportion using the same visual tricks seen in Hollywood films.

A delayed departure, white-knuckled wildlife encounters, scorching Badlands heat, lost map pins, and a midnight hike beneath alien-looking skies. This landscape photography trip was far from glamorous, but somewhere between exhaustion, wandering, and waiting for the Milky Way above the Alien Throne, the adventure became far more memorable than the photographs themselves.