N1kon1k said:
SNIP>>>>I was trying to make negative space work and give a sense of scale... I was actually trying to use the clouds as a stronger element to make the tree look lost in a bigger world... like a worm looking upwards and seeing "damn I thought that tree was bigger, but there is even bigger stuff out there"
I just wasn't sure as to how to communicate that message...
Any ideas as to how I could of approached it that way
I understand that desire! And it's a good idea, a good concept. How to approach such a thing? It's a fine line between using true perspective, which is based on camera-to-subject distance, and using apparent perspective distortion, which comes easily with extreme wide-angle lenses. There's a fine balancing act between getting the desired
perspective, and utilizing wide-angle lenses and their ability to create
apparent perspective distortion.
It would take me a chapter in a book to explain this. So let me give you this simplified piece of advice: perspective is controlled by how close or far the camera is from the subject. The easiest way to improve your photos is to decide on the desired perspective, and to then use different lens lengths, to see how they affect the in-camera image.
You shot this with a wide-angle lens from too far away. The tree--and everything else--looks small, and insignificant. You cannot crop this issue away, after the shot. The best idea would have been to have moved the camera closer, so we could SEE the tree, and I mean see it clearly, for what it has, the branches, the leaves, etc., and then so we could also see the sky. The issue is that you show everything SMALL, due to the extreme wide-angle lens length, and from too far away, thus compounding the smallness. We cannot appreciate the tree;
we KNOW how big a tree is. But the photo showed the tree looking tiny, like a shrub, like a bush.
The idea of contrasting the vastness of the sky with the size of a tree fails when the tree is shot from 70 meters away and the tree is small; you needed to have gotten closer to the tree, to change the perspective of the tree, and from there, THEN used the wide-angle zoom to show the sky as the larger object.
Learning HOW to use a wide-angle lens takes time, and lessons, exercises, and an understanding of lenswork theory and practice.