
In class last month we were studying some of the history of painting that could be relevant to our photography and looking at the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, I learned about the world landscape style, in which an imaginary panoramic landscape is seen from an elevated viewpoint. The horizon is high in the picture, giving the viewer a bird’s eye view of the scene. The physical canvas is large, and the characters are small. Bruegel deploys this in The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, among others. Â The high viewpoint and the mass of small figures show strong compositional similarities to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, for example. So I started taking some pictures from a higher viewpoint, looking down at a panorama that might be a back plate for such a scene (click the images below to see them larger).

