The power of landscape photography rests largely in the relationship between light, color, and composition. On this day, the light was flat, offering no emphasis. Yet this landscape, made from the top of an observation tower in a tortoise habitat in the hills of Santa Cruz Island, still works well. The saturated greens energize the image. I composed the image around the brown path running from the foot of our observation tower to the forest in the mid-distance. That forest, in turn, points the eye towards the distant hills in the background, and the gray sky, tinged with blue, frames the image at the top.
