Mountains

Mountains are where the earth meets the sky, and are thus a special place in the hearts of landscape photographers and those who love the wilderness. There's no doubt that some of the most dramatic landscapes are in the mountains.

However, the wilderness landscape of the mountains is often not hospitable terrain. Even though the alpine meadows in The Sound of Music seem placid, truly mountainous terrain is rugged and snowbound and shows the cataclysmic and tortuous gyrations of the earth when looked at from a geologic time perspective.

Complex landscapes of upthrust igneous rock combined with glaciated areas and vast fields of snow may be interesting to geologists who study the bones of the earth, but these elements will mostly seem a jumble to viewers of a photograph unless there is an organizing principle in the composition.