During my near fifty years, I have been privileged enough to have lived and travelled all over the world. I was born in the UK, but I am now based in Scarborough, a district of Toronto, Canada.

Until fairly recently, my work was mostly focused on social-documentary and travel photography. Now, I am very much concentrated on exploring how we interact with our urban environment. I want my photographs to make people think about the world around them. 

This image is one that I took on a visit to the Liwa Desert in 2015 whilst living in Abu Dhabi. My wife and I were fortunate enough to spend a night in one of the desert hotels. We thought it would be nice to go out into the desert at sunset. It was a good decision as it turned out to be a beautiful evening. 

It is hard to ignore the wonderful patterns that you find in the desert. This hardy plant and the lovely ‘S’ curve behind it made a fairly obvious image if I am honest. It was a matter of getting the composition and camera settings right. Fortunately, I think I was able to do that. I took a lot of photos that evening, but this is the one that stands out. Looking back, I am quite fortunate that nobody else in our group had walked through the area and left footprints there.

The image ended up as the cover of an academic journal that was published in the UAE. That was a lovely thing to have happened. When the journal’s editor left the region, she took a framed print of it with her.

As I noted above, I am now much more focused on exploring our relationship with our urban environment. However, this image remains one of my favourites especially as it represents our time living in that part of the world. It reminds me how remarkable a place for photography the desert is. If you are there in the right light, it seems difficult to take a bad photograph.

What do you think are the TWO most impactful features that make your image a good photograph? Don’t be shy!

I think the composition of the image is key to making this a strong image. The isolation of the plant and the ‘S’ curve are both classic compositional elements. Beyond the technical, I think that photographs of deserts can easily be clichés no matter how beautiful they look. I believe that here I managed to produce something that was at least a little bit original in its presentation.

If you would be able to make this photo once again, what would be the ONE thing you would like to do better or different?

If I were to do one thing different with this image, I would shoot the same composition but would set up a tripod and experiment with greater depths of field. We did not have a lot of time in that location as we were part of small group tour, so it was a case of shoot and go. I do not know if a deeper depth of field would create a stronger image, but it would have been nice to try.

Rob Wilson shared his photograph in the FRAMES Facebook Group.

Photographer

Rob Wilson, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
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Equipment and Settings

As the desert is rather bad for the health of your camera, I shot this with my old Canon 5D Mark II and Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. This was the camera that changed my photographic life. To me though, it does not really matter what camera you used and what the settings were. All that counts is the image that you get in the end. However, if anyone is desperately interested, it was shot at f/5.6 and 1/200 sec.