30 second photo technique: by keeping my distance from the east blockhouse at Fort Lincoln I was able to “compress” my shot in order to get it in perspective with a couple of other local landmarks: the state capitol and the Cathedral tower.

How is this most useful? When doing things like this: putting the capitol directly in front of the sun. Twice a year the sun sets directly behind the capitol, and in order to get this perspective I had to drive out nearly to Lincoln to capture it with a 300mm telephoto lens.

Once again, with our most prominent local landmark as the foreground object, I found just the right spot – a friend’s yard on a hill in east Bismarck – to line the two objects up correctly. The capitol is very tricky to photograph in this way, because there are few places from which to get both high enough and far enough to accomplish the desired perspective.

The theory here is that I can’t make the object in the background bigger by traveling significantly closer to it, but I can certainly make the foreground object smaller by traveling away from it. After that it’s a matter of having a long enough telephoto lens to get a decent photo of the arrangement. Try it once…it’s fun!