Mise-en-scène

With vast sums of money in play in the film and television industries, there is an incentive to examine the variables that contribute to successful and not so successful productions. It is not an exact science as there are some productions that are phenomenally financially successful whilst failing to satisfy many variables considered important and conversely there are productions that are miserable financial failures, despite satisfying many variables considered important. One of the variables is the Mise-en-scène, a term that appears to have many definitions for what is in a scene that contributes to the film/production narrative.  The average feature film has 144,000 frames, the success or failure of a feature film rarely hinges upon a single frame, whereas landscape photography is all about a single frame.

In my humble opinion mise-en-scène has some relevance to a landscape photographer in determining a narrative for an image. For viewers of landscape photography, especially critical ones, there's the objective application of the mise-en-scène to an image. Subjectively you may not like an image, but objectively you can appreciate an image by considering the mise-en-scène.

The wearing down of mountains ~ Norway 2012

The image above was one that resulted from a desire to make a landscape photograph with a narrative of active geomorphological processes. The last glaciers melted somewhere around 12,000 years ago in the UK, so a trip was made to Norway and Google maps identified a suitable area. The foreground is an outwash plain with a braided meltwater stream undergoing channel avulsion. The backdrop is a glaciated mountain environment, with some relict glacial landforms and mantled in part by flora in autumnal colour. The lighting could be better, but I'll take dappled sunlight over clear blue sky/leaden blanket cloud. The image will not be to most viewers liking, that's the nature of the world, but appraising the mise-en-scène and hopefully an objective appreciation of the image narrative becomes apparent.