Dominant foreground

This is another one of the Cinque Terre villages, Riomaggiore. We got up early to photograph it in beautiful light, but also because few people (except serious photographers) are up that early. The crowds are still in bed or having breakfast. Cinque Terre faces west, so the villages don't get illuminated by early sunlight. The soft, diffused light is beautiful though, and the colors really pop. This is contrary to what you might think. We had a great sky, and for this shot I stepped over a stone wall to position myself close to the cactus. I used a 14mm Sigma f/1.8 lens 2 or 3 feet from the foreground, and this made it disproportionately large compared to the background. I like this look a lot because of the depth and dimension created by the combination of an extreme wide angle lens, complete depth of field, and the apparent difference in size between the elements. My settings were f/16, 160 ISO, and I used aperture priority and daylight white balance plus a tripod. The shutter varied because this is a 3-frame HDR composite with a one f/stop increment between exposures.