By Ashley Troutman

Photo taken at the Race Track in Death Valley

Catch a glimpse of Israel, Austria, California, and more at the SCAT gallery in Union Square. Somerville photographer, Scott Dicks’ exhibit of large-scale photos Expanse, will be on display for the rest of the month.

Dicks is a street photographer, and uses a digital dark room and wide-angle lenses. “I’ve always been a fan of using the physical zoom, your legs,” Dicks said.

An article in National Geographic inspired Dicks to choose Death Valley, California, as the site for several of his photographs on display at the gallery. Dicks said, “I went with a friend, with the intent of going out with our cameras every morning before sunrise.” Using sunrise and sunset as his optimum timeframe to work in, and High Dynamic Range (HDR), an advanced set of techniques opening up new lighting possibilities in photographs, he captured photos with an enormous amount of detail and texture.

While shooting in Cape Cod, Dicks said, “One of the things I was trying to do was play around with a tool called a lens baby. It’s a plastic lens on the end of a little bit of tube. You can point and shift the lens, so the contrast of the lens is greatest at that point. It gives the photo a painted feel in the background.”

The exhibit also contains a black and white photo indoors at the Tate Modern Museum in London, a shot from the top of Masada in Israel, a scenic photo from the German and Austrian border, and a gorgeous panoramic view of Utah. “I travel a lot, and I love to travel,” Dicks said. “Usually my travels put me in places where there’s interesting things to photograph.”