Monday 21 December 2009

The real landscape

Another post, whatever next. Flight delayed, time to burn in the lounge.

An interesting article on HDR techniques up on Luminous Landscape. And just as interesting the links to the BBC website on the UK Landscape Photographer of the Year.

To start, I agree with Alexandre Buisse on using HDR (and he makes some stunning images, go check out his book). I use it quite a bit for landscape work, always striving for the sort of effects he describes. It's a technique for reducing the contrast of a scene that is beyond the reach of the sensor.

And then there are the comments on the BBC site, decrying most of the posted competition winners as HDR, although that isn't necessarily so. And I have to agree with most of the negative comments. A lot of unreal looking shots, taken of "iconic" (read clichéd) scenes. It's not restricted to this year's entries, either. I have the books from the previous two years of competition and the content is disappointingly similar. Far too many shot processed for a dramatic, high-contrast effect (which goes equally for the digital as the film entries). It seems the way to impress the judges (and often the masses) with British landscape work is to go for dramatic lighting of well known scenes processed with contrast and saturation up tto 11. It's a style of photography that seems rather popular in the making and the viewing.

Where are the real landscape shots? Have the judges of these competitions ever been outdoors? Or maybe they're so swamped with worse excesses that their selections look tame in comparison.

1 comment:


  1. Landscape photography
    is not about a specific place, but about seeing the significance of the natural world around you every day. Your own backyard literally can be a great starting place because you know it better than any other place. If you don’t have a backyard to call your own, a city or county park, a campground or even a drainage pond bordering the local shopping mall can provide a great starting place to explore landscape photography.

    ReplyDelete

I like comments, especially constructive ones.
Comments get emailed directly to me before publishing , so if you want to get in touch drop a comment.
All comments moderated by me before being published, keeps the spam at bay.