Red Rock Quarry

[luxborealis]

Of course! Why didn't I think of that? That explains why "Moonrise Over Hernandez" is so bad. Ansel shot it from the roadside. Even worse, he shot it from his vehicle.

Not Quite!!! Because something is shot from a roadside doesn't make it automatically bad. Adams is an inspired work for all the right reasons and your example was not.

Peter

Edward Weston, I believe has the last word here: "Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn’t photogenic."

[James Clark]

I'm not sure what you're trying to say, James. Sounds as if you're suggesting this is something Adams shot?

When I viewed the thread this morning I was not logged in - I see now that what you posted was your own shot in B&W. I mistook your, sarcasm, I guess, for what I assumed was an actual Adams shot of the same location. My bad for not wholly looking at the context (or the image) before posting.

All that said, others have made the point better than I could have anyway.  It's not hard to take an uninspired landscape shot, just as it's not hard to take an uninspired street shot.  That said, unless you are controlling the personalities, the setting, and the action in more than a passive way (i.e. more than searching for them or waiting in a given spot until they come along), I have a very hard time accepting that street is any less (or any more) banal than landscape, nor do I accept that competence in one subject matter is necessarily harder to achieve than the other.   And after all, if we can edit Winogrand down to excellence, why not Adams?

[James Clark]

Edward Weston, I believe has the last word here: "Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn’t photogenic."

 

[RSL]

Okay, here's another one from the same shoot, along the same difficult, quite vertical, mountain path. This (and the other one) is a hell of a lot farther from the "car" than 500 yards. Oh, and James, you need actually to check some of Weston's photographs. Most of them were a lot farther than 500 yards from the car.

[James Clark]

Okay, here's another one from the same shoot, along the same difficult, quite vertical, mountain path. This (and the other one) is a hell of a lot farther from the "car" than 500 yards. Oh, and James, you need actually to check some of Weston's photographs. Most of them were a lot farther than 500 yards from the car.

Does finding his quote amusing mean that I'm not familiar with his work?  It's a quip, not an artistic directive.

[William Walker]

Okay, here's another one from the same shoot, along the same difficult, quite vertical, mountain path. This (and the other one) is a hell of a lot farther from the "car" than 500 yards. Oh, and James, you need actually to check some of Weston's photographs. Most of them were a lot farther than 500 yards from the car.

I really like this one Russ, in fact I would go so far as to say it is the best landscape I think you have posted!

It does seem pretty sharp but I think that we have been down that road before with the D800. Very nice!
William

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

"Blade" is indeed not bad at all, perhaps a bit left-side heavy compositionally.

[RSL]

Thanks, Slobodan. You're right. That's why I let the sky get that dark in the upper right.

None of the pictures from this series are my best. No question about that. At the moment my schedule isn't letting me get downtown on the street or out on the prairie where there are dying towns. It's driving me nuts. So that's my excuse.

Thanks to you too, William. Yeah, I sometimes wonder about the sharpness when I look at a shot from the D800 that I've posted, but it really isn't over-sharpened. I went back to the original file and made sure the sharpening was minimal. Conversion to jpeg is at least part of the problem.