Luminous Landscape Forum
Site & Board Matters => About This Site => Topic started by: Riaan van Wyk on June 26, 2015, 03:02:58 pm
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Congrats Hougaard on being published on Lula. I nearly did a backflip when I saw your article as I have so often wondered why you have had no exposure here.
You are one of the landscape photography heroes for us plebs in South Africa and it's great to read your thoughts here on this esteemed site.
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I just read Hougaard's piece and I was very much impressed.
As somewhat of a wide-angle addict myself, I started in thinking that he was going to extoll the virtues of wide angle lenses in landscapes. But I soon realized that his "Gin and Tonic" analogy applied to me.
My main camera these days is a Canon 5DII with the 24 to 105 L lens, which I use over 90% of the time, and most often near the 24 end.
I also have a 70-200/4 L, which I almost never use. I have generally felt that if 105 wasn't long enough for a shot, the shot probably wasn't interesting enough to bother changing lenses.
However, for a recent three-week trip to France I bought a Sony RX10, which has a built-in 24-200mm (equivalent) Zeiss lens that is very sharp. Suddenly I can take shots out to 200mm without having to change the lens, and it is great fun, and with good results.
So I take his comments to heart. It was a great read with excellent illustrations!
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Wonderful article Hougaard, and marvelous images. "Rufus the homeless rock." I am stealing that one from this day forward!
I can relate to this article because I've never been very effective with wide angles for all the reasons given. I looked at the images I had in my most recent show: Of 32 images, 3 were wider than 35mm (equiv), 5 at 35mm, and 24 longer than 35.
I think I've become the Landscape Portrait Photographer.
Dave
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I must admit that when I got my 45mm (90 equivalent) f1.8 lens, I had shooting portraits of freinds and family in mind. In reality, I found I really enjoyed the perspective, and ended up standing (far) further back and re-taking photos I'd preciously taken with a very wide lens. Perhaps many of us go through the same process: kit lens, to ultra wide zoom to telephoto. Not to say I don't take wide angle photos, these days. The 12-40 is pretty much glued to my main body.
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Wonderful article and photo's.
It reminded me of some of the advice written by John Shaw in some of his books. When you're done exploring a scene with the lens you normally use for it just change it out for the lens you're least likely to pick for the subject/scene and see what you can make of it. The only problem with that advice is that I forget about it most of the time, but when I do remember I usually get some extra photo's I am happy with.
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Good article. I admire folks who can see consistently well with wide & ultra-wide lenses. IMO there aren't a lot of 'em out there, and I'm most certainly not among them. Also IMO David & Marc Muench deserve a royalty on every successful ultra-wide near/far composition in existence, seeing as they've probably framed 'em all up at some point or other. :) I personally do my best in the 35–135mm (or equiv.) range, probably as a result of my rangefinder upbringing. If any of the lens makers offered a reasonably lightweight quality zoom in that field-of-view range I'd be right on it. (I did own the Y/C mount Zeiss 35–135 at one point, many years ago, but that lens was a beast.) But I concur with the idea and strategy of pushing yourself to use FOVs you'd otherwise shy away from. Sometimes the uncomfortable choice leads you beyond your preconceptions…IMO a Good Thing.
-Dave-
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Congrats Hougaard on being published on Lula. I nearly did a backflip when I saw your article as I have so often wondered why you have had no exposure here.
You are one of the landscape photography heroes for us plebs in South Africa and it's great to read your thoughts here on this esteemed site.
+1
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This is a much needed article and echoes my thoughts on seeing many landscape photographs often wondering why such an uninteresting foreground consumed the vast majority of the frame with the main interest being made small and distant as a consequence of the wide angle. Some really great examples used to illustrate his point too.
I’ve never really got on with wides and find them really hard to use. Often because of the issue he describes but also the ‘bent’ looking-at-my-feet-but-also-straight-forward distortion most obvious in vertical compositions. The widest I will tend to use is 35mm but usually 50mm.
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There's no particular reason the foreground needs to be interesting. It should play well with the rest of the frame.
The biggest problem with wide lenses for landscape is that it enables in yet another way landscape photography as an exercise in form.
The dark foreground rocks. The sea in the middle ground. The distant spit of land, with the sky and sunset beyond that. How many of these things exist? 100 million? A billion? And how many of those stand out?
A long lens won't save you from all the long lens cliches, But it will save you from that particular horror.
That said, some people are fine with running through an exercise. I play the piano badly and am delighted when I can bang out a passable imitation of a half decent player. Which is pretty much the same thing as going and shooting some cliche photos passably.
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Using a long lens always feels like cheating. I feel like I should make more effort to compose using what's in front of me. Perhaps I should stop thinking that way.
Anthony
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it doesn't matter if its a cliche wide-angle shot - if the scene looks good, shoot it - regardless of the lens choice.
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Wonderful article and photo's.
It reminded me of some of the advice written by John Shaw in some of his books. When you're done exploring a scene with the lens you normally use for it just change it out for the lens you're least likely to pick for the subject/scene and see what you can make of it. The only problem with that advice is that I forget about it most of the time, but when I do remember I usually get some extra photo's I am happy with.
An interesting reply but off topic?
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It is an interesting story to read as it details a journey through discovering what it is that makes the photograph. There's elements of Alain's posts about discovering Vision in it and also references back to some of Michael's essays - one of which I'm sure includes a line about how most photographs can be improved with appropriate cropping (which relates to zooming in the field.) Then there's the throwback to when the D800E was new and the Tamron 70-300 went into Michael's kit. There's also a comment or two from Hans Kruse in his Dolomites threads where he points out that sometimes people miss shots on his workshops because they don't have a long enough lens (i.e. people go on landscape photograph workshops with only wide/standard zoom lenses.)
Well, maybe being able to recall things like this means I've been reading this website too long ;)
When people talked about the D800E + Nikkor 12-24 being a landscape photographers delight, I'm often puzzled because a wide angle lens requires a very specific type of scene setup to work and work well. I think my most used focal lengths are between 100 and 200.
Hopefully this article will help put something of an end to the perception that wide angle lenses must be used for landscape photography. Which reminds me of seeing a professional photographer at a Formula 1 event that did a quick shoot with models .... using a 16-35/f2.8.
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Hopefully this article will help put something of an end to the perception that wide angle lenses must be used for landscape photography.
iirc Galen Rowell wrote that the problem he saw most frequently during photography workshops was too much foreground; and it didn't seem to matter how often he explained what was wrong using other peoples photographs, people only started to change what they were doing when he made them see how the picture they were framing would look without all that foreground.
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iirc Galen Rowell wrote that the problem he saw most frequently during photography workshops was too much foreground; and it didn't seem to matter how often he explained what was wrong using other peoples photographs, people only started to change what they were doing when he made them see how the picture they were framing would look without all that foreground.
There's an essay by Michael(?) somewhere on this website which suggests that the photographer ask themselves this question when taking a photograph "What is the photograph about?" And it is a good question to ask!
To look at some of the photos in the story...
- is the image from Lago Pehoe about the mountains and clouds or is it about the water washing over the rocks in the foreground? The aquamarine colour of the lake is squashed between the shoreline and the breaking wave in the middle of the picture. it happens that the shape of the rock in the lower right complements the shape of the mountains and clouds in the upper right ... but is the image about the top half or the bottom half? Compare the image if you crop the rocks out of the bottom part of the image...
- Betty's Bay is a better example of gratuitous foreground content adding ... what value? Crop it out (or most of it out) and the image becomes about something: the sunset.
- And again with the next image... lots of foreground but what is the photograph about? The foreground or the rocky ridge line? I can't see any symmetries or complimentary shapes here.
... and the inclusion of the moon in the bottom image... if you crop lots of sky (and the moon) out, it becomes a more intense image. Crop it until the sky-land barrier is at the half way point up the image."
Conversely the "Big Daddy" picture is perfect for what it does.
https://luminous-landscape.com/understanding-the-art-of-cropping/ (https://luminous-landscape.com/understanding-the-art-of-cropping/)
And that's where the "What is The Image About?" comes from! Oh, that's from 2007 ... I thought it was much more recent than that :*)
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Dreed, a very thoughtful post. A nice reminder about cropping and not cropping to a particular aspect ratio.
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Using a long lens always feels like cheating. I feel like I should make more effort to compose using what's in front of me. Perhaps I should stop thinking that way.
Anthony
I try to look a photograph as an additive process: start with nothing and include only what is needed to get the feel I want - everything else only distracts and think of space in the frame as being a premium; if something is given a lot of space it needs to justify it's place there. Sometimes I cheat, stitch frames together from the whole scene and play with different crops later :)
Often it is a challenge playing off including context and the human mind's way of finding thing interesting when less is shown.
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iirc Galen Rowell wrote that the problem he saw most frequently during photography workshops was too much foreground; and it didn't seem to matter how often he explained what was wrong using other peoples photographs, people only started to change what they were doing when he made them see how the picture they were framing would look without all that foreground.
That would be a subjective comment..... too much foreground; It would depend on the photographer's vision? A greater problem imo is lack of flexibility. If an educator keeps stating "problems" such as..... too much foreground then all landscape images would start to look the same?
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Nice essay, beautiful images and I cannot agree more on value of long lenses for distance landscape/zooming on a sub-set of a scene with aesthetically value.
As far as I am concerned, my whole choice of equipment has been driven for years by the need to focus reliably distant objects with top quality long lenses in a reasonably light package. As a side comment, the 70-200 fx.y lenses are good, but the reference IMHO is the Leica R 180mm f2.8 APO that was designed specifically to be shot near infinity. Combine it with stitching and you have a very flexible kit.
I never quite understood why some many photographers keep shooting sea side rock scenes at sunset with ultra wide lenses and ND filters. ;)
Cheers,
Bernard
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Nice essay, beautiful images and I cannot agree more on value of long lenses for distance landscape/zooming on a sub-set of a scene with aesthetically value.
As far as I am concerned, my whole choice of equipment has been driven for years by the need to focus reliably distant objects with top quality long lenses in a reasonably light package. As a side comment, the 70-200 fx.y lenses are good, but the reference IMHO is the Leica R 180mm f2.8 APO that was designed specifically to be shot near infinity. Combine it with stitching and you have a very flexible kit.
I never quite understood why some many photographers keep shooting sea side rock scenes at sunset with ultra wide lenses and ND filters.
+1
Maybe because they've seen so many such images.
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You said it, Isaac. Copying is such a strong word, I'm afraid most plagiarists won't like it.
Let's put this way - some like to take and create original and previously unseen scenes, others strive to create their own versions of already and often seen images.
Paradoxically, displays of the unseen and bold images can sometimes backfire, and invite wrath of the titans.
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Let's put this way - some like to take and create original and previously unseen scenes, others strive to create their own versions of already and often seen images.
I can understand the desire to emulate and compete; and the practical matters: strong content, content that will be recognised.
For better and worse, a scene formed fresh in my mind has more appeal to me.
Paradoxically, displays of the unseen and bold images can sometimes backfire, and invite wrath of the titans.
We feel uncomfortable when our expectations are not confirmed.
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I enjoy playing the piano. I'm not much good. Simply playing a simple piece as notated, with expression as notated, satisfies me enormously.
While I don't approach photography this way, I imagine that there is a similar pleasure to be had in replicating well some more or less cliched picture.
I don't try to sell CDs of my Bach, however, and don't think that I ought to be able to make money doing so.
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While I don't approach photography this way, I imagine that there is a similar pleasure to be had in replicating well some more or less cliched picture.
If you did approach photography that way, the analogy would be interesting.
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iirc Galen Rowell wrote that the problem he saw most frequently during photography workshops was too much foreground; and it didn't seem to matter how often he explained what was wrong using other peoples photographs, people only started to change what they were doing when he made them see how the picture they were framing would look without all that foreground.
Ah yes, the Evil Cropping Mat Boards. Galen would set up the projector and sit next to it on a bar stool. As the participant's slides came up on the screen he would take a pair of 90 degree mat board pieces, hold them up in the projected light and crop away extraneous parts of the image, usually the foreground. Often a real gem would pop out.
Dave
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Hi,
Great article. Maybe a bit late (did not visit the forum for about 4 days until Tuesday 30) but I just saw it and had to read it twice because of being so interesting.
OK, I think that everybody has a different view about super wide, wide and portrait or closed angle view of what is in front of him especially in Landscapes.
Some like super wide, which is difficult to manage ¿? and other like portrait of closed angles which from my point of view is easier to handle ¿?
Will make a tour through my images and apply what Hougaard Malan wrote in his article and perhaps post some of my super wide angle images in the critique forum ... and if I have with long focal lenses ... ¿?