Hi John,
As I’ve said before: If you want “aesthetic and artistic as possible,” grab a brush and learn to paint. The camera is not a paintbrush. To me, the camera was invented to memorialize the human condition as it moves forward in time and fails to improve in any way other than the complexity of its mechanisms. The camera also can be used to record nature, but in the long run, who cares? Ansel’s Half Dome hasn’t changed since he shot it. If you’re interested you can go there and see the real thing. If you want truly “aesthetic and artistic” nature you turn to Bierstadt. Compared with abstraction in paint, abstraction in photography is laughable. As I said in “
What's Photography For?”: “The camera is a recording instrument. It's not the kind of tool that lets you express your own ideas about what reality
should look like. If you're careful it can give you images that are pretty, sometimes verging on beautiful. But it's very difficult to make it give you an image that'll grab you and shake you with a transcendent, spiritual experience – that sudden flash that goes beyond anyone's ability to describe or explain. And that's really what art is about. It's not about making records of things.”
By the way, I never used, nor would I ever use the term “nice,” unless I were deliberately knocking something.
