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Author Topic: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?  (Read 10079 times)

langier

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #40 on: December 07, 2018, 02:32:36 pm »

The wisdom of a Serb nails it again.

Don't take the bate! :-)
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RSL

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #41 on: December 07, 2018, 02:59:44 pm »

And how many people sitting (static!) in cafe shop windows before a yawn?

For me, one. How abut you, Slobodan?
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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #42 on: December 07, 2018, 05:19:05 pm »

For me, one. How abut you, Slobodan?

One is one too many for me, Russ ;)

RSL

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #43 on: December 07, 2018, 07:46:54 pm »

Well, you have to see at least one to understand what a cliché it is.
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Rob C

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #44 on: December 08, 2018, 08:16:07 am »

Ah, cliché!

I was sitting in another bar yesterday having a cheapo lunch -filling in winter until that favourite Frenchman reopens in, I think, February - and as I waited (they have no wifi) I gazed blankly around the walls at the various painting hanging there. None is great art, I'd suggest, but one thing struck me: however simple and unpretentious, every one is unique and a measure of that painter's ability to apply paints to a surface. I'm sure there are those would argue the same could be said for the guy who applied it to the walls and ceiling. And the thing is, however good or bad the art, there is no mechanical or electronic device altering it. WYSIWYG - honest representation of a person's skills.

No matter how many Med pines, rocks or fishing boats, they are never quite the same as anybody else's paintings and so even if clichéd they remain pretty unique in their own right.

There are conclusions to be drawn, I think.

Rob C

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #45 on: December 08, 2018, 08:22:03 am »

The wisdom of a Serb nails it again.

Don't take the bate! :-)


Thing is, if people refuse to rise to bait, then the site might as well be closed, for its readership would suddenly have nothing left to contribute to, or to read from fellow members.

Can you imagine how bored Jeremy would become? He might even relocate to France!

Rob

amolitor

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #46 on: December 08, 2018, 07:19:41 pm »

I don't know what the original "static" comment meant, but there is a basic difference that's worth exploring.

A landscape (generally, not always) lacks reference to a larger human story. Sure, there's a story there, but nobody cares all that much about the story of a raindrop or a blade of grass of the wind and clouds.

A photograph taken on the street, or really of people, (generally, not always) has at least some slight reference to a human story. A girls perfectly still in a cafe, but still one might wonder why the enigmatic expression, the half-smile. One imagines a lover, a job, a burnt breakfast egg.

There's other things that can go either way. A still life of a craftsman's tools might suggest the human story, whereas a still life of some flowers, or stones, might simply be pretty.

Maybe I am stretching things to call one "static" and the other "dynamic" but I think it's a very important difference between one kind of picture and another kind of picture.
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James Clark

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #47 on: December 08, 2018, 09:13:58 pm »

I don't know what the original "static" comment meant, but there is a basic difference that's worth exploring.

A landscape (generally, not always) lacks reference to a larger human story. Sure, there's a story there, but nobody cares all that much about the story of a raindrop or a blade of grass of the wind and clouds.

A photograph taken on the street, or really of people, (generally, not always) has at least some slight reference to a human story. A girls perfectly still in a cafe, but still one might wonder why the enigmatic expression, the half-smile. One imagines a lover, a job, a burnt breakfast egg.

There's other things that can go either way. A still life of a craftsman's tools might suggest the human story, whereas a still life of some flowers, or stones, might simply be pretty.

Maybe I am stretching things to call one "static" and the other "dynamic" but I think it's a very important difference between one kind of picture and another kind of picture.

I think you’re right... but I would suggest that your romanticizing of humanity isn’t an argument unto itself. “Street” to me, the way some people push it here, seems dependent on the idea that there’s something mysterious, interesting, or even worthwhile about ordinary people going about ordinary people, but I’d suggest that in many cases that’s no more so than the interpretation a first year art student pushes upon a pile of trash in an alley, or a single red dot on a blank canvas.

This isn’t to compare people to trash, to be clear.  It’s just to point out the possibility that the “meaning” or mystery we ascribe to unknown humans isn’t inherently more important  than a meaning we might find in a field of new flowers or a barren desert.
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amolitor

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #48 on: December 08, 2018, 10:25:32 pm »

Well, people find people interesting, for one thing. Interestingly all sorts of stuff like "leading lines" and "light advances" and whatnot are all a crock, what eye tracking studies consistently find is that people identify the faces and human figures in the frame, and look at those, and that's pretty much it if there are any people.

As for meaning? I dunno. There's more human meaning in a random figure walking down the street than in a waterfall, no matter how dull the former and interesting the latter, isn't there? The waterfall is beautiful, sublime, perhaps the hand of god, but it's not *human*.
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Rob C

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #49 on: December 09, 2018, 05:53:23 am »

Well, people find people interesting, for one thing. Interestingly all sorts of stuff like "leading lines" and "light advances" and whatnot are all a crock, what eye tracking studies consistently find is that people identify the faces and human figures in the frame, and look at those, and that's pretty much it if there are any people.

As for meaning? I dunno. There's more human meaning in a random figure walking down the street than in a waterfall, no matter how dull the former and interesting the latter, isn't there? The waterfall is beautiful, sublime, perhaps the hand of god, but it's not *human*.


"Interestingly all sorts of stuff like "leading lines" and "light advances" and whatnot are all a crock,"

Yes, and that's the problem that people who want to set themselves up as teachers of photography, art and the like face: you can certainly teach the history of those subjects, and it should be taught wherever people gather to learn about the arts (something totally, and understandably, absent from my obligatory night-school course when I became a company photographer trainee), but apart from teaching the mechanical how-to bits, the ability to teach another human being how to see or, rather, get something graphically and sensually pleasing onto that blank canvas or sheet of film/sensor when confronted with a subject - is a dream. Yes, you can demonstrate how you, as teacher, would do it, but does that imply that the student can then go on and extrapolate a personal development through that example into his own future work? And even if you could, would you, then, be reproducing clones of yourself? The student first has to have the ability in his makeup. If he has that, you can go on to hand him the tools and point out some short cuts. You can't create the genes. Does it make sense to produce all those silly sketches of visual reverse-engineering and expect some poor sap to carry that index file around with him in his head, along with the complicated camera in his hands? Paralysis seems a likely product.

But insofar as landscape not being static: it depends what you define landscape to mean, whether you refer to the physical bits, the influence of the seasons etc, upon how those bits look. Claiming that a waterfall falls and thus, by definiton, can't be static is a bit disingenuous. Saying you can't stand in the same river twice is also twaddle: of couse you can, and you do every time you clamber into your waders and go fishing in it - only the water is changed (even if of exactly the same quality), not the river. There things are just handy little phrases that people latch onto because, on the face of it they look like truisms, but they are really just false analogies and misapplications.

When you can't change the object or control it, hey, you have to accept that it won. All that you can do is skirt around the problem and adapt whilst the object itself remains immutably itself.

Then, you have to decide whether the importance to you is that you are creating something new, or whether it is sufficient for you to observe what is happening and would still be happening, regardless of your presence there or not.

Do you want to start with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper, or are you happy just to read?

People photography, in the sense of street, is no more creative because you still lack control beyond standing in one spot and waiting for something to happen. If you start to direct people, then you are hardly doing street: you are creating cameos of whatever you had in mind. It might be fun, it's creative, but it an't street!

Rob

elliot_n

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #50 on: December 09, 2018, 06:26:29 am »


When you can't change the object or control it, hey, you have to accept that it won. All that you can do is skirt around the problem and adapt whilst the object itself remains immutably itself.

This, for me, is the heart of photography — the object strikes back!

Quote
Then, you have to decide whether the importance to you is that you are creating something new, or whether it is sufficient for you to observe what is happening and would still be happening, regardless of your presence there or not.

To give a sense of the persistence of objects, independent of human observation, seems a worthwhile task for photography — more important than street photography's fixation on human drama, or landscape photography's pursuit of the picturesque (a very human concoction).
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32BT

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #51 on: December 09, 2018, 07:11:08 am »

I think the original remark regarding static and dynamic was merely a reference to the fact that trees generally do not run away when you set up a tripod with intimidating looking MF gear. You have time to set up and anticipate your shot, you have time to anticipate the dynamics. Whatever one thinks streetgenre should be, we all agree it is about fleeting moments that can hardly be anticipated in the same way.

That said, I do seem to get an interesting revelation from all this bickering. Apparently, landscape does not allow metaphor or simile, where street might be almost entirely about metaphor or simile. In that sense, on the ladder of recognisability, "nature" as a genre is one step ahead of "landscape", since we do recognise behavioural patterns and even simile in animals or groups of animals. Examples of this are left as an exercise to the reader.

Now stop monkeying around.

PS to Keith: No, you don't get to repost your "moderator" picture for the umptiest time to illustrate the point.
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KLaban

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #52 on: December 09, 2018, 08:04:20 am »

Aw shucks, can I: pretty please.

;-)

Ivophoto

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #53 on: December 09, 2018, 09:26:11 am »

“I don’t like how the forest is organized !” Complained the Birch.

“Don’t mind the Birch, he will be gone before we know. “ said the Beech to the Oak.
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RSL

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #54 on: December 09, 2018, 09:30:51 am »

I don't know what the original "static" comment meant, but there is a basic difference that's worth exploring.

A landscape (generally, not always) lacks reference to a larger human story. Sure, there's a story there, but nobody cares all that much about the story of a raindrop or a blade of grass of the wind and clouds.

A photograph taken on the street, or really of people, (generally, not always) has at least some slight reference to a human story. A girls perfectly still in a cafe, but still one might wonder why the enigmatic expression, the half-smile. One imagines a lover, a job, a burnt breakfast egg.

There's other things that can go either way. A still life of a craftsman's tools might suggest the human story, whereas a still life of some flowers, or stones, might simply be pretty.

Maybe I am stretching things to call one "static" and the other "dynamic" but I think it's a very important difference between one kind of picture and another kind of picture.

Well said, Andrew. There's another thing in street photography that makes it work: ambiguity. A bit of ambiguity forces you to fill in the blanks yourself, as you have to do with the girl in Slobodan's "best street picture of 2018" which makes it a lot more interesting than something (landscape, for instance, but not always) that simply tells you, "This is the way it was."
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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #55 on: December 09, 2018, 12:11:10 pm »

Why the people who bash Landscape flock to the site Luminous Landscape ??? Go away!

32BT

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #56 on: December 09, 2018, 12:17:28 pm »

Why the people who bash Landscape flock to the site Luminous Landscape ??? Go away!

Hahaha, why would you feel threatened? Nothing but urban & cityscapes from you...

;-)      <-------------
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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #57 on: December 09, 2018, 12:21:55 pm »

Hahaha, why would you feel threatened? Nothing but urban & cityscapes from you...

Not threatened. Just annoyed.

32BT

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #58 on: December 09, 2018, 12:26:07 pm »

Not threatened. Just annoyed.



Ha, didn't we open a thread specifically dedicated to your winning images so we could safely ignore those and stay in our own filterbubbles of assumed excellence?

Ban!
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Martin Kristiansen

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #59 on: December 09, 2018, 12:31:41 pm »

Not threatened. Just annoyed.



What a fantastic morning image. Wish it was mine.
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