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Author Topic: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?  (Read 10082 times)

Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #60 on: December 09, 2018, 12:32:23 pm »

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!

No, you didn’t, but you should have ;)

Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #61 on: December 09, 2018, 12:40:44 pm »

What a fantastic morning image. Wish it was mine.

Thanks, Martin.

I occasionally repost my old images for two reasons:

A. To annoy old members
B. To show it to new members

;)

P.S. This image happens to be a good example of a non-static landscape. The whole spectacle lasted a minute or two, in which I had to find a parking spot, jump out, set up a tripod, and fire a dozen overlapping shots. Come to think of it, the photographer wasn’t static either.

Martin Kristiansen

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #62 on: December 09, 2018, 12:54:14 pm »

Yes Slobodan. I do feel that much of landscape is static. As I said before I don’t mean in terms of moving trees and water and the like. I mean so much of landscape is copied from winning formulas and is rehashes of succesful images.

Obviously it’s not inherant to the genre and I’m certainly not alluding to this image that you have just shared.
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32BT

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #63 on: December 09, 2018, 01:04:47 pm »

No, you didn’t, but you should have ;)

Well, i was half right then.
https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=109683.0

(Why oh why does my brain store this stuff and not the more useful stuff like where-did-i-leave-my-keys-last-night stuff?)
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Rob C

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #64 on: December 09, 2018, 01:30:34 pm »

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


If they did, who'd contribute anything much?

You'd be left with the proverbial daisy chain...

:-)

amolitor

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #65 on: December 09, 2018, 04:46:06 pm »

The fact that the purist Landscape shot lacks "the hand of man" and therefore, by definition, lacks connection to human stories makes it harder, not easier.

You could as well argue that "street" relies on the crutch of cheap and easy human stories to generate interest, as you could that "landscape" is static and therefore uninteresting.

I am, explicitly, arguing neither of those things.
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Jeremy Roussak

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #66 on: December 09, 2018, 04:51:13 pm »

The fact that the purist Landscape shot lacks "the hand of man"

Who says?

Jeremy
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Ray

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #67 on: December 09, 2018, 11:00:36 pm »

Who says?

Jeremy

Be careful, Jeremy. One could argue that the hand of man is everywhere in the landscape, especially noticeable where there are open fields with cattle grazing, or fields full of beautiful sunflowers.

Even if a landscape appears to be completely natural, one could argue that the verdant lushness of the vegetation is partly due to human emissions of CO2, or that the excessive dryness depicted in an image is due to human-induced climate change.  ;)
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Peter McLennan

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #68 on: December 09, 2018, 11:26:21 pm »

The fact that the purist Landscape shot lacks "the hand of man"

And, as somebody asked a while ago: "What's a purist?"
Still waiting for an answer on that one...
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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #69 on: December 10, 2018, 01:29:15 am »

Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #70 on: December 10, 2018, 01:36:07 am »

The fact that the purist Landscape shot lacks "the hand of man"

And, as somebody asked a while ago: "What's a purist?"
Still waiting for an answer on that one...

Now, on a serious note, is it really possible that a bunch of grownup, educated people need to engage in a semantic hairsplitting about a sentence that is perfectly, absolutely, unambiguously clear? 

Martin Kristiansen

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #71 on: December 10, 2018, 01:49:01 am »

I do enjoy the beautiful pristine landscape images that somehow manage to pretend that we are living in a untouched garden of paradise. I spent many years attempting these myself. I was quite young when I saw Faye Godwins work and was quite surprised by it. The walls and domestic animals were things I would have excluded.

Now with our environment under  such stress and with my own feelings about that I seem to be more interested in discussing those stresses in my photographs than In seeking out the pristine remanants of our world.

I’m not saying that is the only valid response to the issues but it is mine. I do also think that landscape photography seems to be stuck in a romantic turning away from the realities we currently face. The masters of the f64 movement were so spectacularly successful that their dominating aesthetic continues to this day. Sometimes I think all we are seeing is f64 but in colour and with stars.
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Rob C

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #72 on: December 10, 2018, 04:08:42 am »

I do enjoy the beautiful pristine landscape images that somehow manage to pretend that we are living in a untouched garden of paradise. I spent many years attempting these myself. I was quite young when I saw Faye Godwins work and was quite surprised by it. The walls and domestic animals were things I would have excluded.

Now with our environment under  such stress and with my own feelings about that I seem to be more interested in discussing those stresses in my photographs than In seeking out the pristine remanants of our world.

I’m not saying that is the only valid response to the issues but it is mine. I do also think that landscape photography seems to be stuck in a romantic turning away from the realities we currently face. The masters of the f64 movement were so spectacularly successful that their dominating aesthetic continues to this day. Sometimes I think all we are seeing is f64 but in colour and with stars.


Funny thing about Godwin: when I first came across her I didn't take to her at all. Now, decades later, I find she has something that is mordantly honest. Also, that honesty is projected more strongly through her use of black/white which helps to strip away the rainbows of romanticism and show us what reality looks like when you stop and look at it instead of hurrying past as usual. The very same conclusion was reached a long time ago with war photography: use colour and you create movie trailers, and for the same reason: romance found in the glamour of a little patch of colour on an otherwise bland newspaper or magazine page. It's the well-known effect of the colour red in any picture; it's why Leica planned that dot: they wanted no bush to hide their glow.

Reduced to black and white, there's no place to hide: you either caught something or you came up empty.

The landscape is what it is, and will remain for as long as we don't destroy it. Before we manage that, we shall have destroyed ourselves, and that will allow nature the time to recover, even if with perhaps new forms of vegetation before the world becomes desert and it's too late. Ironically, by our own pyrrhic hand will we will have been proved dispensable, even if nobody will be around to realise that.

As I wrote the above, it struck me that there is perhaps a huge, underlying link between landscape and street, in that both of them really reflect the actions of man more than they tell about anything else; whilst we still exist, we have made ourselves the gods that govern the survival of everything. And probably, the destroyers of that too. Testosterone has one helluva lot for which to answer, something that struck home very forcefully as I looked at the televised graduation portrait of the pretty English girl murdered in new Zealand these past few days. What a waste; what a sin.

LesPalenik

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #73 on: December 10, 2018, 04:09:31 am »

....
Which leads to the point that landscape as art usually is done with a brush and paint. Yes, it's static when you grab it with a camera, but it often has led to a spiritual experience when done with a brush.

Actually, quite impressive touches to otherwise plain photographs can be added also with a digital brush and radial or graduated filters.
Or by warping, squashing, stretching, blurring, and cloning - as demonstrated on this site by Alain Briot or David Osborn. The results of such creative projects and image enhancements can be stunning.
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Ivophoto

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #74 on: December 10, 2018, 04:11:23 am »

I do enjoy the beautiful pristine landscape images that somehow manage to pretend that we are living in a untouched garden of paradise. I spent many years attempting these myself. I was quite young when I saw Faye Godwins work and was quite surprised by it. The walls and domestic animals were things I would have excluded.

Now with our environment under  such stress and with my own feelings about that I seem to be more interested in discussing those stresses in my photographs than In seeking out the pristine remanants of our world.

I’m not saying that is the only valid response to the issues but it is mine. I do also think that landscape photography seems to be stuck in a romantic turning away from the realities we currently face. The masters of the f64 movement were so spectacularly successful that their dominating aesthetic continues to this day. Sometimes I think all we are seeing is f64 but in colour and with stars.

+1

There is nothing wrong with romantisme, as long it is understood as romantisme and realism is not considered as inferior or unacceptable.
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Rob C

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #75 on: December 10, 2018, 04:12:17 am »

Actually, quite impressive touches to otherwise plain photographs can be added also with a digital brush and radial or graduated filters.
Or by warping, squashing, stretching, blurring, and cloning - as demonstrated on this site by Alain Briot or David Osborn. The results of such creative projects and image enhancements can be stunning.

Like a kick in the balls. Subtle.

LesPalenik

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #76 on: December 10, 2018, 04:31:02 am »

Like a kick in the balls. Subtle.

It's no so different from creative writing. As Farley Mowat said about his story telling - “I never let facts get in the way of a good story”.
So if you need a little bit more light on that distant hill or add a moose crossing a road, just do it to make a better story. I won't hold it against you. 
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rabanito

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #77 on: December 10, 2018, 04:59:00 am »


So if you need a little bit more light on that distant hill or add a moose crossing a road, just do it to make a better story. I won't hold it against you.
+1
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Alan Klein

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #78 on: December 10, 2018, 05:23:16 pm »

Street captures humanness.  Landscape captures Godliness. 

Alan Klein

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Re: Is Landscape Photography "Static"?
« Reply #79 on: December 10, 2018, 05:24:19 pm »

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