The apparent change in the style of his work may have a lot to do with the change in his equipment from a 4x5 view camera shooting film to a Canon 1Ds III.
Possibly, but I very much doubt it. It's not either/or, it's and-and.
First, although Mr. Neill's contribution is well-written, eloquent and clear, what he describes isn't new or unique, as he himself indicates, others have experimented along much the same lines.
For me personally, I recognise every line and thought in his article, I went through much the same process and wrote a bit about it on my website in September 2006. I'd bought a large format camera to make hyper-detailed landscape studies, but at the same time I also started to experiment with in-camera motion (not even digitally - I did motion images on medium format Fujichrome Velvia. Stunning autumn colors without detail). I found it's two sides of the same coin.
You might want to have a look at the series Motion, Large Format and Memories on my website and click on the intro ("About-") texts on those three index pages. There was a lenghty thread on abstract pictures in landscape photography a while ago on this forum which discussed much the same techniques.
Motion-blurred images require strong, balanced compositions in order to work well. Mr. Neill's work contains excellent examples. Out of the hundreds of images you take using this technique, only those with strong compositions seem to work well.
However, as I saw more and more of this kind of motion photography on the net, I found it is very difficult to tell the one apart from the other. I started clicking from link to link from one motion photographer to the next, and soon found I couldn't tell which was which, myself included, and that's where I sort of lost interest in this technique. To me, landscape photography, or indeed any photography, should be a personal statement, but I found I couldn't make motion photography personal.
I do still sometimes take a series of motion images, because in some aspects it is a very valid and worthwhile technique. For instance, it allows you to take pictures not of 'a forest' but of 'any forest', if you see what I mean. In one successful image, you can show what any forest looks like. You can get to the heart of what the concept of 'forest' is about. If that makes sense to anyone, I hope,
Gerard Kingma
www.kingma.nu