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Author Topic: What is 'landscape'?  (Read 63629 times)

Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #60 on: May 21, 2011, 09:42:12 am »

Rob - it worked better for me with the sound and visual turned off. ;)

Amen, brother! Watching the video makes waterboarding look like a cold lemonade on a hot summer day  :D

RSL

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #61 on: May 21, 2011, 01:40:01 pm »

Can't help but agree.
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Rob C

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #62 on: May 21, 2011, 04:40:15 pm »

Rob can you show us some examples of your efforts with regards to painting? It is all right to talk the talk but when it comes to walking......? ;) ;D


Do you mean you want to see my landscape paintings? I don't paint them; what has that got to do with anything? For another kind of painting, such as my own attempts at making colour sploshes, visit the website.

If you want to see good landscape painting, try a host of past masters... my own tastes are for some of the Impressionist/post-Impressionists, but even the English painters of the recent past have terrific stuff.

?

Rob C

Rob C

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #63 on: May 21, 2011, 04:47:11 pm »

Well, I did suggest not watching, but if the sound is too much - oh well, there's always rap...

I love sentiment that is honest. You may prefer yellow roses, blue moons or even flying to the moon. Pick your poison; it's all the same in the end: you die.

Rob C

Rob C

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #64 on: May 21, 2011, 05:29:54 pm »

On the other hand, maybe something lighter?

I remember this one on the car radio when I used to drop my daughter and her little pals off at school on my way to the studio. See no evil, you hear no evil.

http://youtu.be/qO18k215gpk

Tempus fugits, dunnit?

; - (

Rob C

Colin4May

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #65 on: September 21, 2011, 05:52:29 am »

You leave your little Fuggits out of this!
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AreBee

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #66 on: April 27, 2016, 11:27:32 am »

Russ,

Quote
...with regard to landscape, if anybody wants to see why there's no way photography can compete with painting when it comes to landscape, they need to look up Albert Bierstadt's painting: Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California....

Quote
Here's a pretty good example of what I'm talking about... If I'd been able to use 300 mm on the 28-300 mm zoom I'd have been able to make the peak look closer to the way it appeared to the eye -- much higher, but then the foreground would have been foreshortened far too much. Besides, I was against a cliff myself, so I couldn't back up to zoom more... Had I been a painter I could have captured the real feeling of the sight. Good landscape painters play around with linear perspective to create what the eye believes it sees. With a camera, no way. With a camera you can do some neat things with atmospheric perspective, but you're always constrained to exact linear perspective.

Portrait
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MattBurt

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #67 on: April 27, 2016, 12:31:11 pm »

Rob, It'd probably be a pretty good place to hide out after the high altitude emp burst takes out all our communications and returns the world to the early 19th century. Actually, it's a root cellar at a ranch that was homesteaded in the 19th century.

But with regard to landscape, if anybody wants to see why there's no way photography can compete with painting when it comes to landscape, they need to look up Albert Bierstadt's painting: Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California. The image kept jumping into my mind as I read the comments on this thread, but I couldn't remember the name of the painting or the name of the artist. Finally, after a bit of a search, I found it. You can get a rough idea of what's involved at http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/bierstadt/bierstadt_among.jpg.html. You can get a larger view of the painting by clicking on the "Image Viewer" hyperlink on that page, but to see the real article you need to go to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC.

You could spend the rest of your life sitting with your camera waiting, like Ansel Adams, for this kind of scene to appear, but you'd die unsatisfied. Yes, the painting's exaggerated, the mountains in the background are stretched, and the lighting's physically impossible, but so what?!! The first view of this painting is almost enough to knock you down. I've never seen a photographic landscape that can produce anywhere near the emotional impact of this painting, and there are plenty of other paintings with the same kind of impact.

I also love landscapes, both the actual landscape and our representations of them. I like paintings and this Bierstadt one is just a bit over the top for me. It reminds me of Bob Ross a little in the way everything is idealized. But I guess that is a matter of taste because some embellishment to feature what I think are the important elements of a scene is ok so maybe it's just the degree to which Bierstadt (and Ross) take it.

While I'm rambling I want to include some thoughts on beauty that this thread touched on earlier. I once had a psychedelic experience (shhh don't tell my mom) where I was out hiking in the mountains and climbing around boulders and the theme for the day was beauty. "WTF is beauty?!" Is beauty in our minds and part of perception or is beauty inherent to the objects we admire? Anyway that had my head spinning for hours. Or something did anyway. Good times. :) But I think the question is a valid one to consider and I tend to believe more that beauty is in the beholder's eye, but yet I still have this emotional feeling that it is connected to the objects as well. Hard to resolve in a tidy way for me.

When I was an active watercolorist I really admired the work of John Singer Sargent and his treatments of grand scenes as well as intimate ones. He definitely stylized his images but in a different way from Bierstadt. Somehow it strikes me as more real, yet still an idealization.





« Last Edit: April 27, 2016, 12:43:19 pm by MattBurt »
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RSL

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #68 on: April 27, 2016, 02:34:55 pm »

Russ,

Portrait

Very nice, Rob. Now let's see the placid pond in the foreground among bluffs that don't reach all the way to the sky and the deer drinking at the pond. I like your two shots very much, but they share the same flaw my shot of Pikes Peak has: linear perspective which, with a camera, always is straight. There are places in the Rockies where I can get in close and shoot the height without long-lens distortion as you did here, but when I do that, there's little or no foreground -- no place for the pond or the deer, and there's no way to overcome that problem. I can move back and use a long lens to emphasize the height of the mountains, but then my pond looks like a puddle. In painting, I can cheat and have both things: the placid, inviting pond and the overwhelmingly high mountains.

Bottom line: It depends on whether you intend reportage or art. If it's reportage your objective is to show it as it is. If it's art, your objective is to move the viewer rather than report the strict facts. I look at Bierstadt's painting, having lived in the Rockies for more than fifty years, and it FEELS right. I've never seen a photograph that can produce that same feeling. Mountains are made up of illusions. It's quite possible to take Trotsky out of pictures of the Bolshevik gatherings and produce an illusion of that sort. It's very, very hard with a camera to produce an illusion that feels like truth.
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RSL

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #69 on: April 27, 2016, 03:14:36 pm »

I also love landscapes, both the actual landscape and our representations of them. I like paintings and this Bierstadt one is just a bit over the top for me. It reminds me of Bob Ross a little in the way everything is idealized. But I guess that is a matter of taste because some embellishment to feature what I think are the important elements of a scene is ok so maybe it's just the degree to which Bierstadt (and Ross) take it.

While I'm rambling I want to include some thoughts on beauty that this thread touched on earlier. I once had a psychedelic experience (shhh don't tell my mom) where I was out hiking in the mountains and climbing around boulders and the theme for the day was beauty. "WTF is beauty?!" Is beauty in our minds and part of perception or is beauty inherent to the objects we admire? Anyway that had my head spinning for hours. Or something did anyway. Good times. :) But I think the question is a valid one to consider and I tend to believe more that beauty is in the beholder's eye, but yet I still have this emotional feeling that it is connected to the objects as well. Hard to resolve in a tidy way for me.

When I was an active watercolorist I really admired the work of John Singer Sargent and his treatments of grand scenes as well as intimate ones. He definitely stylized his images but in a different way from Bierstadt. Somehow it strikes me as more real, yet still an idealization.

Hi Matt,

To make a long and complicated story short and simple: I agree with you about beauty. For instance, when people first came to this continent (not "native Americans," which they aren't) they were afraid of the landscape -- the mountains, etc. They didn't find beauty in it. Beauty in a landscape is a learned experience. No, I don't think beauty is inherent in the object we see (unless we're looking at pretty girls where the response is built-in). Beauty is learned.

Yeah, I also agree with you about Bierstadt idealizing the mountains. Yes he did, but he wasn't there to do reportage. He was there to make art. Based on our current sensibilities his work was a bit over the top, but it wasn't over the top when he did it. And though the deer in that picture are more than a bit kitschy, with some effort I can ignore them.

I like Sargent too, especially the second one with the hand of man in it.
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MattBurt

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #70 on: April 27, 2016, 03:43:42 pm »

That reminds me of some indigenous (relatively so, as you point out) Mexicans called the Cora who wind up here with the ranching industry. They are terrified of rainbows and believe they are a harbinger of evil things. The more traditional ones generally keep their windows and blinds closed all the time to keep out "bad wind", rainbows, and other threats.
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AreBee

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #71 on: April 27, 2016, 03:48:23 pm »

Russ,

Quote
I like your two shots very much...

They were not made by me.

Quote
There are places in the Rockies where I can get in close and shoot the height without long-lens distortion... but when I do that, there's little or no foreground -- no place for the pond or the deer, and there's no way to overcome that problem.

The photo has a foreground. Humans feature in it.

Quote
Mountains are made up of illusions.

Mountains are made up of rock.
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RSL

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #72 on: April 27, 2016, 04:34:16 pm »

Humans, but not deer. It's reportage, and pretty good reportage, but that's all it is. We don't have a contrast between a placid pond and the high and wild mountains, and there's no way you can get that contrast with a camera.
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petermfiore

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #73 on: April 27, 2016, 07:37:01 pm »

In painting, I can cheat and have both things: the placid, inviting pond and the overwhelmingly high mountains.

Artists call it design...

Peter

RSL

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #74 on: April 28, 2016, 08:16:29 am »

Good point, Peter. Of course that's exactly what it is. And you can't "design" with a camera.
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MattBurt

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #75 on: April 28, 2016, 10:32:59 am »

Good point, Peter. Of course that's exactly what it is. And you can't "design" with a camera.

At least not to the same extent. Composition and lens choice give design options, just not as many as with a painting.
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GrahamBy

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #76 on: April 28, 2016, 11:46:53 am »

I'd suggest going to Arles, in the south of France. There are various points around and in the town that were painted by van Gogh. Compare the paintings to what he was standing in front of while painting...

Conveniently, it's also the site of the biggest French photography festival each year, so you can go off and look at some impressive photography after lunch :)
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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #77 on: April 28, 2016, 12:24:17 pm »

I'd suggest going to Arles, in the south of France. There are various points around and in the town that were painted by van Gogh. Compare the paintings to what he was standing in front of while painting...

There is a whole book on the subject, this time with Paul Sezanne: Cezanne: Landscape into Art

From the introduction: "Pavel Machotka has photographed the sites of Cezanne's landscape paintings - whenever possble from the same spot and at the same time of day that Cezanne painted the scenes. Juxtaposing these colour photographs with reproductions of the paintings, he offers a range of evidence to investigate how the painter transformed nature into works of art."

MattBurt

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #78 on: April 28, 2016, 04:33:07 pm »

That book looks very interesting. I may ask the birthday fairy to add that to the list!
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HSakols

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Re: What is 'landscape'?
« Reply #79 on: April 28, 2016, 06:52:55 pm »

Thanks for the the link.
Quote
There is a whole book on the subject, this time with Paul Sezanne: Cezanne: Landscape into Art
And I thought that he just painted fruit. 

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