The most illuminating quote for me in the article was,
"Unlike painters, we can not create the light needed for a particular image. Instead, we must wait for nature to cooperate and provide light that inspires us in some way. Cultivating patience, perseverance, and a developed awareness of light and its many qualities is an essential skill that always pays dividends."
This sentence captures the essence of what many photographers believe is important in what they do. Other writers on this site seem to believe that the light is added on the computer later to suit their 'vision' of what the scene should have looked like.
I love that you have let the landscape speak for itself and eschewed HDR techniques to even out the light. Your use of dark and shade is beautiful
Your images are truly masterful and to add a bonus you have not placed yourself as the 'artist' at the centre of the story. You let your craft with the camera in the field speak for itself and it is obvious you didn't need to spend hours reworking these images to 'create your vision'
The above statements needs clarification. Obviously a photographer
can create light in the form of flash, or switching on other sources of artificial light. Whilst this is usually not effective for landscape photography because of the limited range of flash, it might sometimes be useful to illuminate shadows or dark objects in the near foreground of a landscape.
Alternatively, HDR is a perfectly legitimate method of creating more light because this is exactly what the eye does as it peruses a scene, with the pupil dilating and contracting according to the intensity of the light.
If the pupils of one's eyes (equivalent to a lens aperture) didn't dilate when shifting one's gaze from the foreground of a landscape to the bright clouds in the sky, one would feel very uncomfortable. The excessive brightness of the sky could hurt the eyes, and one probably wouldn't like the landscape at all.
When a so-called HDR effect is criticised for being unnatural, it's the processing skills and/or judgement of the photographer that deserve the criticism.
An example of this requirement for HDR would be the 'Twilight Wilderness' painting by Frederic Church, shown in the article. To photograph such a scene, one would be advised to bracket exposures and merge to HDR, otherwise that foreground would be unacceptably noisy, especially if a Canon camera were used (sorry! couldn't resist
).
Even the scene depicted in the previous painting in the article, 'In the Wood' by Asher B Durand, could not be satisfactorily captured by a camera without using HDR techniques. Without HDR, either the blue sky would be blown, or the lower foreground would be unacceptably noisy.
Another very easy way to add (or subtract) light in a photograph is to select any area in the scene using the Lasso tool. After appropriately feathering the selection, one can lighten or darken the selected area according to taste, and without any unnatural effects.