Landscapes, they're tough

[rjlhughes]

First there can be a landscape that you really like, but it can be really hard to define why you like it.

Then it can take a while for the light to be right (months sometimes)

and then my pro friends say digital even 8 mp won't deliver the detail that film can....

[stephen]

Truly beautiful Bob can you give us some exif details please as i am trying to get the lanscape thing going at the moment. Stephen

[rjlhughes]

Stephen thanks for asking:

35mm f14 1/50th iso200 (I usually shoot Aperture Priority)

11/7/05 at 16.39

It's just over the hill to the east of the Oberon dam, on the Jenolan Caves Road. You're looking at the Fish River, down stream of the dam, and the Sydney road in the distance.

I thought that by putting it up here and on Flickr I'd get some insight into my attempts to get the soft curves of the landscape right. I think Henry Moore was inspired by similiar countryside. (But I'm not HM).

[Nnnnsic]

Beautiful shot, Bob... very serene look to it.

I don't think there has to be a definition or reason to like anything in a piece of art or an image, landscape or otherwise.

You like it because you do, even if you can't say why.

And as to 8mp not having the detail that film can, it depends on the film, doesn't it?

11mp tends to be the minimum to beat 35mm, but by shooting in a RAW format, you can find detail in an image that even one shot in 35mm might not have.

Each format has a compromise of sorts.

[glamy]

Very nice, Bob. I really like the atmosphere. My wife and I enjoy the countryside when on holidays (Broken Hill area especially)
Cheers,
Gerard

[gecko]

A good photo
I like the way your eye is drawn in by the farm track etc and you keep discovering more details. Nice shadows and colours. and the little pink cloud is a bonus.

Keep up the good work
Gecko

[mudder]

G'day Bob,
Lovely serene feel to the image... Nice soft light with long shadows, softly undulating rolling hills, with a lonely shed on it's own...

A good landscape is simply one that brings on some form of emotion or feel when viewing the image, that may be a memory for only the photog, but what else matters

[stubbsy]

Bob

This is a great shot. Very Australian feel to it. I like the composition with good leading lines and the farm building "neat and in the middle".

Not sure if it was an artistic decision or if its my monitor, but it seems to have a slightly brown/orange cast to it. PS I also think your avatar is great - I really like the way your subject is posed

[gstark]

Bob,

Beautiful landscape, great lighting and time of day, and a good and usable contrast range throughout the image.

[ozimax]

First there can be a landscape that you really like, but it can be really hard to define why you like it.

Then it can take a while for the light to be right (months sometimes)

and then my pro friends say digital even 8 mp won't deliver the detail that film can....

Bob, nice shot, know the area well, all my family come from Burraga, out Rockley/Trunkey way.

Light is definitely everything with landscapes (like most of photography I suppose), film definitely does have an edge at present. A 'blad or medium/large format cameras can take some amazingly detailed images that digital can't compete with, yet.

However, comparing a standard film 35mm SLR vs DSLR?? Not much difference there when it comes to larger size enlargements.

Keep posting here...

Max

[sirhc55]

Bob - beautiful shot - would be great to take two more identical location shots at different times of the day and make up a tripych

[Sheetshooter]

"A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse ...."

.... or anything else animated for that matter - tractor, kangaroo, Farmer Joe locking the shed.

It is a really lovely landscape - well seen and well executed - and my comments are not intended in any way to detract from the stillness, the form and the charm of the pic. But consider also for a moment the added dimension of a "MOMENT PRESERVED" that would derive from the inclusion of a non-stagnant element.

A major part of the appeal of this landscape is the unadulterated veracity of it. No coloured grads, no polarisers; just the captivating allure and essence of a part of the world seemingly afflicted with cellulite to put it into the Moore 'grand-dame' perspective.

[wendellt]

"A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse ...."

.... or anything else animated for that matter - tractor, kangaroo, Farmer Joe locking the shed.

It is a really lovely landscape - well seen and well executed - and my comments are not intended in any way to detract from the stillness, the form and the charm of the pic. But consider also for a moment the added dimension of a "MOMENT PRESERVED" that would derive from the inclusion of a non-stagnant element.

A major part of the appeal of this landscape is the unadulterated veracity of it. No coloured grads, no polarisers; just the captivating allure and essence of a part of the world seemingly afflicted with cellulite to put it into the Moore 'grand-dame' perspective.

A very verbose dictum, eloquently put and equally insightful.
Care to discourse further?

[rjlhughes]

Thanks for all the kind compliments.

And Sheetshooter I'm tempted to say that the shed, which I orginally centred on is meant to contrast with the soft folds of the ground on the river. But I do agree that I could have gotten closer to the subject and perhaps defined it better. I was reading Niall Benvie's thoughts last night about landscapes, and the endless time it can take to get the right look during winter in Scotland. For this one I was caught by the scene as I drove past, and stopped to do a few captures.

sirhc55 - I am doing that with another hill that I drive past frequently. Perhaps in the end I'll have 30 different shots to chose three from, over some months.

Ozimax, it's a very different landscape up here on the high tablelands to most of Australia, which is desert or beach it sometimes seems. It's subtler up here, I think.

nnnnsic, serene - I like to think so....and yes I am shooting a lot more in raw, but don't know yet of it gives much more of the fine detail fvor landscape that film can.


Thanks again for all your kind comments.

[Sheetshooter]

Aaah Bob,

I have no issue with the general placement of the shed - its precise placement would be a matter for lengthy deliberation about the toanlity and the balance of mass of the shed ... and its shadow ... but that is somewhat too esoteric for written dialogue on a forum.

With regard to detail and trying to match film - why? Does an artist working in watercolours concern himself with emulating oils? You have chosen your medium - DSLR digital capture - and you should make the medium work for you in establishing its own unique dialogue rather than perverting it into trying to be something else. Accept the qualities of the medium and exploit them for their own sake is my suggestion.

With regard to my horse statement I refer you to a shot done by St. Ansel of Yosemite: WINTER SUNRISE - Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, California, 1944 (it's on page 162 of "EXAMPLES - the making of 40 photographs in case you have access to a copy.)

Much of Adams's landscape and wilderness work is lost on me - it is from another time and of another school - but this particular shot has always stood out for me because tiny in the foreground (about 1% or 2% of the image area) is a horse grazing. This was so foreign to the preferences of Adams that in some early prints he retouched the horse out - it was an animate intrusion into the pristine world of his wilderness vision. But for me the presence of the horse elevates this work beyond his normal oeuvre and lends relevance and purpose to the scene (which is still 99% or 98% wilderness). My suggestion was not for a different crop or scale but merely the inclusion of something with a pulse or a function (beyond the function of shelter provided by the shed).

Anyway, inclusion or not, it is a fine picture of which you should be proud and a giant step towards your goal in this regimine.

[rjlhughes]

I have a very mixed reaction to sheds on farms. They speak to me of farmers' great need to colonise and impose a simple geometry on the landscape.

But you're right in the general principle that signs of animal life attract our human eyes rapidly.

Partly in response to Wendell I thought I might pop this up. It comes, I think from dpreview, I copied and pasted into my palm some time ago. I'm happy to acknowledge the author, but don't know who Owen is.

Hey guys.

If you saw my post a few weeks ago I went to a landscape workshop and would just like to post a few tips I learnt from it.

- Use a wideangle lens.

- Use leading lines.

Lines that lead the eye into the picture, whether it be a straight line, curved line, curly line whatever. It could be made up of a row of flowers, rocks, train tracks you name it.

- Sometimes put a 'blocker' on the leading lines.

Put something that stops the eye from following the leading line all the way out the frame. Eg. on a train track that leads from bottom left to the right hand side, if you have a train at the right then your eyes will not continue out, but rather stop and find more interest in the train.

- Use foreground objects

Good landscapes have objects close up in the foreground which enables the eye to be lead into the picture, and also provides a more 3-dimensional image.

- Colour in foreground

Brightly coloured objects in the foreground can be used to entive the viewer, and also be used to counteract larger areas of duller or opposite colour.

- Use hyperfocal focus.

In order to get everything in your image sharp when using a small aperture (eg f11-22) if you focus on the distant mountains or whatever then the foreground object will be soft. If you bring the focus in a bit then you will be able to get a greater depth of field (eg. from 3ft to infinity) for more information have a search for hyperfocal focussing.

edit: USE A TRIPOD! Smile

Hope this helps you guys out! Smile

Cheers.
Owen.



Pretty simple stuff, (and debatable) but perhaps worth adding to a thread on landscapes.



"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes..." Marcel Proust.

[ajo43]

Rob

As someone else said this is a very Australian shot. Could have been painted by any of the Heidelberg school, Streeton etc.

What I like about it is that it feels like I’m looking through a window into another place more serene and calm than the real world.

I’d like to have a go at this kind of landscape photography myself.

Cheers

[Sheetshooter]

I do hope that unknown Owen did not pay too much for the workshop that told him that.

If there is one golden rule applicable in all milieu it is:

ADVOID FORMULAIC TECHNOQUE

Just to elaborate on the point about hyperfocal focus for example - that is commendable at reasonable apertures, which on 35mm sized gear might be somewhere in the range of f5.6 to f11, but stopping down to f22 on such small focal lengths is an invitation to image degradation due to diffraction. The entire image could end up more unsharp than the lack of depth of field at a wider aperture. To this end I have a formula in a spreadsheet on the Palm which indictaes the optimal aperture for a given focus spread where the benefits of increased depth of field are not negated by diffraction. It should also be noted that only 35mm lenses with depth of field markings for various apertures those indications are sufficient for only a 6"x4" print at normal viewing distance.

[digitor]

I like the landscape very much, shed and all,

I have a very mixed reaction to sheds on farms. They speak to me of farmers' great need to colonise and impose a simple geometry on the landscape.

but honestly speaking, sheds on farms speak to me more of a farmer's need to keep some hay dry, or keep a tractor out of the weather!

Cheers

[rjlhughes]

Sheetshooter - don't you have to know the rules to break them?

I didn't know about diffraction, but was playing with hyperfocal distance this morning, so will have a look at those shots tonight.

And digitor, yep, I'm a farmer and I have sheds, it's about where and how they're placed that interests me. And what it says about the farmers relationship with the land.

When bulldozers first became very available after WW2 a lot of people used them to clear most of their properties. They remembered how hard it had been for their fathers and grandfathers to clear the scrub, and loved the modern miracle. Now Landcare has made for a rethink of that attitude. Farmers are very happy to hide their houses in the landscape, but they often like big bright sheds in the middle of open paddocks.

It articulates some unconscious need, or something....

[Sheetshooter]

The discussion of the actual picture at hand has developed sufficiently for me to feel within my rights to go left of field a tad:

Bob made the comment about the farmers' intrusion into the landscape with sheds and so forth. Indeed, more subtle than sheds are the boundaries, the fences, the roads, railways, viaducts, aquaducts, power transmission lines and on, and on, and on. Worthy of investigation is the work of the other - still living - Adams: Robert. Robert Adams is also a very eloquent and erudite man who depicts not the 'natural' state of wilderness but man's impact upon what was once wilderness. He also writes some interesting books, notable amongst which is: "WHY PEOPLE PHOTOGRAPH" [Publisher: APERTURE - ISBN: 0-89381-603-5]

Then last night while waiting for the sandman to do his nightly sprinkling in my eyes I went through my volume of: WILLIAM GARNETT - aerial photographs [Publisher: University Of California Press - ISBN: 0-520-08445-4]. Garnett has photographed the most wonderful abstractions of the landscape from the cockpit of his Cessna 170-B since 1956 and is Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkely. Here, from above, man's Euclidean fantasy and its mastery over natural form is more obvious than in most places. In fact from Garnett's vantage point the cubic mass of the shed becomes the comet head of a trailing tail of shadow that curves and distorts as it traverses the undulations of the earth below. Set in juxtaposition with other views of more pristine 'wastelands' the hand of man could be seen by some as demonic.

Landscape can be many things - and many things can be landscape. In photographing the nude I have only ever seen the human form as either architecture of landscape. Only with the structural concerns in place would I then seek the passion and personality beneath the surface. The same principle must apply to all subject material as Bob's quote from the blessed Minor White contends.

I hope my digression has not been an encumbrance.

Cheers,

[rjlhughes]

My hand has passed over Why People Photograph on the shelves of my favourite photography bookshop on a number of occasions. I'll look more closely.

Our human eyes make most sense of faces and landscapes I think. But then there's something about the 'bumpiness' of the nude that also attracts us.

Benvie keeps talking about the 'wildness', rather than 'wilderness'.

And Robert Frost:

Something there is that does not love a fence.

[Sheetshooter]

Bob,

The honourable Mr. Benvie is talking of Britain, a place where all the wilderness had disappeared even before the Romans arrived. As for wildness: that could be a Saturday night on the mound in Edinburgh or even walking into a dockside bar full of Scottish ferry crew in Oban on a night when Turkey is beating Celtic in the football. (Fastest pint of Guinness I can ever remember scoffing - in fear of my life I was. Such wildness!!)

[wendellt]

I am finding this thread an enthralling read!

sheetshooter your bursting with knowledge and opinion please post more i love reading your posts!

and rjlhughes now that i have read this thread I can appreciate your landscape shot even more, great work, personally i think the fact that it's not Medium format sharp is core to why it has such a moody painterly and abstracted true to life representation.

keep the thread alive!

[rjlhughes]

Wendell - you're a celt in your heart.....I think that's the wildness that Sheetshooter is talking about.

Sheetshooter celebrates the unruly but religious people pushed to the boundaries of the then known world - the highlands of scotland, the Irish island and the high holts of the Basques.

You could make the argument (and I have all too often) that in Australia we cling to the verandah of the coast fearful of the interior, looking away over the seas to our past or future.

Benvie does say start with the one small detail that caugfht your attention and then don't add too much more to the picture for fear of diluting the theme.

On the medium format idea - I think that cropping to make a square picture is an interesting idea, as is cropping to a panorama for the landscape shots.

Did I mention that Sheetshooter suggested the crop, and I've used it again here

[gstark]

but honestly speaking, sheds on farms speak to me more of a farmer's need to keep some hay dry, or keep a tractor out of the weather!

There's farmers, and there's farmers.

One whom I know has a complete car body - Alfa Romeo Giulia TI Sedan (late 60s vintage) - undercoated, and fully wrapped in the factory parts clear plastic with Alfa Romeo printing in orange - in his shed.