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John had severals suggestions for topics and I thought this might be worth consideration.
In painting, the artist can place objects wherever he wants. The only option for a photographer is to use his position, left, right, to, fro, up and down to control placement of multiple objects in an image.
The painter adds only those details to the landscape necessary to the painting. The photographer struggles to simplify the composition so the viewer can concentrate on the important elements. This is a major cause of walking away from otherwise good images - just too much stuff, especially bushes and branches and so on.
The painter can (and usually does) soften the lighting, open the shadows hugely and choses the warmth of light to match the mood he wants to create. The photographer can do some of this in Photoshop but it often requires photographing in the early morning or evening light for best effect. Even HDR techniques can't turn mid day lighting into interesting landscape images.
The painter can add clouds as needed while the photographer must either wait or cheat - funny that it isn't cheating in painting.
Canvases come in all manner of sizes and length ratios though it's interesting that typically a painter will chose a canvas first, then paint to suit the canvas. You don't see cropped canvases. Of course, heights of trees and rocks and the width of rivers can be adjusted to suit, so perhaps it's more sensible for photographers to vary the ratios of their images to suit the particular subject, rather than to fit the paper they happen to print on or the sensor size of their camera.
Painters have complete control of the colour of objects - no yellow rocks next to pink ones, unless they want it. Of course, it's possible to do this in Photoshop and I have made subtle changes to fit in better, but in general photographers live with what nature provided. It does mean though, that we have to work extra hard to be selective in our compositions.
Painters have the choice of infinite or limited depth of field. Often backgrounds are hinted at with fairly large brush strokes which are themselves sharp where the photographer has a choice of blurred or not, and limitations within those. Helicon Focus has allowed us in some landscapes to increase depth of field - but it doesn't work in wind or with water that's moving.
Painters can control the sense of depth and distance through fading colours where photographers have to live with the light and atmosphere present. No wonder that photographic landscapes on a bright sunny day with little haze don't portray the sense of distance seen in paintings. We need weather and the right atmospheric conditions. On the other hand, cameras do great fog.
Perhaps most importantly, painters can paint the landscape as any degree of abstract they care to make it. Photographers rarely have that option with grand landscapes, though with close up details we can often approach abstract.
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6 comments:
This post highlights a fundamental difference between photography and painting - painting is additive, photography is subtractive. A painter starts with a blank canvass and adds content until it's time to stop. A photographer starts with basically the world view and starts to eliminate content by choosing where he is, where he points the camera, etc. etc. etc. until it's time to stop -that subtractive process is what we call simplification.
It's also interesting to note that the problems a painter faces (knowing when to stop - or adding too much content) and the photographer (stopping the "simplification process too soon) are the inverse.
Good point about the additive and subtractive natures of painting and photography respectively. Of course the similarity is in the knowing when to stop. In the case of photography, have you simplified to the point that the image no longer has the power it once had. Unfortunately in photography, it may well be that the image needs simplified yet won't be powerful when that is done and so you have to walk away - and they said photography was simple!
My view of photographic art may be slightly different than yours as I sue photography to expand my artistic mediums.
While a lot of images I take except for those normal changes that could be made ina darkroom, remain as taken.
There are others and this is the real learning and experimenting part for me is that I use the original digital image whether from a digital camera or scanned from large format film as the as the background sketch as a painter would. Albeit somewhat more detailed and richer in colours.
I have preplanned and combined 2 images to create a scene that did not exist.
In ‘Vision approach to a composite image – Nov 2007
http://niels-henriksen.blogspot.com/2007/11/vision-approach-to-b-composite-image.html
Also many times I will replace elements, especially skies as in
Replacing Skies What Mood Today - Feb 2008
http://niels-henriksen.blogspot.com/2008/02/replacing-skies-or-what-mood-today.html
(I included the description and month because I remember before I had a hard time posting long links)
I also regularly use digital editing tools such as Photoshop and add-ons to change the effect such as blue haze, lighten shadows, even change hues to suit my emotion for scene.
I do think painter have more latitudes in completely or creating as new landscapes, but I remember seeing a video clip where some software will search the web and replace elements of your photos with parts from different times
Maybe as the tools get better or they are already here (Corel painter) the blur between a photograph printed on canvas and a pigment painting will merge.
Niels Henriksen
This is one position, and it's revealed clearly when you say that inserting clouods is "cheating". My position, on the other hand, is that nothing is cheating because the final picture is what everything is geared toward. I look on what comes out of my Nikon as the raw material for my picture. It's 50% and Photoshop is the other 50%. I strive to get what for me is a first-rate picture (I never call what I make a photograph). Sometimes the raw material is changed very little; other times, I work it over a great deal.
In short, there's only one question: do you like the picture? If you do, great; if not, I'm sorry to hear it. But there's no rightness or wrongness about it; no cheating whatever.
This discussion reminds me about a description of different concepts of photography that was introduced by Minor White: The camera as an extension of a paint brush vs the camera as an extension of vision. Obviously Photoshop took the first concept probably far beyond what Minor White could have envisaged. There is of course no absolute wrongness or rightness as Jack points out. But I certainly could imagine to consider truthfulness or not in the context of each these concepts.
Dirk
I agree with you George, but someone could never paint the unexpected. This is a big advantage of photography, even when there is not much unexpected in Landscape photography. :)
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