Photographing The Landscape, Part 1

I thought I might tackle the whole concept of photographing the landscape from a creative, artistic and compositional viewpoint, in a series of articles, starting with:

Landscape As Subject

Why

Landscape has been a subject for painting long before photography came along - though even in painting it has been a development of the last couple of hundred years. Prior to that, most paintings were of people or religious themes or at least people in their surroundings. The idea of pure landscape is in fact relatively modern. That said, landscape was in full swing by the time photography came along around 1830 so it was no surprise that landscape became subject matter for cameras too. Of course there were technical reasons - like it tends to hold still and lighting is provided (often lots of it).

There are practical reasons for photographing the landscape - typically you don't need permission, you don't have to have people skills, it gets you out in the fresh air and usually involves getting some exercise, besides, it's pretty, and clean, and smells good. Of course, it can also be -40 or raining, muddy or stormy. It often involves travel which can be a mixed blessing - you get to go nice places, but can make doing landscape work near home frustrating if home doesn't look anything like the mountains or the seashore.

For the serious photographer, landscape offers many attractions. The mere challenge of taking beautiful scenery and somehow translating into a piece of paper inches across is significant. Typically you don't have the option of moving things around to arrange them so the challenge is to work with what you find to make an interesting composition which is both simpler and harder - simpler because complete freedom to put things anywhere you want means the huge responsibility of designing the composition instead of discovering it, yet the frustration when things don't quite work out and you wish that rock were three feet to the left.

Landscape being one of the classic themes and very popular, it is quite possible to compare your results to those of others, to gauge your progress and to know where you stand. You can easily visit galleries and see what really good prints look like, and there are many books of landscape photographs to study from.

Landscape is relatively generic - you can hardly give a picture of your girlfriend to your boss as a Christmas present (well, maybe you could if it's racy enough - but would she want you to?). Landscape works well as decoration and for the intelligent but uninformed, it is easy to relate to. The sales market is certainly larger and your spouse is more likely to give up wall space to your work when it's landscape.

Landscape photographs can be truly beautiful. I am particularly partial to black and white landscape but there are some really talented colour landscape photographers out there.

I find the challenge of deciding on the right position from which to photograph, the choice for the edges of the image (ie. the framing) and the process of translating the landscape into a fine art image very satisfying, if at times frustrating too. If it was too easy, it wouldn't be as much fun.

Next time I'm going to write about what to photograph. there are many inexperienced photographers who bemoan not being able to visit Yosemite or Big Sur as a huge limit to their photography or who feel that only travel can produce satisfactory work, discounting their own surroundings as being too mundane, or too flat for satisfactory landcscape images. I have some thoughts on those problems - and they don't involve a bigger travel budget.