Is nature and landscape photography boring?

[kalle.koponen]

Hi

I?d be interested in your thoughts of a doubt that keeps nagging me.

That is the question I have here as the subject line. One could argue

that it would be hard to give a positive rating of originality to

most of the nature and landscape work posted here, including my own.

Images of nature and landscape tend to be extremely beautiful, but

repetitive. Honestly, how many sunsets of biblical colours or razor

sharp insects can we take?! Avoiding cliches is probably the biggest

challenge here and I think, unfortunately, most of us fail more often

than not. Should we strive to show other aspects of nature and

landscape than beauty to keep the genre interesting?

Kalle

[fk319]

I find cooking boring, but not eating. Thank God my wife loves to cook. I am not a Pro, so I don't shoot for a single picture, but I shoot for a sequence or group of pictures. I find that it is hard for me to get a single shot that uses all 1000 words, so I take several shots to tell my story. I live out in the country, so most of my pictures are of my family and of nature. Personaly, I dont get that much enjoyment out of a picture of two people playing chess, something about watching paint dry, but looking at landscape or the hairs on a fly is much more to my liking. (Even more so when I take the picture.) In other words, shoot what YOU want to shoot and look at later.

[bill sullivan]

As to your question about the originality of most nature photography, I can answer that in a couple of ways. One is that if I send a photo to the Photo Critique Forum and it gets only average marks for originality, I don't let it bother me. If I get a couple of ticks above average, I am very happy. (I also look at the individual grades and throw out any 2s or 3s, thinking they probably just came from sarcastic fools anyway.) Bottom line is I don't expect much except that it confirms my belief that I can take above-average but not necessarily brilliant pictures. I can live with that. I don't need to be brilliant.

 

My other thought on originality is that I try to avoid some of the famous cliche places of the world (I haven't revisited Yosemite in years). My favorite place is the Sonoran desert in Southern California. It isn't the ugliest desert, but it isn't the prettiest either. If I get low marks for a photo from here, I tell myself it's a hard sell and lots of people probably just don't understand. Frankly, I like the challenge of photographing a place that many people might not consider photogenic.

 

As for avoiding cliches, let me put it this way. I don't think a person should go into the field and not take a picture because he or she thinks it will be a cliche. Take the picture. Capture the beauty. Make it the best picture you can. Take it as a challenge. Your skills may just carry you through.

[yakim_peled1]

>> Avoiding cliches is probably the biggest challenge here and I think, unfortunately, most of us fail more often than not.

 

Right, and this is where the eye and mind play their most important part.

 

>> Should we strive to show other aspects of nature and landscape than beauty to keep the genre interesting?

 

Of course. Don't forget that that what you consider beautiful will not necessarily be so labeled by others.

 

Happy shooting,

Yakim.

[ian_whitehead1]

If a photograph is boring then we have failed as the photographer. I have seen photographs of landscapes that have been photographed thousands of times but they cause the viewer to feel something that the others do not. What you shoot, is not important, if you connect with the viewer.... is.

[phyrpowr]

1. I have no interest in how many great pictures of Arches David Muench has taken, or you either (no offense): my pix are MINE, taken by me at the spot, for me. If I'm in a great and beautiful place, I won't be bored by shooting it

 

2. Even "postcard cliches" might be improved upon, given the right light and weather (I blew a terrific "Gathering Storm, Half Dome" by assuming I had a few more minutes to let the driver park the car. WRONG)

 

3. Not everyone has seen what you shot. Show it to someone who doesn't recognize the names Rowell, Adams, etc., and watch them light up

 

Now, all that being said, I think I've improved my personal little portfolio by looking down at the ground: tons of pattern, color, light variations on a forest floor, for example. Also I took a great tip, when there's a good sunset/rise, turn around. Use a telephoto and get close enough to turn something into an abstract. Use a wide angle to emphasize some item in the foreground that's anomolous to the background.

 

But you know what? All this has been done before too. I'm not sure anyone can be totally original, but I guess my ultimate point is who cares? Get the best shot you can of some thing you think looks good, and the rest will take care of itself

[._kaa]

My current thinking (subject to change :-) ) is that there are several radically different kinds of photography.

 

One kind is documentary/"family album" photography where the goal is get a correct depiction of whatever was in front of the camera and preserve it.

 

Another kind is what I call "craft" photography. The goal is to create a nice and polished (often called "pretty" or "beautiful") picture without necessarily any originality or the personality of the photographer being visible. A great deal of nature/landscape photography (but not all of it) falls into this category.

 

The last kind is "art" photography where all the criteria for being contemporary art apply.

 

These three kinds of photography have different goals, and different criteria should be applied to them. Sunsets/flowers are highly boring to someone interested in "art" photography, but they do not strive for originality -- they really are evaluated on the basis of how "well-made" and polished they are...

[johnb]

Kalle,<br>

I could understand you if every photo looked the same, but they don't. In fact 10 people can take a photo of the same location and they will have 10 different photos. Nothing is EXACTLY the same. Like Frank Kujawski was comparing it to food. You can get the same steak at different restaurants, but do they all look and taste exactly the same? Not to my taste, nor vision.

[srspears]

Kalle Koponen interesting question. I wonder, though, why you suggest that just nature and landscape photography is boring? I find that most photographic genres are boring. How many nude poses can one see without repetition? How about wildlife shots? Or "city life" scenes? Or...? Or....?

 

I find that the aspect of boring crosses all genre and all mediums.... painting, film making, photography, music, etc. The trick, in my opinion, is to find a way to make your medium exciting and original. A standard that we must work toward individually I think.

 

steph

[sknowles]

Since I only photograph for myself and do it whenever I want or the opportunity presents itself, I don't run out of interest. Yes, there are times I see others shooting scenes over and over, and I find myself shooting the same scene too often, it only reminds me to be more creative and observant. The main reason I don't get tired of it is that being there, especially Mt. Rainer NP, and hiking are the driving forces to my photogaphy, not just being a photographer.

 

As someone has keenly observered, probably most of the photographs of Mt. Rainier NP are taken with 100 ft of the road, and there are lots of great photo ops for that, but the rest of the NP is almost not photographed except by a few, such as Pat O'Hara, or the shots you find in trail guides. It leaves tons of room for the serious photographers like to explore new photographs.

 

My goal when I retire is to hike and photograph every trail in Mt. Rainier NP. It's always different and new, and full of photo opportunties. What can be better than that?

[Sandeha Lynch]

Irrespective of genre, I'm fairly certain that if it's YOU, really YOU, taking the shot, and not just "you-while-thinking-under-the-influence-of-insertnamehere" then it will be an original shot. The final tally of people who also like it is not so important.

[bobatkins]

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00530i

[david_senesac]

Well not at all for me But maybe part of the reason is that I have evolved as a photographer. And another reason is that the technologies of photography have always been gradually evolving to higher levels. I've been concentrating on landscapes for a couple dozen years. You young people would laugh at what we had to do even just twenty years ago. A decade ago, I was on the first wave of digital processing and today its like everybody else has arrived to the point it feels like its been around for ages. Technology wise we who live in this day and age are on a knee that will be unlike any generations before or after.

 

I just picked up an expensive stack of 30x38 inch Lightjet prints from results of a recent 22-day Utah trip. Superior without question to what you might have seen using best processes a decade ago. I'm really excited that I can make such incredible prints these days that were impossible years ago.

 

So no I am not bored, I can hardly wait to get back out the door.

 

One thing in your comments, I have to laugh at. As I see it a large proportion of nature and landscape photographers are caught up in using overly saturated color films which often only work well with early, late, stormy, or overcast conditions. Thus you all spend time running around in dim light while I am out there shooting normal saturation film mostly when the sun is well up. I don't need blazing colors because nature's usual hues, shades, and tones are just fine the way they are without enhancements. And as far as landscapes go, there is an absolutely vast amount of great landscapes in the west that have never seen a serious camera lens. Go half a mile away from roads or trails almost anywhere and you may be the first person to do so. ...David

[markci]

As I said in the other thread, it's usually boring to look at because it's usually not art, and it's usually not art because it's not usually done by artists. It's done by naturalists who are artists second.

 

This is compounded by the "photojournalistic ethics" of nonmanipulation that most nature photographers adhere to, to one degree or another. There is nothing wrong with these rules, necessarily. They make better photojournalism, but much worse art, because rules are the enemy of art.

[greg s]

"I can hardly wait to get back out the door."

 

That's the spirit I like! :) I'm the same way. -Greg-

[ilkka_nissila]

I find good nature photography very, very interesting. I especially like landscape photos. However, it is so easy to take a poor landscape photograph and so difficult to take a good one. As photography gets older, it becomes more and more difficult. However, every once in a while someone comes up with something completely amazing - you just have to try harder.

 

Think of it like this: if it is easy, it's probably not going to be interesting. If you think of someone in 1930s taking pictures of the American West with a 8x10 inch view camera and far less infrastructure to get to places than we do (but also less "human clutter"). Now, if you go through the same effort (not the same place, but some place which is as difficult to reach as those places were then) and photograph using such a mastery of light and technique which is relatively as much above your contemporaries as Ansel's technique was above those living in those times and shooting landscapes, then you may be into something interesting...

 

Of course, there are photographers who can take fabulous pictures in their back yard, but those are not really landscape photographs, generally those are plant and wildlife pics in a semi-urban environment, which is another field (but can be very interesting also).

 

For example, going to Mars and shooting some Velvia there with a 8x10 view camera would be considered interesting at this time, and even if the shots are crappy, you'd be commended for a good try at doing something original :-)

[ilkka_nissila]

I remember on Photo of the Week where the photographer had rigged a digital compact into a kite and taken photos of the coast with the setup. That was amazing and original. Of course, it's photographing blind in a sense but it usually takes something extraordinary.

[bill_thorlin]

Nature - I lived/regularly visited East Africa for over 20 years based mainly in Nairobi. I probably visited the Nairobi Park on average around once a fortnight with countless visits to the others. Every time I went I saw something new/different.

 

Landscape - I have certain views that I pass most days and find them ever changing depending on the mixture of the time of day, the type of light and the arrival in the scene of outside influences.

 

You have to keep on seeing not just looking. Perhaps like beauty, "boring" is in the eye of the beholder.

[david_henderson]

It seems to me that very, very few "top" landscape photographers move on. So if you look at their work now it looks pretty much as it did a decade ago and frankly there is so little in the way of personal style in evidence that it is virtually impossible to tell which photographer from a shortlist of dozens might have made a particular image.

 

Some of them appear to be on a constant search for new locations at which they can make ostensibly the same photographs but somewhere else. Others (and I've found this particularly true of the USA luminaries) don't even seem to travel much and test their skills and approach in different environments that they don't see every day.

 

I think all this is a recipe for becoming stereotyped and boring, and that a degree of experimentation is necessary to preserve your own interest and that of one's audience.

 

By contrast any visit to an art gallery will demonstrate that good painters don't carry on producing the same sort of work all their lives - their work develops and their style changes, and not just by seeking new scenes to paint. I do wonder whether our landscape luminaries can be considered in any way "artists" unless they have a drive to develop?

[kalle.koponen]

I am glad so many have found my question interesting.

 

To Stephanie Spears I?d like to admit that yes, many other genres can be boring too, not only landscape and nature photography.

 

Bill Thoring describes well the process of seeing landscapes, especially familiar ones. You always see something new there, I agree. This is one reason I like to take landscape pictures too. But taking pics and seeing the places is very different from wieving pictures taken by others. When I look at a landscape picture, I see only that. I don?t see the process of having seen the scene in many different and inspiring situations. I see only the one scene.

This brings to me to a point several people have made in various formulations. That is the idea that we are only shooting for ourselves and it does not matter what others think. That may be accurate to many, but honestly, can it be true for anyone who has ever posted a picture on this site for others to see? At least I would like people to see what I have shot. I am definitely not shooting ONLY for myself.

 

On a final note, I totally agree with David Henderson who has observed the lack on development in many landscape photographers. Again, that goes for many other genres too. Nudes as especially problematic, I think. You can observe in the critiques that attention is more often payed to the beauty of the model and less to the parameters of the picture. Ordinary composition, unimaginative lighting and mediocre setup can get rave reviews if the model is stunning. And again, the picture is as pleasing to look at as is a great landscape.

Kalle

[bill_thorlin]

Kalle - perhaps landscapes should be done in blocks i.e. morning,noon and night or spring, summer, autumn and winter.Might make them a little less mundane.

 

Good thread.

[andrewpgrant]

I'd have to agree with Ilkka when he points out how diffifcult GOOD nature and landscape photography is.

 

When recently working for a company who employed a number of photographers, the general consensus amongst my peers seemed to be that nature and landscapes were something they did "when they were only learning" until they saw the light and progressed to more "advanced" photography of things like sports and people (their words, not mine - some of them were unjustifiably arrogant, to be honest).

 

Having always loved nature photography I felt somewhat disheartened by this and lost confidence to some degree, even feeling a little self-concious about trying to pursue creative compositions in nature.

 

But then I caught a look at some of the "early" nature/landscape images of some of these co-workers and their photos were indeed, IMHO, really, really boring. Why? Because they lacked solid and/or creative composition. Nor was there much appreciation for the use of light, line, texture or tone.

 

So then I got thinking that perhaps these guys had merely given up too soon on this form of photography and not really invested enough time in practising how to bring solid compositional and graphic design elements into their nature and landscape photos.

 

So now I stick to my guns and photograph all the nature shots I want, hopeful that if I practise enough then someday I will eventually learn to adequately produce photos of a standard similar to those photographers who's work I admire. And when I start to wonder if good landscape and nature photography isn't possible I jump online or go to my local library to seek out the work of some of those photographers to draw inspiration.

 

Anyone can point a camera at a scene and press the shutter. And more often than not perhaps the results really are boring as hell.

 

But you only have to look at the work of some of the more accomplished and groundbreaking photographers out there to realise that taking good/interesting/creative landscapes and nature shots is not only possible, but really does take quite the level of skill and practise.

[edverosky]

When I think of landscape photography, I imagine a large scene, with most of the subject at a great distance from the shooter. Most photography is made "intersting" by the photographer's choice of perspective, composition, etc. But, taking a picture of a landscape might be more like taking a picture of a large mural. The picture is in front of you, you just have to figure out how much of it to record. Less room for creativity in some respects.

 

A nature photo, however, can be an image of one or more objects (flowers, trees, animals) that you have more control over where it comes to perspective and composition. More room for creativity.

 

All landscapes shots aren't boring, but the boring ones are!

[philippartridge]

<p>Kalle, I have seen eneough sunsets and bugs to last me my lifespan, even if I live for a thousand years. I do not understand the appeal of these subjects outside of academic studies. Nature and landscape photogrpahy is extraordinarily broad, however, and the best of it takes the breath away - our world is dense with amazing and interesting (and very diverse) scenery, all of which can be imaged so remarkably - it just has to be captured well, and that is so hard to do, no matter how good one gets. It doesn't help that the best places take great effort to get to, and great patience/luck/persistence to have great light. Natural beauty is uninteresting to you? sad. You have to feel the beauty before you can photograph it I believe. Here is <a href="http://www.josephholmes.com/index.html">one approach</a> on the subject.</p>

[arie07]

Far from true.... nature photography awakens a lot of interest among photographers and non photographers. In the end is not only the nature the escence of our photos but the way we see it. About the scores received from photnet users - do not give them too much credit, impression is subjective and lots of newbies with sofisticated and expensive digitals believe they know something about photography, well, many don't.