Wednesday Landscapes, 23 August 2017

Leslie Reid · August 23, 2017

You are invited to upload one or more of your landscape photos and, if you’d like, to accompany your image with some commentary: challenges you faced in making the image? your intent for the image? settings? post-processing decisions? why you did what you did? the place and time? or an aspect you’d like feedback on? And please feel free to ask questions of others who have posted images or to join the discussion. If you don’t feel like using words, that’s OK too—unaccompanied images (or unaccompanied words, for that matter) are also very much welcomed. As for the technicalities, the usual forum guidelines apply: files < 1 MB; image size <1000 px maximum dimension.

I spent much of last week scanning old slides and negatives. This is a rather minimalist view of Mt. Mawenzi and Mt. Kilimanjaro at sunset from Tsavo National Park in Kenya, made with a 300-mm lens on an Olympus OM-2n, and Kodachrome film. There’s not a lot of post-processing here—all I did was slide Lightroom sliders until it looked more-or-less like the original, and then removed some dust spots. I also have a 50-mm-lens view that features the spectacular sunset off the right side of the frame as the star and the mountains as supporting cast, but I like this one better. All this scanning is making me realize how quickly I’ve become spoiled by digital. I keep wishing I’d had the foresight to take more shots of each subject, with different foregrounds, framing, or points of view. On the other hand, with less experimentation, my proportion of keepers was a lot higher then than it is now. In retrospect, though, that wasn’t a good thing—it’s my prolific stream of failed experiments that I’m now learning the most from.