a winter landscape

.....

Not nearly as good as some of your other work...exposure is a bit flat.

nice work. the less cloud the better though (to emphasis the migrating birds)

Your Colorado landscapes have a problem, or evince a problem, or beg a question, or exemplify a quandary, or like that, which I've been agonizing over myself. In the 70's I used big-negative equipment (Rollei, 4x5) to do landscapes, and even then seldom printed bigger than 8x10. The impact of my photos, assuming they had any (and if they did it was on me alone, absent the Internet), depended on textures and details that would've been lost, or so I thought, in large prints.

Then I gave up photography for a long time and came back to it in 1998, working mainly with 35mm and then with DSLR's and digicams. I knew nearly all my viewers would see the pix on the Web at 72dpi, and had only small format to work with anyway. So I consciously revamped my style to make my images flatter (OK, more two-dimensional) and to build them out of large areas of similar color or tone. Think comic books or stained glass. Scenics were replaced by details of landscape for the most part no horizons, no whole trees.

Because there's no point in giving the viewer details smaller than a pixel. Even in color, where adjacency effects can give the impression of sharpness, surface and detail, a photo like the one I'm commenting on here tends to look mighty approximate when it's the size of a postcard a postcard viewed at that canonical 72dpi.

Consider what happened to painting in the 19th century. It began with artists like David, whose paintings depended on hard details. He even varnished the damned things to get a glossy, high-contrast finish. Such canvases were quite large had to be, to show off that detailing. But photography came along, and cheap tintype or Daguerrotype had more detail than any painting ever. Time to shift gears. Enter the Impressionists, who devoted themselves to less detailed, more dynamic, more Web-like imagery. They tended to produce smaller canvases, since the loss of fine detail didn't matter. (Their academic rivals continued to work minute details into ever-larger canvases.)

Such were my principles, or at least my thoughts, in 1998. Over the last little while, for reasons I don't know, I've been backsliding. During the holidays I cranked out lots of detail-riddled landscapes that just don't look good on the Web. (Whether they look good anywhere else is a point I'd rather not pursue.) This distresses me, but I'm having trouble seeing the way I did a few years back. What to do? That is the question. (Or quandary, or problem.)

I see the same problem in this photo, and in other recent scenics you've done in Colorado. If you find a way out of the quandary, let me know!

Wow, one of the more incisive critiques in recent memory.

 

Can't say I'm a huge fan of landscapes mainly because I have seen so many. After a while they become very formulaic, foreground interest item, mid scene background, with the payoff being a multi-colored sky. Quite often, the foreground interest item will be a pool of reflective water, flora or perhaps some large boulder or geological feature. There is a photographer on one of the other photo sites who churns out a seemingly bottomless supply of such images. Often they are skilfully done but one wonders if this person doesn't get bored after a while of doing virtually the same image all the time.

 

But utlimately as with any other photograph the only thing that matters to me is the emotional impression or interest level. And the perceived lack of details in this image doesn't disturb me at all. There are many other elements that more than make up for any such deficiency, if dificient at all.