The Difficulty of Landscape

I was recently asked to judge a small international photographic competition, of which landscape photography was a genre. Readers will no doubt assume that I am about to go off on a tirade against the plethora of overworked and essentially false impressions of places and spaces - the spirit that I understand led to the creation of the Natural Landscape Photography Awards. To an extent they would be correct. There were indeed a number of images that were simply ‘overcooked’; not just a step into the valley of the uncanny, but a wholehearted plunge beyond reality. There are of course a range of arguments allowing for the ‘anything goes’ approach, such that photographers can stretch mountains, bend trees, and create kaleidoscopic skies since that is what they ‘felt’ they were looking at. I’ve been guilty of saying much the same in the editing process; that one should edit the image to the way that it ‘looked’ and felt to you when you were shooting the scene in the first place. 

Read More