UKC

https://www.internationallandscapephotographer.com/index.php/previous-years...

Some nice ones and plenty of mountains, but many seem to me a bit like indoor competition style bouldering - becoming ever more divorced from reality.

The one of Rum from Eigg (about a third way down on the left), squashed up so that the mountains look pointier than they really are seems particularly silly. Quite a few others use seem to use the same "technique".

I agree about the unreality, some of the colour palettes in particular seem physically impossible -- I've no idea what sort of processing is being done, perhaps a "Lord of the Rings" slider comes with photoshop nowadays. It's always a difficult, as they are all stunning images, but I much prefer the naturalistic approach fostered by https://slpoty.co.uk/

Scrolling through they mostly left me cold, not evoking the feel of the places I knew myself. Many very formulaic as if they know what the judges are looking for.

Absolutely. 

Have to say I agree, for the little my opinion is worth. They're all fabulous photos artistically, but they don't look real. They could almost all be AI, way too over processed.

There’s a fair few that look the same with that sort of pastel / dreamy kind of view. Doesn’t do much for me.
Do like the volcanoes though.

The smoothed water falls from long exposure is so passé .  Agree a lot of them look fake, so much so that the ones that stood out for me were the ones that looked natural.

Iceland seemed to be heavily weighted, I have been there and it didn't look like that to me (it rained most of the time )

There's some real bangers in there but after the initial wow factor you realise that they all look like CGI. The real skill in landscape photography (that very few seem to talk about) is producing an image of something organic that doesn't look soulless, as if created in a sanitised laboratory.

The majority of landscape photographers I know bang on about being at one with nature and see themselves as being above other tourists when it comes to appreciating beautiful environments. Their work, however, totally contradicts that view and what quickly becomes clear is that they care more for photographs than they do for the landscape itself. This is evidenced in part by the enormous amount of traveling (much of it by air) they do in order to visit the same cliched locations as their peers.

Their enjoyment of the outdoors seems to hinge on, or can be measured by, the quality of light they experience, reducing fragile and beautiful environments to mere stages on which to create their increasingly psychedelic images, rather than seeing the true value of spending time in wild places, away from the acquisitive, me me me attitudes they claim to be escaping from.

This zeitgeist is what has led to me becoming disenchanted with landscape photography in recent years. It has become a competitive sport rather than an expression of love and respect for the natural world.

Sorry, I had to get that off my chest and it may sound as though I am seething. I'm not, it's just an observation and many will love these images.

"Their enjoyment of the outdoors seems to hinge on, or can be measured by, the quality of light they experience"

that might have been the case pre digital but I don't think they care anymore - all the light and colours they need in the software they spend hours using to develop their pictures.

Each to their own taste but for me, bleurgh, mostly.

The vast bulk of them take me back to Yes album covers by Roger Dean. The one of the Aiguilles des Arves is a particular horror. The one of Damavand would be stunning if it was all toned down a little. Yes, I did wonder if there is a Lord of the Rings plugin for Photoshop.

Oddly I like a lot of the abstract photos where it's about the shapes and often impossible to tell what one is looking at.

If there's one thing I take from this it's added comfort and confidence in my own photography. I'm forever worrying about whether my "vision" and processing techniques are either veering off into hyper saturation and contrast or just bland and 'meh,' but I've got some way to go before I start outputting things like this. I sometimes wonder if I should concentrate entirely on B/W and most of this lot certainly inspired me that way.

Visual eye-candy, but divorced from reality. Need to get Alex Nail on the job to check their 'authenticity'.

Interesting to compare them to: https://naturallandscapeawards.com/competition-results-2022/

There’s better photos on here, and by miles

Agree completely - the photos in that link look like the sort of prints you buy from a tourist tat shop, so over-edited.  I’m no photographer, but there’s always some really fab work on here from posters that blows me away and always impressed by the weekly top 10. 

I think it'd benefit the competition if someone won with an AI generated one then declined the prize because it was AI, might make the judges reconsider the synthetic look they favour?

Done stunning photos despite that, I'd love to be able to claim any of them myself, even though it's not the naturalistic look I prefer.

I agree, but I wonder if we would like them so much if we knew what we were looking at.

It certainly reinforces my feeling that I am at least trying to do the right thing with mine.

Yes, his approach is inspirational for me.

Interestingly, Tim Parkin (who sometimes posts on here), who, along with Alex Nail, is one of those behind the NLPA, is also a ILPOTY judge. So maybe it is possible to have a foot in both camps. His views would certainly be interesting!

I see that at one of last year's judges wrote:

"When judging photographs, we always run a difficult knife edge between simplicity and complexity, but more than anything this year, the pictures seemed to reflect a very intense personal response by the photographers to their subject and its treatment."

I think it might be possible to take a rather more cynical view......

They remind me of Sky captain and the world of tomorrow

Check out this bizarre work:

https://www.artrabbit.com/events/albert-watson-skye

Why stretch photos vertically? I dont get it.

trying to understand the Seascapes winner photograph. What is going on in the background? waterfall? seems to large to be a crashing wave?

Otherwise all fantastic and far more attractive than the OP link

I don't know but (going off on a tangent!) many years ago I read Alfred Wainwright's 'Fellwanderer' wherein he explains his approach to drawing landscapes from his own photos. Apparently, he believed that the lens of his camera compressed the view vertically so he compensated for this slightly in his drawings. Having taken his guidebooks out in the field many times it's fairly obvious that his drawings are often exaggerated slightly in this way compared to what you're actually looking at. Nothing like those weird Skye pics though!

Oddly I quite like some of them. I don't know if you know of Albert Watson but he is a legendary figure in photography, in the way that David Bailey is. Landscape is not his usual thing, he's much more portrait and art. These landscapes are making zero attempt at accuracy, they're artistically created images derived from the reality seen by the eyes and recorded by the camera. 

Robert and fotovue: I've been checking out Alex Nail's stuff. What a breath of fresh air, and it really shouldn't be.

Really horrible. As I said, there's quite a few amongst the ILPOTY photos, though not as comically ridiculous as those.

Check out his youtube videos of photography trips into the Wester Ross hills. 

Hi there - the seascapes winner is insane! It's a long-lens photo of the downfall of a breaking wave across a harbour. So there's a wave half way across and in the background a huge wave has crashed shedding spume into the sky and as it falls it looks like a waterfall.

There's obviously space for expression and creativity photographically (distorted mountains, cloning out things, etc) but some people want authenticity. It's like having a documentary photography competition vs a creative art photography competition - they both have there place. 

Personally I want to be engaged with the photography I see so unless editing is done in a very complementary way, I tend not to appreciate it as much but I have some of my favourite photographs that I wouldn't be allowed to use in NLPA because they've been edited a bit too much. Usually the edits are 'life like' rather than 'creative'. e.g. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkin/32217590647/

When you shoot a >180 degree pano, you normally get lots of distortion in the foreground. In this case a normal stitch would have had Beinn a Chrulaiste in the bottom left and right edges. I stretched them down to exclude them which stretched the clouds. This still look believable and looks like I remember it but the stretching broke our own rules. If I'd stretched it without the inversion the distortion would have been obvious but clouds let you get away with a bit of warping.

So much of photography is taste driven, I prefer indie-folk to R&B but I can appreciate the best of both.. 

I checked out his gear one quickly. He must be strong to backpack a Quasar and his photography kit, (very similar to mine which isn't lightweight) into the Fisherfields. I'll be looking at more.

Not stretched vertically, they're squashed sideways

The photographer actually wanted to visit Zhangjiajie National Forest Park but couldn't afford the plane fare

Funnily enough that's how I perceive it too. Maybe that is why it looks so ridiculous!

But do you think there is this particular "Lord of The Rings" style* which is very much competition driven (a bit like, as I suggested in my OP, comp style bouldering), and which people might not bother with if it wasn't seen as what judges are looking for? Or is there a market for this stuff? Do some people who realise it's unrealistic actually like it aesthetically? 

I think this is key for me; is the photograph how I remember it, does it evoke the feelings I had being there? But obviously you can't just say that for the NLPA; it has to have enforceable rules.

*Armageddon clouds, improbably lit mist wreathed mountains, gnarled log or apparently spotlit close-up flowers in the foreground, any water smudged etc.

And don't get me started on the milky way........

And are there set judging criteria (whether you like it or not) for such as ILPOTY that favour these types of photographs so that it makes it very difficult for the sort of photos which do well in NLPA to come through? In fact is this why you set up NLPA?

There is definitely a market for it. I've long since deleted the photo but just out of curiosity I deliberately over processed a photo in over saturated, full HDR style just for fun and stuck it a FB gallery of otherwise 'normal' photos, all of which to my mind were pretty good. The OTT one got way more likes than the others. I thought it was hideous and difficult to look at, but tastes clearly differ. 

I can't help but think that trying to produce work to an ill-defined or possibly imaginary brief against one's own vision is a recipe for unsatisfactory results whereas aiming for what you actually like tends to be self-fulfilling. Whether that wins competitions is another matter.

Don't forget the illuminated tent.

I'm not sure it's competition driven. Within landscape photography, Instagram photos like this get huge amounts of views and people make careers selling people 'techniques' to create photographs like this. It's all a bit meta to be honest. 

If you think about how fantasy is presented in the movies with special effects, there's a lot of that going on. 

Yep - for the NLPA we insist on raw files or 'supporting evidence' (a set of pictures taken either side of the submitted one, video, etc) and for film we'll facetime the people who do well to double check on a lightbox. 

It's a symptom of competition judging in general I think. When you're going through 10,000 images, things that stand out draw your attention and so something 'different' tends to do well. Most times, subtle images don't trigger this reaction. You really need to have self aware judges to try to suppress this instinctive reaction. 

However, amazing pictures can still be amazing so if you take two really well taken and well composed images and one is of some woodland and another is of a stunning Norwegian gully with a waterfall and a mountainscape in the background, it's hard to choose the tree photo as the better picture. Also, for a single photographer who is very good, they'r emost likely to submit the norwaegian waterfall. 

And yeah, this is exactly why we started NLPA and we are seeing a bit of a shift in what people are submitting as they see the results from the first and second years. 

I'm really enjoying creating the books as well  - I may be biased but I think they're some of the best landscape photography books going. 

Tim

Facebook bombarded me with that before switching to ILPOTY. Almost nothing I liked about any of them!

Mmm..... So why all the cliches doing well then

They seemed to me to be quite heavily weighted to the abstract-looking detail photos. Is this because more people are taking photos of this type or just that there happened to be very good ones? I was quite surprised at how few "classic" landscapes there were - subtle versions of the stuff people have been objecting to.

Maybe I should investigate!

I would find a category for un-retouched shots interesting, but I suppose the difficulty would be in the definition of "un-retouched".
Would a little tweak of levels be allowed, color balance, saturation etc? hard to say where you'd draw the line.

I would say impossible. If you meant any jpeg straight from camera, then, well, my camera has a whole multitude of jpeg settings. Phones seem to have all sorts of settings (or I think people call them filters) including, as far as I can tell from some friends' facebook, a Lord of the Rings one. You could go for exporting a jpeg directly from the RAW preview your software gives you (I imagine this depends on the software you use and can be preset), but mine would often be rubbish and unauthentic.

We have a general rule that is "do not deceive the photography aware viewer" so anything you see in our competition is pretty close to what you might have got from a slide photo (albeit with darkroom style dodging and burning etc). 

We check this by having people submit raw files, something I'm doing today, and comparing them with the submitted jpgs

It is getting a little frustrating seeing some of the pictures, the prevalence of over processed pictures on Social media and now in competitions is affecting peoples expectations for commercial photography.

I’m hoping to see more print journals showcasing outdoor/climbing photography i think people have reached peak over processed pictures.

Maybe something UKC could look at? 
A yearly best off paper journal 📓 🖋📷

Cliches do well because they've been proven to attract people's attention. Trying to suppress that reaction as a judge means you have to know all the cliches of course!

That's surprising as we have a Grand Scenic category that is explicitly not abstract looking. The only fully abstract pictures should be in the Abstract and Details category. 

There is a 'fashion' for more intimate photographs and we have a category just for that sort of work. I think this is more popular for a few reasons. Showing your skills as a grand scenic photographer takes a hell of a lot of work and there are just not that many people who have the time or inclination to create work like this. That's why so many mountain shots are from easily accessible locations. 

I understand the photo that won photograph of the year in NLPA the first year was shot on film and more or less straight out of camera. But that was a detail shot where you can get away with this more than your typical grand landscape. There is a misconception about the relationship between realism and editing in photography. There has been loads of discussion regarding that on here previously. In short, a raw file doesn't always start in a form closest to 'real' with editing moving you beyond real. Often editing is with the objective of recapturing realism and necessary to do so. My point is straight out of camera, whilst great if it works, isn't necessarily more 'honest' than an edited photo.

I think there are two threads to the 'editing' thing. Seeing the image that the camera produces at the outset as the 'true and honest' photo simply isn't right - all camera sensors, in-camera processing, film emulsions, etc - will respond to light differently to each other, differently to the eyeball, and quite possibly contrary to the result you're hoping to achieve. The base image is already a step removed from the 'true' scene that one was capturing. I don't think it's disingenuous to then tweak the parameters of the image to render a result closer to what one's artistic intent originally was. If we are to accept photography as an artistic medium, there needs to be latitude for artistic interpretation. Doing it digitally is no different to making a specific film choice.

The other is using those tools to produce something that is entirely outwith the reality at the time of taking the photo. And sometimes one's artistic intent might be to deliberately produce something entirely outwith reality - but in my opinion that doesn't generally fit will with the natural landscape genre of photography. And it's becoming really quite cliché.

Is there any other genre of art where people care so much about the process employed over the end result achieved?

In my own mind, I would make a distinction between photography as art (where anything goes) and photography as, well, photography where there is an honest attempt at realism. I certainly wouldn't consider my own photography as art!

I have probably been bracketing abstract and intimate together (ie anything that is not classic "grand scenic" which is what I've tend to think of as landscape photography (showing the actual landscape!).

And it possibly explains why people are falling over each other to make their version of the same view stand out from all the others by overprocessing rather than going back again and again until they get something genuine and special. 

For me the planning and effort to be somewhere different and special at just the right time is a large part of the fun and satisfaction. Hence why I find Alex Nail's stuff inspiring. But then I think of photography as just another branch of mountaineering!

I asked earlier in the thread whether people actually like this stuff. Maybe I should have asked whether actual photographers and any of those of us who spend time in the mountains and know what it is really like actually like this stuff. Or are they just feeling forced in to it in order to sell photos or do well in competitions.

Landscape photos on UKC seem to be dying out at the moment. POTW with less than 20 votes averaging about 4.5? Most of the regulars who posted great photos seem to have left. It is a real shame. I'm not sure what would revive it (my suggestion a few months ago didn't go down to well!)

But it is art though - you're a brilliant landscape photographer, and presumably when you take a photograph it's with the intention of it communicating or invoking some sort of emotion or feeling? Art doesn't need to be 'clever' or abstract to be art - it just needs to tell a story. In my humble opinion. A photograph is just another medium for telling a story - whatever the story is.

Precisely how I feel about it. I wouldn't bother if it was easy and I'm not particularly drawn to other types of photography other than mountain landscapes. Certainly not to anything like the same extent. I don't even particularly bother with photographing climbing, other than bum shots, as it feels too much like watching someone else do something rather than doing something. If I do it's usually to get a shot for a mate, or a free guidebook...

Agreed. The galleries need overhauled. Shame the marmot comp seems to have been binned. Voting probably needs changed as you've suggested before or binned to encourage more people to post. I'd be in favour of binning voting all together. If you like a photo comment on it.

I suppose I have a pretty strong bias because I have to work so hard to get shots that depict mountains, crags and climbs in very realistic and specific ways.
Although I find a lot of those shots beautiful on a certain level, I also find them a little cartoonish and I certainly wouldn't want them hanging on my wall.
I think what goes on with very processed shots is that the gimmicks are good for catching the eye, but over time they just become boring and clichéd.