UKC

As a novice, I was about to post my first landscape, when I chanced to read my first thread, “International Landscape Photographer of the Year” and learned to my shame that all my illuminated tents and moonlit landscapes  are cringeworthy clichés😱

Have some pity on solo campers please,  sometimes the tent is the only foreground interest there is and they are very drab when the light fades...

What are the other faux-pas that make you cringe please!?

Please don’t say sunset, sunrise, full moonset/rise, or I won’t have  much left.

When you’re brutally honest, the crescent moon, blue hour and golden hour are all clichés too, then I’ve really got nothing left😞

That bloody mountain in Iceland* with the stream in front of it.

* or the one next to the A82.

Photos are about capturing the moment. If that moment means something to you, then fsck what anyone else thinks. If it means something to others as well, so much the better.

Those cliches you mention, sell millions of pounds worth of pics and posters per year. So is that a failure? I expect they are crying all the way to the bank about their lack of creativity.

If you want a brutal critique, not just on composition but also technique, then there are some flickr groups dedicated to that. If not, post and be dammed. Some people will like them, other wont. That's life, in a nutshell.

Those ones of a tree in a dip with a bit of old wall alongside. Luckily we'll not be seeing many more of those. 

Blurred water - appreciate however that ravines with waterfalls in them may not always be the best lit of places.

HDR, max saturation, max contrast and sunsets. The latter can be stunning though.

Oh, and illuminated tents.

🤣 pretty much everything in the Faroe Islands and Namibia too

🤣

Couldn’t have said it better. My photos are for my enjoyment. They’re not a form of entertainment.

What I really want is 5* on here, so I need to know what UKC likes!

Those two Scottish postcard makers would get 3* here

Thanks

👍

There seems to be a plague of such images around, with colours that might make you look for a second but the second after that make you think, this is ludicrous.  I blame Instagram, which I don't use and know nothing of so I'm obviously correct.

Give nature a helping hand with the colours sometimes sure, but a nudge is better than a shove; and go easy with the sharpening too.

Otherwise, they're your images not ours and if they please you then that's job done.  

T.

(Comments aimed at the OP, obviously).

Slanting sunlight through misty tree, mist over lakes, cloud inversions, sunsets, sunrises, silly or even not so silly poses on top of pinnacles, jumping between pinnacles...

Just about any landscape you are likely to envision has almost certainly been done 100s of times before and therefore will be a cliché to some extent. But the thing that's unique about yours is that you took it and presumable it evokes memories that are special for you. That's why your image of X will evoke emotions for you whereas an almost identical image made by someone else will do nothing (other that a knee-jerk "What a cliché!). Cliché's are what you see looking at other peoples' picture, never your own. So enjoy what you take for what it means to you. There rest doesn't matter.

Determination. Reckless curiosity. Bravery. A free spirit.

How about setting up a photo, where someone tows a caravan over Hardknott pass. I doubt that's a cliche. Maybe with a group of cyclists behind it, eagerly waving them on.

Make art the way you want it if it's for you.

If it's for others, ask yourself why you're making it in the first place. That should give you a good idea of what and how to shoot.

Nudge nudge. Wink wink.

Jeeesus. That’s really scraping the barrel. But I’ll give you a well deserved 8/10 

Anything which is not an honest attempt to depict reality as seen. Most already covered.

Moonlight silly exposed bright as day.

Stars in a blue sky or absurdly unrealistic milky way.

Blurred long exposure of moving water.

Aurora unrealistically vivid (so almost all aurora photos).

Close up foreground "interest" just for the sake of it (Often flowers).

Obviously anything over processed.

I’m partial to taking cheesy low effort shots of a line of trees receding in to the fog or of foggy trees reflected in a lake.  

How do you feel about astrophotography?

Isn't Aurora photography an extension of that - the pursuit of beauty not visible to the naked eye?

Do you mind any of the above as long as they're not identified by the photographer as a landscape photo?
For example, are you OK with a 'unrealistic milky way' if the photographer has made it obvious that the main object of the photo was the enhanced milky way and with the earthly landscape being almost a backdrop to it?
Or, do you just hate all photos which aren't 'realistic'?
By the way, agree with you about some of your points such as the moon & stars in the day and the obvious one of over processing.

Given that "seeing" is as much in the mind as in the eyes (and not even yours), how do you define realistic?

🤣

Thanks 65

I'll most my illuminated tents with a disclaimer and see how well they go down😀

Thanks

I've heard that photographing Uranus is hard. Needs a good reflector.

Thanks Bob, how are you?😀

I agree with most of that, but is that not the beauty of the camera, being able to create something beautiful that the eye doesn't see, when there's very little ambient light?

I've just posted a photo (with an illuminated tent 😅) deliberately taken shortly before the stars disappear in the morning, to get enough ambient light to create an image  of the landscape.

The sky was deep blue in the raw file, deep blue in the in-camera jpeg, I don't see how the sky could be anything else in my processed image?

all best

Mark

No problem with it as long as it is not presented as landscape photography and passed off as what was seen with the naked eye (or at least would be seen with visible light binoculars or telescope). When the aurora (or milky way) is shown above an actual landscape I think this is usually the implication. In general I like astrophotography to be annotated with how it has been coloured (infra-red shown as visible red or whatever). Let alone whether it is an artist's impression or an actual photograph!

If you were looking at the photo then were magically transported to the time and location it was taken and felt a bit cheated.

I dislike those photos taken from a distance and zoomed right in that make the background appear much closer. There were a few of Inverness doing the rounds a couple of years back that made it look like An Coileachan or Ben Wyvis were practically in the town. I actually thought they were photoshopped initially but apparently not.

Yes! As when the Moon is appearing large when close to the horizon is an illusion of the mind.

I am satisfied that everyone's eye/minds are sufficiently alike that if a photo of the aurora or the milky way is nothing like I see it, then it will also be nothing like anyone else sees it.

I admit that I always carry and like using a longish (55-200) lens in the hills. I like the way it makes me observant of distant details in the landscape and allows me to record them. I agree that showing these to other people could be construed as dishonest, but I see it as the photographic equivalent of handing someone a pair of binoculars and pointing out something for them to look at. Perhaps, in the interest of transparency, I should label them somehow with the focal length.

I'm fine. Hop you are ok too!

Of course people can do what they want. But it is easy (and, in my opinion, lazy), to just stick a camera on a tripod and take a long exposure of an unrealistic moonlit landscape or of the milky way, but really quite difficult to capture the authentic beauty of moonlight or the milky way over a night landscape.

Possibly not, but I think it is more relevant what it looked like to the naked eye at the time and whether the raw file you captured allows you to reproduce that.

With the great auroras we've had this year and with so many photos of it going mainstream, how do you feel about most of the population thinking that they would have actually seen something similar if they had been in the right place?

Again, no objection to how people want to take photos, but I would just prefer to see honesty and transparency. 

Ah, OK, I see where you're going wrong then!

OK, at a very simplistic optical/physiological level, a young person's iris opens up about twice as wide as that of someone in their 50s or 60s. Also most people have no idea how long optimal 'dark adaption' takes (>2 hours). So a milky way (or aurora) that is barely discernible to you or me after 15 minutes outside will be bright enough to read by (just about) to a properly dark adapted youth. Technique counts for a lot too: Much of the retina is actually much more sensitive to light than the bit in the middle that you use when you 'look' at something, so people who have learned to use their 'averted gaze' can also get maybe an extra stop of sensitivity.

Psychologically, people tend to see what they expect to see - the classical example being the positions of Jupiter's moon.

At a philosophical level, you actually have very little evidence telling you how other peoples' minds perceive what then see, so your personal 'satisfaction' is just that and nothing more.

Predicating the definition of a term on 'magic' is not really going to get you anywhere. And your experience of 'seeing' is a lot more than then sum of photons.

I agree in principle, but the reality is that very few photographs (particularly in the digital domain) come with any sort 'certificate of authenticity', so 'honesty and transparency' becomes a matter of perception as much as presentation.

So are you seriously telling me that there are people who would look at one if those garish photos of the milky way in a blue sky and a well lit landscape and, if they had been there, be able to honestly say it looked pretty much like that to them? Sorry, but I don't buy it.

This should, of course, be easily testable. Has that been done?

No not at all! But it's not just black-and-white (sic) - there's a continuum of realism (whatever that means) in photography ranging from from what you might do right the way to 'art' (whatever that means). And most of it is somewhere in the middle. My point being that 'where' in the middle is as much to do with the viewer as the photographer.

It should, but I doubt it is - at least at a scientifically rigorous level. 

Fair enough. As long as we are somewhere in the middle I am happy!

I agree, however with professional DSLRs nowadays you can shoot at a high ISO without too much grain, and portable LED flood lights are cheap enough, so i'm not sure they have much excuse any more. Those expensive ND filters might make a quirky lampshade.

Shock, horror! Artificially lit landscapes*? That's worse than anything you can do in the camera/darkroom!

* Been there, done that. Got laughed at by wife.

How about reality as "felt". If you were to look at an object, say the Adam and Eve boulders, and then look away. How would they appear in your mind's eye?

I watched a remarkable YouTube about brain decoding techniques. It is possible now for an AI system to interpret what you're thinking or even looking directly at by analysing brainwave patterns alone; they output an image remarkably similar but also fundamentally different to what the subject is observing, highlighting the subjective nature of observation, as art should too.

As long as you take a very loose interpretation of 'interpret'. 

The differences probably says more about the AI architecture & training dataset that about...

Agreed. And (arguably) the AI output as as 'subjective' as any comment in this thread.

Of course then you are perceiving an interpretation of an interpretation.  I would be interested to see how rapidly an image diverges or if there are any fixed points if you iterate.

Up to you, but as far as I am concerned that sort of interpretation is for art, not photography.

[edit - ok maybe I have gone a little off-piste given that this is meant to be about landscapes specfically, but I'll at least stand by my first two. I have a climbing photo in my gallery where the climber is tiny enough that it's almost a landscape photo. It is black and white and infrared. I like it and I don't think it is dishonest even if I personally saw it in colour and entirely in the visual spectrum) ]

Photography isn't art? 

I don't think black and white would often be mistaken for colour.

No problem as long as I am told it is infra-red.

No idea what any of that means!

It obviously can be, but can also avoid any 'artiness' e.g., professional astrophotography, microscopy, photogrammetry, etc.,  where it's really interested in capturing objective data. Most is somewhere in between (and a long way from either end).

It comes down to definitions. As far as the landscape photography I do is concerned, I like to make the distinction. I have no time for unrealistic "arty" landscape photography or for paintings which look like photographs (I can admire the craft in it but kind of can't see the point). I do like mountain art though and have a collage of the Cuillin and some very abstractish winter mountain pictures in pencil on my wall (I felt obliged to buy them from the artist because she doubted anyone else would recognise where they were of!).

These are your words: "Anything which is not an honest attempt to depict reality as seen."

I won't patronise you by highlighting what I think are the key words. You need to take more care with what you write.  And on that note, I shall depart the thread. I am not getting into an argument. 

I agree; Robert and I would say UKC are very literal in their taste when it comes to landscape photography. Fine, but it doesn't mean it's 'right' -- there's no such thing. It's all just personal taste. Taken to the limit, you should all be creating landscape shots for your Viewmaster.

What I think I bemoan most about LP culture (and it's not new) is the general lack of imagination and tendency to go and get the same shot as someone else has.

Although I can see where you are coming from (and agree to some extent) it misses the point about what a photograph means to the photographer, i.e., I have 'cliché' photos that I really treasure - not because the are 'pretty' but because they remind me of the time I took them and the emotions evoked then and now.

I guess one has to make the distinction between photos you take for yourself and photos you take to impress (or not) other people. Two quite different games.

Hi Mark, I just noticed your sesame groove (North Wall Groove) photo from 1993 and twigged - we were at Glasgow Uni in the GUM club at the same time weren't we? Didn't you use to climb with Neil S and Bruce G and that competent crew (whilst my mates and I were still punter freshers!)? If so, how are you? Hope all is well! And I fully support illuminated tents in mountain photos.

Absolutely. We should all be taking photos for ourselves first and foremost, not for likes on social media (which drives the preponderance of that mountain and that stream!).

Although, for me, if I take a shot that looks like someone else's, particularly if I've seen that shot and had in mind while placing the tripod, I feel it's failed and could never really love it. 

oh no telephoto landscapes, my favourite style, we'll have to agree to disagree on that one!

🤣👍

Does that not rule out every focal length except the standard lens around 50mm? If telephoto landscapes are unrealistic, then so are wide-angle.

Rules out every in-camera or phone jpeg, as some human has programmed it to produce an image pleasing to the human eye, or people would buy another brand.

As the camera and lens  can't match the eye and brain for sophistication, I'm not even sure depicting  reality as processed by your brain is meaningful. 

You might be on to something saying to be honest you will add a comment with the focal length.

I'm pretty sure most of the legendary landscape photographers of the last century, would have considered themselves artists. As I think photography is an art and like Ansel Adams, you "create a photo, not take a photo", to be honest, I will add a note in the comments with the focal length and any important notes on how I created it, which anyone is welcome to ignore, or take into account.

Personally I'd be very interested to read other's notes

I'm glad to have stimulated an interesting debate, with  a wide range of strongly-held opinions.

Nothing wrong with robust debate/good-natured argument in my opinion

Mark

You need to check out 

Déjà Vu Vibes 🌲 Wander. Roam. Replicate

https://www.instagram.com/insta_repeat/?hl=en

and if you want to witness some of the best landscape photography there is, visit

https://www.alexnail.com/gallery/

and get a copy of his book, mine arrived today. It is outstanding.

https://www.alexnail.com/great-wilderness-book/

Hmmmm, ever sat on a glacier with a massive aurora corona above you, Robert? I have, nothing gets more vivid.

But yes, most of the recent UK ones will be tepid to the naked eye.

Hmm, not really. The bit of the retina that has decent resolution (fovea centralis) is actually quite small, probably equivalent to a 2000mm lens (or more). The brain builds up a bigger picture by moving the eye around and 'stitching' it all into an overall impression of a high res image*. The rest of the retina really just provide low res hints about 'interesting areas to look at' over about 140 degree field of view. Make of that what you will in terms of what's 'realistic'.

* Many years ago** I saw a demonstration of a high-security monitor which used eye-tracking to identify the precise part of the screen the user was looking at and then blur the rest of the image. To the intended user the screen looked quite normal, but if you looked over the user's shoulder at the screen all you could see was unidentifiable mush. 

** About 40!

As I have made clear, the key for me is honesty and, as I said, a black and white photograph is clearly just that - no attempt to deceive anyone and you can either like it or not. I do actually like a lot of black and white photographs a lot and I sometimes wonder why I make a bit of an exception for them; maybe it is just a historical accident thing, or maybe it is that black and white depends on subtlety - less rather than more.

But if you photographed it the way most people photograph auroras, presumably it would be even more vivid!

'Artists' (with the exception of con-artists) have more integrity than most, often eschewing materialism in pursuit of their ideals, including photographers. You have a great ethic but why dismiss other creative outlets?

I'm not. What made you think I was? 

that's incredible, but how does that fit with the compression effect (I don't know what you call it) something to do with perspective (over my head) when using a long lens. My eye doesn't feel like it sucks in the background like a 2000mm lens does?

You're confusing the image on your retina(s) with what you perceive as seeing. There's a lot of 'creative post-processing' that goes on between them. As for the 'compression', think about it: What the difference between a 50mm focal length image and 1600 shifted 2000mm images stitched together (to give the same FoV)? The later is analogous to what's happening in your brain all the time. What you think you see is the end result of all that post-processing (plus load of HDR, edge enhancement, motion detection, colour transformations...), not what's projected on to the retinas at any instance in time.

A photo can never be truly honest, even in the absence of post processing. It is honest in as much as how the camera sees the scene, but not how we see it. I would therefore argue that a sensitive and appropriate level of post processing is more honest than none at all, because with restraint the result can be that much closer to how a subject is remembered.

I too love black and white photography as it allows much of the perceptive work to be done by the viewer 'filling in the gaps' - as opposed to, say, ugly over-processed HDR images with retina-melting colours.

As you say, subtlety is important.

Slight thread hijack BUT look at these (there are some photographs amongst them, alongside sketches and paintings). Now and again, a piece of art moves me to "like" it on Twitter and without realising, I've curated a small gallery of people's work over the last year or so...

On a thread that pokes a little bit of fun at the visual arts, it can't hurt to simply take some pleasure in them too. Cheers.

https://twitter.com/richardmcj/status/1730639701336301598/photo/1
https://twitter.com/overland_jamie/status/1725200922429501623/photo/1
https://twitter.com/1sallymason/status/1718372168684216496/photo/1
https://twitter.com/Becca3Artach/status/1710964141471506494/photo/1
https://twitter.com/PaulBaileyArt/status/1707089368517640276/photo/1
https://twitter.com/flowerboxorguk/status/1705319580917284959/photo/1
https://twitter.com/flowerboxorguk/status/1703157081618968724/photo/1
https://twitter.com/PaulBaileyArt/status/1692214536508518727/photo/1
https://twitter.com/antsgreentree/status/1691534671065108480/photo/1
https://twitter.com/artdeville_adam/status/1681017028713365505/photo/1
https://twitter.com/SusanOutlaw/status/1681034292313423872/photo/1
https://twitter.com/BarrowmanArtist/status/1681058359913357312/photo/1
https://twitter.com/BarrowmanArtist/status/1680282374079225856/photo/1
https://twitter.com/JCheall/status/1662082879285755904/photo/1
https://twitter.com/JCheall/status/1661053107546079247/photo/1
https://twitter.com/SteadmanArt/status/1657355265937928192/photo/1

Hello again Bob

I noticed one of your pet hates is silly light, moonlit landscapes!

I took one recently. For everyone same, I'm curious if the one I just posted would qualify.

Pushing contrast significantly darkened the sky and the landscape a little, but mostly made it a more pleasing colour. Obviously while it was light enough to see, it couldn't be said to have looked like that at the time

One more, which I forgot earlier.

Anything taken from an effing drone.  I appreciate that the strength of my feeling about this may not be shared by others, but that doesn't deny its strength.

T.

Don't know anything about drones, but I do secretly lust after one🤭 

absolutely I imagine everyone agrees with that,  it needs to be processed to look anything like  you remember

I have to defend HDR though! Does it not increase the effective dynamic range of your camera to be MORE like what the eye sees? I believe colours are optional now, as apps more sophisticated

Nothing to do with app and sophistication! HDR images were being captured and processed long before 'apps' were invented. But it was hard work and made you had to think a bit more carefully about what you were doing. About 50% of my images get some level of HDR processing applied, particularly if they are to be printed and put on a wall (not much DR to play with there), and I pretty much never use an HDR 'app'. Apps just enable a lot of 'lazy' HDR (and in particular tone mapping) and now the novelty value of oversaturated cartoonish images is starting to wear off (OK, I'm an optimist) and we are starting to appreciate that 'HDR' can be subtle and can enhance the reality of images (whatever that means) rather than obliterate it.

HDR abuse is a 'people' issue not a 'tools' issue.

Well yes, but only up to a point in my opinion. I think there has to be a balance between the DR of what we see in a scene and adjusting for what the intended medium can realistically cope with in a photo.

HDR looks false because it tries to squeeze the huge DR of transmitted light into a narrow DR medium, like a print, that depends to a large part on reflected light from the pigments and paper base. A computer screen copes a little better because it too is transmitted light, but still nowhere near the DR of the actual scene.

What I really dislike is the use of software that applies HDR over the entire image with a press of a button. Far better for you to judge where gentle density adjustments to parts of the image are needed, if highlights are blown and/or shadows need some recovery of detail. It is worth learning how to do luminosity masking in order to do this, but be warned - it can be addictive!

I agree entirely with all that. Obviously a photo can never be truly "photographic" (an unfortunate term!). All we can do is try to give as authentic as possible reflection of what we saw within the limitations of the medium.

There seem to be several. Not too bad in my opinion. I think it is a genuinely difficult thing to get right. I tried a few in the dunes of the Sahara last night but gave up because the moon was just too bright (a bit over half moon) to make the moonlit landscape and the starry sky look realistic. In my experience, about a quarter moon will allow a single exposure to get the stars right while giving the impression of a full moon (though maybe that is dishonest!). Maybe a composite exposure is needed, but I don't have a clue how to do that!

PS. Maybe we should get out photographing together sometime.

Drones can allow some fantastic photos to be taken. But whether one should do so is quite another matter.....

I don't have one.

I think there a couple of quite different challenges with moonlit scenes: As you pointed out, a moon is very bright (relative to anything else at night), but a composite (standard HDR technique) will allow you to control that. The other issue is how to reproduce the way a moonlit landscape appears to us which is a bit more subtle. In general you'll see fairly desaturated highlights (eyes don't have good colour perception at low light levels) and completely black shadows. The camera left to it's own devices won't reproduce that - it still sees a normal daylight colour balance and saturation (moonlight is actually much the same colour as sunlight) and it will capture shadow detail you never see with the eye. It a quite good example of where you *have to* actively post-process to reduce what the camera has captured. Most of the time it's the opposite (the eye is better than a camera).

There's a bit of boundary blurring between artistic intent and apparent naivety with use of the automatic features in Photo editing software. If a photographer has first established a portfolio of highly skilled, well-judged 'honest' images and then goes on to produce photos with unusual colours and compositions, it seems more likely to be perceived as artistic intent. If on the other hand he/she goes straight in from the start into imagery with unusual colours and compositions, it is liable to seen as being naive heavy-handedness with software, as there's little or no history of skill backing the work up. 

I've noticed this phenomenon with the art exhibitions I've had in the past (watercolour paintings - not photos). My more abstract paintings sold well when they were exhibited alongside other paintings that required hard-won skill, knowledge of materials and time to produce. They did not sell as well on their own - though I realise there may have been other reasons for that.

Eilean Donan Castle

I can’t be doing with pointless and clichéd titles for landscape photographs. Things like “reaching the top” on a photo of someone reaching the top of a hill. Sure, give us the location but nothing more thanks. Especially puns. Those make me feel embarrassed. 

Any climbing photo with a caption about "questing" is the worst.

Any caption mentioning "golden hour" or, even worse "blue hour". 

Any caption involving sun/moon set/rise, when it is clearly about an hour or more from any such time.

Interesting. Can you or anyone think of an example of a photo caption which actually 'adds' something to the image (excepting purely documentary location & date/time)?

I think it needs to be subtle without trying to be too clever. I know this one went down well with some people:

Haha! I hadn’t thought of that

“Moonrise at golden hour” is insulting your intelligence, except it’s so easy to warm something up to mislead the viewer that it feels necessary to justify especially good light, like I had in Knoydart recently

Hi Jon, as a beginner I don't know what you mean by literal taste ??

I was just scanning through the landscape gallery from the top. My conclusion is that UKC are more easily pleased than this thread. There is even  a photo of the A82 near the top😤

What is viewmaster?

What is LP culture?🤔

Thanks

Mark

It would be a pleasure

As you can tell from my illuminated tents, I'm a camper, not a hill-walker

By literal, I mean a very direct interpretation of the mountain/upland/coastal environment. Think about the mountain landscape shots that typically gets high scores here. The mountain is front and centre, with little apparent consideration of compositional alternatives, light is often not that subtle (though may indeed be nice). Also there is usually little to place the viewer in the landscape (foreground/midground, elements that add depth to the image); often a small human figure seems required to add some sense of scale. If there are foreground elements, are they arranged/resolved satisfactorily, or is there an jarring imbalance?

I often reflect that perhaps I see the world very differently to the average voter here. Take the addition of humans into a landscape (particular mountain) image -- tp me their presence detracts enormously from the image, perhaps to others that's the key to them feeling part of the picture.

One way I probably see differently, is that I physically DO see differently to most: due to an uncorrected dominant eye, my vision is effectively monocular. So it seems perfectly natural to me that landscape shots be vertical 'portrait' orientation, rather than the horizontal traditional 'landscape' format. Bear that in mind when we revisit old ground covered above: any attempt to recreate what one 'sees' in the moment is ultimately doomed to translate to others. Being true to what you saw at the time in your own photos is all you can achieve, but you have to acknowledge that others fundamentally see things differently to you and that will be expressed in their photographic interpretation. 

LP = Landscape Photography. I am sorry: I had assumed that was obvious, but I shouldn't have!

View-master -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-Master. A tongue-in-cheek extrapolation -- if we are going for full replication of seen experience, then why are we producing flat, 2 dimensional images when we (or, rather you lot) have binocular vision?

Chatting with Oliver Wright brought up the fact that some people see the colour and some people don't (he's an aurora guide from the UK working in Sweden). This is while looking at the same aurora and being aware of each other. The eye definitely has variations, some subtle, some quite large

Not just between people.  My left and right eyes have different colour responses.  I don't notice with both open but covering one or other produces marked changes in saturation.

THE “OBVIOUS” ANSWER

One of the first conclusions that people might jump to is that the eye is the same as the ‘standard’ lens. 50mm produces a natural looking picture and it’s chosen as the default lens for our cameras (or it used to be) so is this a possibility? In short, no. It’s simple to check your peripheral vision and see that we actually have a very wide field of view.

If you do a little research on what a ‘standard’ or ‘normal’ lens is defined as, it’s all a bit wooly. It’s the focal length that has the same angle of view as a print held at a 'normal' viewing distance (approx 53° diagonally). This has ended up as being roughly the diagonal of the film format, hence for 35mm full frame cameras the focal length that is normal is approximately 43mm.

THE GEOMETRIC ANSWER

The focal length of a lens is defined as the distance from the centre of the lens (or the principal focal point) and the sensor surface (the back of the retina). For the typical human eye this distance is approx 24mm from pupil to the back of the eye. However, this calculation for focal length presumes a flat 35mm sensor. The 'sensor' in the eye is on the internal surface of a the eye (a sphere) and definitely isn’t 35mm across! So we need a different way of calculating focal length.

It might make more sense to look at the angular light sensitivity of the eye. Here is a diagram showing the distribution of cones and rods in the eye. 

From Vladimir Sacek's wonderful "Telescope Optics"

If we use this as the guide for our focal length we need to convert the 140° field of view to a focal length. Using this website we calculated the equivalent focal length for a full frame camera as 7.9mm. This is insanely wide and although we can see ‘things’ in the far edges of our vision up to this limit, they are typically monochrome and we can only really see things when they are moving. So we’ll see large areas of shape and small areas of movement.

One of the best references we could find for the ‘useful’ field of view was from Astronomers. When they use a telescope, they use an eyepiece that has an apparent field of view. This is the angle of view beyond which the eyepiece goes black due to the mechanics involved. The widest generally used eyepiece is approx 100° field of view. This means that astronomers are happy to pay big bucks for viewfinders up to 100° (which give them the impression that there are no edges to their field of view) and beyond that there is no real demand. This gives an equivalent field of view of 18mm.

However, visual acuity declines by about 50% every 2.5° from the center of the eye up to 30°, at which point the decline in visual acuity declines more steeply. Also, colour perception drops quickly from 20° to 40° degrees from the centre and 30° degrees is accepted as the general drop off point of colour vision. This gives a focal length of 38mm.

Inside this area the resolution of the eye gets higher and higher and the parafovea is an area that works as a 'finder' for the eye. It isn't the most acute part of the eye but it is used to scan for the next thing to look at and also can do some recognition in preparation for the fovea (like when reading). The parafovea covers 5° and hence the focal length for the parafovea is 500mm.

The sharpest part of the eye, and the area in which we really "see" is the fovea. This is the window through which we really see the world - moving it quickly from place to place in a saccade in order to build up our view of the world. The fovea is approximately 2° degrees and hence is equivalent to a 1200mm lens! However, the fovea isn't particularly high resolution in camera terms and by some estimates it is only approximately 1 to 2 megapixels.

The lens in the eye definitely yellows as it gets older. 

https://www.optometrists.org/general-practice-optometry/guide-to-eye-condit...

Although there's probably basic genetic differences that are normally not noticeable

Thanks - a more comprehensive answer than mine!

The "1-2Mpx @ 1200mm" metric seems about right - When bird watching I've note that with the naked eye I can see about the same detail as in the camera screen (~1Mpx) with on 800mm (35mm equiv.) lens. I'm over 60 so the eyes have definitely deteriorated since their not-particularly-good best!

This has been the case since I was a child, so I doubt it's that.

waterfall, orange waterproof jacket,  looking away  🤮 

Oliver is a notorious route thief, Tim. I wouldn't trust him, ask him about Trouble at Gordale, back in the day when he was thin, pale and had dreadlocks.

Fascinating. Ta.

Here's an example of the kind of thing I mean. I don't see anything wrong with the technique as such but like anything you can over do it. 

I saw that pic somewhere on social media. Is it even a real scene that is then over processed? It didn't look it, more like a composite not done very well!

I ended up having a FB conversation with the photographer, he says it's a telephoto shot with some photoshopped clouds and everything else is unaltered. I don't think he was too happy but being familiar with that view I couldn't see how it would look like that without a lot of jiggery pokery. 

 it's an absolutely horrible fake-looking image

I will post some of my masterpieces eventually🤣

I've since understood that the compression distortion isn't a property of the lens, but of the relative distances of near subject and far subject from photographer, so telephoto landscape is a bit of a misnomer

where is it by the way?

It's An Teallach with Loch Droma in the foreground.

I don't think photography should just show things as they might appear to the naked eye but I really don't like photography that distorts things in an attempt to make them look more spectacular. It seems artistically dishonest to me. There are many comments on that photo along the lines of 'wow, Scotland is so stunning' and my thought is yes, but not in the way you think!

Isn't the reflection in the water totally fake? 

Yes, it looks there was no reflection, it's a mirror of the top of the image. The loch surface appears very rippled from the wind then suddenly turns into an unblemished mill pond reflection. Hmmm.....

Even if it's not a composite image and that the image dimensions aren't distorted (I am skeptical!) the post processing of the colours with make it look very fake.

I am a lot less strict than Robert and don't mind some colour manipulation for both visual and emotional effect but that image is awful.

That's was my knee-jerk thought, but on closer inspection I wasn't too sure: There are some clear perspective difference around the tops of the telegraph poles which suggests that's it's not just a lazy flip of the direct image. Having said that, usually a reflection - even off perfectly flat water - has a different contrast & colour balance to the direct image due to the effective polarising effect of the water surface. That seems absent here, so I think it *is* a reflection but then post-processed (pointlessly IMHO) to look like the direct image. Either way the result is not very naturalistic/convincing.

That's the obvious one.
Also the fact that the mountains aren't I assume that close enough to be reflected anyway.
Another bit of weirdness is the gap between the land and the reflection as there should be a join line.

I'm late to the party but had to chip in at this point!

The most egregious aspect of this image, and one of my many pet hates, is that An Teallach has been vertically stretched for dramatic effect.

I suppose if you want to be charitable about that pic, it's an attempt to artistically convey the impression the 'artist' got from looking at the scene rather than an attempt to realistically depict it.  Or sommat like that. 

I think the most egregious aspect of this image is simply that it's done really badly.  If somebody wants to paste photos together to make a largely imaginary scene that, to them, represents the way they see a place then meh, where's the harm?

We'd probably let them off the hook if they were drawing or painting the same scene wouldn't we?  So it's a bit funny how upset some of us get about them manipulating photos to similar ends.

Here's a classic example of such 'artistic licence' applied more competently but perhaps less forgivably, for marketing purposes:

The reflection is absolute just an awful copy and paste (really badly done).

I've just put it up against a picture from the same location and it's a 40% stretch vertically as well... 

If we also get rid of the sky and replace it with something like it would have been at the time (clear skies from the sharp shadows) we get the attached. 

look how easy it is to generate reflections.. youtube.com/watch?v=IVTyLYupECI&

That reflection was awful though - literally just chopped off half the picture and flipped it, ignoring reflections of the two promontories and consistent state of the water (rough in the background, mirror smooth beyond the transition). 

A really good test of a 'flipped' sky is to see whether the skyline lines up. Because of parallax, a real reflection won't 'fit' perfectly over it's source.

I think it was on the BBC website the other day labelled as Beinn Eighe!

Yes, I think that is conclusive. The geometry just doesn't add up.

Hmm, just tried that and there is a parallax difference between the direct view and the reflections. Without even invoking PS, it's fairly obvious at the visual boundary between the brown hill on the right and the black/white area behind. Also (as mentioned above) is visible around the tops of the telegraph poles. PS also shows up a distinct parallax shift between the left peak skyline and the ridge line coming towards the lake.

I agree, it's not a good picture (for all sorts of reasons), but I don't think the 'reflection' is just a simple photoshop flip.

I don't think it is funny or odd at all. Everyone knows that art is just that, but I think most people still look at photographs with the assumption or expectation of an attempt at authenticity, or, if they have seen through the now pervasive dishonesty, with a scepticism which detracts from the enjoyment of many photographs; this sort of thing is in my view undermining landscape photography.

Just the other day I took some photos in the dunes of the Sahara at sunset. There was an exceptional clarity to the air which allowed brilliant light even as the sun touched the horizon. The reaction of my friend when I showed him some of the shots on the back of my camera was that it simply didn't look real (he was there so knew this wasn't the case). People who were not there would certainly be forgiven for assuming the photos were over manipulated. The exceptional authentic is being drowned out by over processed nonsense.

But maybe I shouldn't be bothered and be happy to enjoy my own photographs the way I want to take them whatever other people think.

But I do find the whole discussion fascinating since I think about all this stuff a lot.

we need some rules?

https://naturallandscapeawards.com/rules/

That, I think, is key.

I also think that pursuing the 'authenticity' angle in digital imaging is and always has been unrealistic and naive. Photographs have always been a personal impression of something the photographer wants to show rather than what actually is (otherwise most photos of Scotland would largely be grey mist). Photos are not about 'what is', or even about 'what I saw', they're about 'what I want to show you'. You can't divorce a photo from the aspirations and motivations of the photographer.

I would counter that with "we need less competition". A lot of the 'rule-bending' will be because some people see photography as a competition ("I'm better than you") rather than just enjoying it for what it is. This attitude seems to pervade some much TV these days (baking, painting, sewing etc.,) and all it does is provide some cheap entertainment based on peoples' angst and disappointment. And ends up distorting and corrupting the very thing people loved in the first place.

Yeah you might well be right - it looks like it because of the clean line, but that could be the break between frozen and clear (not wind on water like I thought). Tthe blend of the grasses and poles against the background look too 'competent' for someone who made such a f**k up of the sky replacement... 

So something that looks like a botched fake reflection but actually isn't! Who would have thought!

If we could get rid of competition in general I would agree with you. Being as we can't, I think a good competition where raw files are checked is useful to set a base point of "this photograph isn't deceptive"

those rules are still very relaxed, everything banned is very hi-tech from my point of view. They say nothing about colour manipulation for example. I would hope than none of the submissions here go anywhere breaking those rules, except one - the one I have! Not having the opportunity to scout locations, I once found cables in the way and I once saw some wind turbines on the computer afterwards that I hadn't noticed at the time, arriving and leaving in the gloaming as usual. Erased.

Photography is inherently competitive isn't it? As are most, if not all artforms, there's been awards and competitions as long as art has existed.

I'm not expecting to compete with Hamish Frost, but  have to admit I'm shallow enough, to crave external validation and 5* ratings. I even got my mum to vote for me (and to give Bob 1* ratings - kidding!)

yes

sceptics are welcome to privately ask for my raw files and publicly expose gross deception

But once you add a competitive element, you end up with a 'game', and the rules of any game tend to be arbitrary beyond the requirement to provide a 'good game'. The output of the game (in this case the photograph) simply becomes an embodiment of the rules and secondary to the underlying activity. One of the other issues with these 'informal' games is that the rules rarely explicitly include the most important rule i.e., how you win. It just ends up being a guess as to what the judges will like - likely based on what they liked last time - and that just ends up with a positive feedback loop  of photographs which look like last year's winners on steroids and rapidly disappear in a puff of HDR madness.

OK, I admit: I think competition is actively detrimental in many activities and I may be a lonely voice here.

I think most people still look at photographs with the assumption or expectation of an attempt at authenticity, or, if they have seen through the now pervasive dishonesty, with a scepticism which detracts from the enjoyment of many photographs; this sort of thing is in my view undermining landscape photography.

Absolutely agree, it's very sad to have to justify exceptional light, or other unusual effects that might have taken ten attempts  to get. I have some very unusual moon telephoto landscapes, that everyone immediately thinks are fake, but actually took years!

Up to a point I agree. However, I think a problematic line has been crossed at least when the "what I want to show you" bears no real relation to "what I actually saw". Sometimes this is so obvious, as in a lot of those ILPOTY photos, that one can just laugh at them and move on, but it is often hard to tell what is real/honest/authentic (I'm not sure what word is best) and what is not. This, I think, genuinely detracts from my enjoyment of photography and I am sure I am not alone. If I look at an Alex Nail or a Nicholas Livesey photo I know I have nothing to worry about, but a lot of the time the nagging doubt spoils it for me.

It really doesn't bother me that we don't see hundreds of photos of Scottish drizzle to put things in perspective for every exceptional moment of light. Maybe a really skilled photographer can make something of the drizzle, but I prefer to seek out and share through photography the special moments we go to the hills for.

Perhaps I'm a victim of my own cynicism/realism, but for me the 'enjoyment of photography' is in what *I* do, not in what *others* do (or why they do it). Yes,  I do look at other peoples' photographs and I do get inspiration (and ultimately education) from them, but that's a means not an end.

I'd actually go further than that: The thing I like about photography isn't even the photography, it's more the way it makes me look at the world around me. I can go out and have a great 'photography' day and not come back with a single (decent) picture. But my life has been enhanced by what I've looked at and *really* seen in pursuit of that elusive image.

There's a big difference between it being impossible to get rid of competition altogether (if that was even desirable), and insisting on treating everything as a competition (and in terms of people sharing their photos on here, treating it as a competition in which the rules are as they imagine them to be). 

Anyone who wants to upload their photos here thinking of the voting system as a 'score' and trying to win can do so of course, but they'll have to accept* that not everybody is going to agree with them what the 'rules' are.  (Or even about whether or not there are any rules.)

*Actually they don't have to accept it at all, if they don't like it they can always start a thread to whinge about how other people are doing their hobby wrong and enjoying the scenery incorrectly.  And then another thread, if they like, to complain that people aren't taking the first one seriously enough.

That's one possible good set of rules, for one sort of competition.  An alternative base point you might choose to take as the 'judge' in a different kind of competition is "what is my emotional response to this picture?"

The problem here is that success in art is fundamentally a competition run by galleries, critics and post artist death, art historians and museums (and show critics). 

So you can't avoid competition, you can just try to make it work well.

Competitions are actively detrimental if you don't approach them in the right way. Approached for what they are, they can be useful (depending on the competition)

https://xkcd.com/1314/ 

Why are those two points mutually exclusive? 

Indeed, but is that good thing?

It seems like 'good art' is defined by what's in galleries and 'good galleries' are defined by the art they accumulate. Hardly any wonder that the whole 'art' thing is disconnected from reality.

Or ignore it and don't get distracted/corrupted by it?

Coincidentally, in October I spotted the first dusting of snow in the Dundonnel area and went to get almost the same angle of view into the coire from the 400m hill opposite it, but still didn't recognise it, as so vertically stretched, as spotted by Nicholas, so I don't think we can blame telephoto landscapes here.

I think I've learnt that compression distortion is entirely natural if you have a very far subject and a near subject to work with.  Stand as far as possible from the near subject, which will shrink, while making negligible difference to the very far subject, which will appear relatively larger and thus closer. Have I got the right?

I guess we don't generally notice it, as both subjects are relatively small, the far one is probably hazy and we don't go around deliberately aligning subjects like that.

Have I got that right?

An Teallach was only 5km away and I could only get 60m from my tent, but I used it in a small way from the other side of the loch to make An Teallach appear to tower over my campsite as much as I could.

I'm sure you are all familiar with the clichéd shot of Ben Vorlich and Stuc a Chroin behind Stirling Castle, but in this case I managed to get another very far subject. This took years and everyone assumes  it's fake 😞 Raw files with time-stamps available for sceptics

You're nitpicking now.  But you're right, they don't have to be the way I've phrased it there.  Let me make it less ambiguous for you:

Competition A - photos are disqualified if they're judged to be "deceptive" according to some arbitrary definition of what looks realistic.  And then those that have not been disqualified are judged on 'artistic merit' or some other criteria.

Competition B - skip directly to the 'artistic merit' bit, and judge them without giving a toss whether they're "deceptive" or not.  (Unless that detracts from the 'artistic merit' bit, obvs.)

If you want to upload your photos to the galleries here and imagine that the voting system is your score in a competition fine.  If you want to imagine that it's a type-A competition fine.  If you want everyone else to agree with you and vote accordingly, hard luck.

I agree totally with that. It may be a fault of mine, but I probably need (or at least like) to have a motivator to go out. It used to be Munro bagging and then winter climbing, but now my main motivator, at least in winter, is photography and I love all the planning and effort to try to be in the right place at the right time - much in common with winter climbing. The fact that I sometimes just end up sitting in the clag in the dark makes the times it works out even better. I now see the mountains at their best and can barely be bothered with a standard "9 till 5" hill walking day. As for those who tell me I am too busy looking through my viewfinder to enjoy being there, well, when did they last see sunset and sunrise from a remote hill in the north west? On the contrary, photography has, I think, made me much more observant, especially in "seeing" details in the landscape fir telephoto shots.

ok we definitely have to go out together that describes me exactly 

No it's not but it's the way the art world works.. 

The only way to ignore and not be affected by competition is just doing photography for yourself and only show it to friends.

Competition B will include AI images - is that a problem?

p.s. competition A is not judged by some strange criteria. It's judged by looking at the RAW files and ensuring that the end result hasn't been manipulated to deceive - a fairly clear decision. Don't add or remove stuff, don't change stuff to make it look like something its not.

I didn't say "strange" criteria, I said arbitrary.  As in one in requiring a judgement call as opposed to an objective measurement against a quantitative standard.  There is no way to objectively measure whether or not an image has been "manipulated to deceive". 

If you don't want AI images to be admissable, fine.  It's no more difficult to decide that than to look at a RAW file and decide whether or not a final image has been generated by AI (whilst not caring how it's been manipulated otherwise) in the case of competition B. 

Once AI can generate a convincing RAW file then using it to cheat is equally likely in either case.

Why can you only show it to friends?  How about uploading it to your gallery on here?  That's the topic of the thread.

I am completely on the same page with this. I fluctuate between what motivates me most at any particular time, but I feel like having a 'purpose' enhances the experience and provides the motivation to do what I otherwise might not.

Would that mean that the AI algorithm will generate a photo, falsely allocate a known RAW file format such as .NEF and then essentially pretend that its come from a Nikon camera?
Or, would the AI algorithm have its own RAW file format with a corresponding unique Filename Extension?  If that is the case, then the Filename Extension will identify it as an AI generated RAW file.

I have absolutely no idea.  But if someone is going to use AI to fabricate a photograph to enter into a competition, I'm sure they'd find a way.  If it isn't possible now, it probably will be in the future.

Timparkin said: "Competition B will include AI images - is that a problem?"

What I'm trying to say is that I don't see why it's any more difficult to exclude AI images from the one comp by looking at the RAW file(s) that have been processed to produce the final image than it is for the other.  But that's addressing the first part of the question above - as to the second part, again, I don't know.  Is it a problem necessarily?

All of this is a digression from the thread anyway - I don't know anything about photographic competitions.  What I do know is that individuals who upload their photos to the galleries here and (misguidedly imo) choose to regard that as a competition do not get to decide the rules.

Which is pretty much where I am now.

all digressions welcome😀 I love the different directions this has gone, especially what is effectively philosophy of art. It's all very interesting

That woud mean that someone is knowingly and falsely using a filename extension allocated to a single manufacturer such as Nikon and the AI algorithm would also have to include data so as to try and avoid simple detection by people familiar with how RAW files work.
That's gone from the simple act of faking photo's as JPG's and to the fraudulent use of proprietary software and/or making it look like it's the genuine manufactuer's RAW file.
Massive difference...

You're missing my point on purpose now, this is not the interesting question.  But assuming it's technically possible, if someone is "knowingly and falsely" entering an AI-generated image into a photographic competition where that's against the rules, I really don't see how the minutiae of the "filename extension" of the files they submit makes much difference, legally or morally.  It's fraud either way.

Not really. Most RAW formats have been reverse engineered and the code is open source and widely used for RAW->TIFF/JPG (dcraw, libraw...). I don't believe any of the formats involve a digital signature (also though Canon toyed with it some years ago) so it wouldn't take an enormous amount of programming expertise to write a 16b .tif -> .cr2 converter (for example) good enough for the purpose of fooling and landscape photo competition. I can think of a few forensic approaches that might hint at a faked file (e.g., inconsistent optical aberrations relative to sensor location), but they would be hard to spot. I could be wrong - I've never tried it - but that's my reading of the current situation.

Not really. If someone's going to cheat then they're going to cheat.

Because I was replying to somebody who wanted to avoid all impacts of competition

My whole point is that without RAW checking, you'll get people entering manipulated images including AI-generated images. Hence why RAW checking is important (even more so now)

You might think that it would be easy to convert a tiff to a raw file that convincingly looks like a manufacturers raw but it's really not and no one has managed it. I'm a software engineer with a PhD in computational physics and I spent a few days on it and realised I was going to get nowhere without substantial time spent on it. I manage the raw checking for the Wildlife Photographer of tej Year competition and the Natural Landscape Photography Competition and I have a strong interest in keeping an eye on these things. 

There are a couple of ways of making a file looking like a raw with the right extension and it triggering photoshop ACR and Lightroom but it's easy to tell. 

There are digital signature systems already available as add ons and Leica have introduced a built-in system so we're heading in a better direction already

Good to know. I was half tempted to have a go, but now I think I won't bother.

Just had this photo pop up on fb with your comment. Had a scroll through his other stuff. Horribly clumsy tarting up of average photos.

I think the thing that surprises me most is that there's clearly a market for it. 

So check the RAW then, if that's sufficient to ensure that the base image is authentic.  I don't see how that has any bearing at all on what degree of image manipulation is allowed under the rules, you seem to be conflating two entirely different things.

If you wanted to specify that any additional material blended in is also the same photographer's original work (eg: a more dramatic sky taken from another image), then check the RAW of that too.

Yes, by the comments it seems people lap this stuff up. An interesting phenomenon anyway.

The reflection is bad enough, but although it’s badly done there could have been a reflection somewhat like that in reality. What is absolutely unacceptable to me is the grossly exaggerated vertical dimension, distorting the reality by a factor of nearly 2. In other words the picture is a complete lie. If we did the same thing to a portrait photo it would be rightly ridiculed.

https://img.ukclimbing.com/i/417741?fm=jpg&time=1701862134&dpr=1&am...

This is one of half a dozen pictures of An Teallach that I published in my book ‘Eyes to the Hills’, thirty years ago. I camped with the my assistant in a very small mountain tent at this camera position to get some shots at dawn. We stayed there for 4 days, making a longish walk each evening to the car and thence nearby pub/hotel.

In this and in most of his other photos, the sky is darkened almost to black at the top of the photo. I've noticed others doing this too. Very odd thing.

Yes, such a strange thing to do, to think that the use of an extreme graduated neutral density filter somehow ‘improves on nature’. They were widely used and abused before photoshop came to the fore. If I ever used one, it would be a one stop grad, sometimes necessary where the sky would burn out otherwise.

If you look at the comments on this sort of stuff on social media people absolutely lap it up. A lot of them maybe aren't familiar with the places and seem to assume they actually look like that. 

I probably shouldn't care about that as much as I do but it really annoys me!

This mirrors almost exactly what I wanted to say.

I've been a photographer for nearly 20 years. Landscape, wildlife, timelapse and astrophotography were/are my thing, but I've been branching into the more adventurous areas of photography with doing more climbing this year. I'm certainly no Hamish Frost, but I do enjoy the technical challenges that come with this type of photography.

But if I can give any advice it's to shoot what you enjoy and looks pleasing to your eye. If you like it, sod what anyone else thinks. And as for posting on social media, in competitions or for critique, the old saying "If you stick your head above the parapet, prepare to be shot at" is very true. But do it anyway. Certainly not everyone is going to enjoy your images, but I'm sure many will.

If you're enjoying it, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks.
Go out and have fun with it

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/low-angle-view-of-illuminated-te...
one has to chuckle.

I’ve ordered a copy.

Well that’s what long lenses do ….. 

seems algorithms are partly to blame..

https://petapixel.com/2021/06/21/examining-social-medias-impact-on-landscap...

https://500px.com/p/archiba/galleries/landscapes

Interesting piece that and quite balanced. Thanks for posting.

Truly hideous!

Yes, an excellent article. I think my conclusion is that the two styles can exist independently, but, for me, the problem is where the boundary is blurred and I don't know what I am looking at.

But it does amaze me how much positive social media feedback the guy who did the An Teallach "photograph" is getting when what he is doing is so clumsy. I have to concede that some of the fantasy stuff is done with skill and finesse even if I have no time for it.

Years ago I read Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco. It was written well before the internet age and he focuses on things like theme parks that present a hyped up version of reality. I'm going to dig it out and reread it as I think it might offer some interesting insights into this phenomenon.

any better?

https://tinyurl.com/y73cd248

Yes, I thought that one was particularly hilarious - the Fairy Pools beyond parody.

I did think of commenting, but, after his reaction to my comment on the An Teallach one, there doesn't seem any point; he is clearly happy to wallow in all the love he gets.

Found his Facebook profile. He seems to use this filter on every photo he publishes.

As much as I agree......I'm wary this thread is now turning from a discussion into a character assassination and online bullying. He's not the only Insta photographer trying to make a living from overcooked edits.

It's the usual cumulative effect thing. Nobody says anything very terrible but if everyone is saying something then it looks like a pile on.

I'm partly to blame for using his photo as an example but I've tried to keep my own contributions to discussing that sort of image in general rather than slating one individual.

You have, my comment was really aimed at the whole thread. We're in a whole new world where it's very easy to be photographically creative and to present yourself to the world. It's also very easy for others to be critical, particularly from a distance.

Many would argue that popular approval of photo imagery and the slavish, cliched responses towards such approval, is the arch enemy of a uniquely personal photographic style.

Creative originality in any art form can't be taught, only nurtured. Despite that, teaching a knowledge of technique and compositional norms can be the foundation on which a solid creative personality can be built. But because it takes a great deal of courage and self belief for photographers to go beyond the cliched imaging norms that Photoshop tools and auto settings on phone cameras can produce, perhaps shows that many photographers are too deeply rooted within imagery that only displays technical competence (therefore, cliches), with scant regard towards the all-important creativity generated through personal interpretations and emotional reactions towards a subject.

Technique is only a set of facilitative tools - a rite of passage really - not means in themselves towards a creative end.

Personally, I leave photography and art alone for long periods as a kind of creative ctrl/alt/delete reset. When I resume, I fall back on technique-heavy, approval-seeking cliches to get my hand in again. Sometimes the creative juices fail to flow from that. I know when they do though, as they are more likely to satisfy my own enjoyment of producing them far more than they do as a means of pleasing others.

What is creativity in photography? 

Overblown HDR is just eyewatering, a tool that is used by lazy photographers that cannot pick a good  subject to focus on within a scene

You're not being serious with that question, surely?

(If you have to ask...etc)

I am being entirely serious.

I would be interested in what stages of producing a photograph people consider creative, because I'm not sure that I consider any of it creative really. I'm just pointing the camera in the right direction and recording a scene. Observation and recording of what is already there, but not creativity.

Semantics. You have made an effort to create an image. You have been creative. Whether there is any value in what you have created is of course a matter of judgement by you and anyone who sees that image. And the values are relational rather than absolute.

I think it's a great question. I'm not at all sure what the answer is and I think discussing it is interesting.

On a trivial level, yes I have created an image, so maybe a very low level of creativity, but certainly  nothing like the creativity involved in much art or music. I think to call photography a truly creative process is misleading. 

I think it's as creative -- you are limited by the machinery at your disposal (whether that is physical hardware, lens etc, or software), but it's little different otherwise. Fine art uses tools (paint, etc); music uses notes (mostly!) and typically instruments. The only difference I see is that photography requires photons to be harvested according to your vision, ideally) and there are limits as to how they are collected to form an image. If there is artistic intent behind something, it's art.

If you're using a camera to record an image in the way it thinks best represents what you're seeing, it isn't art at all. Maybe a kind of journalism at best.

If you're modifying what you take and how you take it so as to try to inspire an emotional response from the viewer, there's an art to that. And the more you choose to record things that others wouldn't, or in ways that others wouldn't, in order to inspire such a response, the greater the process might be considered artistic.

I suppose it depends on how you look at it: Does the magnitude of the 'creativity' reflect the work that's gone into it or the value that the consumer puts on it? Does it have to be hard work? Do you have to have sweated blood and shed tears?

Ultimately you choose your own definition - which could be creative in itself . Meta-creative?

I think if you have put something into the public domain you have to accept not everyone is going to like it. Nothing I’ve seen here seems in anyway a public assassination or bullying.

Any photograph requires a conscious decision as to what to put in the frame, how to compose the elements, when to take the picture, etc. And then there are the camera settings beyond automatic, if chosen. At the risk of being patronising, better images, that are undeniably art, have a great deal of craft and thought gone into their taking, and sometimes in their processing. Fairly sure Ansel Adams, Joe Cornish, Colin Prior and Peter Dombrovskis were/are trying their best to capture in camera what they see/feel at the time.

In reply to john arran:

I think this is a failure to understand what art is. If you talk to most high level painters, they tend to see the moving around the paint on the canvas as a similar (although more highly developed) skill as moving the camera around to capture a scene. It's a craft/skill based activity, rather like being able to throw a discus, cook an amazing meal, balance on a tightrope. 

The 'art' comes in the vision to decide what that moving around of paint, pointing the camera, etc. is going to result in and what it means to the person doing it (and normally how the viewer of the image or painting reacts to it). 

In this way, the best photography is as good as the best painting in terms its power to evoke a reaction from an audience. 

What is the minimum necessary activity to make a photograph art? The conscious decision on what to frame in the picture and when to press the button. 

Just as everything made in paint isn't art, everything made with a photo isn't art. But it can be and we have no control over whether it is or no, only the viewer can decide that - and it only takes a single viewer to decide that it is. In fact it only takes the producer of the work to decide if it's art or not if we reduce it to it's basics. Art can simply be a way for a person to develop, and quite often, this is when art is its most useful.

The intention and ability to make photos with 'personality'; subjective knowledge of composition; knowing generally what cameras are capable of doing and incapable of doing; predicting what subjects are likely to do and when; originality in choice of subject matter; sensitivity to good lighting, mood and atmosphere - sometimes looking at weather forecasts and angle of the sun to target them; having an image in your head, and then going out to find it...

Do you not find that the mood or particular feeling you have in in the morning has an influence on how you approach your photography for the day? It certainly does with me. Whether I go for a walk in woodland, mountain, coast, or concentrate on macro subjects, is highly dependent on whether that mood stimulates me to look far, relatively close or very close up. I am receptive to very different things in the landscape with those preconceptions I start off with, and have a reasonable idea (as an example) of what lenses to take with me for that day. If I take only a macro lens with me, it forces me to look at the beauty of minute detail. This is all part of the creative process in photography - in my opinion.

Certain photographers can be recognised just by looking at their work. Metaphorically, they have their name written within the image. Ansel Adams is the obvious one. Also Alexey Titarenko, Elliott Erwitt, Cartier Bresson etc. There are also photographers here on UKC who have recognisable image 'signatures'.

I'm not saying I'm good at it. Far from it. The key for me is the enjoyment and stimulus that comes from all of the above creative processes. And yes, photography is creative.

I personally define art as any creative endeavour that "says something" (though there are limitations even to this broad definition), irrespective of the medium used to say it. A compelling photograph has to be saying something - else why are you connecting with it? A good landscape photograph is surely one that elicits some emotional response or feeling of connection in the viewer?

Anyone who points a camera at something with the intention of taking a compelling photograph is employing creativity and using the fundamental concepts of art whether they're consciously thinking about them or not. One just doesn't consistently end up with pleasing compositions in the viewfinder through complete luck. Artistic choices are being made the instant you decide to point the lens at something with the intention of taking a photo worth taking.

Any good landscape photo is the product of artistic choice. Else what's the difference between the landscape photographer and the landscape watercolour painter? The painter is just doing the same as what you're doing, but with a paintbrush rather than a camera. The art is separate from the craft used to produce it. Something doesn't become art just because it's been made with a pencil or a paintbrush with a skill you don't possess.

I guess that means that the images shown higher up in this thread must be 'art'. They certainly evoked a reaction. Like the 'Emin bed'?

This popped up on FB earlier, and I thought of you.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/snowdoniawales/permalink/10160050463920662

I was thinking it was a composite of Austria and Snowdonia.

Here's a great example (imho) that very good images that convey feeling don't have to have the typical golden light that the landscape photography world tend to aim for: 

https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2023/11/natural-landscape-photographer-of-the...

An also an example of a competition with careful thought behind judging and the judging process -- well done, Tim!

Cheers Jon! We try to 'tweak the game' of judging images to make it a bit deeper than a 2 second view and a score. The fact that some of the lesser 'scoring' images ended up doing well and one eventually won the competition shows how people's attitudes to images change as they spend time with them. 

Normally the reaction would be one that the artist intended although that isn't always necessary. And art doesn't have to evoke a good reaction, although "that's a bit shit" isn't really what I was talking about personally. 

The problem with discussing the definition of art is that it's a lot less enjoyable than the making or consuming of it.

The framing, the specific timing, the scene displayed, what you choose to have in/out of focus, what story you try to capture, what feeling(s) you try to evoke when reviewed later. So much more than just 'recording' an image.

As Jon Read said later, "If you have to ask...etc"!

🤣

🤮

marmite style! Buildings are a mile  from shooting point and appear tiny in relation to mountain. Commentators assume it's a product of the lens, but you'd get the same effect cropping (except for quality) I'd say it was imaginative, if he hadn't copied someone else. Still 5*🤣

Been there, done that... 🤣

that's fabulous in my opinion must have taken some planning

How about this:

Oh dear, how sad, never mind...

In reply to climbuptay:

And remember that most good sunrise/sunset photos are not of the sun setting or rising but of the landscape lit by the setting or rising sun.

People standing back to camera with hands in the air. Only usually seen on Instagram 

The #vanlife photo of somebody drinking a cup of coffee from the back of their van whilst looking at the landscape. Painfully cliché. Kill me now. 

Or in Reuters or AP releases when beyond the people with their hands in the air is large tank or similar!

Hi Gordon, coincidentally I camped on Carn a' Bhreabadair in mid-October for exactly the same view. How fortunate to have a summit lochan in just the right spot.  I did see Eyes to the Hills 30 years ago, but wasn't consciously following in your foot-steps, though it might not be a bad idea😀

In reply to climbuptay:

Thanks for advice, especially on different shooting heights and angles. I usually forget.

I'm aware that right now, I'm a fair weather only photographer.  I'd like to be able to, but I'm too soft to deal with the extra complexity and hardship of bad weather.

I'm definitely impressed by people who van make a dramatic bad weather photo that would never occur to me

I always did a lot of recce-ing beforehand to find the best camera positions before lugging all my heavy camera (and camping) gear up there. It was always very exciting camping in my very small mountain tent and getting up before dawn. Below the east end of Suilven was the best of all … or maybe Gars-bheinn on the end of the Cuillin ridge … or maybe Sgurr a Fionn Choire.

Often stormy, changeable conditions provide the most dramatic, ‘theatrical’ natural light. In fine weather it can be quite dull (except around dawn, and to a lesser degree around sunset.)

I've now sorted out these photos. The first one taken about five minutes before sunset in light of exceptional clarity, the second taken next morning ten minutes or so after sunrise in much hazier/dustier conditions. Processing minimal, really just bringing up the shadows a bit (they look pretty much the same as in the back of the camera) but saturation in fact slightly turned down in the first one to make it a bit more believable.

Hey, I do all my naked selfies like that! Very tasteful. Art in fact.

Why would there be any difference between dawn and sunset? Surely there is a symmetry - if you reversed time they would just swap places.

ground temperature will be different - at sunset the ground will likely be warmer, potentially causing more turbulance in the air & less sharpness to distant views than early morning.

yes, for me creativity lies in two ways

First imagining the shot remotely from the map and other tools and going to the right place at the right time

or second and  much harder,  noticing , imagining and creating something totally unplanned  in real-time. I can't do that at all.

Anything else is a tourist snap. But with luck, a tourist snap can be a great photo, especially easy in places like Nepal, or the Utah desert, where you can point a camera in any direction and get a beautiful shot. Jetting around the world for landscape photography is definitely cheating and in my opinion, immoral,  given what we know about climate change.

I cheat by going camping in NW Scotland in decent weather, but all by bike and public transport. I have the greatest respect for those who can create a beautiful image in shit weather, somewhere like the Brecon Beacons, or Snowdonia.

This is a tourist snap, in the right place at the right time by pure luck, totally uncreative, but I love it.

Far enough, and I suppose there is more often valley mist in the morning. I know someone who claims sunrise lasts longer than sunset (or it may be the other way round... ), but that's clearly nonsense. I do think sunrise is usually more dramatic - sudden light rather than dying light.

I have your Cuillin book. I noticed a lot of the shots are taken in those conditions, not something I do at all. Unfortunately I've got a bit soft, intimidated by camping in bad weather.

Scotland at the crack of dawn

Well I did genuinely ask and it's produced some thoughtful and interesting responses. 

I suppose it comes down to how one defines creativity (and I would define art as something involving true creativity) so I think the two things are inextricably linked.

I would take creativity to mean that something is added from genuinely within oneself. So I'm not sure that subject, composition and cropping are creative; these are just the choices to show people, through a photograph, things which are already there. If a photograph evokes feelings then I would have thought it is just trying to replicate the feelings I have when I took the photographs (if people get other feelings, then that is incidental).

Someone argued that if a photograph is not art then nor is a watercolour. I think I would argue that a painting is almost always impressionistic and therefore, to a lesser or greater extent, give something of the painter's interpretation and therefore creativity, so qualifies as art while a photograph need not. I would then, logically, have to argue that paintings which look like photographs are not creative and are therefore not strictly art (sorry Jamie!) and I think I would stand by that - great craft though.

I think that landscape photography is more analogous to recording music than to creating music. The art is in the composition and interpretation by the player, not in the recording. Skill and craft rather than creativity and art.

I do concede the sort of stuff winning ILPOTY and which the guy who took the An Teallach photo do is, in my book, creative and artisitic. It might be poor art, but definitely art. In fact the An Teallach guy calls himself an artistic photographer (at least he is honest).

I think this is a bit of a limiting factor on my mountain photography. I decided a while back that I would make do with local hills for exercise in dodgy weather but not hold back on driving time and costs (within reason) when the weather is good. As a result I now do most of my photographing in good weather (does sort of make sense when it often involves biviing or lots of walking in the dark) but I undoubtedly miss out on some unexpected moments of magic (as well as lots of grimness!).

As my final contribution to this thread (since I know you'll keep coming back and coming back as you always like to have the last word! 😁) I'll just say that there's a lot more to photography than simply landscapes. And in my opinion,  there's more to art than you seem to be capable of understanding or willing to acknowledge.

This just popped up on my FB notifications. 😀

I know I've stood in the same place as David Ward (for instance) and he uses transparency film in a 5x4 camera and when he's shown me the results, I was surprised and amazed, even though I stood a foot away from where he was. The creativity of seeing, recognising and encapsulating the extraction of a frame of film from reality is more than enough creativity (and a lot more than you can add with a few strokes of a photoshop brush). And those choices are at the heart of what photography is. 

It rarely happens though, take the wind and the noise from rivers and waterfalls. Completely absent from photographs and transformative at the moment. You can't reproduce the aching but satisfied muscles, the camaraderie etc. Quite often I've taken pictures when I've felt awful and I just want to go home but they've become my sublime moments on film. 

But many watercolours are creative accidents as well. As I mentioned before, craft isn't the same as art. It is creative but it's separated from creativity in some way. A 'savant' artist can reproduce a scene with pencil or gauche but they're really being an automaton in some way, just like a camera. 

isn't playing music just hitting some keys in a pre-defined order? 

Fundamentally you could say that art is anything you decide it is (as consumer or creator) so it's a pretty useless term (what does the word 'art' actually tell us anyway? Is it communicating something we can't communicate any other way?)

sorry for waffling!

No, extraordinarily that is not the case. The quality of light is very different at dawn than at dusk, as you must surely know. I think it’s got a lot to do with the amount of dust particles in the air at sunset. One obvious difference is that there is no ‘red sky in the morning’ on a fine day. But it’s very different in lots of ways - not just the less warm colour temperature. It has a kind of beautiful lucidity in the morning, especially in the British mountains (esp. in the north-west). Silvery orange rather than glowing orange-red. I’d say they’re utterly different, really, each beautiful in their own way. But somehow the freshness of dawn wins for me.

Yes, because I found that the most magical time of day photographically.

Yes, of course and some of it (as I acknowledged) is definitely art, but the thread was about landscape photography and I was talking about that (sorry if this was not clear).

Well, as I said, it depends on definitions.

Yay! I wonder if I'll get one too.

I've honestly never noticed a difference.

Why would there be more dust at sunset? Wouldn't dust be to do with wind speed and direction at a given location?

Really? I've often had one. Just needs high cloud with a clear horizon to the sun. Same at sunrise and sunset.

Sorry, but you've completely lost me with that. There may be subtle differences due to geography (the sea, mountains etc.), but I really don't believe there are fundamental differences.

I think that's to do with the direction of the prevailing wind. From the west for most of us, so clearing from the west gives a red sky, whereas clear in the east means (as often as not) that the good weather is leaving. For people living where the weather comes from the east, it's the other way round (and doesn't rhyme as well).

Agreed, but I think it's more to do with the amount of moisture in the air (low after a cold night) than dust. In the UK anyway.

I don't think we are in disagreement there. As I said, I would consider paintings which look like a photograph to be craft rather than true, creative art. And I would consider the sort of landscape photography championed by the NLPA (as opposed to the ILPOTY or the An Teallach guy's stuff) to  be craft rather than art - just extracting something from the landscape rather than actually being creative.

No, I think it more than that; it is very open to individual interpretation. Not as pure art as composing the music, but I would say an artistic element. I suppose it comes down to whether it can be said that photography involves an artistic element in interpreting the landscape - is photography more like being a musician playing the music or a technician recording it? 

With photography I would say no. At least no more than if someone could have been present looking at the scene, perhaps with the photographer pointing a detail out, when the photograph was taken. The photograph is a partial, frozen part of that experience - one might say a snapshot in fact.

But that is just to do with whether a red sky tends to mean good weather coming or going rather than whether a red sky is more likely morning or evening.

I almost cannot believe that no one’s mentioned the old adage ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.'

Both myself and Marek have implied it!

Yes, I know, but without actually saying it !

What happened to the sailors?

Will Self has made comments about his creative process as a writer, he is most emphatic about this one: Don't read anything else when you're writing (it was in a lecture I watched on youtube which I can't find now). Over the last few years I've been increasingly enjoying drawing and his advice is making more and more sense. I've noticed that if I watch a load of instructional videos on technique or whatever during my work then the results don't please me so much and I enjoy the process less. It all seems to come around to authenticity. To your own idea or vision. My own strongest reaction to art; photos or anything else, is when I feel the artist has told me something about their own internal state. All the meh stuff is when I feel that the artist is just trying to please me. Of course my reaction is entirely disconnected from the artists intent.

​​​​​​With landscape photography, do you think that can come about through the photographer's choice of subject and composition, or just through processing (or neither, or both)?

I think you need to distinguish between the 'creative/art' and the 'craft' aspects: Yes, for the former finding your own 'voice' may be easier in a 'quiet space', but for the latter you do benefit from learning from others.

What I like about photography is being there, the internal state of the photographer that I respond to in landscape photography is simply 'I am here looking at this' or 'I want to show you something and I've seen the weather forecast and I might get a chance'. Photography has the potential to capture honest images like no other medium. I can't think of any post processing that I can see to be such, adds to the image and I avoid it myself. I'd rather try again than manipulate.

I'm not sure where B&W fits into all this as I really love B&W photography.

Absolutely, I soak myself in other peoples drawings whenever I can, and can't help looking at other people's technique. But then try to shove it all into my subconscious when I pick up a pen.

Hmm, not sure. There's just so much interpretation that goes on when viewing a image. I suppose you'ld need to define 'honest' in this context to defend this very far.

Ha! There's a massive amount of 'post-processing' that goes on in the camera hardware & software before it even outputs a raw file! You may not have chosen what it does (other than choosing your make/model of camera) - it was an engineering and aesthetic decision of the camera makers. Then when you turn raw->jpeg (or whatever) there's another bunch of post-processing decisions made either by you or by the camera designers (default options). There's no such thing as a non-post-processed image. Using 'dcraw -D' on a Canon raw is about as direct as you can get (unless you're prepared to hack your camera firmware), but it's not very pretty.

Quite!

Well if the canon raw is not very pretty then presumably the default post processing should, or at least can, be an attempt to create a neutral image, replicating, within the limits, what we see?

I remember first seeing the iPhone portrait mode results and being quite shocked at how weird they looked. That's the sort of post processing that you can see.

I feel like going on a multi-day adventure with a bag full of Lomography's most exotic film stocks to stir the pot a little...

Am I a bad person?

Define neutral - and then probably go back to the start of this thread

Only if you share the results on social media in search of 'likes'*. What you do in the privacy of your own darkroom is your business and no-one elses.

* For a very weak definition of 'bad'.

From a bird watching (and hence  photography) perspective, dusk is usually better than dawn. One reason is heat haze, even at very low levels, messes up optics (best observed through a telescope), and dusk is often still warm enough to have some haze (even in winter). I also reckon dawn is usually calmer (cooler, hence less wind) which means less dust whizzing around. 

Did you mean dawn is better than dusk?

I think I am convinced that heat haze might make a general difference. Now I'll see if it registers with me in the hills.

So, if I understand you correctly, you are saying that landscape photography, if others look at your photos, is about sharing as authentic as possible a part of the experience of being somewhere. If so, I am entirely in agreement. Whether that is creative or artistic is not clear to me!

Whoops, yes