Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

For the last few years, our annual holiday to Scotland has been centred around Glencoe. Usually we would spend a week somewhere else and then come back to the Clachaig for a week in one of their log cabins. This year, we decided to try somewhere a little different. Richard Childs, a friend and fellow photographer who lives in Oban, recommended Argyll and I was particularly interested in the old Oak forests of Knapdale. We also decided to go a bit later this year, starting our holiday in October, hoping that the Autumn colour would be getting on well at this time of year. After looking around for acommodation, we found a farm/cottage called SeafieldFarm near Achnamara which had two extension wings for self catering rental. These were situated at the head of Loch Sween to give easy access to some of the forest areas such as Taynish and Crinan.

As always, the drive into Scotland is stunning. I can’t help but get excited to see the mountains as you leave Glasgow and start heading into Loch Lomond territory. As we come off the Glencoe road, we pass an area called Glencroe, which despite having a lot of traffic has some loveley scenery and must be revisited (just up from here is a place called ‘Rest and be thankful’ where a tornado pilot fatally crashed during our stay).

The accommodation turned out to be of a very high quality, we were settled quickly and walking out onto the peninsula within the hour. The forestry walk passed by large ruined croft buildings and it was easy to see that the autumnal colour was on its way, but not quite there yet.

Craignish was our first proper walk out but turned out windy and bleak. When the weather gets blowy, avoid the unprotected west coast. Back inland we walked around the small loch at Barnluasgan, a forestry maintained area with two small lochs and an old growth oak forest on a ridgeline. The small loch is wheelchair accessible and works out at just less than a mile around and includes a bird spotting hide in the reeds at one end. I found a strange floating log that was to become a compositional challenge for me a couple of days later. A quick digital snap for now though and back to farm to get the dinner ready for my parents to visit.

So far the place has been interesting but I wasn’t completely sure about the photographic potential. Then again, I have to keep reminding myself that this is not a photographic holiday! It’s an easy mistake to make but my wife helps me remember.

Excuse the slightly dull academic tone of this post but a couple of recent blog posts and article got me rethinking about ‘what is landscape photography’. I know for most of you it doesn’t really matter but these are the sorts of things that get stuck in my brain for some reason. Here goes..

Following the discussion about over at Guy Tal’s and Jim Goldstein’s about the ‘photographic medium’ and ‘landscape photography’, Darwin Wigget and Samantha Chrysanthou have posted a particularly controversial article on a similar theme over at Nature Photographers online magazine.

They create an imaginary continuum between the Purists (film users who decry any manipulation and are trying to capture reality) and the processors (for whom anything goes, composite images, artifical content, etc. reality be damned). Then they say “All graphic art is illusion and no two dimensional medium can reproduce our three dimensional world” (paraphased), drawing the conclusion that photography can’t reproduce reality so any suggestion that photography is doing so is invalid.

From here, they use examples of photographers that are happy to clear up a foreground when they are on location but not happy to clone out the same items in post processing. This is so as to highlight the ‘extremes’ of the purist approach.

We can only conclude from the premise and the examples that the purists have an inconsistent view when we look at photography as ‘art’. (or that they’re just a bit nuts in general).

The core of the argument is that we should not look at photography as a way of communicating reality; We should look at a photograph as just a form of artistic expression. Comparing our work with some sort of ‘objective reality’ is misguided at best.

All sounds good .. almost .. but this is on the ‘Nature Photography’ website where I would imagine nature photography means ‘photography of or about nature’. In my eyes, landscape photography (where I talk of nature photography and landscape photography as synonymous) has always been about photographs of or about the natural world. Not an imagined natural world, the natural wold. The landscape that every body has the potential to go and visit. This implies an objective reality at its very core. The word photography also implies something otherwise painting would be included.

The article says..

“We as photographers need to do two things: educate the public by not pretending our photographs are ‘reality’ when they are not, and be permissive with each other to avoid that tendency of photographers to pretend they have only ‘manipulated’ their image to make it look ‘like what I saw.'”

So by conclusion, we shouldn’t try to make any distinction between ‘pure’ photographs, manipulated or filtered photographs, composite photographs (swapped in skies from another country at another time perhaps) or completely manufactured pictures made in computers (possibly from pixels sourced from a photograph).

Presumably, we should no longer label photographs with locations or with the names of plants, animals or geology because this would lead the viewer to the conclusion that the photograph was a ‘picture of that real object’.

“All graphic art should be judged on how well it expresses its subject matter, and nothing else. If the idea or story the artist meant to convey is successfully told, then the image succeeds. If not, well…time to practice some more.”

This sounds good again but it presumes that the viewer of the photograph works totally without context; whereas in reality, the viewer draws a large amount of context from the place the that photograph is seen, associated photographs, the parallels that the viewer draws from their experiences of similar photography. All of this accumulated context must be taken into account.

For a photograph to be judged just on its merits alone, it should not appear on a website that has any narrative content. It must appear in front of the viewer without associations (i.e. not linked to from any particular source and not received from any particular individual) and must be accepted with any empty mind. This just isn’t going to happen.

Photographs are presented on ‘landscape photography’ galleries or in shows about ‘nature photography’. Or they appear in forums about the wilderness or linked from friends blogs who are painters or sculptors. Each of these contexts will add the expectation that the viewer has about a photograph.

In my opinion, if a photograph appears on a landscape photography website with captions that give a location of some sort, this suggest a representation of reality captured primarily using photographic processes.

Darwin and Samantha would have us think that the photographer uses a photograph as a way of piping colour texture and shape onto a pallete which can then be used in anyway that they see fit and still label the work landscape photography (actually they probably aren’t but it sounds this way).

Boundaries – How far can we go..

There is a grey area somewhere between cloning out foreground details and pasting in computer generated mountains where a peice of art stops being ‘just’ landscape photograhy and becomes something else. I don’t know where that boundary is but I know there is one and if we cross it, we should be aware of the consequences for ourselves, our viewers and our other photographers, future and past.

This all comes down to more unanswerable questions. What is a photograph? what is landscape photography?

• “photography” – in my opinion it’s the result of a process that predominantly photographic.

• “landscape photography” – I’ve given my opinion on this one previously but it’s becoming more refined as I think about it – ignoring subject matter for now, my current opinion is that it is a landscape photograph is predominantly about the natural world and our relationship with it.

So under my own personal definition of landscape photography, if a landscape photography is manipulated such that it represents some part of the natural order that could not be captured photographically, it is no longer a landscape photograph. So what does this include and exclude?

I’ve been chatting with Tristan Campbell recently and he has a couple of examples of photographic illustrations and computer generated landscapes that are worth looking at. Firstly is an astonishing and beautiful computer generated image of what looks like a bonsai tree in a cave of some sort. This is 100% artificial and I think fairly obviously wouldn’t be a ‘landscape photograph’

http://www.absolutely-nothing.co.uk/default.aspx?cid=995&p=1

Next is a photo composite of Tristan’s that is more closely related to the landscape but I would not class as a landscape photograph

http://www.absolutely-nothing.co.uk/default.aspx?cid=908&p=1

While I’m talking about Tristan I should point out that these don’t represent the whole of Tristan’s work – he’s an excellent photographer of the natural landscape and I would recommend a look at his gallery..

Next on my journey toward landscape photography..

Here is an article on how to replace skies in landscape photographs

Replacing the Sky

Is the result a landscape photograph. This one is contextual for me. If the picture results in something that could have happened then I don’t have too much of a problem. However, local coastal weather patterns, sun direction, colour cast of reflected light, seasonal inconsistencies, etc. Can all make a mockery of a picture. Pasting a sierra wave over a picture of the yorkshire dales in winter would obviously look stunning but would be utterly false. This is the sort of honesty that I feel is important in pictures that I see billed as landscape photographs – If you’d marked the resulting picture as a photographic composite, or a photographic illustration – then I have no problem with it at all.

However, a recent article in a British photography magazine talked about how to take a foreground out of one picture and paste it into the middle and background of another picture. Essentiall copy and pasting some rock structures or a couple of trees into another shot from another location to adding ‘essential foreground’ to your landscape photographs. I don’t know about anybody else but I would feel that a photographer was being dishonest if they put such a picture into a gallery of ‘landscape photographs’.

Nature/Landscape photography can be as interpretive as it likes but I feel it should still represent the inherent truths of our natural world; the symbols inherent in the subject of our photography should remain intact.

For a landscape photographer, the natural world should be our musical scale, photography is our music.

p.s. I should add that I can understand where Darwin and Samantha are coming from and I don’t think they intend to suggest that reality plays no part in landscape photography. It is also possible that the different perceptions of landscape photography in the UK and the US leads to different expectations of veracity in the audience. I also don’t mean to be directly critical of Darwin or Samantha’s points of view – My only wish is to continue an interesting line of discussion and to, hopefully, get some feedback from readers as to their opinions.

We woke on the Saturday to rain. Intense rain. The forecast said even more rain. The day was essentially a write off so we decided to visit a local gallery to have a look at what the residents were doing. First up was Wood Rising which, despite having one of the most sexually suggestive names for a gallery, is acutally a landscape photographer specialising in photographs of Skye. Whilst we were generally of the opinion that his photography wasn’t earth shattering, it was certainly worth the visit and the gallery itself was very impressive. Paul, Tamara and Jenny then split for home leaving just me and Dav who decided to take a look at the Three Herons gallery which I had visited on an earlier trip.

Three Herons is bascially a front room and a kitchen of a small cottage in Broadford owned by Ken and Polly Bryan. Polly works in textiles (although isn’t doing so at the moment due to health reasons) and Ken takes photographs. The kitchen is also a mounting station with an Epson 4800 printer in the corner and the front room has prints stacked up all over the place with a left handed acoustic guitar in the corner. Ken’s work is primarily in black and white but there is a fair amount of colour. Have a look at here for an example. I bought a very minimal print of trees in a thick fog (which Joe Cornish later revealed as one of his favourites).

Leaving the gallery to blue skys, we were a little sad about this being the end. A particularly nice view on the road to the Skye bridge had us back in walking gear and wandering though a pristine area of coastline right next to the road ..

This area was amazing – it was obvious no-one had trodden here for years and the lichen and plant life was overwhelming. We walked about half a mile up the beach, stopping to take photographs occasionally, until I asked Dav how long we’d been there for, expecting him to say an hour or so. Nearly four hours! We’d been battered by rain and sunshine, weather fronts flowing in and past every half hour. As one weather front came through, I managed to take a large format shot in 20-30 mph winds and pelting rain. Exposing a transparency betweem bursts of rain, I captured the next rain front crossing the Cuillins with some stunning geology in the foreground.

Obviously too late to drive all the way back to Yorkshire now so we decided to stay and figure out what accomdotion we could get in Glencoe in the way back. After a couple of hours and a glorious drive through Glen Garry we got to Glencoe only to find that the only accomodation available was a four luxury room at the Ballachulish hotel where we sat drinking Malt Whisky with the film crew for the last Harry Potter movie. Now that is how to finish a holiday! Thanks to everyone for making it such a fun time!

Christopher Burkett is probably the closest thing we landscape photographers have to a divine being. His commitment to photography and the beauty he an draw out of the complex in nature is sometimes staggering. Working in a manner not dissimilar to Eliot Porter, don’t expect stunning sunset clouds or rocky beaches; and forget about flowing misty rivers and gigantic waterfalls. Christopher captures the quiet side of nature. The trees and flowers, grasses and ponds are more Mr Burkett’s purview. I’m going to talk some more about Mr Burkett in the future but for now I wanted to bring a book to the attention of people who may already have seen or own his two masterpieces ‘Resplendent Light’ and ‘Intimations of Paradise’ (both available directly from Mr Burkett at http://www.christopherburkett.com/).

Seasons is a publication of poetry by Robert Frost (an American poet of no small reputation who famously spoke at Kennedy’s inauguration) and is accompanied by 65 of Christopher Burkett’s natural beauties. A few of the pictures are available in his books but the majority are new and are split between the four seasons.

The book is not in print although you can get a copy in OK quality for around £5 including delivery and a mint copy in dust jacket for around £15 or a signed limited edition leather bound in mint condition for £96 which includes brochure, artist’s statement, biography, and resume handouts (Alibris, Abe Books).

Of the pictures I have included, the tree picture is very typical of Mr Burkett’s ability to create patterns and order out of what must be one of the most complicated subjects to photograph. The close up of moss is an example of the photographer’s attention to all detail around him, sometimes finding patches of stone or wood, sometimes a starfish or even a contrail high in the sky. Most of the time his attention is drawn back to the forest or open plains. Finally, a rare vista shot from Mr Burkett to illustrate the winter section of the book where he goes beyond a simple illustrative view and captures of range of tones of snow and shadow and cloud where the whole melts together into a dreamlike consistency evoking something beyond the real.

Go find a second hand copy now and get your introduction to an extraordinary artist.

p.s. I should add that I am not a fan of poetry in general so have not felt best placed to review Robert Frost’s contribution to the book but the lack of pretension of those poems I have read is something I’ve felt is quite attractive.

NB I’ve included a couple of pictures from the book in the sidebar under ‘fair dealing’ copyright exclusion although if any objections are raised by the publisher or authors I will remove them.

Michael Gordon caught my eye some time ago with his extraordinary pictures of the desert of California. One of his photos that really stood out for me was his picture ‘Drivers Wanted‘ (the top photo to the right). This picture went beyond the genre of landsape photography as it is accepted but I strongly feel still is landscape photography. It is what led me to the conclusions I’ve posted previously that landscape photography is about Nature, the processes that govern it, the context of it, the views of it and the images that conjure up feelings about it. It also made me realise that I really want to get my hands on an old petzval style lens and that I want to play with negative film stock (although I’ve yet to do either successfully – although some more Portra experiments are awaiting development).

Michael is also a humanitarian pet owner (with Mojave the dog – great name – as photography companion) and a 4×5 Film Developing, Beer Drinking videographer – a rare breed indeed ;-). Despite suffering serious back injuries, this hasn’t stopped Michael using a 4×5 camera to capture his creative expressions although he happily uses digital too, admirable pragmatism (although carrying both isn’t going to do that back any good! My own back injury will testify to that!).

Take a good look at his portfolio – You’ll see a large format photographer with a novel eye for the landscape. Michael also leads workshops with Guy Tal and if you can get on one of these I imagine they would be a great experience.

p.s. Michael also has one of the best logos in the landscape photography industry (designed by Jack Brauer and Jesse Speer) which was sourced directly from one of the most creatively composed Racetrack Playa photos I’ve seen..

Michael’s website

Michael’s blog

Michael and Guy Tal’s workshops

My flu was progressing nicely today, especially with the long day yesterday. We walked to the beach with Tamara, Paul (he started looking human again) and Dav this morning and progressed onto Laig bay where both Paul and Dav started flaking badly.. We had some intense sunshine and blue skies which quickly knocked people for six. I must have walked around the area for a couple of hours and only found one shot showing the textures of the beach but taken in open light it was never going to win any awards. I’ve uploaded a version of both the Astia transparency. The problem with intense light is that it kills all subtle contrast and colour and although the details were superb in places, trying to shade enough area to make more than a plan view shot is tough. Dav managed a shaded shot which reflected his mood I think.

After taking this shot, I talked Tamara into taking a large format detail shot, introducing her to the delights of compound swinging and tilting. She did a fine job although I’m not sure we’ve converted her yet (her tripod may need upgrading if she did).

That evening, Dav and I ventured all of one hundred yards up the road to a small field in the back of someones garden where a few chaotic pictures were taken against a non-eventful sunset. I was surprised at how well the pictures came out on digital considering that they were taken some time after a cloudy sunset. At the time I didn’t think a large format picture could work but since looking at the digital pictures, I realise now that there is nearly always the possibility for good results, even if you can’t see anything. I could almost see interesting images on the back of the camera, but wasn’t sure they would translate – now I know to try it next time.. This was the last day on Eigg and the next day we split for a very wet Skye

Getting everything together for our journey over to Skye was such a pain – six photographers with associated gear distributed around a two up two down is just not a tidy experience. Two hours later though and our gear is distributed all over the road where a minibus, ferry, steam train, another ferry and a car drive later and we’re in Skye, boozing away in a pub instead of taking photographs (which was pretty nice). On the way back to the accomodation, myself and Dav were rocking away to Sucioperro (a alt-rock band from Ayrshire). Zooming along a dark lane, just as the song reached a head banging climax, I wondered where the road had gone … and why there were lots of boat parts either side of the road … and when we started heading downwards, an emergency stop and clouds of dust cleared and revealed a velvety black loch, a handful of yards away from our headlights. So – moral for the story – rock music, booze and roads that end in piers don’t mix!

Guy Tal and Jim Goldstein swapped blog posts this morning to talk about photography and reality and why the former doesn’t imply the latter. Their conclusions are controversial to say the least and I wanted to talk about the issues to try and get to my own viewpoint.

Guy Tal on Jim Goldstein’s Blog

Jim Goldstein on Guy Tal’s Blog

The posts were a reaction to “This Photo is Lying!”, an article on Outside Online by Rob Haggart, where it’s argued that ‘manufactured’ photographs will trivialise the impact of photographs taken in ‘real’ conditions. The core of the argument was about a guy who manufacters ‘amazing’ surf photographs by pasting in skies and new waves, etc. Also raised are Art Wolfe’s Migrations, where he pasted in new animals (even from zoos) and concludes that a when the unspoken contract between the photographer and the view is broke, it is difficult to renegotiate.

Guy takes issue with Rob’s article, stating that no other artists are held to a standard of ethics in the same way that he is suggesting that photographers should be and Jim takes point with Rob’s implicit suggestion that photographers should be limited in their artistic freedom.

Both Guy and Rob take reasonable points of view to an extent but there comparison with writing is one that is missing a little context. They’re right that noone expects veracity in a fantasy novel but, as Rob points out, if you write a piece as non-fiction and it’s exposed as fabrication, you will have a backlash on your hands. But photographs aren’t divided into ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ and neither are paintings.. However, I would take the point that there is an expectation of ‘non-fiction’ in photography and an expectation of ‘fiction’ in painting.

However, there is a more worrying conclusion that can be drawn from Guy and Jim’s comments. Guy says he doesn’t think Rob is suggesting labelling pictures that have been digitally altered and one can only assume from both peices that Guy and Jim are advocating the point that any photographer may make any digital manipulation of their photographs without any ethical or moral worry.

This concerns me.. I know that many photographers have made manipulations to photographs from the very start of photography (Ansel removed some clouds from Moon over Hernandez for instance) but I beleive that the unspoken contract I talked about earlier does exist and once a viewer discovers that a photograph that they were impressed with was created artificially, then dissapointment will occur. However, that dissapointment will be carried over to every other picture that they see within a related genre.

For a wildlife photographer, a book like Art Wolfe’s Migrations, once spotted as containing fakes, will raise questions about the veracity of all the rest of that photographers pictures. However, for a casual observer, the veracity of all wildlife photographs is damaged. The sense of potential wonder when they next see an amazing wildlife picture will be diminished.

So what do we do? Well, we need to work out when a work of art stops being non-fiction and becomes fiction. Well we can take some cues from the written art. Embellishments to non-fiction books are honoured as long as they don’t substantially change the reality of the story. A historic novel may paraphrase narrative but not facts. The photographic equivalent may be that removing a few clouds or cleaning up some rubbish are OK but adding a new tree or a new sky possibly not.

There is a generally accepted criterion that is often quoted in landscape photographers websites/books.. “Subtracting items that aren’t ‘fixtures’ is sometimes OK.. adding is usually not.” For instance, cleaning up a walker in a red top is OK – adding an extra river is not; cleaning some detritus off a beach is OK.. removing an island is not; removing a bush from the foreground is possibly OK?.. adding a reflection to a still lake, probably not?

Someone will probably say ‘Leave it to the photographer to work out what is acceptable’, but most beginner photographers are heavily influenced by there heroes and I would say it’s up to those heroes to set some standards that they wish to be judged by.

I should add that I’m not trying to ‘police’ photography but, just like the world of literature, I would advocate a ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ section and then let the artist decide what they want to do and then the audience to call them on it if they think it’s wrong (just as in the case of James Frey).

Guy ends his post with ..

“People can be taught to distinguish between the documentary, the fictional, and the symbolic.”

I would disagree – if they could do this then we would not need the aforementioned fiction and non-fiction sections in our libraries. The difference between fact and fiction is an important one.

Just to conclude. I can see where Jim, Rob and Guy are coming from and, again, this is all a grey area. I’d also like to thank Rob, Jim and Guy for creating some stimulating discussion about photography.

Other interesting links..

Art Wolfe – Blog response to Douple Exposure

The Atlantic Review – Art Wolfe vs Galen Rowell

Peter Llewellyn – Comments on Manipulation

Carl Donahue article on Trust, Nature Photographers Online

I found Dan’s website a couple of years ago while I was starting out using a large format camera. His photography helped me to be confident taking pictures that weren’t instantly gratifying but that grew over time. Since the start of last year, Dan has been running a blog about his photography which I kept up with. When I decided to feature a few photographers on my website, I immediatly thought of Dan and had another look through his pictures and started to realise just what an influence he’d been. One shot in particular of a Chemise plant stood out when I saw his website some time ago and when I went back I realised that I had not only used a similar compsitional trick (merging foregounr and background to combine two elements) but the shapes of the featured object also had some similarity. I hope my shot lives up to it’s influences.

Dan is another large format photographer but who also uses a digital camera to capture shots where the large format isn’t feasible or to take ‘notes’ that can still be used as full pictures if they work out. Dan is also another ‘geek’, programming i-phone applications that can be found on his home page. Dan has worked as a full time photographer previously and, as is the case for many people, became disillusioned with his hobby when it became a living. I can certainly relate to this as music was a passion for me when I was young and I eventually got my dream job working as an A&R guy for a record company, only to burn out a couple of years later and in the course of doing so, ruin my love of music. I’m only just picking that passion back up again in a small way, ten years later. Hopefully Dan is back in love with photography (it certainly seems so from the pictures on his website).

Give yourself some time and take a look around Dan’s website and leave a comment somewhere on his blog..

Dan Baumbach’s website

Dan Baumbach’s blog

One of the question that most landscape photographers don’t conciously think about very often but always seems to come up when discussing competitions/awards is ‘What is Landscape Photography?’. It seems like a fairly innocuous question but it’s not really that simple to answer; and even if you ask people who seem to agree, the edges of their definitions are always a little cloudy.

The subject has come up again because of the Landscape Photographer of the Year competition. The competition defines what could/should be included in any of it’s categories, but all of the categories sit under the banner of ‘Landscape Photography’ and so a definition can be drawn from their entry requirements. The classic view is fairly innocuous as the description fits what most people would agree on (to a point), living view is a picture of somebody or a group of people outside with the only limit being ‘no close ups’ – I’m sure their are many interpretations of this that people would not categorise as landscape photography. Your view – “Pretty much anything goes, as long as it is in the UK and in the outdoors.” – definitely open to all sorts of photography that isn’t landscape. So we have a over arching definition for the majority of the competition that is “Anything that is outdoors as long as it isn’t a portrait”. I made a few comments about many of the photographs not meeting my personal definition of landscape photography and that quite a few people seem to agree with. But I also got a couple of comments from people that pointed out I was wrong (and that I was a miserable so and so) and as much as this is a subjective choice (not the miserable bit, I’ll agree with that) there must be some form of overall consensus on what landscape photography means otherwise it’s absolutely meaningless to use the term at all.

In the comments beneath my recent post about the competition, I came up with my own rough definition of what I think landscape photography is. “If the primary part of the picture is of part of the natural, inorganic world or of a human construction that was intended to become part of the natural world then it’s heading into landscape photography territory. (This means that Gormley’s statues in the sand are in, trolleys are out). Even if something was intended not to blend in to the landscape but ultimately does, that would be OK (old mills perhaps but not supermarkets).”

It got me thinking though. Landscape art has been around for hundreds of years. The first mention of landscape was in about 1600 (originally ‘landskip’) and arised in cities where people were using it to describe the land around and away from the city (prior to this, when people lived in the country, there was no need for a distinction between where you lived and the countryside). From then on, the conversations around landscape generally accepted this city/countryside, urban/rural divide. The Oxford History of Art’s book, Landscape and Western Art even goes so far as to define landscape by comparing a Joel Meyerowitz shot of New York with a Claude Monet country painting, defining landscape as the difference between the two radically opposed viewpoints. An interesting ‘hierarchy of art’ was published in the 17th Century wherein the first were important and the latter not … it went .. (1) History Painting; (2) Portraits; (3) Genre Painting; (4) Landscapes; (5) Still Life.The interesting bit is that ‘Genre Painting’ was about scenes of everyday life (the fact that landscape was near the bottom hasn’t changed much though). Here is the definition given “Landscape denoted paintings whose main theme was the portrayal of a scenic view (countryside, seascape, rivers, mountains, townscape etc). Thus a peopled landscape might be classified as a genre painting, if the artist was mainly concerned with portraying human action.”. So historically, including a town in your picture could be landscape but a picture from inside a town would be a genre painting.

As a quick diversion, let’s see what the dictionaries have to say ..

“a picture representing a section of natural, inland scenery, as of prairie, woodland, mountains…an expanse of natural scenery seen by the eye in one view.”
– Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary

“1) A picture representing natural inland scenery, as distinguished from a sea picture, a portrait, etc. 2) A view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view; a piece of country scenery. 3) In generalized sense (from 1 and 2): Inland natural scenery, or its representation in painting.”
– OED

“landscape [n]: “Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum, both a package and the commodity inside the package” (My emphases, see W.J.T. Mitchell”s “Imperial Landscape” in Landscape and Power, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 5)”

“landscape [n]: literally, “shape of the land”; a word deriving from the Dutch landschap that signifies (a) a vista or “cut” (hence the -scape) of the perceived world, construed as “country” or “land” of “field” set within a horizon; (b) the circumambience provided by a particular place; (c) by extension, seascape, cityscape, and so on; (d) a genre of painting that, in contrast with landskip [q.v.], is concerned with the material essence of a place or region rather than with its precise topography, and with transplacement rather than with transposition.”
– Representing Place – Landscape Painting and Maps, Edward S Casey

So interestingly, they don’t include seascapes.. Well I think that’s 90% of most current landscape photography out of the window 😉 But dictionary definitions aren’t much use in general terms, although they do say ‘Natural’ quite a lot which I think is key to a lot of people’s understanding.

To try and guage what people think is and isn’t “Landscape Photography” I’ve put together a little survey. If you follow the link below and answer the questions, I’ll publish the answers in a week or so.. I’ve asked if you can give me your email and name. If you don’t want me to quote you in the follow up, just leave the email empty…

Click Here to take the survey

It does seem from my straw poll that the general issues are related to :

• should people be included in landscape photography
• what level of urban/industrial buildings are shown
• How much of the landscape is shown (some people don’t consider macro shots or even intimate shots as landscapes)

So why is this relevant at the moment? Well I’m trying to work out what categories might be included in the landscape photography awards/competition that I’m considering. If you have any suggestions as to where the line should be drawn within a competition, I’d be interested to hear them.

UPDATE: It’s been pointed out that I’m never going to get a consensus on what landscape photography is, which I agree with. However, I can get an idea of where we agree and where the grey areas are. I should also add that I’m not so interested in the historical and dictionary definitions, I include those only as ‘interesting sidelines’. The interesting aspect to me is what people mean when they put ‘landscape photographer’ on their website. Is it just a form of group identity (i.e. I’m working in the same field as he is) or is it a definition of what to expect within?

UPDATE: I want to reiterate that I am definitely not trying to define what ‘Landscape Photography’ should mean! It will always mean different things to different people but I would like to know if there is at least a bit of consensus. Also, this isn’t wholly a reaction against the landscape photographer of the year, it’s a question I’ve thought about previously. My own personal opinion about ‘cityscapes’ is that they aren’t landscapes and I pointed this out with regard to LPotY but, again, this is a personal opinion and one that I know people are going to disagree with – how many will disagree though?

and no I don’t mean a real field..

Third full day on the island and I decided to join everyone for a sunrise on that funky beach with the black and white sand. Rhum was looking particularly blue and I wasn’t getting turned on by the scene. I wandered backward and forward for about an hour, taking a couple of shots but knowing I was doing very little original. Finally, I was looking through the ground glass and realised that the arrow shapes were looking like comets flying through the blue heavens and the reflection of the island was creating a mystical, blurred, dreamlike vision (I was starting to come down with the flu properly by now so this may have had something to do with it). The first picture on the right shows what I saw.

My favourite picture of the morning was of a small fan of sand and water that seemed to be hanging from some kelp. The picture was taken with an 80mm lens with me about 2 inches from the sand. It was a real struggle not to change the flow of the water by just compressing the sand around me. This was another moment when I was thankful for my waist waiders, I was kneeling, and sinking, in wet sand for about 30 minutes working on this picture. I think the kelp really works as an anchor for the picture; any feedback appreciated though.

Me and Richard Childs went over to Singing Sands at about 12 and spent the whole day there. The beach is stunning, the whitest sands which squeak when you walk on them (see video below) and all along the cliffs are a series of waterfalls that have carved channels and tunnels through the rocks. One particular section, probably known as “Joe’s Canyon” (See Scotland’s Coast) is a waterfall that you access through a small slot canyon. You can also climb behind the whole waterfall through a small cave or, if you go further up the beach (beware of getting trapped by the tide) another long slot cave. I got a quick capture of a green waterfall and then walked back to the main singing sands beach and joined Richard for sunset. About two hours before the sun went down saw me and Richard looking around some rock pools at the top of the beach where Richard quickly discovered that the strange sands also form quite powerful quicksand. It must be that the sands are made of particles of pumice and hence are lighter than quartz sand. As you move your foot under the water, it just gets sucked down very quickly (down beyond ankle depth in a handful of seconds). This made getting stable tripods particularly difficult. I finally found a composition that worked using the warm toned rocks at the head of the beach including a small run off of water and some very tasty looking kelp (when you start to look at kelp and think of food, you really know you’ve missed too many meals!).

As I hadn’t taken any obvious pictures of Rhum yet and the evening looked interesting, I tried to find an area on the beach where the rocks formed a regular, clean arrangement. The quality of light and the dark rocks had me in mind of the Moeraki boulders in New Zealand. The composition that really worked for me was only possible using my digital camera as I would have needed a 65mm lens on the large format to capture (Richard chided me for not asking him as he had one in the bag. The results were quite satisfying. A view from Eigg that I hadn’t really seen before. I tried to take a couple of shots with my large format anyway but they didn’t have the same feeling.