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Subcribe to comment rss feedFranz Gisin chooses one of his favourite images
Franz Gisin
Landscape/nature photography has been one of my favorite hobbies for over 50 years. And like many photographers of my generation, I started out with film and a spare bathroom turned into a makeshift darkroom. But chemicals and I never really got along. Ditto for black-and-white. Which is why, when digital cameras and colorful ink-jet printers came on the scene, it was a no-brainer to switch.
None of Nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.~ John Muir
Scroll. Scroll. Pause. Scroll. Pause. Scroll. Pause. I’m cruising through every image in the last eighteen issues of “On Landscape” eMags, with some pauses lasting much longer than others. It took several iterations before I narrowed it down to two images, plus a flip of the coin before I finally settled on the winner: the landscape image by featured photographer Michael Bollino on page 6 of issue 257. [In case you are interested, the runner-up was a closeup image, also by Michael, on page 10 of the same issue.]
I’m always fascinated by the role “extroversion” and “introversion” play in the process of transferring a landscape onto a crisp sheet of fine art paper or state-of-the-art LCD display.
On one hand, I, as well as most other landscape photographers, spend an inordinate amount of time fussing over an image’s composition. Starting out with camera placement, often with millimetre precision. And finishing with generous amounts of post-processing embellishments that best showcase the scene exactly the way we want to envision it. Clearly, an extroverted effort where the combined sensibilities of our logical minds, plus an abundance of landscape compositional rules, get projected onto the scene we hope to capture with our hard-earned photographic skill sets.
On the other hand, I know of many landscape photographers, including myself, who often use landscape photography as an excuse to spend copious amounts of time in nature. An extension of the therapeutic Japanese concept of shinrin-yoku, loosely translated as “forest bathing”. An introspective effort where we use the natural world to swiftly peel away layers of opaque multi-tasking stress, clearing the way for our rejuvenated senses to efficiently reenergize our tired aching hearts. And during those magical moments, we photographers cannot resist taking out our cameras, hoping to capture hallelujah images that do justice to the larger-than-life exhilarations sweeping through our very being.