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Photography can be a frustrating art form. It delights to pose questions and not to provide answers. Take this eerie image by Kilian Schönberger. Why are these trees bent at the base and straight at the top? What is going on? How and why does a tree grow like this? It seems unnatural, a deformity, a challenge to our usually...
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Photography is always a delicate balance between technique and aesthetics. Think of the debate that swirls around long exposures/Big Stoppers. You either like the effect or hate it. All very Marmite. And a similar discussion is evolving around the manipulation of depth of field (DOF), particularly as tilt and shift lenses seem to become more popular in mainstream DSLR photography,...
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The best photographs leave something to the imagination, they leave room for the viewer wrote David Ward In an article "Leaving room… Where does the viewer live?" (OnLandscape, issue 65) David Ward goes on to explain that to capture the viewer’s attention, images pose questions without necessarily providing any answers; they tend to be slightly ambiguous and are open to...
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Photographers have to make many decisions while creating a photograph. At the most basic level, however, there are perhaps two key decisions that face every photographer. These decisions are linked and are fundamental to the success of the image. The first is how to frame up the image, and the second is how to organise the elements within the frame....
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The Quiet Sublime The tradition of the Sublime in landscape has existed since the 18th Century. The most common understanding of the sublime is when the landscape inspires awe and wonder, even dread and terror. However, that particular representation has fallen out of favour, partly, I suspect, because it was overdone in artistic painterly circles and rapidly degenerated into cliché,...
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Water, Agriculture & Abstract Beauty ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ goes the adage. And that’s certainly true for photography which, as a descriptive medium, has always been used to tell stories. Whilst the single image can communicate meaning instantaneously, stories come into their own when a selection of images is put together as a series. A sense of...
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Sahara 08:33, Utah 23:38 Paralland Sand, Stone and Time Semiotics is the study of how meaning is created and communicated – signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. It grew out of the study of the written and spoken word: linguistics, but rapidly broadened to encompass all forms of communication. All of us are excellent semioticians, particularly in the...
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Living just next to Epping Forest I have always been fascinated by images of trees. They can be wonderfully expressive things. Not easy to photograph though. Too chaotic, seemingly random, difficult to isolate from surroundings. The mainstay of landscape photography, the vista, becomes incredibly hard when you enter amongst the trees. Which is perhaps why focusing on the near and...
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Island in the Mist, Iceland. I remember when I was a kid being dragged around the art galleries of Europe by my parents. The national galleries, with room after room of Old Masters through to the Impressionists, were uncontentious. That changed when we got to a Modern Art gallery. Faced with minimalist, abstract, difficult Art, everything suddenly was contentious! One...
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