Join the conversation
Subcribe to comment rss feed
Back in 1973 John Szarkowski made a comment about photography that has only increased in resonance in recent years: “The simplicity of photography lies in the fact that it is very easy to make a picture. The staggering complexity of it lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been equally easy…” Now...
more
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...
more
If our reading of a picture is based on a literal, descriptive level, then the inclusion of a figure in the landscape has a very simple function: it is there to suggest a sense of scale. The figure acts as a basic juxtaposition between a known height/size and the rest of the content of the image. However, if a photograph...
more
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....
more
Landscape photography is a slight misnomer, in that a large number of landscape photographs have as their subject not land but water. Or at least they take the interaction between water and land as a starting point for their imagery. The juxtaposition of moving, viscous, water and immobile, matt, land helps create tension and flow in the image – a...
more
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...
more
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...
more
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,...
more
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,...
more