Sunday, March 15, 2015

Looking into Landscape Photography-Matt


Landscape photography has always captured my interest. The scope of the images always tend to inspire me. It’s probably the most effective method of photography to show the sizes of   geographic features by contrasting the foreground and background. During the Wells reading, I was able to learn about landscape photography including some technical details.

A main distinguishing factor of landscape photography is shot to where the horizontal side is longer than the image vertically. By shooting the image in this way, a wider amount of information in the horizontal plane can be displayed. Landscape photos generally include a natural landscape or skyline to display, hence the title landscape. An interesting technical feature of landscape photos is that they generally follow the ‘golden rule’ of landscape photography, the sky should occupy two thirds of the image to create harmony and create an accurate sense of scope.

The landscape images of Jeff Wall in the reading has a very painterly quality. In his images, he sometimes will script an action, and then have it play it out among the landscape. In the photo in the readings, it is paper that is carried by the wind. This action creates motion in the image. He distorts the image by increasing the color saturation it looks like. The effect of the river going down the center of the image break up the landscape and it also matches the greenness of the sky. The bending of the tree that takes up a significant portion of the left side of the image puts the image into perspective. It makes the people look smaller and to that effect increases the power of the image.

The differences between modern and postmodern landscape photography seem to be minute. It seems that postmodern landscape attempts to change or challenge the way we view an image. Generally it is through the title of the image and other small details that lead us to challenge this.

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