LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY?
MAY 6 2022
After my trip into the Uintas I got really interested in Landscape photography and tried to photograph a few landscapes around my home in SLC. For a little while I was really motivated to wake up early and hike for sunrise and I did this a couple of times until I finally saw my results…
There were three ‘landscape’ shoots that I remember well, one up Ensign Peak, one up Mount Van Cott and one up Kessler Peak. The one up Kessler was the longest and farthest from my home so it was THE big landscape shoot that I did before I kind of stopped shooting landscapes.
I didn’t really give landscape photography the attempt that it deserved but after a few tries I determined that it wasn’t for me. This ‘ruling’ out of landscape photography is purely subjective and even I know that I don’t have enough experience to make this decision so I wouldn’t read this blog as advise… it’s more like me sharing my experiences and just writing about photography.
Before I get into it lets talk about how I define landscape photography. I tend to define landscape photography as basically any photo where nature is the primary subject. So, a photo of a bunch of mountains is a landscape photo but a photo of a bunch of buildings is not. A photo of a bunch of trees would be a landscape and a close up of those trees would still be a landscape although maybe more like a portrait of nature… same for macro shots of flowers. They’re like portraits of natural things… but I guess nature is still the subject, so it fits into how I view landscape photography. AND NOTE my definition is nowhere near correct, it’s just how I think of things, so I wanted to clear it up before I get into talking about why landscape photography became not my cup of tea.
I tried to define my style once already in this blog in this post here, if you’re interested you can read that post, but I defined my style as “a landscape photographer that seeks melancholy, loneliness/emptiness, and solitude in their environments.” And now you might be thinking WHAT!?!?!? Here you are writing about not liking landscape photography, but you call your self a landscape photographer!? How does that work. And the answer is, it doesn’t really work, but it’s complicated. In how I define my style I use the word “landscape” as an umbrella term to include photography of nature and man-made landscapes. I often shoot man made landscapes more so that I should say I am an urban photographer, but I prefer the broader term when I define my style and when I tell people what I like to photograph.
In this post it’s confusing because I’m sort of mixing the definitions of landscape photography. My definition where only natural subjects constitute a landscape photographer, and a more common broader definition of landscape photography that includes man-made subjects and therefore the travel and urban types of photography that I usually do… If that makes sense, I hope it does.
Now, with my more narrow definition of landscape photography in mind, we can talk about why I actually don’t like it :) and I don’t like it because I’m bad at it! Big surprise right :)
I haven’t put in enough time to learning landscape photography to expect good results but when I got my photos back the images were so bleh compared to the beautiful environment that they were taken in that I was quite disappointed with myself and shooting landscapes in general.
I think from my little landscape photograpy spree following my trip to the Uinta’s there were only two pictures that I actually liked. The rest were just meh and not worth the film that they were shot on.