British Landscape Photographers

[Julio Fernandez]

Lisa: A good photo is a good photo, are we supposed to ask first what passport its photographer carries?

[Steve Feldman]

Lisa,

Please pay close attention to the above posters commenting on the use of filters in b & w. Without filters, scenics can be dull, boring and flat. Filters are a necessary artistic tool to be used as the artist (that's you) feels will aid the viewer (that's me) to see what you want me to see. To be used as necessary just as darkroom work improves the final print. Dodge, burn-in, contrast papers.

It's all there for you to use to create photographic art.

Also, I agree the Julio.

Good light.

-Steve

[tim atherton]

I think Lisa may have been talking about the use of filters in colour landscape - those lovely tobacco filters or ultra saturated polarizing.

BTW - thanks for the link to John Davies website. I have a book on British Photographers fromt he Thatcher Years with him in it, as well as some old magazine articles - I've always liked his work, but had never thought of looking his site up on the web - duh!

So - new books to blow money on...

(does anyone have the book by him and Martin Parr on Lake Garda? It's a place that holds childhood memories - memories jogged by and combined with old Super 8 kodachrome cine film - the mook might be rather intersting. Any opinions - I love Parrs work) tim

[Herwig Prammer]

sorry, i am a bit late. i live in continental europe, have studied landscape-planing, i occupied myself with valuing landscapestructures and with pictured landscape, and i am a lf-photographer. what i must say to your question and to your following comments is: i do not really know what you are talking about! obviously you seem to have a urgent need of extending your (quite narrow) idea of landscape and maybe also your idea of pictures. so landscape is the sum of elements in it (and this contains botany and zoology as well as architecture and its ground - a simplyfied version of a definition). and i will not try to define what is a picture now. your comments sound to me like you call schubert's songs old boring stuff, and say to archie shepp's experiments "...blowing into a saxophone like crazy can do everybody..." (just to use two well-known artists). but of course there is no need to tell that to an art-student. rgds

[Sandy Sorlien]

"Lisa" may be a troll, but this subject is worth discussing again because a lot of people don't seem to get it. *** Subject matter is neutral! *** So maybe the picture of the road and the sign wasn't any good, but it wasn't because it had a road and a sign in it. And if you don't think that's "landscape photography," you should check out the New Topographics photographers -- hardly new any more.

I agree with Herwig.

Cheers,

[Bill Jorden]

Lisa, I teach "Contemporary Color Landscape Photography and the Environment" at the International Center of Photography in New York, and color printing at the Westchester Art Workshop in Westchester (a suburb of New York City). In my ICP course, I include people like Richard Misrach, Joel Sternfeld, Joel Meyerowitz, Mitch Epstein, Len Jenshel, David T. Hanson, William Eggleston, Martin Paar, etc. These are all photographers who include social concerns about the landscape into their images. I'm also writing an article for the August/September issue of Camera Arts magazine on my own "Mystical Landscapes" and the glories of the C print. In the article, I attack the over-filtration of many landscape photographers, and the formulized approach which only considers the landscape in isolation. So your question is quite pertinent. If you would like to check out my own work, you can go the www.nextmonet.com, and look up my name. There are 12 of my Irish landscapes there. I'm not British -- nor Irish -- but I've been tremendously influenced by Celtic culture, as well as its connections to Vedic culture which I have been studying for more than 20

[Bill Jorden]

I teach "Contemporary Color Landscape Photography and the Environment" at the International Center of Photography in New York, and color printing at the Westchester Art Workshop in Westchester (a suburb of New York City). In my ICP course, I include people like Richard Misrach, Joel Sternfeld, Joel Meyerowitz, Mitch Epstein, Len Jenshel, David T. Hanson, William Eggleston, Martin Paar, etc. These are all photographers who include social concerns about the landscape into their images. I'm also writing an article for the August/September issue of Camera Arts magazine on my own "Mystical Landscapes" and the glories of the C print. In the article, I attack the over-filtration of many landscape photographers, and the formulized approach which only considers the landscape in isolation. So your question is quite pertinent. If you would like to check out my own work, you can go the www.nextmonet.com, and look up my name. There are 12 of my Irish landscapes there. I'm not British -- nor Irish -- but I've been tremendously influenced by Celtic culture, as well as its connections to Vedic culture which I have been studying for more

[Dick Roadnight]

Polaroid Filters...

can produce artificially deep blue skys and the blue sky creats a blue cast anyway, so I tend to use a pink filter with a polariser.

A landscape should look natural, but I lke (natural looking) bright, saturated colours.

The use of filters is one of the main differences between photographic artists and the auto-everything happy snapper.

[Sandy Sorlien]

I must respectfully disagree with Dick's comment, even though he has a most excellent last name.

Whether one is a "photographic artist" can't be measured by whether one uses filters or not. If you don't need them to get across your vision, for god's sake don't use them.

I also believe there is no "should" in art without a big "if" after it. That is, a landscape "should look natural" only IF that is what the photographer wants. If s/he is trying to communicate something else besides naturalism, then why should the picture look natural?

[Nigel Sutton]

Colin Prior photographs panaramic landscapes of Scotland with the 6x17 format using the Fuji camera. He has two excellent books out call "Highland Wilderness" and "Scotland:The Wild Places". So far as I know he doesn't use filters. He goes to great lengths to find the lighting situation he is after. Regs, Nigels (UK).