Rich in distant detail
Dive deeper into your landscape photographs by including a wealth of sharp detail
Here I’m going to return now for another short bout with the deadpanand-distanced ‘school’ of photography. That’s a bit unfair of me, I know, as it’s not actually a school in the sense that the Düsseldorf School really was, but rather a loose collection of photographers who sometimes have been influenced by each other but were and are essentially working independently. They include Struffsky, of course (see the previous pages), but also Americans like Joel Sternfeld, the Canadian Ed Burtynsky and British photographers Simon Roberts and Paul Graham (his earlier pictures).
Without making this a history lesson in art photography, if you’ve got this far with this month’s creative path, I strongly recommend looking at all of them. What they all share is a dislike of reactive photojournalism and in-your-face subject matter, and possibly more important for us here looking for different creative paths, the possibilities that come from combining a very large picture with lots of detail. Going big seems to be an unstoppable gallery trend nowadays, partly because you can charge more for a large print and partly because of increasing sensor size together with better and better inkjet printers that are fully up to the job.
Books, magazines and monitors (even my 30-inch Eizo) cannot do full justice to a 40-plus megapixel image, so this kind of shot is only properly at home on a gallery wall. I’m in two minds about this. On the positive side, monster-print syndrome really does deliver on the experience of enjoying a photograph, and who could argue against that? My doubts mainly centre on making large size such a major quality of modern photography.
the bigger picture
We don’t, after all, take pictures at a large scale; we use the viewfinder or the very small screen on the back of the camera. So, if a picture that’s intended to look good only when printed large is seen smaller, what does that do to the composition? To be honest, I haven’t made up my mind on this. I like this shot of the waterfront of Mandalay in Myanmar because there’s a lot of life going on all over it and a lot to look at, and the crisp, low sunlight excited me at the time, as well. But in the lack of any strong compositional technique it gets close to what you’d call a ‘field’ image – meaning an all-over field of stuff with no single or obvious point of interest. That is, of course, the idea. These doubts aside, and they may be unjustified, the idea of
My doubts mainly centre on making large size such a major quality of modern photography
stepping back to show a wealth of small detail has a definite appeal to the craft and technology side of our photographic personalities. Few of us are immune to this, and I take as much pleasure as anyone in the exquisite detail and colour from the D850, which is beginning to usurp the pride of place of my D4S (I didn’t find the D5 enough of an upgrade to be worth trading up, and had I done so, I know I’d be irritated that I hadn’t waited). To make the most of this creative path, technical perfection is an absolute, which will please some people and annoy others.
Quite simply, everything has to be tack sharp, because while exquisite detail looks fabulous when you peer closely into a large print, focus blur of any kind looks terrible. Save selective focus for ordinarily-sized images. This brings us to one of the usually unspoken demands of shooting at a distance. There does have to be an empty distance between you and the subject, with nothing in the way. Just air. That isn’t as straightforward as it may sound, unless you elevate the camera viewpoint somehow. In the case of this shot, it’s from a boat, and with a long lens.
With a wide-angle lens, this is more difficult, and usually calls for either a high viewpoint or tilting the camera upward, or both. Ansel Adams, many of whose grand-sweep images are indeed distant views, solved the problem by building a flat platform on top of his cars, where he could place the tripod with 10x8 camera. Simon Roberts, mentioned above, took inspiration from this as a way of getting rid of the foreground and more of the middle ground. One reviewer wrote of Roberts’ works that they, “upon closer inspection reveal a richness of detail and meaning. They exhibit a disciplined compositional restraint, a richness of palette, and a wealth of narrative incident.” That fairly well describes what this kind of detached shooting is about, although for “disciplined compositional restraint” you could also read “resisting the temptation to make an exciting composition!”