Seeing Photographs

Digital cameras can help you take better landscape photographs. If I had said that even just a few years ago, OP would have received lots of letters. People would have challenged that statement, defending film, and basically telling me I was crazy. I may be crazy at times, but not because of this idea.

This isn’t simply an opinion. I’ve seen it to be true from what I’ve observed of participants in workshops around the country and the world, from talking with many top pros, and from watching my own work evolve over the last few years. I’m not talking about image quality, color, noise or lack of noise, or any technical aspects of a digital image. I’m talking about the aesthetic of a photograph.

Capturing exciting and beautiful landscapes challenges photographers. Their experience with that landscape is so overwhelming that the temptation is simply to point the camera, press the shutter and think a landscape photograph is made. Yet what often happens is that one gets an attractive snapshot of that scene, but not necessarily a better photograph.

I often bring up Andreas Feininger, the LIFE photographer who wrote popular books about photography during the 1960s and ’70s. That’s the period when I was growing up as a photographer, and I was influenced by his ideas. His books are no longer in print, but you can find them in used bookstores and over the Internet.

Feininger talked a lot about the difference between a photograph and a snapshot. A snapshot comes from simply pointing a camera at a subject. A photograph comes from using the craft of photography to create a unique image that says something special about the way you saw and interacted with that subject. That means using such aspects of photography as recognizing good light, choosing focal length for perspective and finding a unique composition. A photograph is something that stands on its own as an interesting visual interpretation of a scene, but isn’t simply a record of that scene. You can spend a lot of time studying photography, including reading every page of OP to get ideas for your photography. But you have to get outside and photograph if you’re going to implement those ideas. The challenge of film always used to be translating what you saw in the world into a photograph. You had no way of being certain that what you captured on film would be satisfying as a photograph until the film returned from processing.

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