I recently went on a landscape mission - heading into the high country of the South Island of NZ to capture 'grand vistas'.
There was certainly no shortage of snow capped mountains to point the lens at; but I sometimes struggle with landscape photography to find a 'connection'. When you are photographing a person (or animal) you can bring character into the image; or you can see the character - we are naturally drawn to a person or animal's eyes. With landscape photography how do we express the 'character' of the location or, does it even matter? Do we simply just want to view images that take us to places outside of our current location?
There are many different types of landscape photography - three of the main ones are representational (representing the natural environment in a natural way); impressionist (the viewer gets an impression of the landscape) and abstract (the image may be a of a part of the whole scene, or different components shown in an illogical order, it is 'abstract'! ).
Back to me in the high country. I was struggling. Each mountain started to look the same - they were beautiful but they weren't 'my' mountains. I had no connection to them. And, if I am honest, I wasn't having a brilliant time. So, I took off my wide-angle lens and plonked on (technical term) my macro. Then, I started to have fun.
