In several photography
magazines, you can read that the landscape is the favourite subject of
many, if not most, photographers. One of the reasons will be that the
landscape is always there, and that many think that it is beautiful enough
to be photographed and shown to others that were not present. Yet, probably
most of us will agree that a beautiful landscape is not easily photographed.
This has led to many articles in magazines and many books on this subject,
providing us with guidelines or rules on how to improve our landscape
images. Because of this, the overall quality of our landscape photographs
has certainly gone up, but all those rules and guidelines have one drawback:
all images - no matter how beautiful - start to look the same. These days,
nearly all places on this planet, even the most remote, have been visited
by photographers, who have used the basic rules to take gorgeous pictures,
taken in the best light, in the optimal season, from the best angle and
with the best equipment. These pictures make us long to be out there and
photograph as well, and when we get there, we use the same rules and guidelines
and the same equipment to take more or less the same pictures.
For me, this is no longer sufficient motivation to make photographs. I have come to realize that I would like my images to show something about myself, about how I see nature and about how I would like others to try to see it in this way as well. I realized that this cannot be achieved by taking the newest digital camera and the best lenses and go to the same locations as other have done before me (and will do long after I have gone) and “shoot” the landscape in the best (low) light, from the best angle with the optimal focal length, with the best foreground, ultrasharp from foreground to the horizon, etc. Recently, I all too often thought by myself when I saw one of my colour images that I took in this way “Well done, but it’s not much more than just another pretty picture”. So currently, I am on a quest to create images that better reflect my vision, my way of looking at nature.