+++ The Weekly Landscape Thread - #8, 2025.03.28

... here is the promised link (for all) about "How to make your photos look better" on this website :-)
dprevived.com/t/how-to-make-your-photos-look-better-on-the-photo/7116/

Both are very good!
Not quite sure exactly what you did but the result is very special , especially the second, with its soft appearance. The gentle warm pastel-like colours look like a painting of a dreamy moment
The first is like a firework of grasses!

High Country

Another one from the vault. Coming down off of Buffalo Pass in the Northern Colorado Rockies, we came to a lovely lake where we were going to set up camp for the night. It was about 4 PM and I saw this peaceful scene. However, the light just wasn't right. I set up my tripod, put my camera on and moved it around to get the composition and just left it when we went about setting up. After we set up I pulled out my fly rod and started to stalk dinner.

When the sun got into the right position illuminating the far bank generating reflections I knew it was time and the time was short. I checked the composition, metered put in the film holder pulled the dark slide and shot. About 30 seconds afterwards to sun was blocked by a tree and the scene disappeared. I put the camera gear away and went back to fishing.

Taken in September 1984 with Zone VI field camera, 210 mm Schneider lens, TriX developed in HC110 Solution B.

Dear all,

I've recently spent a week of (well deserved, of course) holidays in Gran Canaria with my wife but without the kids (yeah !). Very nice place to hike and stroll, with varied landscapes. On two occasions we went for sunset viewing, and it was much less crowded than I feared (the places are easy to walk or even drive to). Here is a small selection of three pictures :

Wow, 41 years ago!
yes, indeed good light is the key to a good photo.
Looks like a great place for camping and fishing. Hope you caught something good for dinner 😊
The little peninsular is well placed in the image and the squiggly reflections on the slightly rippled water are great.
As usual from you, lots of details and good tonality.
The mountain, just visible over the trees gives an extra “dimension” and more depth. Adding a feeling for the “lay of the land”.

These scratch my brain in a very particular way. Especially the first photo really encapsulates the feeling of looking at a "mundane" landscape and seeing it through new eyes. The overlayed plant life looks like fireworks in a way. It reminds me of a short poem I read in our calender recently:
Tree:
The
Infinitely
Slow
Explosion
Of
A
Seed

The grass envokes the feeling of properly percieving the little things in life for the first time. Suddenly, this "boring" landscape is home to a million little wonders.

Yes, the larger this image is viewed, the more the darker areas reveal details. The face in the wall is unmistakable. It looks as if the shadows on the wall face have been raised. That's fine but it appears to have been done with a radial gradient and the edges are a bit too pronounced. Perhaps use a little less brightening and take it out to the edge of the building while avoiding any brightening of the immediate background around the building Raising the shadows on the building while the remainder of the foreground is almost featureless, feels a bit odd. You might brighten the shadow areas across the rest of the foreground a little as well so the stone walls don't look artificially spotlighted.
I like the touches of sunset sky shown right through the windows.

Very, very nice indeed. I often use ICM but I have never thought of combining it with multiple exposure. There is a glorious soft, mellowness to these that feels exactly right for Ireland.
Would you also care to post these in the abstract/Experimental thread? If they haven't spotted them here, many in that thread will like what you have done.

Lovely sunsets!
All good, but I'll pick the middle one from the three.
Not only the sky, but also the air, is full of that golden light. Those sun rays are nicely visible and add some diagonal lines too :-)
The sun, sky and golden air are all very bright, without being totally saturated. They look even brighter, to the extent it almost blinds you, because of your composition of the sunset together with the very dark foreground :-)
Lots of receding layers provide a good feeling of depth and those jagged peaks look particularly interesting.
It's already a wide format image with 16:9, but one edit I'd suggest would be to try to crop even more off the bottom making it into something like a 2:1 panorama format. I think it feels a bit more balanced and impressive like that.

The Constable countryside is indeed beautiful! You've found and captured a nice scene here with that cow under the big tree. The diagonal branches hanging down make like leading line, from the corner, that you can follow to discover the cow :-)
Impressive clouds in England :-)

While I didn't carry my 4x5 into the high country often - sometimes it was necessary as mountain landscape scenes don't always have roads leading in.
This was a three day trip. My pack was over 50 pounds. I went at about a buck 50 at the time. Going up over passes was not the problem, you just had to go slow and stop often. However, coming down was another issue. But sometimes - it was worth it.

As far dinner high altitude lakes, this one was about 10,000 ft, are normally great fishing as the feeding time at that altitude is limited because of early freezing and late thaws so the trout are usually feeding and aren't to picky about what they strike. The lakes are deep and the fish tend to be large. We had a nice dinner that night. It's a good thing we did, as my pack was heavy from camera gear we cut back a bit on food.

Very nice place and picture. It looks calme and peaceful, I feel like that would be a perfect place for holidays. I like the realistic colors, and the fact that there is a clear subject (the trees and village) and the mountains are used as context and not competing for attention, and the path and fences in the foreground add dynamism in part that could otherwise be less interesting. If I were to nitpick a bit, I would only say that I would prefer the tree in the top left foregroud (the one you use as framing) to be more clearly separated from the other tree with flowers just below / behind it (so, lowering the camera a bit or taking one step forward), and maybe I would remove the lonely bits from it at the top around the middle.

Mike,
I love the contrasting red and green colors from trunks and leaves. The spots in the picture I like most are where you got the red trunks right in front of dark green leaves. What I like less is the blown out sky, and the panoramic format because I feel the picture lacks a real main subject. I would suggest to try a crop, removing the left part to the limit of the white sky, and maybe crop some of the right off as well (not a lot), to havethe two treens in the center stand out more.
Do you have other pictures from the area ? Did you try other approaches, such as a closer, almost abstract / texture view ?

Very nice, as others already said, with amazing ripples in the foreground, a line of small "bumps", dunes and mountains. The light makes the ripples really stand out. I have two suggestions: maybe the two "bumps" on the left would have been better slightly more separated, and I can't help but imagine how gorgeous it would also look going for a more "minimalist" style, without mountains and sky at the top, only ripples, bumps and desert sand to infinity !

Layers upon layer. That is what makes this shot. The front layer - the almost fractal like patterns of ever finer and finer "dunes." With a series of mounds leading to the second layer of smooth open sand. Then followed by a transition layer leading back to final layer in the mountains. Wonderful composition. This is the type of image that begs for infinite depth of field and why traditional landscapes were done with view cameras with camera movements to tile the focal plane. I would have loved to seen this taken with a tilt shift lens or using focus stacking to sharpen up the mountains.

You dealt with the difficult light very well here. The picture shows these unusual towers in the overall landscape very well, but I feel like something prevents me from really getting drawn in. Maybe a slight crop at the bottom (up to the bottom of the lovely little tree into the bottom left) would help give less prominence to the white foreground ?

This picture is fine, but I wonder why you chose it ? The signs, road, power lines detract a bit. Maybe other towers would have had less things around ? Or did you want to show how it is now used (and then maybe frame closer so that it is clearer) ? Also, is it straight ? The post and signs seem tilted, but maybe they were in reality.

Yes, I have other pictures from the area. They are of single trees. I did the sweep to try to get something of the feel of the red trunks dotted through the forest.This shot was done with the multishot panorama mode in the camera. You do a fast sweep and the camera combines the images. It's hit and miss and exposures tend to be set by the first shot in the series. The whole of the frame where the sky is blown is different to the shots on each side. The series is a bit off horizontal as well.

Nice! I like the first for the distant view of Mount Teide and Tenerife, and for the backlit foreground plants. Maybe a lower viewpoint would have given them a bit more prominence?
The second is good too, with its layers and god rays.

The black level and shadows on the wall have been lifted, but with a radial gradient that was then painted over and erased (there are about half a dozen masked layers adjusting various parts of the image), albeit a bit too coarsely along the left hand edge. However, painting it accurately up to the edge doesn't really change the impression of a darker line because the corner bricks are in fact darker than the facing bricks. The overly bright patch you noticed is actually where the wall has been repointed, so the cement on that side is in fact brighter. There is an argument for reducing the amount of lift and possibly dropping the contrast level below that of the rest of the image which I might experiment with at some point should I ever decide to do anything with the image.

The attachment below shows (from left to right);

• the original image as first posted.
• the same image, but with a more precisely painted mask on the left hand edge. The bottom has been left deliberately uneven.
• a version with all edits other than the crop removed, but the blacks and shadows lightened uniformly across the frame to reveal the hidden details.

The details of wall and other foreground elements don't really add anything to the scene (in my opinion) and were intentionally left in silhouette rather than cropping them out which would have left the image feeling compositionally unbalanced to my eye.