Landscape – Peter Oshkai photography

November 3, 2015

Sunsets: noticing beauty of common events

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

Visual impressions are inherently subjective, so it is a fundamental challenge to prescribe a recipe for an “impressive” photograph, either in terms of the subject or the technique. The are some guidelines, though, that can increase the chances of a particular image being noticed or stirring emotions in people. Typically, these guidelines are rooted in human phychology, more specifically, in phychologycal traits that have developed through years of evolution.

One such trait is that rare events have more emotional impact than common ones. For example, sunsets are more spectacular than solar eclipses, but the latter ones are more memorable, because they are far less common.

Photographers are in a unique position to make even commonplace events memorable. One way to make everyday events more impressive is to highlight their exceptional surroundings or circumstances. For example, I don’t notice the splendor of most everyday sunsets in my home town, but I remember every detail of the one my wife and I watched from Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence during our first trip there.

August 15, 2015

Lens for landscape photography: wide-angle or telephoto?

For me personally, a telephoto lens is easier to use for landscapes, because I like the perspective-compression effected also because I am used to picking out mini-compositions that I can crop out from the overall scenery by zooming in on them. I developed this skill because my first pro-level lens was Canon’s 70-200mm f/2.8L IS, which was far superior in quality to any other lens I had. Because of that, and despite its relatively large size and weight, I used to carry it around all the time. As a side note, I still think that it is, perhaps, the most versatile lens in Canon’s lineup.

Wide-angle lenses, in the right hands, can produce spectacular landscapes, but I find it more challenging to recognize a potentially striking photo. To practice this skill, I decided to put a 16-35mm f/2.8L on my camera for the first half of today’s hike in the East Sook park. I also wanted to practice taking photos of trees, which I find to be a very difficult subject. By the way, I find the following rule of thumb helpful when evaluating “interestingness” of a potential landscape: all other elements being equal, showing inclement weather, cliffs or mountains, shore lines and people makes the picture more interesting.

April 11, 2015

Foreground interest

In Robert Pirsig’s book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“, there is an episode when the riders marvel at the expanse of the prairie and John, one of the main characters, comments that landscapes like that are difficult to photograph, because there is nothing there: “This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it’s just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone.”

Actually, one straightforward way to address the apparent lack of the compositional focus is to include a foreground element that would serve as an anchor point for the composition and a scale reference. In the case of the motorcyclists, their machines or even one of them could have made an excellent foreground.

Alternatively, setting the camera very low to the ground can allow a flower, a rock or a blade of grass to be included in the frame in the foreground. It should be noted that achieving sufficient depth of field becomes an issue is this situation. Even at high f-numbers (f/16 or f/22), it is usually impossible to keep both the foreground and the background in focus (and this is what is usually desired in a landscape). One needs to make choice what to focus on and where to sacrifice sharpness. The ultimate solution is to use composite focus, where two frames with different focal points are taken and later combined in post-processing.

March 17, 2015

Seasonal references

Many traditional Japanese arts, such as calligraphy, poetry, tea ceremony, flower arrangement include seasonal references. Those can be specific words (kigo) or particular plants and flowers used for ikebana. In calligraphy practice, poems that represent the current season are typically used. This month’s calligraphy that my wife use for practice is an unusual example of seasonal reference (see image above). What refers to the season is not the meaning of the writing, but its pronunciation. It is pronounced “fu jyo ki kyo”, which is supposed to resemble a song of a spring bird.

I am fascinated by a subtle, indirect way certain references are introduced in Japanese art. In fact the subject is rarely addressed directly. Instead, the consumer of the art (reader, viewer, listener, taster, depending on the type of the art) is invited to complete the image by him/herself, making the whole experience more personal. The use of negative space in Japanese ink painting (sumi-e) is a prime example of this concept.

Another insight from this month’s calligraphy is how effective a reference to nature can be. This notion is directly related to the importance of including an element of weather in landscapes, which was first explored in photography by Ansel Adams, and even in an action photos. In the modern world, we are so isolated from the effects of the weather (indeed, almost all my daily activities are weather-independent) that an image, which references the effect of weather on the subject, has a strong potential to stir up some primal emotions in the viewer.

March 4, 2015March 4, 2015

Panoramas

Panoramic landscape photos, the ones that are composed of several individual shots that are stitched together by a software, are fun because they offer a view that cannot be achieved by naked eye. By the way, I think this is one of the main criteria for “interestingness” of a photo – it should show something that I viewer would not normally see by him/herself, e.g. an extreme close-up, a frozen motion, a unique point of view or colour combination, etc.

For panoramas, I find that composing the final image is a challenge, because at the time of shooting, my brain picks the focal points of the individual sectors, not that of the final image. As a result, panoramas often either don’t have a compositional focus or have multiple competing elements (e.g. a mountain, a cloud formation, a rock in the foreground, etc.) Because it is difficult to visualize the end result at the time of shooting, I like using my iPhone camera for panoramas. It allows me to see the result right away instead of waiting until I stitch the individual images on a computer. Of course, the technical quality is inferior, compared to an image produced by a DSLR, but I think the main appeal of panoramas is their initial impact (the panoramic nature of the scene being the main element of the composition), so the instant feedback offered by the phone camera is worth the penalty in noise, banding and other defects. As one prominent photographer, who’s name escapes me, said about excessive noise in particular, “if people a concerned about noise in your photo, you have a boring image!”

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