Natural Landscape photography awards

jerry12953

jerry12953

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Jeremy Moore
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I have just read the rule on removing items out of the image in the Natural Landscape Photography Award competition. It states the following -

* Can I clone objects out or use the healing brush to remove distracting elements from my photograph?

Yes, with limitations. The keyword here is transient, which is defined as lasting for a short time (like a leaf, small twig, candy wrapper, parked car, person, etc.). This would then exclude things such as power lines, boulders, tree branches, fallen trees, buildings, fence posts, etc.

I know I bang on about cloning objects out of images and replacing skies etc, but it appears to me that they have got this exactly right in this instance. Any thoughts on this?
 
jerry12953 said:
I have just read the rule on removing items out of the image in the Natural Landscape Photography Award competition. It states the following -

* Can I clone objects out or use the healing brush to remove distracting elements from my photograph?

Yes, with limitations. The keyword here is transient, which is defined as lasting for a short time (like a leaf, small twig, candy wrapper, parked car, person, etc.). This would then exclude things such as power lines, boulders, tree branches, fallen trees, buildings, fence posts, etc.

I know I bang on about cloning objects out of images and replacing skies etc, but it appears to me that they have got this exactly right in this instance. Any thoughts on this?
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The answer always depends. The rule sounds sensible and perfectly suitable for the competition. If people want to create images with, for example, power lines removed for other purposes, then why not?
 
It's a great principle to work to if the objective is displaying the landscape as it is NOW. However if the objective were to show the scene as it's possibly been for several hundred years then stuff like specific trees, wires etc are also transient objects. It would be completely honest in this situation to erase such things provided it were done in sympathy with the landscape.
 
jerry12953 said:
I always keep my "processing" within the principles espoused by the NLPA. If I could persuade everyone else to do the same I'd be very happy! Level playing field and all that.......
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Surely people can do what they like with processing? They’ll all have different ideas and objectives, no?
 
TimHughes said:
Surely people can do what they like with processing? They’ll all have different ideas and objectives, no?
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Yes, people can do what they like. I'm all favour of honesty and integrity myself.
ancient_mariner said:
It's a great principle to work to if the objective is displaying the landscape as it is NOW. However if the objective were to show the scene as it's possibly been for several hundred years then stuff like specific trees, wires etc are also transient objects. It would be completely honest in this situation to erase such things provided it were done in sympathy with the landscape.
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Surely the unique quality of photography is to "capture the moment". Trying to guess what the landscape might have been like some time in the past and re-create that would be something else altogether - if that's what you mean. I'd say it would be impossible.
 
jerry12953 said:
Yes, people can do what they like. I'm all favour of honesty and integrity myself.


Surely the unique quality of photography is to "capture the moment". Trying to guess what the landscape might have been like some time in the past and re-create that would be something else altogether - if that's what you mean. I'd say it would be impossible.
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Photography surely can capture the moment. It can do much more too and is a very broad church. Embrace the diversity :)
 
jerry12953 said:
Surely the unique quality of photography is to "capture the moment". Trying to guess what the landscape might have been like some time in the past and re-create that would be something else altogether - if that's what you mean. I'd say it would be impossible.
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That's one way of viewing a photograph. To me, it a way of showing a scene and saying "look at this - does it say something to you?". Sometimes the scene is now, and sometimes I want it to seem timeless, possibly even to have come from a fantasy.
 
jerry12953 said:
I always keep my "processing" within the principles espoused by the NLPA. If I could persuade everyone else to do the same I'd be very happy! Level playing field and all that.......
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This depends entirely on context, these are good principles for the ethos of that award.

Any individual can adopt whatever rules they want for their own photography, and like you, mine are very close to what the NLPA have said, but the only sensible level playing field for an artistic endeavour is one where there are no rules.

The unique aspect of any art is the artists vision, and I don't think there is any need to artificially constrain that vision, except in specific, and limited, circumstances e.g. documentary photography and restricted category awards.

For everything else, I would like to persuade everyone to feel free to be driven by their vision of the world and to try and capture that vision by using their camera and processing skills in any way they want to.

But I know you don't agree with this :)
 
In years gone by I subscribed to an American magazine called Outdoor Photography (Photographer?)., not the UK one........

It was the early days of digital and I remember articles about "the photographers' vision", which as far as I could see mainly consisted of cloning out anything in the photograph that didn't "fit". I'd like to think that things have moved on since then.
 
At the moment I'm trying to put photos together for a book or zine showing the canal around Kidlington, Oxfordshire. It's not an area given to completely overwhelming beauty, but with some care the shots can look interesting and even mysterious. I could just collect record shots of the area, and in fact I have many, but unless one forgets a lot, there wouldn't be much reward in looking at them. TBH I do very little cloning work, much more dodging and burning, and that changes the appearance of the area far more that neatly excising a wire would.
 
jerry12953 said:
In years gone by I subscribed to an American magazine called Outdoor Photography (Photographer?)., not the UK one........

It was the early days of digital and I remember articles about "the photographers' vision", which as far as I could see mainly consisted of cloning out anything in the photograph that didn't "fit". I'd like to think that things have moved on since then.
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In years gone by, so did I, but it was long before digital.

If cloning something out better expresses the message the photographer is trying to convey, I don't have a problem with it (again I exclude documentary photography from this freedom to "follow your vision" concept).
 
ancient_mariner said:
TBH I do very little cloning work, much more dodging and burning, and that changes the appearance of the area far more that neatly excising a wire would.
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I suspect this is what most us do, but with the exceptions mentioned, I think you should have "permission" to clone out a wire if you feel it necessary.
 
myotis said:
In years gone by, so did I, but it was long before digital.

If cloning something out better expresses the message the photographer is trying to convey, I don't have a problem with it (again I exclude documentary photography from this freedom to "follow your vision" concept).
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This discussion is going over old ground , I know, but if the photographer is trying to convey the message "what a perfect landscape this is.....isn't nature wonderful.........." but in order to do so clones out a wrecked car and a line of electricity pylons, I'd say that was a problem.
 
jerry12953 said:
This discussion is going over old ground , I know, but if the photographer is trying to convey the message "what a perfect landscape this is.....isn't nature wonderful.........." but in order to do so clones out a wrecked car and a line of electricity pylons, I'd say that was a problem.
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Yeah, but equally maybe the person is saying imagine how great this would look without the wrecked car and line of pylons? I'm trying to encourage a different perspective as you seem quite stuck in a rut on this.....
 
It sounds like a flock of cranes would be transient.

In other words I don't care about this or that competition. There are enough money grabbers we now all need to deal with
 
jerry12953 said:
This discussion is going over old ground , I know, but if the photographer is trying to convey the message "what a perfect landscape this is.....isn't nature wonderful.........." but in order to do so clones out a wrecked car and a line of electricity pylons, I'd say that was a problem.
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I struggle to follow the premise of the question, why would a landscape with a wrecked car and pylons trigger a "perfect landscape, isn't nature wonderful" emotional response from the photographer. Why would this be the message they felt compelled to convey when reacting to this subject. Why, if their aim was to convey a message of "how perfect the Welsh countryside is", would they not just move on. Which in itself is evidence of how easy its' to lie with photography by selectively choosing your subject matter.

If they were simply reacting to the scene you describe, I would think their reaction more likely to be on how these things had ruined the landscape, and if they didn't feel the "straight" image conveyed the level of distress they felt when at the scene, possibly clone multiple rows of pylons across the landscape and make the car more dominant that it really was.

But with the cloning (and car enlargement) done in a very obvious way to make it clear this was how the photographer "felt" when looking at the landscape and not how it really was.
 
LongLensPhotography said:
It sounds like a flock of cranes would be transient.

In other words I don't care about this or that competition. There are enough money grabbers we now all need to deal with
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I'm more interested in cows in a field, whose transient nature always mean that their perfect composition when I start to set up, has fallen apart by the time I take the picture.

Am I allowed to clone out a, now compositionally wayward cow, or move them back to where they were when I first set up?
 
myotis said:
I struggle to follow the premise of the question, why would a landscape with a wrecked car and pylons trigger a "perfect landscape, isn't nature wonderful" emotional response from the photographer. Why would this be the message they felt compelled to convey when reacting to this subject. Why, if their aim was to convey a message of "how perfect the Welsh countryside is", would they not just move on. Which in itself is evidence of how easy its' to lie with photography by selectively choosing your subject matter.
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But isn't the internet full of photographs like this? Where photographers have cloned out various elements from the landscape to make it look like their vision of perfection, when it quite clearly isn't?

Anyway, I was very pleased to discover that the rules of the competition are almost identical to those that I follow myself. Also excluded are various other techniques including composites etc, etc, most of which I would have no intention of using, even if I knew how.

Whether you (or anyone) believe competitions have any value or not is another matter.
 
jerry12953 said:
Stuck in a rut = sticking to my principles...... :)
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Sticking to your principles is a good thing. Feeling that everyone else should share them? I’m not sure about that.

I’m repeating myself and not conveying the message that I’d hope you’d receive, so this is my last reply on this thread.
 
jerry12953 said:
But isn't the internet full of photographs like this? Where photographers have cloned out various elements from the landscape to make it look like their vision of perfection, when it quite clearly isn't?
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I really don't know, It's not something I've noticed. I find a lot of landscape photographs rather uninteresting, even though this is my main interest, so maybe people who feel their photographs should be visions of perfection, also produce uninteresting photographs that I quickly pass by.

If the cloning is as clear as you suggest, why don't you just move on. The way that I quickly move on from those landscape photographs where the colours, saturation and sharpness makes my eyes bleed. Maybe they also have extensive cloning and I just don't look at them long enough to notice. But, If the cloning is as obvious as you suggest and detracts from the image rather than adds to it, as I described above, then that would also cause me to just pass it by.

But I'm still not sure what harm it's doing. If this is how people get pleasure out of their photography, that's up to them. I suspect that the majority will either just give up, or their photographic eye will mature. Some of the people linked with the NLPA competition (e.g. Alister Benn) have confessed in the past about how horrible their photographs once were because they were entirely driven by the need to gain likes on the Internet.
jerry12953 said:
Anyway, I was very pleased to discover that the rules of the competition are almost identical to those that I follow myself. Also excluded are various other techniques including composites etc, etc, most of which I would have no intention of using, even if I knew how.
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Yes, I remember when this competition was first being discussed and the proposed rules were circulated, that they were close to my own approach. However,(competition rules apart) I don't see why anyone else needs to follow this (my) approach for their personal photography. And, if my interaction with a subject, creatively drives me down a road of seeing an image that involves a composite or extensive cloning, that's what I'll do. It hasn't happened yet, but I did enjoy doing some ICM pictures earlier on in the year, and did think about compositing some.
jerry12953 said:
Whether you (or anyone) believe competitions have any value or not is another matter.
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Not sure where this has come from, but, yes, I think competitions can have value.

More importantly, what is the answer to my transient cow question :)
 
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