Landscape Photography: an Honest View.

When I was fifteen I was told that I should decide what I wanted to study at university, since that would determine what subjects I took between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.

I thought long and hard about what I was really interested in, and decided that the only thing which had compelled my attention during my life to date was landscape. I’d always loved landscapes, and so the question was: how do you turn a love of landscape into a career? I could think of only one subject that fitted the bill. I said I would take geology.

It would have been a mistake, even if I’d been allowed to continue my education beyond sixteen (which I wasn’t.) I later realised that geology is the scientific study of landscape; my interest was aesthetic. And that was why I eventually became a landscape photographer and made an enjoyable living at it for six years. But then I realised something else.

Aesthetic appreciation of landscape comes from much more than just the simple physical form contained within your field of vision. It comes from the wind in your face, the smell of new-mown hay, the sound of running water and birdsong, the moving shadows of clouds on hills, and the clammy feeling of mist on your skin. But most of all it comes from the sense of being a tiny speck contained within a very big space. Landscape photography misses all that. What you get with a landscape photograph is a small, two-dimensional facsimile. You’re looking down on it, rather that it looking down on you. All the power is missing. The photograph is little better than worthless.

And so I watch YouTube clips with their slide shows – pictures of autumn leaves, and sunset skies, and waves breaking on rocks, and creamy water courtesy of slow shutter speeds.

‘Amazing pictures!’ say the commenters. Actually, they aren’t.