338 - Landscape Woes

You know I don’t object to changing image content at all. For every photograph there are always many different images: the one I had perceived when I decided to take the image, the one the camera recorded as a JPEG, the one I imagined it to be, the one that I distill out of RAW data, the one that I turn it into when going through cloning, straightening, vignetting, etc, and finally those that all individual viewers see, each of them a different one, because though I publish only one JPEG, it has to go into your minds, and what finally arrives there, that is highly subjective, with you being the subject and I being completely out of the game.

With all those transformations going on, with all those stages full of subjectivity, with all those acts of judgment, do you believe it is very likely that one or more transformation in between would matter? Would make the image less “true”? And true to what? Reality? My initial perception? My initial imagination? My skill? Your expectations?

And still, I have a problem. I tend to overdo landscapes. They often come out clearly artificial, many a time the sky being the culprit, when I could not resist making it darker and more contrasty than necessary, while at the same time much too saturated. Or only too greenish. And at the same time, when I ask myself why I’ve done it, I can’t give a better answer than “Because I can”.

This particular landscape is not overdone. I have done a lot to it, in fact it looks very different from what the camera chose to make from RAW data, but I have disciplined myself. I did not go over the top. It rarely becomes landscapes.

The Song of the Day is “Walk Straight Down The Middle” from Kate Bush’s 1989 album “The Sensual World”.