Rural Landscapes

Rural landscape photography focus’ on places that are open and less populated, such as the countryside, and capturing the life in these areas which can include photographing trees, mountains, rivers, lakes etc along with its surrounding environment. They can be photographed at any time of day regardless of weather as different types of lighting/weather can change the atmosphere and can even enhance the mood being captured in each image [i.e: shooting in rainy weather at 9pm will create a darker mood compared to shooting in sunny weather at 3pm].

Some more examples of rural landscapes are:

Key Features of Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. The artists emphasized that sense and emotions – not simply reason and order – were equally important means of understanding and experiencing the world. Romanticism celebrated the individual imagination and intuition in the enduring search for individual rights and liberty.

The Age of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment, a philosophical movement that dominated Europe during the 18th century, was centred around the idea that reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy and advocated such ideals as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.
This movement’s three central concepts were the use of reason, the scientific method, and progress. Enlightenment thinkers believed they could help create better societies and better people.
Enlightenment thinkers also wanted to improve human conditions on earth rather than concern themselves with religion and the afterlife. These thinkers valued reason, science, religious tolerance, and what they called “natural rights”—life, liberty, and property.

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The impact of the Enlightenment on the arts took various forms. Some artists paid homage to science, others studied the classical past. During this time, Classical art’s realism, restraint, harmony, and order, was in line with Enlightenment thinking. Its influence was strongly felt in the art of the period, in work such as British artist Joseph Wright of Derby’s A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, 1764-66. Its dramatic use of light was intended to show how inquiry and learning are profound and deeply solemn.

The Age of Romanticism

Romanticism was in part inspired by the idealism of the French Revolution and embraced the struggles for freedom and equality and the promotion of justice. Painters began using current events and atrocities to shed light on injustices in dramatic compositions that rivalled the more staid Neoclassical history paintings accepted by national academies.

Above is Europe: A Prophecy, 1794, by William Blake. In late 18th century England, the mystical visions of William Blake were a powerful counterpoint to Enlightenment rationalism. Blake sought to regenerate mankind spiritually and his artistic style is unique.

Both the English poet and artist William Blake and the Spanish painter Francisco Goya has been dubbed “fathers” of Romanticism by various scholars for their works’ emphasis on subjective vision, the power of the imagination, and an often darkly critical political awareness. Blake, working principally in engravings, published his illustrations alongside his poetry that expressed his vision of a new world, creating mythical worlds full of gods and powers, and sharply critiquing industrial society and the oppression of the individual. Goya explored the terrors of irrationality in works like his Black Paintings (1820-23), which conveyed the nightmarish forces underlying human life and events.

For the majority of his career, Goya suffered from hearing loss, causing him to express his internal thoughts through paintings he did inside of his home. The paintings depicted many characteristics of the Romantic style with his use of intense emotions and ideas such as death and horror.

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At the end of the 18^th century and well into the 19^th, Romanticism quickly spread throughout Europe and the United States to challenge the rational ideal held so tightly during the Enlightenment. The artists emphasized that sense and emotions – not simply reason and order – were equally important means of understanding and experiencing the world. Romanticism celebrated the individual imagination and intuition in the enduring search for individual rights and liberty. Its ideals of the creative, subjective powers of the artist fueled avant-garde movements well into the 20^th century. 

The Sublime

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For Romantics, the sublime is a meeting of the subjective-internal (emotional) and the objective-external (natural world): we allow our emotions to overwhelm our rationality as we experience the wonder of creation. The sublime is further defined as having the quality of such greatness, magnitude or intensity, whether physical, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic or spiritual, that our ability to perceive or comprehend it is temporarily overwhelmed.

Romanticism in Landscape photography

Romanticism has long been associated with the landscape. In the medium of photography, the sense of romance of the landscape features its spirit in full bloom The nature of Romanticism is rather uncontrollable and unpredictable, which is shown in the wild nature of romantic landscape images. Sometimes its quiet and sensual power manifests into beautiful images, and other times it features animals or humans, while at other times the landscape will be empty and bare of any form of life. The most notable feature in a romantic landscape photo is that it will stir the emotion and feelings and cause inspiration of the imagination.  Romantic landscape images typically also have a moody atmosphere – they are more about the subjective feelings of the artist than an objective record of the observable world.

Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph.

Photographers such as Ansel Adams and Fay Godwin use romanticism in their images, like in the image above. The use of the sublime in clear in this image, with the moody atmosphere and the sense of the looming mountains above. This image is influenced by Adams use of tonal range – there is elements of pure black in the woodland areas of this image, which illustrate the power and darkness of nature, linked to the sublime, a key feature of Romanticsm. Furthermore, there is evidence of the texture and untextured white at the complete other end of the zone system, in the river, tips of the mountains and sky.

Rural landscape photography refers to “photography in the countryside” and covers the rural environment. While rural landscapes often contain architecture – much the same as urban landscapes – rural landscape photography is more about capturing the life and elements found in the countryside.

According to records, the earliest known evidence of a landscape photograph was taken between the years of 1826 and 1827. It was an urban landscape photo taken by a French inventor by the name of Nicephore Niepce.

The Age of The Enlightenment (1700-1800ish)

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The age of enlightenment of ‘age of reason’ shifted art in the sense that it encouraged criticism of the monarchy. This new movement also created a theme of simplicity and elegance

The Age of Romanticism (1800-1900ish)

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Between 1800 to roughly 1850 an artistic movement called romanticism, this was a artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement. Romanticism put an emphasis on emotion, and individualism within art and often portrayed an idealised version of what they were seeing, similar to how we use Lightroom to adjust colours and shadows creating vibrancy and depth.

Sublime – In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. 

The Romantic sublime

Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.

Rural Landscape Photography

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Ansel Adams

As the 20th century began rolling in, the world saw American photographers at the forefront of landscape photography, and this was because they had a rather vast and varied array of landscapes to photograph. There are many notable names in landscape photography, and one of the most legendary ones is Ansel Adams. He was an ardent environmentalist who advocated for the natural world and inspired people to show love for the planet by showing love and respect for it. He has produced some spectacular images of canyons and rivers, which have become a sort of inspiration point for photographers that followed.

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Ansel Adams born 20th February 1902 was a landscape photographer born in California. As Well as being an amazing photographer, Adams was also an environmentalist and would use his skills to protect many national parks from being made into building sights.

Ansel Adams mainly captured the natural black and white beauty of the American West and began publishing in the 1921, by 1922 Adams ‘Yosemite’ prints were on sale by ‘Best studio’. 

During the mid 1920’s Ansel experimented with the Bromoil process due to the rise of pictorialism. For many of Adams images, he used a soft focus lens and he described using it as “capturing a glowing luminosity that captured the mood of a magical summer afternoon”. In 1925 Adams has made the decision to reject pictorialism and focus on a more realistic approach of using contrast, exposures and sharpness. One of the key compositional techniques that Adams employed in many of his images was to place the horizon about two-thirds of the way up the frame. This would mean the composition was biased in favour of the landscape rather than the sky and would help to communicate the epic scale of the scene.

The genre of this style of photography is landscape. The mise-en-scene presents the magnificent Teton Mountains and impressive Snake River which creates a loud and interesting composition. The photo has been taken from a forward angle which makes the image look alluring.  The colour (or tone) in this image is striking blacks and intense whites. The leading lines begin at the furthest point that we can see of the river and continue in the snake like trail. Bright lighting through the clouds reflects on the windy river, the rest of the image is captured in ominous dark lighting, the exposure of the image is underexposed due to the dark shadowy mountains. The image portrays a large depth of field and focuses on the river in front. The rivers contrast in tones provide a powerful leading line towards the ominous mountains. 

The sublime

The sublime has long been understood to mean a quality of greatness that inspires wonder. From the seventeenth century onwards the concept and emotions it inspires have been a source of inspiration for artists and writers, particularly in relation to the natural landscape.

During the Italian Renaissance the initial concept started to arise. The depictions of Christ lifeless and suffering by Andrea Mantegna and Masaccio, as well as Raphael’s sketches and analyses of skeletons, inform us of the certainty of mortality and the unknowable – essential elements of the Sublime. However, it was only in the Romantic era that the Sublime as an artistic notion gained traction throughout Europe.

It all started with Nicolas Boileau’s translation of On The Sublime 1674 by the ancient Greek Longinus. Longinus stated here that the presenter should seek to create emotion and move his audience rather than just convince them. Longinus, who was primarily interested in languages, did speak momentarily about the aesthetic Sublime in both wildlife and man-made artefacts; in his opinion, vast scale and diversity may generate a sense of the Sublime.

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Théodore welcomes the observer onto the floor of the ship by enabling the sides of the raft to extend past the base of the image. By having the victims facing upwards and away toward the sky you are dragged deeper into the tragic scene of events. He also uses a chiaroscuro light on the fallen people and the sky which pulls focus on to the events that have occurred on the raft

romanticism and enlightenment

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Martin manages to create a senesce of tranquillity and harmony in this image the celestial landscape in the image creates the feeling of salvation the incorporation of the artists and poets who can be seen on the hill creates an angelic feel to the image as they are depicted in all white the darkness around the mountains allows for the people to focus on the green of the hill top in the foreground.

romanticism is a movement in art and literature which began in 1800s the over all characteristics of romanticism is a new emotionalism in contrast to the resistant ideas. it challenged the rational ideals so loved by artists of the Enlightenment. Romantic artists believed that emotions and senses were equally as important as order and reason for experiencing and understanding the world.

Following the French Revolution, the enduring search for individual liberty and rights fueled the Romantic celebration of intuition and imagination. The Romantic ideas of the subjectively creative powers of the artist continued to fuel Avante-Garde movements into the 20th century.

Romantic artists reacting against the sombre Neoclassical style found their expression through music, literature, architecture, and visual art. The Romantic movement encompasses a variety of styles because it valued imagination, inspiration, and originality. Personal connections to nature and an idealized past were a significant theme for many Romantic artists attempting to hold back the waves of industrialism.

In the earliest days of landscape photography, technical restraints meant that photographers were bound to working with static subjects, due to long exposure times which rendered any movement blurry. This made landscapes and cityscapes prime material for their exposures.

Depicting a man having his shoes shined, the single image took ten minutes to make and just happened to capture the individual, who stood statically, one leg perched on a stool. The shoe shiner working on Paris’ Boulevard du Temple that day had no idea he would make his­tory.

As the technical side of photography developed and cameras became more affordable, almost anyone could become a photographer. Whilst democratizing and diversifying the craft, this also gave form to some form of elitism, as certain artists began to distance themselves from the status quo by creating their own visual movements.

 it is hard to trace the exact origin of landscape photography since the very first photograph that we have knowledge of was taken in an urban landscape during 1826 or 1827 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. Then in 1835 the English scientist Henry Fox Talbot came into play with various photography innovations.

Landscape photography was delivering something that only painting was capable of doing until that time – rendering reality in a two-dimensional format.

A lot of landscape images and portraits were taken during the Victorian era of photography, but it was in 1904 when Edward Steichen produced a photograph known as Moonlight: The Pond that landscape photography gained certain recognition in the art world.

Carleton Watkins is a true pioneer of landscape photography. He is an American photographer who is best known for his amazing photographs of the Yosemite Valley.  To capture the extraordinary detail of the breath-taking landscape, Watkins famously packed up his mammoth-plate camera, which used 18X22 inch glass plates, tripods, and tents on mules and trekked through the Valley, returning with 30 mammoth-plate negatives that went on to kick off the National Park movement in the US.

Watkins was also hired by the California State Geological Survey as their official photographer where his team made a large number of photographs that held information about California. The images of Yosemite produced by Watkins were among the first images to be seen of the Yosemite Valley in the Eastern US, caused a stir in the US Congress and these amazing images were, as such, fundamental in convincing the congress and ensuring that Yosemite was preserved as a National Park.

By the time it was announced in 1839, Western industrialized society was ready for photography. The camera’s images appeared and remained viable because they filled cultural and sociological needs that were not being met by pictures created by hand. The photograph was the ultimate response to a social and cultural appetite for a more accurate and real-looking representation of reality, a need that had its origins in the Renaissance.

When the idealized representations of the spiritual universe that inspired the medieval mind no longer served the purposes of increasingly secular societies, their places were taken by paintings and graphic works that portrayed actuality with greater verisimilitude. To render buildings, topography, and figures accurately and in correct proportion, and to suggest objects and figures in spatial relationships as seen by the eye rather than the mind, 15th-century painters devised a system of perspective drawing as well as an optical device called the camera obscura that projected distant scenes onto a flat surface (see A Short Technical History, Part I)—both means remained in use until well into the 19th century.

Realistic depiction in the visual arts was stimulated and assisted also by the climate of scientific inquiry that had emerged in the 16th century and was supported by the middle class during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century. Investigations into plant and animal life on the part of anatomists, botanists, and physiologists resulted in a body of knowledge concerning the internal structure as well as superficial appearance of living things, improving artists’ capacity to portray organisms credibly. As physical scientists explored aspects of heat, light, and the solar spectrum, painters became increasingly aware of the visual effects of weather conditions, sunlight and moonlight, atmosphere, and, eventually, the nature of colour itself.

William Henry Jackson is famous for his images from the American West and he was a painter, geological survey photographer and explorer. When Jackson served in the Union Army, he spent most of his free time doing drawings. In 1866, Jackson travelled to the West and along with his brother Edward Jackson, settled down in Omaha and got into the photography business.

Jackson worked for Union Pacific in 1869 where his job was to document sceneries along various railroad routes which were to be used for promotional purpose. Ferdinand Hayden discovered Jackson’s work and asked Jackson to join one of their expeditions to Yellowstone river region.

The next year, Jackson was invited to join the US Government survey of the Yellowstone river and rocky mountains that was led by Ferdinand Hayden. He was also a member of the Hayden Geological survey of 1871 and he along with other members of the expedition documenting the Yellowstone region played an important role in convincing the congress to establish the Yellowstone National Park in March 1872, which was the first national park in the US.

Peter henry Emerson was a British writer and photographer who argued about the purpose and meaning of photography. He argued that photography was a form of art and not something that was done for scientific or technical reasons. Inspired by the naturalistic French paintings, Emerson started to photograph country life as naturalistic photography. He got his first album of photographs published in 1856 called the “Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads.”

Sublime

The sublime evades easy definition. Today the word is used for the most ordinary reasons, for a ‘sublime’ tennis shot or a ‘sublime’ evening. In the history of ideas it has a deeper meaning, pointing to the heights of something truly extraordinary, an ideal that artists have long pursued. Taking inspiration from the rediscovery of the work of the classical author the so-called ‘Pseudo-Longinus’ and from the writings of the philosopher Edmund Burke, British artists and writers on art have explored the problem of the sublime for over four hundred years. In the introductory essay Christine Riding and Nigel Llewellyn trace the relationship between British art and the sublime, discussing ideas and definitions of the sublime used in the Baroque, Romantic, Victorian periods and modern periods. The accompanying piece by Ben Quash considers an intractable problem for Christian art – the notion of a separation between the sublime and the beautiful in God’s creation.

The baroque sublime:

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The sublime in art, it has often been suggested, starts with Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757). Before this, so the conventional narrative goes, the sublime was a notion that applied only to rhetoric. However, the sublime in this period was very much concerned with the potential power of style and composition in the visual arts as much as in language, though it had yet to be applied to nature. In recent years the early history of the concept of the sublime has proved a fertile area for research, with attention focusing on the impact of the writings of an ancient Greek writer known as Pseudo-Longinus, which were first translated into English in 1652.The essays and case studies in this section review this earlier sublime, covering the relationships between writing, rhetoric and art in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The romantic sublime:

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Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.

Notions of the sublime are closely linked with the English Romanticism – artists and writers who were concerned with humankind’s relationship to, and reverence for the natural world; in particular those works of painting or poetry that celebrate the majesty and overwhelming power of the natural world. Paintings like Turner’s Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth – with lashing waves and whipping storm clouds, clearly articulate Nature’s majestic and terrifying power. If one witnesses an extreme or terrifying situation and survives, one is then free to experience delight – a ship battling through a violent storm, traversing a precipitous mountain ridge, stumbling through a pitch black forest and finding, at last, a road. The tension between terror and relief is the source of Burke’s sublime feeling – a delight in surviving terror. This is especially the case in art where we become, in a sense, voyeurs of terror; the viewer understands that the terrifying scene they are witnessing is not real and is therefore free to feel a delicious frisson of fear at the idea of being there.

Joseph mallard William turner:

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Joseph Mallord William Turner RA, known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colourisations, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings.  English artist and a Royal Academician. He is noted for his body of work that depicted the visual proof of the unfolding Industrial Revolution in England. Above all, Turner is known for his loose brushstrokes, vibrant colours, and his subtle rendering of light on landscapes.

Turner effortlessly enjoyed painting various landscapes styles. His art composition incorporated various drawings from all around the world.

Of all Romantic painters influenced by the aesthetic of the sublime, his works have been widely recognised as the most successful in capturing the effect of boundlessness which Burke and Kant saw as a prerequisite for the sublime in verbal and visual representation – the sublime being something that can be evoked but not achieved. Those works by Turner typically seen as sublime employ a formal language that avoids precise definition, instead using paint to hint at the terrifying and awesome but on a relatively modest scale when compared to the bombastic productions of painters such as Francis Danby and James Ward. Through juxtapositions of dark and light, obtrusive facture and subtle blending effects, combined with energetic centrifugal and vortex configurations and exaggerated distortions of scale, Turner’s works have been seen to both elevate and inspire perception in the beholder.

The Victorian sublime

After the Romantic era Victorian artists took a step away from the vastness of the sublime and developed a keener interest in the pursuit of beauty. The following essays and case studies consider why the sublime should have fallen out of favour in this period, and explore the work of those Victorian artists who continued to engage with a sublime aesthetic.

The chief philosopher of the Sublime, Burke in 1757, favoured this aesthetic idea over Beauty because, he said, astonishment, obscurity and vastness cause a more powerful physical reaction in us than Beauty’s orderly calm. Constable’s painting is balanced between these two aesthetic ideas.

RURAL LANDSCAPE

The term “rural landscape” describes the diverse portion of the nation’s land area not densely populated or intensively developed, and not set aside for preservation in a natural state. All kinds of rural land use are involved: agriculture, pastoralism, forestry, wildlife conservation and tourism. Planning also provides guidance in cases of conflict between rural land use and urban or industrial expansion, by indicating which areas of land are most valuable under rural use.

• The cultivated land. It is the space intervened by the work of man, both for cultivation and for forest products, which allocates very little space for the development of infrastructure or public services.
• The reduced public transport. The development of transport services in the rural area is low and low frequency. Its route usually joins the main routes with the nearest villages.
• The low population density. The rural area has few residential areas, and the houses are very far apart. They are mostly inhabited by employees who work in the field.
• The abundant vegetation. A large number of plants, grasslands, and trees are spread throughout the rural territory in a uniform way, naturally or by human intervention.
• The division of the land. The rural area has delimited lands that can be smallholdings (small agricultural properties and not very profitable by type of soil ) or large estates (large properties and very profitable for its nutrient-rich soil).
• The low percentage of environmental pollution. The rural area has a reduced level of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide emissions, compared to urban areas that have a high concentration of vehicles and transport.
• Rural tourism. The country houses and the farms are usually a destination requested by people living in the cities, to enjoy the tranquillity and recreation during the seasons or on weekends.

Rural photos

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Rural photography refers to photography in the countryside and covers the rural environment. Rural landscapes consist of agriculture. A rural area is an open swath of land that has few homes or other buildings, and not very many people. A rural areas population density is very low. Many people live in a city, or urban area. Their homes and businesses are located very close to one another.

Rural Landscape Photography focuses on photographing areas that are left mostly untouched by mankind, instead focusing on shapes and compositions created by nature. A lot of rural landscape photography is taken in the countryside, in large green fields, however images can be taken in almost any environment, be it woods, mountains or even seaside cliffs.

Early rural landscape images would have been taken by scientists and explorers while on expeditions. These images could be used to show the people back home what the place looked like, as well as to document animals and plants in that area.

Romanticism is an artistic movement that was most popular from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s, it consists of multiple kinds of art, like painting, literature and music, but it can also be applied to photography. A large focus of Romanticism is appreciating the beauty of nature, as well as the rejection of artistic values of the time.

Paintings that are a part of the Romantic movement tend to have a big focus on ornate landscapes, making them both beautiful and terrifying, their size swallowing the small figures placed on the canvas, known as the sublime. In Edmund Burke’s book, Philosophical Enquiry, he connects the emotions felt towards the sublime as experiences of awe, terror, and danger.

Romanticism came as a result of the Age of Enlightenment, a period of time where Western ideals began to shift from religion towards science. Romantic artists questioned the sense of order and rationalism pushed by Enlightenment, and the relationship between nature and humanity is often explored in Romantic work.

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Eliot Porter was an American landscape photographer, best known for his interesting landscape photographs. His pictures were inspired by the work of Ansel Adams, another photographer known for photographing the sublime. Porter’s style was very bright and colourful, with compositions reminiscent of old paintings from the Romantic era.

An image taken by Porter during his travels. The image is split almost perfectly with the rule of thirds, the stone arch and the brown dirt dividing it horizontally, while the two thin trees divide it vertically. It looks almost like a gateway, if the viewer was actually there, they may get swallowed by nature itself. The image is peaceful and still but still unnerving, perfectly able to capture the feeling of the sublime. The colours are bright like all of Porter’s work, the blues, greens and greys contrasting the warm dirt in the rough centre of the image, with small bits of yellow hinted throughout the picture. The shadows are deep, once again fuelling the fear of the sublime, and the trees through the arch look as if they go on infinitely. Nothing in the image is manmade, making it seem as if they are trapped in the natural world, with nowhere to go except through the arch.

Rural Landscape Photography

Rural landscape photography refers to “photography in the countryside” and covers the rural environment. While rural landscapes often contain architecture – much the same as urban landscapes – rural landscape photography is more about capturing the life and elements found in the countryside.

13 Types of Landscape Photography:

• Seascape Photography
• Mountain Photography
• Forest Photography
• Cloudscape Photography
• Astrophotography
• Panorama Photography
• Time Lapse Photography
• Long Exposure Photography
• Star Trail Photography
• Sunrise/Sunset Photography
• Night Photography
• Representational Photography
• Abstract Photography

Below are shown some landscape images that have been photographed across Jersey CI at many different beaches and locations. All images have been taken of the sea and beaches because Jersey has very nice beaches and has many good places to take photographs.

Jersey Landscape Photography Moodboard

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Romanticism Photography

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Romanticism – a movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual.

Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

Romanticism originated in Europe during the end of the 18th century, but it’s still well and alive today. Contemporary Russian artist Anna Razumovskaya manages to capture the romantic style of Renaissance portraiture in her own, modern way.

Anna Razumovskaya work examples

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Landscape photography shows the spaces within the world, sometimes vast and unending, but other times microscopic. Landscape photographs typically capture the presence of nature but can also focus on man-made features or disturbances of landscapes. Landscape photography is done for a variety of reasons. 

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Fay Godwin

Fay Godwin first became interested in photography in the mid-1960s as a result of taking pictures of her young children. Alongside early portrait work, she developed a sophisticated landscape practice, often collaborating closely with writers to produce in depth surveys of particular rural topics or regions. Her photography has sometimes been linked to a tradition of romantic representations of the British landscape, in the manner of Bill Brandt or Edwin Smith. But, as a socialist and active environmentalist, Godwin makes the land in her photographs reveal traces of its history, through mankind’s occupation and and intervention.

Fay Godwin started her professional career as a portrait photographer and in the 1970s and 1980s photographed a wide range of literary figures. During this period her poetic black-and-white interpretations of British scenery also established her reputation as one of Britain’s most accomplished landscape photographers.

“I’ve been working with the land for most of my life; walking it and photographing it. And I love it to bits.”

She collaborated with a number of writers and photography and literature were combined most successfully in Remains of Elmet (1979), a collection of poems and photographs produced in partnership with Ted Hughes. Her later work—particularly after receiving a fellowship from the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television at Bradford in the 1990s—was characterised by an increasing use of colour and semi-abstract compositions of natural forms.

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Two of Fay’s cameras were on loan from the British library, and displayed at the National Science and Media Museum in 2010, showcasing how she created her works. There are two of Fay Godwin’s cameras on display—a Hasselblad 500C/M camera fitted with a Planar f2. 8 50mm lens and a Leica M6 camera fitted with a Summicron f2 35mm lens. Both of these cameras would have been used to produce some of the images included in the exhibition.

A folder containing Fay Godwin’s original negatives is also added to the display, open at the page containing her negatives for the Flooded Tree image. She made careful notes on a pencil sketch of the photograph to remind her how best to print from the chosen negative. These notes show areas highlighted to ‘hold back’ and others which need additional exposure. Such detailed attention resulted in the final exhibition print, framed and on show next to the display case.

“I like photographs which leave something to the imagination.”

This image of Fay’s is black and white. There is strong contrast between the light and dark tones in this image – for example to the left of the image there is an area of darkness in the tree. This deeply contrasts the bright white clouds in the background of the image. The bright white sky separates clearly from the middle and foreground with the clever use of colour. Also in the middle of the image, there is a clear use of line and shape. The fields with strong lines through them create a sense of repetition in the image, as the lines continue to the foreground, becoming wider. This adds depth and dimension to the image, and creates an unusual scale and size to each part of the picture. The grain in this image also adds to the rough texture of the fields. This is a moody image and quiet feeling image, with the black and white effect creating a desolate and lonely composition.

Don Mccullin

Don McCullin is considered to be one of the greatest living photographers.. For the past 50 years he has proved himself a photojournalist without equal, documenting the poverty of London’s East End, or the horrors of wars in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. He is an incredibly versatile photographer, capable of beautifully arranged still life, soulful portraits and moving landscapes.

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Following an impoverished north London childhood blighted by Hitler’s bombs and the early death of his father, McCullin was called up for National Service with the RAF. After postings to Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus he returned to London armed with a twin reflex Rolleicord camera and began photographing friends from a local gang named The Guv’nors. Persuaded to show them to the picture editor at the Observer in 1959, aged 23, he earned his first commission and began his long and distinguished career in photography more by accident than design.

In 1961 he won the British Press Award for his essay on the construction of the Berlin Wall. His first taste of war came in Cyprus, 1964, where he covered the armed eruption of ethnic and nationalistic tension, winning a World Press Photo Award for his efforts. In 1993 he was the first photojournalist to be awarded a CBE. At home he has spent three decades chronicling the English countryside – in particular the landscapes of Somerset – and creating meticulously constructed still life all to great acclaim. Mccullin’s landscapes feature dark, moody skies that provoke feeling within the viewer – they are often of waterlogged fields and misty landscapes, which feature a clever use of water reflections and shadow. Yet he still feels the lure of war. As recently as October 2015 Don travelled to Kurdistan in northern Iraq to photograph the Kurds’ three-way struggle with ISIS, Syria and Turkey.

“Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.”

Don Mccullin

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was an American landscape photographer, most well-known for his widely influential photos of the Yosemite National Park. He created the Zone System, a photographic technique for determining exposure in black and white photos.

Adams was inspired by photographers who specialized in mostly expedition photography, for example Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan, and Frank Jay Haynes, who worked with large bulky cameras and set off into the wilderness carrying their equipment on mules. Adams first visited Yosemite in 1916 and began taking photos there not long after.

His subject was the awe he felt in nature, the humbling exaltation he felt in the wilderness, whether manifest on a huge or tiny scale. In the early 1930s, other photographers and critics complained that the world was going to pieces while people like Adams and Edward Weston were photographing rocks. Adams responded in a letter to Weston that “Humanity needs the purely aesthetic just as much as it needs the purely material.”

IMAGE ANALYSIS

This is one of many photos taken by Adams at Yosemite National Park. This photo features the zone system, with 1 being the shadows reflected from the cliff and 8/9 being the moon which is one of many focal points in the photo. It features not only different shades but also different textures, with the rocky cliff face and the smooth effect the shadow has created. My favourite part of this photo is the moon in the background, as that is what immediately caught my attention even though it is arguably the smallest detail in the photo.

Adam’s role in photography has played a key part in influencing how photos are taken. The creation of the zone system helps distinguish different settings of exposure in black and white. Adam’s love of photography helped him create the image he wanted to see in his mind then recreated it in his photos, inspiring other landscape photographers to do the same.

Landscape photography is a type of photography that captures the beauty of nature, bringing the viewers into the scenery, setting, and mood in these outdoor locations. Most landscape photos are taken in colour to capture features like the sky or colours of nature, but I have chosen to look at photographers who shoot in predominantly black and white – I prefer this because i feel like it captures more emotion.

Light is by far the most important element of a landscape photograph. A photograph of a stunning location taken in harsh mid-day light will fall flat. A photograph of a boring location taken at that perfect moment when the light is magical will turn into a unique and memorable photograph. Another important feature is composition – whilst taking the photo there are key things to think about such as texture, colours, shapes and frames.

IMAGE ANALYSIS

This photo was taken by Ansel Adams of a wind-damaged tree in the mountains. The dark branches and leaves of the three juxtaposes the light background of the sky, most likely taken on a sunny day. The tree casts a shadow on the floor again contrasting the bright background whilst the light from the sun illuminates the silhouette of the tree.

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These two photos show the difference between a poor landscape photo and a better one. Depending on aesthetic the left photo could be considered good, but the blur and poor choice of lighting makes the focal point unclear. However, the photo on the right is clear and has two major focal points – the tree and the lighting in the background – the colour contrast between the tree and the sky plays a major part in making a good photo.