New Topographics was a term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers whose pictures had a similar banal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape. The photographers associated with New Topographics include Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and Bernd and Hiller Becher, who were inspired by the man-made.
Composition. Centred, ‘matter of fact’ style framing, flat horizontal and straight vertical lines are all hallmarks of New Topographic photography. Composition is everything and what you exclude from your frame is just as important as what you include.
What was the New Topographics a reaction to?
It is a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental.
Robert Adams
Robert Adams (born 1937) is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.
Adams Style – a spare formalism coupled with emotional depth.
Analysis
Contextual (Photography in Relation to Its Environment & Purpose)
Robert Adams’ work in the New Topographics movement (1970s) responded to rapid urbanization and environmental change. Instead of romanticizing landscapes, his photos presented suburban expansion with a neutral, detached perspective. This image shows the tension between natural landscapes (the distant mountains) and human development (tract housing and roads), highlighting the spread of suburbanization in the American West.
Conceptual (Ideas & Meanings in Photography)
This photograph challenges traditional landscape photography by portraying the human-altered environment rather than untouched nature. Adams doesn’t dramatize the scene; instead, he presents suburban sprawl as mundane yet thought-provoking. The image invites viewers to reflect on progress vs. loss, raising questions about how human expansion reshapes nature. The placement of the mountains in the background suggests an underlying contrast what the land once was vs. what it has become.
Visual (Composition & Aesthetic Aspects)
Framing & Depth: Adams uses a straightforward, almost clinical framing with a balanced composition. The houses and streets lead the eye toward the mountains, subtly reinforcing the idea of encroachment.
Lighting & Tone: The use of black and white removes any romanticized colour, making the scene appear stark and factual. The tonal contrast between the light-coloured homes and the darker roads creates structure in the composition.
Repetition & Patterns: The uniformity of the houses and roads emphasizes suburban monotony and the lack of uniqueness in modern development.
Textual (Photography & Language/Representation)
Absence of People: By not including human subjects, Adams shifts focus to the environment itself, letting the landscape tell the story of human impact.
Title as Context: “Colorado Springs, Colorado” is direct and unembellished, reinforcing Adams’ documentary approach. The neutrality of the title reflects the movement’s goal of avoiding subjective emotional influence.
Photographic Language: The image’s restrained, observational tone aligns with the New Topographics philosophy describing rather than judging.
Joint Analysis
Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975, chromogenic colour print
Visual
The line across the horizon, squashed compressed loads of negative space in the top of the image
Technical
Clear sky no clouds, cold lighting, hard edged distinct shadows
Contextual
8 cars 4 pumps and 3 gas stations this photos about the cars and roads connecting places back together all about petrol cars and oil damaging the environment. sense of nationalism red white and blue colours same as the American flag.
Conceptual
The road leads back to the mountains and open air. leaving the squashed ruined land and going back to the beautiful open sky of California.
New Topographies: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” was a ground-breaking exhibition of contemporary landscape photography held at the George Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography (Rochester, New York) from October 1975 to February 1976.
Their photographs depicted the built environment, suburban sprawl, industrial structures, and the mundane aspects of daily life
The New Topographies photographers, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, and Stephen Shore, documented built and natural landscapes in America, often capturing the tension between natural scenery and the mundane structures of post-war America: parking lots, suburban homes, crumbling coal mines. The photographs, stark and documentary, are often devoid of human presence. Jenkins described the images as “neutral” in style, “reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion
What was the new topographies a reaction to?
Their stark, beautifully printed images of this mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental.
For my photos, I decided to go to St Anne Port as there is a dynamic balance of rock, water and sky; the only three things I want to feature in my photographs. Inspired by Ansel Adams’ composition, I am going to shoot my photos with a shallow focus to include all elements of the landscape in view while making the large and intimidating rocks a focal point. This allows for elements of the sublime to continue to shine through into my pictures while having the influence of Ansel Adams still prominent in my work through the content in which I am focusing on. To emphasise this I am going to shoot my photos from a low angle, positioning myself on the ground and tilting my camera upwards to make the rocks appear larger and therefore more daunting. I will take these on a day which has prominent clouds in the sky to overall make the image more interesting, especially when it comes to editing.
Contact sheet
HDR Edits
In Photoshop Lightroom, I selected a few of my best images that featured the yellow aspects of the rocks and edited them to appear as HDR photos. I choose these pictures specifically because I wanted to really bring out the vibrancy and beauty of the natural elements of coastal landscapes. These edits helped to extenuate the colours of these photographs, bringing out the contrast between the blue sky and sea and the tense rocks. By toggling with the effects in the SDR Display setting, I was able to find a perfect balance in my photos where the highlights in the waves and clouds had great clarity while not removing depth from the shadows in the foreground. These effects were overall complementary with my work due to the colours and texture of my photographs being heightened to a level that allows for definition to really shine through.
Developing
Settings
Before and After
Final Photos and Edits
When choosing my final pictures, I considered ones which looked the most like something that would come out of Ansel Adams’ work and finally edited them in black and white to make them appear as a collection while also furthering visuals that highlight my inspiration and intended goal. I edited my pictures with Adams’ technique of the Zone System in mind where he includes a tonal scale of 0-10 in his photographs; including areas where the brightest whites can be seen as well as deep blacks. I made a specific effort to incorporate all these tones in my final pictures and I guaranteed this by increasing levels of highlights and shadows as well as contrast when editing. With this in consideration, I still ensured that I would not lose clarity and texture in the focal points during this process in order to maintain detail seen within nature.
This is just a way to tweak how bright or dark your photo turns out. Your camera tries to find the “perfect” exposure, but it doesn’t always get it right. If your photo’s too dark or too bright, you can use exposure compensation to fix it.
Minus (-) makes it darker.
Plus (+) makes it brighter.
Exposure Bracketing:
This is when you take several shots of the same thing, but with different brightness levels. The idea is to make sure one of them is perfect. It’s useful if you’re in tricky lighting, like a scene with both bright lights and dark shadows.
For example, you might take:
One that’s a bit brighter.
One regular shot.
One that’s a bit darker.
HDR photos:
How to use it:
HDR modes can usually be found in the settings of most cameras, in which it gives you a variety of options to choose and tweak to how you want your photographs to be.
On the camera screen you are also able to choose High speed continuous photos, this makes it so the 3 photos needed for HDR (low exposure, medium exposure, high exposure) are taken in a fraction of a second, this makes it so if there is any movement in the camera, there wont be any differences in the photos besides how dark or light they are. This will overall make it alot easier to obtain the HDR photo you are looking for as you wont need a tripod or anything to stabilise the camera.
HDR is a trick where you combine multiple shots with different exposures to get a photo with more detail in both the bright and dark areas. It’s like using the best parts of each shot to make the final one look more interesting.
So, if you’re taking a picture of a sunset or something with a lot of contrast, HDR can help you show both the sky and the shadows in detail.
My own photos:
These are the before and after of my photos regarding HDR photos in which there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference but it is quite hard to replicate the HDR without taking multiple photos of the same shot but with different exposure, so using photoshop doesn’t correlate with the same type of quality if i were to do it properly.
Panoramic photography allows for the capture of expansive landscapes, showcasing the vast beauty of nature, including towering mountains, rugged cliffs, sprawling glaciers, and vast deserts. Unlike standard landscape photography, panoramas provide a broader perspective, emphasizing the scale and grandeur of a scene.
Historically, photographers created panoramas by capturing a landscape in sections and aligning their daguerreotypes or other photographic formats side by side to form a continuous image. This technique was widely used to document historical landscapes, and many antique panoramas are now highly valuable collectibles.
A panoramic image typically encompasses a field of view similar to or greater than that of the human eye, which spans approximately 160° horizontally by 75° vertically. In photography, an image is generally considered panoramic if it has an aspect ratio of at least 2:1, meaning its width is at least twice its height.
Panoramas can be created through various methods, including stitching multiple images together or using a wide-angle or specialized panoramic lens. In filmmaking, the panoramic effect is often achieved by panning the camera horizontally from a fixed position, capturing a sweeping, immersive view of the scene.
FIRST ATTEMPT AT PANORAMIC LANDSCAPE
Photo Walk: Initial Shots and First Panorama Attempt
The very first three images I took during our photo walk were quite pale since I hadn’t adjusted my settings yet. These raw shots lacked depth and vibrancy, but they served as my starting point for experimentation.
After capturing these images, I used Lightroom’s Photo Merge tool to create my first panorama. The process was straightforward:
Click Photo Merge > Panorama
Experiment with different projection options
Among the available projections, I found that Perspective Projection with a 100% boundary wrap gave the most cohesive and immersive result.
However, the image still lacked impact, so I applied masks to separate the land and sky, enhancing the colours to make them more dramatic but still realistic
Final panorama
Refining the Panorama with HDR Merging
Although I wasn’t satisfied with my first attempt, I had taken precautions by capturing the panoramic shots using exposure bracketing. This allowed me to merge each set of bracketed exposures into HDR images before stitching them together into a high-dynamic-range panorama.
Steps I followed:
Merged individual exposures into HDR images
Selected the 6 HDR images and marked them in red to track them easily
Merged the HDR images into a final panoramic HDR composition
The final HDR panorama was a massive improvement—more vibrant, richer in detail, and with an increased dynamic range that allowed for deeper edits.
final
Enhancing Detail with a Closer, Zoomed-in Approach
To push the quality further, I tried a new approach:
Using a 45mm focal length
Increasing aperture for sharper details
Capturing 7 images of the same location with a tighter frame
This resulted in a higher-resolution panorama with improved detail retention. However, a trade-off was a narrower field of view due to the closer perspective. Despite this, zooming into the final image showed incredible sharpness and clarity, proving the technique to be effective.
This was the Zoomed in image, as you can tell the quality is still surprisingly good
Panoramic Merging Techniques & Adjustments
While merging the panoramas, I experimented with different projection settings to refine the composition:
Perceptual Projection – Created a fish-eye effect but felt unnatural for my scene
Cylindrical Projection (with 100% boundary wrap) – Helped zoom in and make the panorama more readable
BEFOREAFTERcylinder wrap
Despite these improvements, I still felt some versions were too stretched and zoomed out. To fix this, I tested merging only 4 images instead of 6, creating a more balanced composition. I’m still unsure which version I prefer, but it’s an interesting comparison.
HDR Panormama #2
For this photo, I initially thought that a panoramic composition would work well because the rocks in the foreground aligned nicely, creating a strong sense of depth. The way they naturally lead the viewer’s eye across the image enhances the perception of scale and dimension. A panorama in this setting would not only capture the vastness of the landscape but also emphasize the textures and shapes of the rocks, making them an integral part of the composition.
here i merged 18 different images to create a HDR Panoramic.
final outcome after In post editing ;
In this photo, I applied a gradient filter from top to bottom to enhance the sky and make it more dramatic. This technique helped deepen the tones in the upper portion of the image, adding contrast and making the clouds stand out more prominently. By gradually darkening the sky while keeping the foreground untouched, the image gains a stronger sense of depth and atmosphere, making the scene feel more dynamic and visually striking.
Joiner Panoramas: Experimenting with Angles & Composition
In the same location, I took multiple images from different angles, tilting the camera slightly each time. This technique allowed me to create a Joiner Panorama by merging the images without enabling Lightroom’s boundary fill.
The result was an interesting collage-like image, but I wasn’t completely happy with it it felt a bit too plain. I decided to experiment with a second attempt using different images that could work better for a joiner-style composition.
Second Attempt
Using AI to explore.
Lightroom has an AI-powered option that fills white edges when merging panoramas. I tested it on my joiner panorama and compared the results:
Without AI Fill – The panorama looked more fragmented and artistic
WIthout AI
With AI Fill – The image appeared smoother but lost some of the artistic, raw appeal
with AI
Surprisingly, I preferred the non AI-filled version because of its colour vibrancy and warped, abstract look—it gave the image a more artistic feel that I really liked.
WHAT IS JOINER?
David Hockney, a British artist, pioneered the “Joiner” technique, a style of photographic collage where multiple Polaroid or printed images are arranged to form a larger, fragmented composition. Instead of creating a seamless panorama, Hockney embraced the overlapping perspectives, mimicking the way human vision works over time. His joiners often depict distorted yet dynamic viewpoints, emphasizing movement and depth. This approach directly relates to my piece, as I experimented with merging multiple images from different angles to create a fragmented landscape, similar to Hockney’s method of reconstructing reality through photography.
David Hockney and the Joiner Technique
David Hockney (born 1937) is one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, known for his work in painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography. While he gained fame for his vibrant paintings, particularly those depicting California swimming pools, his Joiner Photographs stand out as a unique contribution to photography and collage art.
Hockney developed the Joiner technique in the early 1980s while experimenting with Polaroid cameras and 35mm film. Instead of taking a single image of a subject, he captured multiple photographs from slightly different angles and at different moments in time, assembling them into a larger composition. This method rejected the idea of a single, fixed perspective, instead creating a dynamic, multi-viewpoint image that mimicked how the human eye naturally perceives the world.
The Origin of Hockney’s Joiners
Hockney accidentally discovered this technique while working on a commissioned piece of a house in Los Angeles. He initially took multiple Polaroid images of the scene and arranged them in a grid-like fashion to recreate the space. He soon realized that this method allowed for a greater sense of movement and time within a single artwork. Inspired by Cubism, especially the works of Picasso and Braque, Hockney continued to refine this fragmented yet immersive style.
How Hockney’s Joiners Relate to My Work
Hockney’s Joiners have a direct connection to my own approach in creating a joiner panorama. Much like his fragmented yet cohesive style, I combined multiple images from slightly different angles to construct a wider perspective of the landscape. By avoiding Lightroom’s auto-crop feature, I allowed the natural misalignments and overlaps to remain visible, mirroring Hockney’s raw and experimental aesthetic. His work demonstrates how photography can move beyond a single, static viewpoint, and this idea influenced my decision to push the boundaries of traditional panoramas in my own project.
Photoshop Experimentation: Joiner Collage
To take my joiner panorama further, I followed a Photoshop tutorial to create a Joiner Collage Effect:
Exported the selected images into Photoshop
Went to File > Automate > Collage
Applied drop shadows to give the images depth
I also tried adding gradient backgrounds, but I found them distracting, so I opted for a simpler look. After finalizing the composition, I re-exported the image into Lightroom for further adjustments, though I ultimately preferred the clean, minimalist version.
Final Thoughts & Takeaways
My first panorama was underwhelming, but exposure bracketing saved the project by allowing for an HDR panoramic merge.
Using a closer focal length resulted in sharper details but a reduced field of view.
Panoramic merging settings make a massive difference in how readable and engaging the final image is.
Joiner panoramas are a fun technique, but they require the right images to work well.
AI enhancements can be useful, but they take away from the artistic side of things.
For my photoshoot, I mostly captured cliff faces that are along the coast.
Image Selection
These are the images I have picked to edit due to having a range of light and dark tones through out the images.
Editing
Image N01
This my image before the editing process
In this image I have used the SDR setting to lighten the sky and it also slightly darkens the foreground of the image.
This is what I used to edit my final image.
Black and White Edit
This is the Black and white edit.
The filter I used was called BW07.
These are the settings I used to get a balanced exposure between black and white. This will make sure some parts of the image are not to dark or to white.
This is what I used to make the image lighter in some parts , so it didn’t look to dark.
Image N02
This is my second image I want to edit.
For this image I also used the SDR setting to bring more blue out from the sky, so it has brightened it. It has also darkened the the foreground and some of the background.
This is how I edited my image.
Black And White Edit
This is the Black and White edited image
This is the filter I used , which is called Dark drama.
This is how I balanced the brightness and shadows in this image.
Image N03
This is my Third image I want to edit.
In this image I used the filter called Blue Drama and it from the sky range. This has caused the sky to have a very deep shade of blue, which pops out in the background. In this image I have lightened the foreground of the image.
This is the filter I have used.
This is how I edited my image.
Black And White Image
This is the Edited image
This is the filter I used
This is what I used to make the image lighter in some parts , so it didn’t look to dark.
I also added a vignette to make the image proportional and so the leading lines will attract you to the centre of the image.
Image N04
This is the 4th image I want to edit.
For this image, I experimented with texture,brightness and darkness and many more settings.
This is how I edited my image.
Blake And White Image
Edited Image
Above is the filter/Pre-set I used, which is BW03.The amount is used is 45, because it creates a big more contrast between the black and white.
This is what I used to make the image lighter in some parts , so it didn’t look to dark. I also adjusted the contrast because I wanted a clear difference between black and white.
Image N05
This is the original image that I want to edit.
This is the edited image and I used the filter called sunset to make the blue water in the background a little bit darker.
This the filter I used.
This is how I edited my photo.
Black and White Image
Edited Image
This is what I used to make the image lighter in some particular parts , so it didn’t look to dark. I also adjusted the contrast because I wanted a clear difference between black and white.
Image N06
This is the original edit.
This is the edited image.
In the foreground of the image I created texture on the rock which will bring out the layers of rock (strata)and this also focused the lighting on the layers of rock.
This is what I used to edit the image. I used a combination of dehaze, texture and clarity and I also used much more.
Black And White Image
Edited Image
This is the pre-set I have used, which is called BW10.
This is what I used to make the image lighter in some particular parts , so it didn’t look to dark.
The Zone System Image
This photo shows the zone system because there are places that are very light and some that are very dark. When the Zone System is used, the darkest areas of a photographic image are referred to as low values (Zones I — III), the grey areas are called middle values (Zones IV — VI), and the light areas are high values (Zones VII — IX). The zones are always represented as roman numerals.
Virtual Gallery
These are my 6 final images in the virtual gallery.
Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer known for his drastic exposure contrast creating dramatic imagery, he normally used a black and white colouring to more distinctly show the differences in exposure.
Ansel Adams helped to found the f/64 group , an association of photographers desiring to create “pure” imagery
“Colored and modulated by the great earth gesture“
ANSEL ADAMS in reference to his own life
” His first published photographs and writings appeared in the club’s 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one man exhibition in 1928 at the club’s San Francisco headquarters.
By 1934 Adams had been elected to the club’s board of directors and was well established as both the artist of the Sierra Nevada and the defender of Yosemite.
His creative energies and abilities as a photographer blossomed, and he began to have the confidence and wherewithal to pursue his dreams. Indeed, Bender’s benign patronage triggered the transformation of a journeyman concert pianist into the artist whose photographs, as critic Abigail Foerstner wrote in the Chicago Tribune (Dec. 3, 1992), “did for the national parks something comparable to what Homer’s epics did for Odysseus.” “
Content taken from :
EXAMPLES OF HIS WORK
ZONE SYSTEM
THE ZONE SYSTEM was a system discovered by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer
” not an invention of mine; it is a codification of the principles of sensitometry, worked out by Fred Archer and myself at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, around 1939–40.”
Ansel Adams in regards to the zone system
DEFINITION
The technique is based on the late 19th-century sensitometry studies of Hurter and Driffield. The Zone System provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results. Although it originated with black-and-white sheet film, the Zone System is also applicable to roll film, both black-and-white and color, negative and reversal, and to digital photography.
PROCESS
Although zones directly relate to exposure, visualization relates to the final result. A black-and-white photographic print represents the visual world as a series of tones ranging from black to white. Imagine all of the tonal values that can appear in a print, represented as a continuous gradation from black to white:
From this starting point, zones are formed by first dividing the tonal gradation into ten equal sections, all one stop apart, plus one more for blown-out paper white.
Note:The darker shades may not be distinguishable on some monitors.
Then for each section, one average tone represents all the tonal values in that section.
Finally, the zones are defined by numbering each section with Roman numerals from 0 for the black section to X for the white one.
VISUALISTATION
DEFINTION :
Visualization (graphics), the physical or imagining creation of images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Data and information visualization, the practice of creating visual representations of complex data and information.
The Zone System is concerned with the control of image values, ensuring that light and dark values are rendered as desired. Anticipation of the final result before making the exposure is known as visualization.
Exposure bracketing is when you take a picture of the same exact thing with different exposures. One tip that makes your exposure bracketing images come out better is using a tripod. Because if you are trying to do this by hand once you have changed the exposure you will often not be able to place the camera back in the same space and the images will not be identical.
This technique gives you a range of options to choose from when you’re editing as a result its much less likely that you’ll end up with a badly underexposed or overexposed photo.
For example:
Bracketing is a good technique for photographer’s to learn as is can help avoid ruining whole photoshoots when you finish shooting to upload the photos and realise that they’re all either too under or over exposed.
There are a few different way to do exposure bracketing but the best way would be to set your camera to the exposure you think is best for that image then move the exposure and bit either side just in case either one of those exposures look better.
HDR stands for high dynamic range. And the term dynamic range describes the ratio between the brightest and darkest parts of the image. And high dynamic range can mean the camera or technique you use to capture a greater dynamic range than SDR.
Examples of what exposure bracketed images look like:
The reason that people decide to use HDR is because the sky and the foreground of the image usually look better in different exposures, so you take 2 images one where you expose the image for the sky and one where you exposed the image for the foreground of the image and they cut and edit them together to create a somewhat surreal looking image. These images can look surreal because that is not how we are seeing that with our eye.
Example with my own images:
before:
here are 3 of my images that I used for exposure bracketing one that was over exposed (left) under exposed (middle) and a middle of the range exposure (right)
so now I will edit them together to create a an exposure bracketed image.
after:
So as you can see on this image I took the sky from the image that was underexposed as it looked better and replaced it with the sky from the overexposed image so that all the rocks still looked nice on the image as well as the sky which required 2 different exposures.
This isn’t the best representation of HDR as the sky on that was relatively clear and quite boring however, you can see a difference between what it looks like now compared to before.
