Questions

Being away from the internet for a total of 25 days in the last two months left me with a load of feeds to update myself to. After 2 days I am still at it. To be honest I have 2 hours a day dedicated to blogs so its 2 days for a total of 4 hours.

While scanning several blogs, you know how it works, you can have a better feeling of the recurrence of some themes the following is one of them:

Is there any sense in digging deeper in landscape photography to search for innovation or some kind of advancement.

More, is there anybody interested in those pictures ? Or in the lower end what to photograph for a landscape ?

In recent times (and not so recent for it being a recurring theme) i stumbled upon similar questions.

First a brief note: in the last decades (3 at least) the word ``innovation'' has shifted to a new meaning not that positive.

In some ways those thoughts seems to depresses me a bit. So i became used to this easy answer: I would like that there was some sense in taking landscape pictures anymore.

This feeble hope is based on the assumption that there is a genuine interest in knowing the way in which others see how life (almost only human as of today) goes on in this planet and the variety of ways of seeing that earth still offers and yes, there are no more European rhinoceros but there is plenty of suvs.

To cite one of my preferred:

``Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe...''

Monty Python ``Galaxy Song''

In taking pictures of the landscape there is always a documentary component, the need to document and communicate, at least, the event of seeing or its memory as in painting. I still do not understand much about truth (i am a bit to much on the relativistic side) but if it is the private vision which could convey it I am one interested in.

Observing the web it seems that there is still a lot of spaces to fulfill. New born on line magazines are coming in, the sizes are still poor but this could be a way to pursue an income. Certainly a more relaxed than blogs lecture could have it's own benefits for landscape photography. Sites could be a lot better and more intriguing. We could waste less in printers, papers and inks.

By the way the speed of the propagation of concepts is now astonishing. Ten years ago in the Internet (and in the the major US photo magazines about landscape) the ``sublime'' ruled in landscape. Today, it is possible to have different needs and satisfy them too (if properly displayed on a computer screen).

A last word on the term ``Landscape''. I have pointed out in earlier posts that there are several good definitions in geography for what is to be considered a landscape. But coming to photography, as usual, the term gets semantically ambiguous. Landscape is either a subject and either an outcome of the whole photographic process. It is a pretty recursion of landscape forming actions starting from the way the subject has been shaped. Photography has been and it is a powerful landscape shaping tool.