I don’t know if every question has an answer, but life has showed me that every answer prompts a question. That is certainly true in photography.

If you live in a fairly ordinary place, landscape photography can sometimes be a challenge. Never let that deter you. Create images anyway. Find the beauty in where you live even if a city park or your own backyard are all you can think of.

Remember, using contrast, both high and low, to create moods can turn a somewhat ordinary location into one with pop, or with seasonal atmosphere.

These two landscapes were made at two different local parks. The first screams spring, high color and pop. The second imparts a somber, quiet, yet equally beautiful mood and makes a clear statement about winter.

Where there are flowers, there are landscapes.
Purple coneflowers than geraniums

Remember, in order to make great landscape images wherever you are, you first have to be out with a camera, and then learn to “see” with your heart, as well as your eyes.

When you are up tight and close with birds, and they are preening, scratching, trying their wings or displaying in courtship, how much of the bird to YOU need to be sharp. How much should be covered in focus via depth of field? Do the soft spots bother you? Maybe you find them artistic. If there is movement by the bird, what do you need stopped sharp, and how much (if any) motion blur on other parts of the subject is acceptable to you?

Wilson’s Phalarope

Snowy Owl

Male Greater Scaups

I enjoy, and sometimes pursue those out of focus areas but it is always difficult to get the sharp and the soft parts just where they work best.

What do you need sharp if anything, in abstract sunrise/sunset pictures? Maybe you just don’t like what seem to be departures from reality like my two pictures below. I say “seem” to be departures, because the only true abstraction from reality in these pictures is the distorted sun (s) due to my use of a 500mm lens.

I was not generally a pure abstract photographer, but if in my mind, without effort and quite naturally, I saw a scene a certain way and I could reproduce that vision or what you might say what was in my mind’s eye, simply by using creative lens choices or exposures, I took the challenge every time.

I love this next image. It was made by Patrick Kavanagh. It was placed on my Flickr group called of course, Earth Images. I show you this simple, elegant, work of art because not one single photographer on Flickr found this image intriguing enough or good enough to comment on. It is not unusual for me to like images that nobody else likes, but come on! I suppose the subject was not considered important enough. Please!

Keep making YOUR images. Someone will come along and appreciate them.

God Bless,                                                                                                                                      Wayne