Expressive Landscape Photography: Fog and the Zen of Art

[Music] a couple of weeks ago i did a talk at a camera club and one of the questions that i got at the end of it was how much of my time living in the far east has influenced my kind of creativity and my aesthetic appreciation and so forth so what i want to do today is talk a little bit about the influences of chinese and japanese art on western photography and also what some of those concepts mean in terms of things like using negative space and simplification and kind of stripping down landscapes into their bare component parts so that's we're going to be talking about today so uh yeah let's dig into a bit of zen so one of the things about composing scenes like this is first of all choosing the type of the type of scene to shoot what makes a shot a good candidate for this type of minimalistic art now obviously foggy conditions are fantastic the second thing we have here is there is no wind it's completely calm they're the perfect reflections and the way that uh line of land with the trees on it kind of just diffuses off to the right hand side of the frame there there's a journey there there's somewhere for the eye to go in the final photograph here what i've tried to do is just distill this down to nothing i've reduced contrast i have reduced i've made the shadows medium you know not too dark you don't want you want minimal contrast in these scenes and i've made the highlights and the whites quite bright so it's very high key as the light developed we started to get a bit more warmth coming through and as soon as you get that injection of warmth and the fog dissipated slightly and we could start to see the mountains behind oddly enough particularly in the reflections there and this is higher contrast it's instantly higher contrast by making it a 16x9 the impact that we've had there is that we have made it more expansive we have longer lines we have more energy the warm light creates more energy the contrast creates more energy and what i've tried to do is i've kept it subdued in terms of the fog luminosity i didn't want the fog to be too bright i'll guess just very very quickly if i was to grab in a gradient here and just pull that in and make it very gradual and just increase that slightly and then i'll have to dampen down the top a bit [Music] just with the highlight slider i don't mind that little bit of clipping there if i turn off that that was the original that we had and that very quick luminosity increase has lightened the mood of the image if we look at how it was originally it was quite somber the left hand side had the warm light and the luminosity the right hand side is somewhat dim if we think of that as an emotional gradient we've got all the energy and happiness on the left hand side and it's a bit somber and melancholy on the right hand side by increasing the luminosity on the right there we lift the mood of the photograph so there's two things that are going to be our main assets here the first is the combination of elements that are sympathetic to what it is that we're trying to articulate images like this are typically associated with calmness kind of spirituality kind of an ethereal nature heavenly almost they should certainly become we should certainly be relaxing we think about japanese gardens we think about zen we think about meditation we think about sitting cross-legged in the mountains you know this type of art is associated with spirituality to a certain extent so what we're doing here is we're looking at elements that are complementary to what it is we're trying to articulate so first of all we've got fog the second thing is we have no wind so if you think about those two things in isolation wind is a chaotic energetic element it whips up waves it blows clouds it makes trees and vegetation rustle it certainly creates ripples on water so it's a disruptive element it can be soothing in its own way but essentially from a compositional point of view it's going to be counter-intuitive to what it is we're trying to say so we have calmness we have fog we have simple elements so we have in this particular composition reeds which are obviously not moving in the wind and in the distance there we've just got this very gentle hillside which in itself is a soothing element there are no hard lines in this photograph any of the photographs i'm making there are no hard things everything's gentle everything's soft everything's diffused and the light in the back there is starting to warm up as we approach the end of the day so the light is naturally very very soft it's quite pink it's a little bit warm in some areas but it's quite cool in others and it's definitely going to be one of these photographs that once we get it into lightroom we can use those cool and warm tones but desaturate everything so everything's very pastel and we don't want anything loud in this i've talked many times in processing before volume control contrast detail clarity all of those things black points and white points won't be coming into this photography we are talking about subtle so a stunning place beautiful beautiful moment the loch is partially frozen there's ice forming up underneath all the reeds it's a truly stunning place in beautiful conditions so yes it is very zen-like and very calming and yeah i'm definitely getting my buddha face on now this is a another photograph of quite minimal elements and it takes a certain amount of conviction to photograph things like this because a lot of people are going to look at it as boring it's a repetitive pattern of elements here which are all these reeds dried dead reeds with a bit of ice underneath and then they've got this very diffused foggy trees in the background it like i said it takes a certain amount of conviction to put this out there into the world and say this is my work now the irony is when it comes to selling prints it's things like this that people put on their walls because they're reflective and you can live with this day by day because you see all sorts of different things in it every day there's more imagination required by the time you get to high impact contrasty photographs of dramatic scenes they can get a wee bit tiring after a while so these are are quite contemplative and these work beautifully if you want to start writing your own haikus or your own poetry to go alongside your photography i did this about four years ago where every photograph i produced i produced a poem to go along beside it and it was a very interesting time for me because the words that were forming in my mind as i was processing the images came out as a natural flow of natural rhythm metaphors similes uh visions of um of emotion would come through in in the poems uh so yeah there's a great correlation i think between what we see and what we feel and how we want to articulate those things and sometimes the photograph just isn't quite enough i love this type of photography i really do and whether it was the amount of time i spent in the himalaya or living in china that's had an influence on me or whether there's just a bit of me that likes simplicity and calmness and order and harmony i'm not entirely sure it's not really easy for me to say anymore i'm 54 years old and i'm kind of the product of an awful lot of living and one of the things i want to point out in places like this though composition is a distillation of our experience the way we see the world is big we see everything it's very easy for the world to be a very cluttered place there's nothing better than an 80 to 400 or a long lens to strip down the world into these tiny slices the shot i've got here at the moment just now with the mountain the point in the mountain on the right-hand side and just that solitary little group of trees down in the bottom left there's a harmony and the journey in there and i think this is the thing that simplified art is really good at doing is making very simple profound statements and in a world filled of shouting and complexity and arguing and bitterness and division i think if we can find harmony and beauty and simplicity when we're looking through the viewfinder of our lens or of our cameras rather that is quality living and i think we can't underestimate how important in this day and age quality living creative living can actually be for our state of well-being and these photographs make me feel calm being here makes me feel calm and talking to you folks about this makes me feel a degree of hope that i hope that i can share some of this enthusiasm i have for this style of living and it doesn't okay we're living in this beautiful place but there's beauty in many many places that we can find quiet and calm it's another example of seeing how the contrast reduction caused by the fog has such a profound impact on the way photographs feel and the types of things that we can articulate them with the image of the left very foggy very diffused very low contrast very little color it's a cool photograph the fog was diffusing a lot of that light and making it feel quite cool as the fog started to recede down the lock the mountain there in the background started to come through it becomes a much more dynamic thing in the frame the light warmed up as sunset was starting to come the fog sinks down into the bottom of the frame these are very gently processed i've hardly done anything to them at all but the one on the left the simplification of the trees and the very subtle depth of the of the pointy mountain in the background oddly enough i kind of prefer it even though the one on the right has more contrast more impact and more warmth to it i somehow like that simplicity on the left hand side it's a no-brainer to say which one would be more popular on social media just because it's more colorful and more contrasty so we've actually finished making the video and the the thing about making those types of videos is that you're very focused on the conditions as they are and we had all this fog and it was really amazing and what's happening now as we get nearer to sunset is that the fog is starting to dissipate and move down the lock again and it's opened up this area that we started the video on and if you remember looking back to the start we just had this single line of trees in the fog kind of just isolated in space and what we've got now is is we've got these layers of contrast again and it's much more a big landscape and it's very very beautiful but it it's got a completely different i'm going to use the word emotional fingerprint to the previous images that we'll be making very very different we've got blacker blacks we've got deeper shadows we've got more contrast we've got more dynamic light it's a very very different type of photograph and this just goes on i think to emphasize the point i've made so far in this in this video is that the photographs that we make are they have their own wishes they have their own um message in them and it's up to us to be respectful to those messages quiet and calm means quiet and calm contrasty and dynamic is saying something else so uh yeah it's it's a it's a it's an artistic creative pastime for all nuances of experience and landscape so i just wanted to say how blessed i'm feeling that i get to do this for a living now if there was ever a change of vibe it was on this particular day uh as you can see there in the film we had finished the video and we had come back to where we'd started and these are the trees that we saw in the very first photograph almost invisible in a big blanket of fog now as the mist has headed off down the lock again we're in this situation we've got this beautiful grand calm vista of uh beautiful serenity but it's very high contrast we've got the setting sun off to the left there so we've got dark moody shadows this is a single exposure with the nikon d850 the dynamic range is all contained there was no clipped shadows no clipped highlights and it's a very beautiful photograph now the irony is that these types of photographs are the things that stir our emotions the most we see high contrast we see atmosphere we see beautiful colors the 16x9 panel format gives this feeling of expansiveness and grandeur these are all the things i talk about in the psychology of how we put our images out there into the world people respond to expansiveness people respond to warm cool color transitions people respond to contrast people respond to the geometry and the atmosphere that's in our photographs so this photograph of all the photographs that i made on this particular day and if i just put them all up on the screen there together we can see how the brain is going to zone in on the one with the most contrast so we see this one this one stands out this one stands out and actually the reed stands out the two with the least contrast which are the first photo on the left there and this photograph on the right there those two are the most zen-like in a way they're very calm they're very contemplative they're very introspective they're not loud they're not shouting they're not making strong opinions it's delicate and thoughtful the images with more contrast are more impactful more forceful louder and obviously people engage with contrast these types of things are hugely important and how we present our photographs has such a massive impact on how viewers perceive them but we cannot throw everything into the melting pot of external judgment we have to understand that we can make quiet photographs to say quiet things to ourselves they're more like in our thoughts if we choose to share those inner thoughts with other people we have to be very selective about who we decide to share them with so once again thank you very much for watching i hope you find my ranting and raving about the inner zen of landscape photography to be of value to you thanks for watching tune in again next week for more expressive landscape photography bye for now we're finished now cut cut [Music] you

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 8,496

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, Landscape photography, how to, tutorials, composition, educate, expressive photography, barriers, vision, experience, tutorial, lesson, be better, motivation, inspiration, inspire, Luminosity, Processing, Understanding light, Light, engagement, better photographs, landscape, mountains, process, meaning, emotion, personal development, Adobe, Nikon, creativity, KASE, abstraction, local, development, atmosphere, Scotland

Id: 3qLokBkKUXw

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021