In photographing the grand landscape, the scale is tremendous. Photographs can include many, many miles from horizon to horizon. To change a viewpoint significantly, you have to pack up the camera and travel miles. You travel miles to change the viewpoint, and then in the final positioning of the camera, the success of the composition is decided in the fractions of millimeters in the viewfinder. Just where did you place the horizon? How many fractions of a millimeter will that rock extend into the photograph? How everything fits into the photograph is now measured in fractions of millimeters. In those little details lay the success of the photograph. I still miss the large ground glass of a view camera. At least they were big enough to measure the image in the viewfinder in fractions of inches! But those days are now gone.
But what hasn’t changed is the success of a photograph being influenced by incredibly small changes in the things that we as photographers do. We photographers still confront and solve these (and other) technical and aesthetic problems every time we pick up a camera. Success has always been and always will be in how we handle the details.
We show people the photographs where we successfully solved the problem in our viewfinder. The rest of the time, those files never make it out of Lightroom.
One of the issues in landscape photography is answering the question, "Where is that?" My Panasonic G85 doesn't have GPS tracking, but my iPhone does. All I have to do is remember to make an iPhone happy snap when I want to identify the location. Fortunately, I did so when I constructed a stitched panoramic photograph of Big Indian Creek near Steens Mountain in Southeastern Oregon.
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