Interpreting the Landscape
We hike in the backcountry often and take a lot of photos. Every image we take is an attempt to capture part of the experience we have. Our personal impressions are rarely captured in a photo. In the first stage, we selectively choose (frame) the scene, including or excluding subjects or objects. We pay a lot of attention to exposure, and we are mindful of focus, getting the horizon level, and various composition issues. We take the photo with hopes of a good image and we often get something close to what we wanted, but there is often the need to tweak the image digitally too. When the photo does not reflect what we saw we want to restore it to what we remember, but all memories are also biased by our own emotional response to that experience too, so the “tweaking” sometimes reflects what we felt as well as what we remember visually.
We can choose to go beyond fixing an image to interpreting it artistically. Using some digital techniques, we can carefully alter the image to reflect a more emotional and artistic feeling about the scene. It is not easy to find the right images and it takes experience, time, and effort to produce these interpretations, a few of which are shared here from recent hikes:
