Types of Landscape Photography

I dislike using the word type.  It makes my work sound so typical.  No artist wants their work to be typical.  Yet for lack of a better word, I want to share a little about the way I often view landscape photographs, in two types.  

First, let's go over the painterly type of landscape photography.  While looking at a stack of my prints, a professor of mine once commented, "Your pictures look very painterly.  As if they are landscape paintings."  I agreed.  Art often transcends the medium with which it was created.  I think the biggest reason he would draw that conclusion about my images is that I use a painterly eye for composition.  Arranging the elements of a landscape in the frame of my camera is similar to the way a painter would arrange the same elements on a canvas.  An artist wants to keep the viewer interested in an photograph or painting by drawing the eyes from element to element, enjoying all the details.  


Next, we'll go over the experiential type of landscape photography.  You might notice that the second photograph does not include all the landscape elements that the first does.  The light, fog, and dew on the webs and the grass are the same but this image is considering just one thing, the rays of light shining through the fog and catching the land.     Highlighting this experience, this thing that is happening with the light is experiential landscape photography.  


To illustrate these painterly and experiential types of landscape photography here are two photographs to compare and or contrast.  These photographs were taken at the same time and in the same place.

painterly

experiential

Make sure you click on the images to view them at a larger scale.