This week, Amy challenges us to share our landscape photos. Well, as a photographer who pretends to have some expertise in this area, that’s a tough challenge. I’ll give it my best shot and share some of my favorites. You can read Amy’s entire challenge post here. One of the most difficult aspects of landscape photography is trying to “sandwich” an enormous 3-D visage into a small, 2-D screen image, or even a 40×60-inch canvas. One of the ways I try to improve on the 2-D image is to create a wider screen panorama. Sometimes it’s only a little wider than the maximum frame width of my camera as in the example view of the Blue Ridge Mountains above. Other times, I’ve chosen to make the image wider as this view of a storm over the White Tank Mountains. The storm, obviously too vast for a standard width image, needed a panoramic treatment.

One of my favorite images attempts to capture the living landscape, a view of the Bosque Del Apache and the nearby Magdalena Mountains.

Even a cellphone can do an amazing job of capturing the vastness of a landscape as shown by this Cellpic Sunday image I posted on February 3, 2019. The image, captured on a Samsung S7 cellular phone, was enhanced with Lightroom, Aurora 2019, and Luminar 2018, demonstrating that modern processing tools can bring out the smallest of details in an image captured with a tiny camera sensor.

As the great photographers of the twentieth century showed us, color isn’t a requisite for a landscape photo. I don’t pretend to put myself in that class of photographers, but I do find that I enjoy the conversion of digital color to black-and-white. Sometimes the lack of color brings out something in the image that color masks. This shot is from Canyonlands National Park in Utah.

The image below was captured near Page, Arizona. It’s a smaller view of a landscape, one that has seen the effects of wind erosion over centuries. This image I called “Stone Wave” demonstrates that the wind can make waves of sand that appear to be petrified in time, and indeed can’t be easily moved or modified, yet centuries from now, I expect it will look different from the day I took the image.

With this post, I’m trying something new. Since I upgraded my FLICKR subscription to “Pro” recently, I decided to link these photos to a public album on Flickr. If you click on any of the images above, you will be redirected to a Flickr album that features all of the above images in 4K resolution. Once there, click on any image and you should then be able to scroll through the album. If you like that presentation mode, please let me know. It’s a bit more work to create the 4K images, upload them to Flickr and then modify the image links here. I hope you enjoy this week’s photo challenge.

John Steiner