Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/07/22

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Subject: [Leica] Re: landscapes and people
From: Ken Wilcox <wilcox@tir.com>
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 06:53:52 -0400

Robert:

I share your affliction. In all the years I've been doing photography
(about 40) I've taken exactly ONE decent landscape shot. Not that I haven't
tried! I've wasted more film on this activity than I'd like to admit.

People shots also seem to be my forte. I can usually get nice activity and
portraits with little thought and using just about any equipment. Go figure.

Ken Wilcox

At 10:14 +0200 7/22/0, a fine scholar, Robert Appleby wrote:

>I've been looking at a few luggers' websites and noticing that quite a few
>of them are full of landscape shots. For myself, I find it impossible to
>photograph anything that doesn't have a person in it, preferably within a
>couple of meters of the front of the lens. Nothing else really gets me
>going. This is a real weakness of my photography - one of the reasons I
>want to do panoramics is to break out of this. So do other people feel
>equally bound to or limited by one genre or type of subject? I find
>landscape incredibly dificult - I can spend ages looking at a beautiful
>scene (preferably with a g+t in one hand and my feet up on a stool) - but I
>can seldom get a coherent picture out of it. It's relatively easy, I
>suspect, to make the human face/behaviour interesting or arresting,
>compared to landscape.
>One of the reasons I'm impressed by people like Eggleston or Ghirri or
>Adams (not Ansel!) who can make a powerful picture of a quiet,
>unexceptional landscape. Inerestingly, all of them use normal lenses and
>normal perspective (as I recall - it's been a while since I looked at any
>of their pictures).
>Rob.
>Robert Appleby
>V. Bellentani 36
>41100 MO
>Italy
>tel. (+39) 059 303436
>mob. (+39) 0348 336 7990


- ----
Ken Wilcox                                Carolyn's Personal Touch Portraits
					  preferred---> <wilcox@tir.com>
 		      			  <kwilcox@gfn.org>