A big thanks to Petapixel and Medium Format Magazine for recently featuring my “Back Roads of Americana” Project.
“The Back Roads of Americana photo series is a modernist masterpiece” Click on link below to read 👇🏻
"How it Was Shot"
"The ordinary world needed to be portrayed
with a substantial narrative as I wanted the
viewer to look deeper into the photograph.
That meant contradicting the traditional
"rules" and techniques, and not being
constrained creatively by photography's
current social media motivated,
creativity killing popularity trap"
See more in this months ELEMENTS Landscape Photography Magazine.
Landscape Photography Awards. No Thanks!
As of this year 2020 I will be reducing the amount of photography competitions I enter but especially within the oversaturated “landscape photography” genre. Most landscape photography competitions don’t interest me anymore, bring nothing new to the table in terms of representing the diverse subject matter within the landscape, and, generally speaking, are just money making exercises most of which are judged largely preferencing pretty picture visual aesthetics over anything that is likely to convey a thought provoking or substantial narrative. The landscape photography genre in general really struggles with recognising diverse subject matter within our environment and the idea that “the best” landscape images must present as a “epic” scenes of grandeur photographed in “good light” with plenty of “wow” factor is just a narrow minded perspective and does nothing for the genre. Unfortunately, the “enter as many as you can” mentality associated with many of these landscape competitions just promotes mass produced generic mediocrity and cliche, and subsequently for the new entrant holds very little value educationally unless constructive critique is given, which it rarely is as there are simply too many entries. If anything it just encourages the new entrant to just replicate the winning formulaic styles or trophy shots in the future which might be good for shallow Instagram “likes,” but is hardly productive for creating a long term, credible image portfolio. Sadly, the term “award winning photographer” holds very little credence today in an era where landscape photography competitions are a dime a dozen, and so is the commonly seen, often cliche photographs that typically dominate these awards. The landscape photography genre is extremely popular but it needs to evolve away from simple popularity motivated pretty aesthetics and into something more meaningful, and so does the somewhat hollow criteria used for judging these landscape competitions. Photography for me never has, and never will be, about trying to please someone else’s subjective tastes or preferences, but sadly, success in landscape photography competitions these days will largely depend on who can “wow” the judges typically with a spectacularly “epic” pretty picture, while leaving perhaps the most important elements of a photograph behind. A thought provoking story, a message, or even something meaningful.