In my post yesterday, I said landscape photography is an exercise of frustration. You can see some of the Grand Canyon pictures are flat because they were taken in the early afternoon. The harshness of the light and the angle of the sun simply couldn't produce a decent picture. The traditional good landscape pictures are invariably taken during the "golden" hours, in photography, that's the hour after sunrise and before sunset when the sun is near the horizon. The only time the dynamic range of the soft reflected light can be captured by the camera (with a relatively narrow dynamic range of about 10 stops, or 2 to the 10th, or 1,000:1 ratio). Sometimes, a good landscape photographer is as much a technician as an an artist.
A few years ago, I bought a book called The Inner Game of Outdoor Photography by Galen Rowell after the famous photographer died in a plane crash with his wife. In the book, he said something like you should say something in your photos, and it is the photographer's duty to convey what he sees. Then he drove home the point by pointing out the very best tourist picture taken, ever. I had to agree when he said it was the picture of the Earth rising behind the moon taken by an Apollo astronaut (using a fixed focus, point-and-shoot Hasselblad).
Photography is a silly hobby that appeals to technical geeks, buying stuff and over analyzing everything is 99% of the online photography forums. I'm part of that silliness as well, but I have to admit Galen Rowell is right, the picture has to say something. 文以載道, indeed.
You can find the Earthrise picture from NASA and this is Galen Rowell's Mountain Light website.
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