Landscape photography, alternate realities

Landscape photography is a fascinating discipline where you can experiment with a lot of techniques. You can choose to compose your pictures horizontally, vertically or go for a panorama. But with a tripod and few creative filters, new dimensions can be added to the scene, and produce something which can be quite far from the reality.

The scene in question was a metallic waterer standing in a fresh field of grass. It was a cloudy day with some sunshine and a strong wind which is plenty to play with.

As an exercise, I took a series of pictures from the same spot (give or take few meters) using a Canon powershot G9 and the following accessories: tripod, neutral density filter Hoya ND400, infrared filter Hoya R72, circular polarizing filter. Processing was done with Adobe photoshop CS3, Lightroom 2 and Photomatix. Please click on the pictures to see a larger version.


Photo 1: panoramic view (two pictures stiched together)



Photo 2:vertical view 



Photo 3: vertical view, HDR processing



Photo 4: long exposure (15 seconds, ND400 neutral density filter + G9 internal ND filter on)


Photo 5: long exposure (6 seconds, ND400 neutral density filter)



Photo 6: long exposure infrared (8 seconds, R72 infrared filter)



Photo 7: long exposure infrared (1 second, R72 infrared filter)



Photo number 4 is my favorite because it depicts the best this windy day of spring but I like also the alternate reality of number 7. These pictures are not very stock oriented, however it will interesting to follow them to see which ones get the most downloads.....