Pictures of the modern drainage of fields illustrate how unnatural farmland is, despite it's acceptance as bucolically timeless in the eyes of the general public. Fields are fields and crops grow in them. In fact they are industrialised and managed. It's just that this is all hidden underground. Maybe the picture above makes this point in a subtle way which requires the photograph to be read before it can be understood rather better than the one below which spells things out more literally.
I would have liked to get closer but the lack of a longer lens prevented that from where I was, and I couldn't get physically closer because of a couple of fences and a ditch! I've yet to find out why the ditches in this area run a rust brown. It makes for colourful and perplexing images though.
Whenever I look at my photographs of the landscape they never look like the ones I see in photo magazines or on photography forums or blogs. Even when I carefully compose a picture, as in the one above (believe it or not!) I choose views which fall outside the widely accepted formulae for making landscape pictures. I think it's because I'm as much interested in what is in the picture as how it is constructed.
Just the other day I saw a picture of a sandy cove with some people enjoying the sunshine and the sea posted on a forum. It looked a bit of an obvious view but nice enough. I felt the people gave it some scale and their footprints showed how they had got where they were. Someone took it upon themselves to edit out the people to improve the shot. This is what I find so wrong with the aesthetic which populist photography follows. It's an aesthetic of idealised romanticism that doesn't want to say anything or try to make any point other than 'this is pretty'. So here's a picture of some soil and some water.
I've been taking my new compact around town with me recently and liking the way it handles. More importantly I like the way the pictures it makes look.
I still find annoying frustrations with the whole compact camera thing, though. The different native aspect ratios of compacts and DSLRs is one such. You can switch this compact to shoot in 3:2 aspect ratio - but only in JPEG. Why? One of my DSLRs can be set to shoot in 5:4 aspect ratio in both JPEG and raw, but not in 4:3. When using both systems to work on one project means there has to be some guesswork involved if trying to compose for future cropping. At least with the micro four thirds Panasonic I had it would shoot raw in 3:2. This must be a simple firmware issue. And quite why the thing has to be sluggish to respond is another bafflement. Ho hum.
That aside the only other niggles I have are, I guess, connected to the lens quality and the size of the sensor. There's a lack of dynamic range and a strong tendency for purple fringing, plus quite a bit of distortion which was evident in the railings above. Aside from the dynamic range, which I overcome by deliberately underexposing to preserve highlight detail, the fringing and distortion can be easily corrected. A3 prints look good enough after a bit of tweaking to me.
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