What Landscape Painting Can Teach Photographers

By Geoff Wittig

How do you convey the beauty of the natural world, both subtle and grand, using nothing more than microscopic dots of colored pigment or grains of silver on a sheet of paper? This is the fundamental problem of landscape photography. With more than 15 years of study and a bunch of workshops under my belt, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the essentials. But I've recently tried my hand at painting landscapes, and it's been a revelation. Landscape painting has many of the same technical and aesthetic challenges as photography, and it's been around a lot longer—since at least the 1600s in its present form. The vocabulary used by painters, and the often elegant solutions they have come up with, have something to offer the interested landscape photographer.

Compressing the virtually limitless range of luminance seen in nature down to the comparatively miniscule dynamic range of the photographic negative, and then to the even smaller range of printing paper, all without fatal damage to the image, is the fundamental problem of classical black and white landscape photography. With the Zone System, Ansel Adams developed a vocabulary (zones, values, placement) that clarified and defined the specific problem of contrast distribution, thereby making it amenable to technical and æsthetic solution. But painters had been dealing with this problem for centuries before Niépce and Daguerre. There is a strictly limited range of values between the darkest available black and the brightest lead- or titanium-white paint, analogous to the total range between Dmax and paper white. How have painters dealt with this challenge? By deliberately allocating the available contrast "budget" in a manner that serves the painting's æsthetic goals.

Ansel Adams, Clearing Winter Storm

One widely used technique involves starting with a "grisaille," or monotone under-painting. The range from shadow to highlight is carefully apportioned until the painting's value foundation is perfect, orchestrating the path taken by the viewer’s eye to the intended center of interest. Only then are color and detail added to the painting. Ansel Adams explicitly used darkroom techniques to achieve precisely the same goal. In Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Adams spelled out precisely how he did this for "Clearing Winter Storm." Overall contrast was altered, edge burning applied, and elements darkened or lightened to conduct the viewer's eye to the glowing tendril of Bridal Veil Falls. I find it more than a little ironic that Adams endlessly ridiculed the painterly ambitions of the pictorialist photographers, while employing classic painters' tricks in his own darkroom.

Painters also discovered a few tools to effectively stretch the value scale a bit. When a light element is placed against a dark one, or vice versa, the apparent value of each is exaggerated. (Think sunlit face in a dark doorway.) This chiaroscuro technique is central to much of the drama in paintings from Rembrandt onward. Another technique is to substitute color for value. Painters are limited to the same 5 to 7 stop range from shadow to highlight that photographic printers have, but the range of available colors is much greater. Some of the limited available contrast range may be consumed depicting (say) the highlight-to-shadow transition of a cylindrical tree trunk, curving away from the viewer. But part of that transition can be illustrated with a warm to cool color shift, which conveys an impression of "roundness" or volume, while saving a bit of contrast that can be used elsewhere for more differentiated shadows. Next time you see one of Mary Cassatt's pastel paintings, check out the chubby arms of her toddler subjects. She used this trick all the time.

Asher Durand

Another problem for both painting and photography is attempting to depict brilliant transmitted light with the limited reflective gamut of paint, silver, or inkjet pigment. Hudson River School painter Asher Durand addressed this dilemma in his "Letters on Landscape Painting", a fascinating set of nine essays serialized in The Crayon, an art periodical, in 1855. Durand noted that one could never directly reproduce the glow of a shaft of sunlight bursting through the clouds using paint on canvas. But by intentionally using a warmer color for the sunbeam against a darker and cooler backdrop, the impression of its brilliance could be emphasized. We're doing some of this when we apply an S-curve in Photoshop: increasing the relative tonal distance between values on the part of the curve that is now steeper. But painters are free to apply a subtle color shift as well, to accentuate the impression of light. They've known for centuries that juxtaposing complementary colors against each other—blue against orange, red against green—will markedly increase the apparent saturation and impact of each. That's why those salmon-pink clouds in front of a deep blue sky at sunrise are so intense: the colors almost vibrate against each other. Knowing how this works, you can consciously use it to increase the color impact of your photographs—without thoughtlessly resorting to the saturation or vibrance slider in Photoshop.

Color balance is a technical challenge that was known and effectively addressed hundreds of years before auto white-balance or Adobe Camera Raw. Painters have long recognized the importance of color temperature to a convincing rendition of a natural scene. In fact the sophistication of painters' understanding of color temperature tends to be several notches higher than that of photographers. Recognizing that the light illuminating a subject is (for example) fairly warm is necessary, but not sufficient. The resulting color temperature of shadows will be cool, and accurately portraying the color temperature of each increment from shadow to highlight, relative to each other, is central to making a painted scene look right. The converse also tends to be true: subjects illuminated by a cool light source will tend to have proportionately warm shadows. I had always wondered why I so disliked landscape photographs subjected to gratuitous overuse of a warming filter. Now I know: the shadows are warmed as much as the highlights, and it just looks...wrong to my eyes. The best discussion of this issue I have found is in Richard Schmid’s wonderful book Alla Prima. Schmid suggests training yourself to accurately see the color temperature of the light on your subject with this exercise: place a sheet of white paper in the same light, then place a neutrally colored opaque object on the paper. Now look carefully at the color of the lit side of the object, and of its shadow. The difference in the color temperature can be striking, once you know to look for it.

A decade ago, we were pretty much stuck with the color balance of the film we used, modified by any physical filters we applied over the lens. Color correction tools in the darkroom were clumsy and limited, unless you were masochistic enough to attempt dye transfer printing. With digital image editing tools, color is today infinitely malleable.

This all too often means the neon "digital Velvia" look so prevalent on Flickr, but it can also mean carefully adjusting highlight and shadow color temperature to better emulate what we really see. I find myself using the Photoshop eyedropper to check the RGB numbers of neutrals in my shadows and highlights, and gently adjusting them if they don’t make sense with the prevailing light. It's a subtle effect, but the results look better, more realistic, to my eye. Painters spend a lot of time thinking about color harmony and the "palette" of a painting. When you can choose from dozens of tubes of paint and mix any combination you want, it’s easy to concoct an unrealistic or even absurd set of colors, so it's essential to think through what you're doing. Careful study of natural light and plein air painting—quickly executed paintings done outdoors to accurately capture the true colors of nature—are the traditional approaches. Having to deliberately choose the colors you're using to paint a landscape encourages you to consciously consider their emotional and æsthetic impact. As photographers we tend to take what nature throws our way; but once you start thinking about the impact of the color balance or the "palette" of your image, you can start to play with it for creative or artistic effect.

Conveying the illusion of vast depth and distance on a flat two-dimensional surface is another challenge shared by landscape painters and photographers, and again painters surely have something to teach us. The Hudson River school artists of mid-19th century America produced exquisitely detailed, giant scale landscape paintings that created an astonishing illusion of depth. Reproductions are indispensible, but this effect really has to be seen in person. If any museum within your reach has a large painting by Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Church et al, by all means go see it. Near my home, the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York, has Bierstadt's "Mount Whitney." It’s mind-blowing; you can almost walk into the painting. (It’s hard to imagine in our jaded age, but the unveiling of these paintings were major events in the 1850s and '60s. Crowds would line up for hours and pay for tickets to get a few seconds in front of Church’s "Niagara" [below] or "Heart of the Andes.") The Hudson River painters used every perceptual trick available: highly detailed foreground elements, diminishing texture from near to far, overlapping elements, linear perspective, S-curves, atmospheric perspective, color temperature shifts, dramatic lighting, strategically placed shadows, animals or people for scale...anything that could accentuate the impression of depth and space. Careful study of such paintings is time well spent. Most if not all of these techniques are applicable to photographs. A few moments of thought when composing and capturing an image can add greatly to the sense of depth, as can carefully judged printing to accentuate these elements.

Frederic Church, Niagara

I won't go into detail on the subject of composition, except to say that for painters it's a very explicit proposition, because you're starting from a blank canvas. Photographers are instead editing the entire world down to the contents of a frame. The viewer's eye is immediately drawn to the brightest light tone, the most saturated color, the sharpest edge, and the most immediately identifiable subject on the canvas. The arrangement of shapes, values, colors and lines on the canvas can lead the viewer's eye to the painting's intended center of attention...or they can lead it out of the frame to the next painting further along the wall. Painters deliberately design their work to guide the viewer’s eye. As photographers we can do the same.

Finally, anyone involved in digital inkjet printing over the last decade is probably aware of the issue of metamerism, or, more correctly, metameric failure. The first affordable pigment inket printer to offer good print longevity was Epson’s 2000p, ten years ago. If, like me, you owned one of these, you know just how God-awful the resulting prints were when it came to metameric failure. Prints that were very nice under tungsten lights turned a ghastly vivid green under daylight. Those that looked decent under halogen lights turned markedly red-orange under tungsten lights. No amount of profiling or adjusting would solve the problem. Each subsequent generation of pigment inkjet has been less prone to metameric failure than the one before, and the current models are pretty good. But painters have this problem too! Paintings executed in both oil and acrylic can have significant issues with metameric failure, particularly with more translucent/transparent paints. But you won’t read anguished diatribes on the subject in art magazines. Instead, it’s understood that paintings should be displayed under controlled conditions: carefully lit from above with appropriate daylight balanced halogens. Problem solved—no wailing or gnashing of teeth. A related problem unique to painting involves the quality of the light falling on the painter's palette and canvas. If a painter has direct sunlight illuminating her palette while mixing and applying paint, the resulting painting is guaranteed to look much too dark and too saturated when displayed under typical indoor lighting conditions. That’s why painters use those goofy-looking umbrellas outdoors, to keep direct sun off their palette.

Geoff -

Suggested Resources

Alla Prima: Everything I Know About Painting by Richard Schmid, Stove Prairie Press, 2004

There are countless "how to" books out there for amateur painters, but this one is honestly miles above the rest. A revered teacher and widely admired realist painter, Schmid is also articulate and thoughtful. The book features a shrewd analysis of how we see, from an artist's perspective. It provides a remarkably clear-eyed approach to rendering the subject in paint precisely as you intend it to look. It also presents a sophisticated, yet straightforward approach to recognizing color temperature, accurately mixing color, and putting it down on the canvas. Schmid looks upon photographs with a jaundiced eye, accepting them as memory aids regarding subject detail, but rejecting them as sources of color information due to their limitations compared to the trained eye. He also reserves withering contempt for anyone tracing a photograph rather than drawing a subject freehand.

Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting by John F. Carlson, Dover Publications, 1973

First published in 1958, it's still a terrific resource, and available dirt cheap from Dover. Carlson was a widely admired teacher and painter, and this book presents an incisive analysis of how light really works in the natural world. He effortlessly explains the distribution of shadow/highlight values on both cloudy and clear days, and his discussion of why trees look the way they do against the sky is worth the price of admission all by itself. Carlson taught that the entire range of contrast in nature could be described in visual "shorthand" using only four values: bright sky, lit ground, darker distant hills, and darkest nearby trees. This sounds stupid when described, yet for painting it perversely works very well indeed.

Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape by Linda S. Ferber, D. Giles Ltd., 2007

This book was widely available just last year, but its price is already escalating wildly on Amazon. It’s well worth seeking out if you can get it for a reasonable price. The reproductions are very nice, with some enlarged details. Durand was the acknowledged master of detailed forest interiors and trees. The appendix includes the complete text of "Letters on Landscape Painting." These nine articles, originally published in 1855, provide perceptive lessons in painting from nature. Durand stressed the importance of spending a lot of time outdoors carefully studying nature to understand how light works. Though largely self-taught, he had a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the optical and perceptual tricks required to create depth and light on canvas. He explains how amplifying the warm temperature of a painted shaft of sunlight will make it "glow," and how exaggerating the height of a mountain can overcome the limitations of paint on canvas, becoming the "lie that tells the truth."

The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision by Linda S. Ferber, The New York Historical Society, 2009

Simply a beautiful book, with lovely reproductions and incisive discussion of the history of this group of American landscape painters and their place in the broader world of art. Still available new.

Frederic Church by John K. Howat, Yale University Press, 2005

Church was the most successful and widely known of the mainstream Hudson River painters, and this book includes excellent reproductions and details together with an incisive biography and artistic assessment. Grab it if you can find it; I saw one at my local Borders last month, but its price on Amazon is already escalating into the stratosphere.

-

The Hudson River School by Louise Minks, Barnes & Noble/Brompton, 1999

An older book, this contains a very nice selection of reproductions representing the entire range of this group of painters, including the "Rocky Mountain" painters like Bierstadt and Moran and their Luminist descendents. Available used for reasonable prices. Books on the Hudson River school and their Western/Rocky Mountain and Luminist descendants go in and out of print quickly. Any books on these painters with good reproductions are worth having, just to study their remarkable work. They've taught me more about the convincing rendition of space and depth than any photography book I've ever seen.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Jan Kusters: "I do landscape, both in painting and in photography. Both have their own strong points, and from both I learn things I use in the other discipline. After two years of 'mucking about' with photographs I took in Norway, things only started to work when I decided to use the same 'drama' in my prints as I did in my paintings.

"I have always loved Adams way of choosing his values in a print like a painter would do. What he teaches basically boils down to 'do not accept what a camera, film and paper do on their own, make your own decisions and make them do what you envision.' As for his view on photographers trying to make their pictures like paintings, I think he meant something different; do not try to make a painting using a camera. If you want a painting, get a brush and paint. But both are flat objects on a wall, the decisions one makes, are the same....

"As for the freedom to edit reality as a painter; as a plein-air painter I can only say that this freedom comes at the expense of very cold fingers and regularly soaked clothes when painting a Norwegian fjord in dramatic weather. Taking a picture takes me 10 minutes, a painting takes me over an hour...."

Both: Hamnoy, Lofoten, Norway, by Jan Kusters

Comments

[Paul W. Luscher]

There is one other advantage painters have over photographers--that is, they can exclude unwanted elements from their landscapes, which is a little harder for the photographer.

I am referring to the many times I have seen a good landscape shot spoiled by--among other things--phone poles, power towers, ugly buildings (i.e., the metal storage sheds favored by farmers these days), roads, cars, and my particular perennial curse, jet trails in the sky.....

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

Goeff, thank you so much for explanations that reveal the obvious, albeit missing truth: most teachings of the Zone systems have overemphasized its MEANS to the expense of its actual GOALS.

I took me a while to figure out why would I place this thing on Zone III, then that one on Zone IX, and that other one on Zone VI. Why would I do that? The day I figured out that Adams was in fact painting with the resources of photographs, i.e. trying to nudge his tools into the correct light/grey/dark tone on paper, my girlfriend was worried I fell down, given the amount of expletives I eructed upon such a realization...

That said, I also want to share my favourite quotation about Zonies and the Stieglitz school, from Berenice Abbott: “These latter-day pictorialists did not know that they were pictorialists. They were what I can only call, for lack of a better word, the advanced or super-pictorial school. The individual picture, like a painting, was the thing.” (From the essay "It Has to Walk Alone", 1950).

Abbott's words where the first one who made me realize that all the Pictorialism-bashing was 1) completely misguided, given the amount of incredible work done in that so-called "style" and 2) utterly oblivious to the beam in their eyes for pointing to the straw in the others' eyes.

The difference between the Pictorialisms and the so-called "Straights" is more or less the same difference between the Symbolists/Pre-Raphaelites and the Modernist painters.

Abbott raises in my opinion a very valid question: can photography really "walk alone" and not perpetually pay tribute to painting? In terms of techniques, they obviously share a lot of baggage, since they are both visual arts on reflective surfaces, and unless you are absolutely dedicated to the dubious claim that a photograph is always more "true" than painting, I don't personally think photography can fully divorce itself from painting, pictorially speaking, even if photographs have brought incredibly interesting innovations in the field of visual arts.

[Ken Tanaka]

An excellent essay, Geoff! I am always delighted on the rare occasions when someone takes the time to bring insights from other art disciplines into the photography sphere. Your notes, and suggestions for additional reading, are spot-on.

Personally, truth be told, I spend far more (10x) time in my museum's classical galleries than in its photographic or contemporary galleries. The lessons to be learned from the best of hundreds of years of painters are more instructive, at least for me, than from 170 years of photographers.

You tagged many of the little topics that I so often think about when looking at paintings; specifically how the artist used their palette to create illusions of depth and light. How underlayment was often used to establish chrominance and luminance platforms. Using shifts in color temperature to create more subtle and effective shifts in contrast, even locally. And on, and on...

But, alas, there is one very significant difference between painters and photographers. The painter is continuously working on the presentation medium. It becomes part of the work from the very first moment of creation. Not so for photography, particularly these days. Trial and error becomes the standard for the printing process. And let's not even talk about the fundamental differences between working on a light-emitting medium (usually) to create a presentation on a reflective medium!

But there's gold in them thar' paintin' hills for every type of photographer with the energy to go prospectin'. Your book recommendations represent some good starting maps.

[charwck]

Thank you for reccomending both Carlson and Schmidt. I do think that Carlson's book is classic useful both to painters and photographers. (Copies can be found used for a dollar), but its an immensely valuable resource for landscape artists. Schmid's impressionism is a little less transferable to photography in my mind, but is a terrific book.
You make a valuable point: artists often scorn photography, but just as practicing watercolor can improve ones oils, and vice versa, so the problems of photography can transfer into improved paintings, and also vice versa. Nice essay.

[Greg Brophy]

As a painter, now photographer, I would also suggest The Art Spirit by Robert Henri.

It's pretty much required reading as a painter.

[Jeff]

..."Carlson taught that the entire range of contrast in nature could be described in visual "shorthand" using only four values: bright sky, lit ground, darker distant hills, and darkest nearby trees."

Geoff, was it coincidental or intentional that the cover of Durand's book, in full view when reading this quote, perfectly illustrated the points? Great juxtaposition, one might say.

[Jan Kusters]

I do landscape, both in painting and in photography. Both have their own strong points, and from both I learn things I use in the other discipline. After 2 years of ‘mucking about’ with photographs I took in Norway, things only started to work when I decided to use the same ‘drama’ in my prints as I did in my paintings.

I have always loved Adams 'way' of choosing his values in a print like a painter would do. What he teaches basically boils down to ‘do not accept what a camera, film and paper do on their own, make your own decisions and make them do what you envision’. As for his view on photographers trying to make their pictures like paintings, I think he meant something different; do not try to make a painting using a camera. If you want a painting, get a brush and paint. But both are flat objects on a wall, the decisions one makes, are the same...

As for the freedom to edit reality as a painter; as plain aire painter I can only say that this freedom comes at the expense of very cold fingers and regularly soaked clothes when painting a Norwegian fjord in dramatic weather. Taking a picture takes me 10 minutes, a painting takes me over an hour...

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l72/oeoek/232-Hamnoy.jpg

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l72/oeoek/afd_prof_1397-bij-Hamnoy.jpg

Hamnoy, Lofoten, Norway

[xfmj]

Geoff recommends visiting any large landscape painting of the 19th century greats for learning how to depict light. For those of you in the Portland, OR area, there's now a brief opportunity to do so: Thomas Moran's huge (12ft wide) "Shoshone Falls on the Snake River" is on display at the Portland Art Museum until mid-January, on loan from Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa.

I was happy to see Geoff's "watch the light masters, even if painters" recommendation here. I saw Moran's painting around the time that TOP posted Eric Ogden's (painterly) photograph of Cormac McCarthy, and couldn't help but think that this particular portrait really supports that kind of advice.

There's a photography geek reward for those folk that go. Along with PAM's display of Moran they've mounted nearby a vast panorama photograph of the same falls--6ft wide or so, and apparently pieced together with some printing and retouching work--done by William Henry Jackson from around the same time. It too is quite a technical feat of a different sort, and worth the trip. And another artifact worth seeing up close, live.

[John Camp]

Well, this post managed to push about every one of my buttons, and I have a *lot* of buttons. I do some photography, and think about it and even write about it sometimes, but I'm primarily a painter and most of my non-news, non-family photography is done in support of painting. I would caution that books like Richard Schmid's are charming, and interesting, and contain some useful information, but *are more like photography how-to books* than they are useful sources of painting information. In my view, the problems of painting and photography are radically different, and other than the fact that they both involve two-dimensional somethings made to be looked at, there's not much relationship between them. Authors like Schmid tend to teach painting as photography...the application of techniques to a scene.

Screw it, I can't really get into this here; I'd have to write a book. I would suggest, though, that in addition to any of these painting books that people read -- I would agree that "The Art Spirit" is among the more useful of painting books -- that they also take a look at Roland Barthe's "Camera Lucida," and in particular, contemplate the fact that "the referent adheres," and the questions of time and composition.

And, I guess, specifically contemplate the differences between Ansel Adams, who, with his pals, were basically painters, and drove American photography into a ditch, and people like Robert Frank, who attempted to get us back on the road.

JC

[Swthomas55]

The ways in which painters can manipulate light was brought vividly home to me a few years ago in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. I walked into a gallery at one end, and at the other end was hung Monet's painting "Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son" (http://www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/tinfo_f?object=61379). I'd seen it in reproduction, but was not prepared for the impact of the real thing. The sky and the outlines of her dress just glowed. It was an amazing manipulation of my visual system by a master.

[Pete F.]

Terrific essay - really got me thinking. Also helped with my Christmas shopping (and Mike's wallet). I ordered the Schmid book for my daughter - a painter now getting into photography. Hope to borrow it from her.

[Steve willard]

Thank you Geoff for an enlightening essay. As someone who's Fine Art education is sorely lacking, I appreciate any suggestions which contributors of this blog offer. Incidently, as an example of how well the internet can be used to inform,(reference the previous topic) you're timing could not have been better.(I doubt this was an accident on Mike's part.)

[MHMG]

Goeff,

I can really appreciate the time and care that went into this wonderful essay. Well done, and thank you for including the great references. Color scientists have other terms for the visual "tricks" you addressed in this essay... lateral adaptation, simultaneous contrast, etc. But when all said and done, it takes considerable skill on the part of both artists and photographers to use these perceptual techniques successfully in their work.

[Tom V]

Wouldn't it be great to have a beer with an old master and discuss lighting? Strobist did.

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2008/12/beers-with-rembrandt.html

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2009/11/beers-with-vermeer.html

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2010/07/beers-with-edward-hopper.html

-Tom-

[Len Salem]

Paul Luscher remarks that he was "referring to the many times I have seen a good landscape shot spoiled by--among other things--phone poles, power towers, ugly buildings (i.e., the metal storage sheds favored by farmers these days), roads, cars, and my particular perennial curse, jet trails in the sky..... " whereas I would argue that the real contribution of photography as a visual art form is when the practitioner includes just these things. They are visual contrapoints to the artificially beautified world of many landscape photographers and painters which are both emotionally and intellectually significant. This connection with what is actually there, rather than what we would prefer to be there, is photography's great strength.

[erlik]

Geoff, great article. Here's a little addition just for the subject you said you wouldn't talk much about. :)

Landscape Composition Rules on Wet Canvas, a painting site. It taught me a lot.

[marino]

Enlightening! Thank you Geoff.
Got the "ALLA PRIMA" book through TOP's amazon link, Mike.

[Mitch Alland]

Interesting article on a subject that is, of course, extremely broad given the wide range of painting. My own approach, at least conceptually, is that the most immediate thing for photographers to learn from painting is composition, for the simple reason that painters can create form — putting down each element deliberately leaving out what they don't want, while photographers must search for it, frame it so to speak, although a photographer can change a lot by burning and dodging.

To learn about form, in the sense of the graphic design of a painting, the best way to look at paintings is to sketch them roughly to reveal their form and design. Interestingly in this respect, someone once sketched one of my photographs to analyze it, which you can see by clicking here, and the photograph itself is here.

I like a lot of what Geoff says in the article, but the painters that I'm interested in terms of photography are Cezanne, for his approach to form, to leaning horizons, for example, and to Gaugain and Matisse for their color, including "arbitrary color", and how this can be applied in, shall we say, in a post-modern context (using Artspeak shorthand). Easier said than done. The closest I've come is a series of photographs, a work-in-progress that still requires a lot of work, inspired the great Basquiat retrospective currently at the Musée de l'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris called Paris au rythme de Basquiat

—Mitch/Bangkok

[Geoff Wittig]

Robert Henri's Art Spirit is indeed an inspirational book of aphorisms and perceptual tips. Henri was one of the late 19th/early 20th century "Ash Can" school of urban realist painters, and a very influential teacher whose students included Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent.

Similar inspiration can be found in Hawthorne on Painting, a collection of observations and advice compiled by the widow of American impressionist Charles Hawthorne. Then there's Hensche on Painting, another compilation of lessons from Henry Hensche, a student of Hawthorne's who taught for fifty years. Also painting in an impressionist style, Hensche taught the importance of actively seeking out and depicting the hidden colors to be found in shadows. Both of these books are available as inexpensive Dover paperbacks.

Finally, you might also consider James Gurney's (just published) Color and Light: a Guide for the Realist Painter. It presents a thoughtful analytical approach to understanding the behavior of natural light and color, and methods of depicting it on canvas. Gurney is the author and artist behind Dinotopia; but don't hold that against him. Illustrators have often been disdained by 'real artists', but folks like N.C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish surely understood light.

[Ken Tanaka]

John C.: I don't think Geoff is really inviting fellow photographers to take up landscape painting. Rather, it's my impression that he's inviting us to take a whirl at seeing like a painter. The additive acts of painting and drawing are, of course, nearly diametrically different than the subtractive acts of photography. Nevertheless, they do have imaginative intersections and Geoff's invitation is very healthy, and potentially productive.

Whether or not his reference recommendations will make anyone an accomplished landscape painter is not relevant. I'd estimate that less than 10% of our fellow TOP readers have had any meaningful art education at all, and perhaps only half of that crowd has ever even tried painting. So, for them, just the simple act of slowing down and starting with a blank canvas would be both terrifying and revelatory. The next revelations would come from observing the actual interactions of liquid colors. No, the canvases will be crap. But such experiences can facilitate experiential lessons that have the great potential to tattoo the mind and influence photographic seeing.

So while you've had plenty of experience as a painter I would not discourage others from (literally) baby dabbling to gain new perspectives!

[James Bullard]

Adams' objection to the pictorialist style of photography was an objection to the deliberate obscuring of detail via soft focus and filters to soften the image as opposed to the sharp detail which was the very thing that made photographs photographic. He had no problem with borrowing compositional or lighting techniques from painters.

[Clay Olmstead]

The poles, towers and sheds are what originally drove me from photography to painting. I never quite left, and the effort to improve the photographs I paint from has informed both mediums.

I find the principal difference between the two is in photography, the greatest proportion of the time is spent in preparation, waiting for the sun, the clouds and that cow to arrange themselves just right. In the painting I do, the greatest proportion of time is spent in post-production, arranging and combining the reference photos and plein air sketches into something that expresses what I originally felt - and that is where painting and photography return to common ground.

[Jim McDermott]

'This chiaroscuro technique is central to much of the drama in paintings from Rembrandt onward.'

Surely from Caravaggio onward?

[ctein]

Dear Paul and Len,

So, I'm guessing that neither of you print digitally, since such alterations to photographs are entirely straightforward on the computer.

Of course, said alterations are excoriated by True Photographers (tm).

Fortunately, only other TP's pay attention to the cries of "Heresy!"

~~~~~~~~

Dear John,

I went the other way -- I stopped painting because I realized I didn't have time for both photography and painting in my life, and I felt that I was a much more promising photographer than painter. I still imagine getting back to painting... one of these days. Real Soon Now.

Like you, I don't feel much connection between painting and photography. I can't decide if there really isn't much of one for me, or if I'm like a fish trying to notice water.

~~~~~~~~

Dear Ken,

"Trial and error becomes the standard for the printing process."

Would you please elaborate? This is a most intriguing teaser, and you've certainly caught my attention.

pax / Ctein

[Ron S.]

Great essay on a fascinating subject. I'd been painting landscapes long before I discovered a collection of Eugene Atget's work at the local library, and was inspired to try my hand (and eye) at making photographs. As a student, we would photograph our paintings in Black and White as an aid to fine tuning the values. A tattered and well used copy of Carlson's Guide still resides on my bookshelf. I believe that making paintings has a strong effect upon how one sees the world through a viewfinder or upon a ground glass. The essay reminded me of a quote from the great American illustrator and teacher Howard Pyle, that pops into my mind quite often when making photographs, I believe it is apt to producing images in any medium:

"Look upon this.
Study it. Absorb it.
If you see it tomorrow,
the light will be different,
and you will be different.
This moment is unique."

Thanks Mike, for a great blog,

Ron S.

[Kevin Thomas]

Very interesting and thought provoking essay. With the Richards Schmid book it is cheaper to order direct from him than Amazon. http://www.richardschmid.com/book.html

[Bron Janulis]

My mentor in art matters had disdain for the Henri book, referring me to the books of the illustrator, Andrew Loomis, as actually having some relevance to the crafts of drawing and painting. YMMV, 8-)

Geoff, the painting unshaded, produces work that has less "dynamic" range. The Shinnecock Hills paintings of William Merit Chase are a good example, and then look at the plein air work of Sargent, who did use an umbrella.

[Ken Tanaka]

"Dear Ken,

"Trial and error becomes the standard for the printing process."

Would you please elaborate? This is a most intriguing teaser, and you've certainly caught my attention.

pax / Ctein"

Painters can immediately see the results of their decisions on the final medium. Yes, they can scrape or wipe away those decisions but they're working in the real world on their presentation platform.

Photographers, however, are working in a virtual world until they apply the image to paper. If the mating of image to paper doesn't meet their expectations (as it rarely does in the first pass) it becomes a do-over. And over. And over.

[Paul W. Luscher]

Well, Len, I'm not sure. I don't think, for instance, that a panoramic shot of the Grand Canyon would be enhanced by a line of power towers marching along the rim, or by including one of the car parks in the foreground.

Ctein: I do print digitally. But even so, it can be quite difficult sometimes to remove an unwanted object from a shot (either that, or my Photoshop skills aren't that good--quite possible).

And of course, it would be much better if the nasty jet trail or beige pressed-metal shed, in the middle of the lovely green landscape, wasn't in the shot in the first place....

[charlie]

Excellent post on all fronts Geoff, et al. Ordered two of those titles for my wife.

[RobG]

Surely the landscape is as it is, power lines, car parks and beige sheds included? Our task as photographers is to present what is there in as pleasing/involving/inspiring a manner as our levels of ability and vision allow us; to show the landscape as it is, the way that it appears to us at that time, in that place, contrails included.

Anything less, and we may as well just paint the scene sans unwanted obstructions.

:P

(/me removes Devil's Advocate hat)