What is picturesque? For me it means something that warms my heart when I look at it, but this is not an objective statement, so something more precise is required. Earlier in this course in Exercise 1.3 I collected a set of paintings from the 18th and 19th century and then found photographic images that were of a similar composition. These for me are what a picturesque landscape image looks like.
The problem for me is that I have grown tired of seeing images like this. With the proliferation of professional and semi professional magazines that show images such as these, I think I have become numb to them, worsened only by the similar images that are all too easily seen on facebook and the like. Typically, some kind of nice looking backdrop, some foreground interest and ideally something to lead the eye from one to the other. I have grown so numb of them that whereas I used to aspire to take images according to the ‘magic formula’ this type of image rarely inspires me any more.
That is not to say that I no longer want to take landscape images, why else would I be studying this course? But, I do want my images to mean something more than just look nice. That could mean ‘interesting’, one can find many images in competitions such as Landscape Photographer of the Year’ that fit this category, that go beyond pure aesthetics, and perhaps that is enough. But images that have something to say, to make the viewer stop and think about what the image is saying, that is what I aim for now. Wether the image is picturesque or not is less interesting to me, I might use an image to help me plan where to go on holiday but not much more.