Landscape Styles of Tim Olson & Jeremy Turner

Jeremy Turner is a landscape photographer who, like me, likes to use a variation of shallow and deep depths of field in his work. He captures stunning photographs in both color and black and white. His colored photographs are breathtaking. Some look as though they had to have been tweaked in Photoshop while others are believable. Nonetheless, they contribute to his unique style. In my third project I tried to capture a few places I like to visit fairly often. These locations are very special to me for a number of reasons. I stumble upon these settings while I am hunting, shooting photographs, or just getting away to relax, all of which I enjoy doing.

One place I love to go to is a stream just a few miles away from my house. It is so peaceful to sit there and not only watch the water rolling by, but also to listen to its voice. It is very calming to sit on the bank observing and listening to the sounds of nature. Unfortunately my photographs are not able to share the audio of their locations. However, one thing they did capture is the movement. Like me, Turner also captures movement in his set titled “Waterfalls, Rivers, and Lakes” I love the way the water flows over the rocks in his photography.

While working on this project, I kept my eyes open for anything and everything that I thought would make for an interesting photo and I ended up with over one hundred photos to sort through. But, all that work paid off because I caught some very interesting shots. The first one is of a farm yard. It contains a fence, windmill, building, and sunlight. I love the way the sun’s rays are casted upon this scene, turning the objects into silhouettes. After looking at his photos, it seems Turner also enjoys capturing the sun’s rays as well. In one of his photographs he brilliantly captures the light shining through the clouds similar to the way I did.

One photo I tweaked in order to make it a bit more interesting was one on an old railroad bridge. Originally the focus was supposed to be on a nail that was sticking up, but I found it sort of boring. Instead, I used the paint tool with different opacities to make the end of the trail bright as if it was empty or perhaps something was coming. The viewer will have to decide that for themselves. The photo is also taken at a very interesting angle, unlike the way a tradition landscape photograph would be. Like Turner, I also utilized Photoshop to manipulate colors. At that same rail road bridge I took another photo of an old beat up sign. In Photoshop I converted the background to grayscale and kept the color in the sign to create an interesting image. Another photo I tweaked the color on was the one of the minimum maintenance road. The original color of the sky seemed a little dull so I used a new adjustment layer to make the sky much bluer which contrasts with the bright yellow sign. While these photographs took a considerable amount of time to edit, others did not because they looked perfect the way they were. These were the photographs of the vines growing on the barbwire and the trail with the blue, cloudy sky.

Finally, I copied selections from another photograph I had taken earlier in the semester of an old shot up wildlife sign and pasted them onto a fresh photo I had take for this project. This photo was of a sign that didn’t have bullet holes in it, but I thought it would be interesting if it did because it read, “Open to public hunting.” I also used the clone tool to make the inside of the bullet holes consistent with the background of the photo they were pasted on. I think this photo turned out very well because it is nearly impossible to decipher that the bullet holes are added layers. One final similarity to my work and Jeremy Turner’s is that, for this project anyway, I didn’t write titles to my photographs. After the last project I decided it would be better not to give away details to the viewer, but rather to let them gain their own perspectives of my photos. I hope you enjoy my interpretations of landscape photography.