+++ The Weekly Landscape Thread - #9, 2025.04.04

By popular request, here is a version with a slightly brighter sky, so now the reflection of the sky in the water is a bit darker than the sky itself; as it should be :-)
Thanks to Woodsider and s1ptome for the suggestion.

Very nice!
In the first you only get a feeling for the true scale of the big mountain when you open the full res version, and then see the trees in the forest , bottom right.
It looks incredibly steep. The interesting textures are well captured.

Any idea what caused the stripy pattern next to that forest, inside the fence?

I've seen something similar here in Austria a few times, I think they were planting trees in those grooves?

The second shot is cool,… Warm to cold. love the way the snow appears, increases the contrast then gets eaten up itself by the mist.

Grass trees. Flinders ranges. South Australia.

This is clever in an unusual way. Having so much of the landscape image in deep shadow. especially B&W, might have been a problem. We can't see the steeply sloped peak on the right but we can see its shadow. The pointy shadow unifies the sunlit back peaks with the shadowed area. Without the shadow peak the two areas wouldn't have sat comfortably together. The foreground sunlit patch of grass extending into the shadow further helps bring everything together.
A satisfying photo.

I like that spiky grass. Portrait orientation is good for a close up of these long thin stalks. Looks like the one on the left is still flowering.
You get a good feeling for the area where they live with your image. The tree lined winding road takes you all the way back towards the mountain range.
The colours are good too and support a feeling of depth from the warm forground going back to a cooler background.

Yes, I would guess it's tree planting.

Extraordinary plants! I like the 'environmental portrait' aspect of this, putting the plants into their place in the landscape. the winding road and the mountain range in the background makes for a nice sense of depth.

What a classic scene! Lone rowboat at a simple dock, in a lake that reflects a beautiful sky. These kinds of photos make great advertisements for "get-away-from-it-all" vacations. Well composed with great colors.

Those pyramidal formations in Badlands are so intriguing, they seem like something on another planet. Well captured.

Spring Grass

At this time of year, I occasionally come across fresh green grass against the light. After a short hike, I stopped the car on the way home, when I saw this. It was taken in the Apennines above Modena

Nice, intimate landscapes that explore the textures and colors of the mountains. I particularly like the second one, with the snow.

What odd plants! Part looks something like a yucca but the top looks like something you'd see on a cactus. The hills and mountains in the background explain its environment.

These are lovely Nigel.
Especially the 2nd is a good example of the use of a telephoto lens for landscape.
The first is however my favourite here. You have that fresh yellow/green grass the foreground, a convenietly placed lone tree and also a great view of the rolling hills with grass and hedges and trees in the background. The way the light grazes the slopes makes for some good texture in the meadows and those multiple parallel lines from the farmer also underline the shape and form of the land. It's definitely a good place for a hike :-)

Just bought the tiny Lumix GM1 for my walks and wanted to see what it could do with landscape photography. This is a view over the Dender Valley towards Zandbergen in the Flemish Ardennes, Belgium

070425 view to zandbergen-1160570 by softmarmotte, on Flickr

It seems to work nicely. Lots of good sharp details, and the colours look fine :-)
The light is low enough here to reveal the shadows in the ploughed field and give it a good texture, those parallel curved lines bottom left look like they're surface ripples, spreading out into the rest of the field.
The image lives from all the fine details and it needs to be viewed big to appreciate them. Cropping some of the sky away to make the format more panoramic would make the image display somewhat bigger (full screen) on the same monitor.

This is quite nice. The forms and lines and shadows of shaped by the terrain with the one lone tree. Quiet lovely.

Putting these together was a good idea. "Same same but different" as the T shirts say in SE Asia.
Slopes. incised valleys, Autumn colours and half a continent apart. While the cloud and snow capping on the second gives appealing contrast, they both gain from the other as we grasp the similarity of landform. It would be nice to be able to have them on a wall side by side to make the comparison more intuitive.

I think it works better on the first where there are bigger expanses of the two greens. Getting a feel of the size of the grassed area make it more impressive. The longer hill edge makes possible all intersecting fence lines contrasting with the lighter green.
The bare tree and the black branches give even mote pop to the spring greens.
A green like this is difficult for Australian eyes to believe.

Loch Lochy, Lochaber, Scotland.

The big tree looks like it is leaning forward towards the lake just a bit, maybe putting a toe into the water and considering going for swim :-)
I like the way the moon is visible in the sky with a realistic looking size. The reflections in the still water are nice and clear and you can even see under the surface in the shallow parts.

The very reason that we are drawn back every year. Basically in the middle of nowhere South Dakota - the unique formations of soft rock and bentonite clay eroded by wind and water over time result in a unique and stark landscape. In the mornings and evenings when the sun is at a low angle - these formations modulate the light in interesting ways. It is not unusual to see big horn rams frolicking up and down these steep slopes almost in defiance of gravity. The morning above was sunrise after a huge evening thunderstorm the night before. Bentonite clay is slicker than a sheet of ice when it is wet, which I knew but relearned as I tired to get into position for a shot and my hit the deck in the wet clay. I managed to hold my camera up and save my camera. However, that was the only thing about me that was not covered in mud. 😂 Fortunately I had a change of cloths in the back of the truck or otherwise my wife would have made me ride in the truck bed.

Unique land scape. This summer on our road trip West, we will of course stop by the Badlands again and also visit their Northern counterpart in Theodore Roosevelt NP, a.k.a. the North Dakota badlands which are unique in their own right.

Gorgeous reflectons. But I find myself wanting to duck down to see the far end of the glen more clearly without the twiggy bits distracting me. perhaps a slightly lower position would have worked even better?