Recreating Nature

Nature creates the world of beauty that we see around us. From lush, halcyonic meadows to dramatic, explosive lightning storms, nature provides a wonderous palette of visual delights. However, nature is also mercurial, unpredictable and uncontrollable, and often never seems to do what you want it to. And this is the double-edge sword of the landscape photographer, a plethora of beauty right in front of you but conditions that just wont seem to give you the shot you want.

Anyone who has dabbled in landscape photography will know the feeling of finding this amazing scene but having poor light and weather conditions. Waiting forever for the right conditions for that perfect shot that just don’t come and ultimately ending up frustrated that you couldn’t get the shot you wanted. Now it would be great if we had the time and resources to keep visitig these places over and over until we get the shot we want but most of don’t have the time, patience or money to do this. So what to do?

Give Nature a Helping Hand

Now in the modern world of digtal photography and editing, image alteration and manipulation is easier and more powerful than ever. It literally can create worlds at a few clicks of a button. So why not use this to give nature a helping hand and recreate the conditions to your suiting? Well there are a number of reasons why you would or would not want to do this which I will discuss below.

Falsifying Nature is Dishonest

Photographic purists would say that large scale alteration of photos is in some way false and dishonest because it is not showing an accurate rendition of the scene that was captured at that time. I can appreciate that to an extent and I would agree that when people are doing significant changes to a photo using post-processing, and then passing it off as an unaltered photo, then that is dishonest. But I have no issue with taking a lifeless image and performing significant amounts of post-processing to change the image, even to the stage where you are changing the actual weather conditions. Many times when doing this it can look slightly unnatural anyway and thus obvious that significan changes have been made to it. But sometimes it can look less obvious and more natural, so it can look like a straight photograph without manipulation. Irrespective of that, I will always be quite honest that I have made changes to an image if someone asks. My goal is to get a high quality final image that I find artistically beautiful, and if that means doing significant alterations to the inital photographs, then so be it. I certainly don’t see it as falsifying a photo, I just see it as enhancing an image.

You can make better photos quickly from impererfect conditions

As I have said earlier, the weather never seems to play fairly, especially where I live. Where I am, the majority of the days are quite dull, overcast, and this gives really flat light. This flat, even light doesn’t allow the for range of contrast that gives interest to an image, meaning the photos can look flat , dull, and lifeless. So with limited time, and patience, I feel a need to give some of the photos an artificial enhancement, rather than just being stuck with screeds of flat, unintersting shots. Admittedly, this can be quite hard to do depending on the initial image and what you want to do to it, and many would also see this as maybe being slightly dishonest. However, I see the initial photo that I have taken with my camera as being the start point of a new image, not the final end point. And I have no reservations about doing large scale changes to a photo to get a better image, even if that means changing the sky and creating artificial light.

Is it really that easy to do?

The answer to that question is ‘sometimes’. Yes, image manipulation is easier and the software is more powerful than it has ever been. And the prevalence of A.I. for image manipulation has become common place now with most major software such as Lightroom and Photoshop supporting A.I. image manipulation. However, it only goes so far. You can change the color balance, luminosity etc of an image quickly and easily with great effect. A.I. can cut objects from their background and replace them with totally new backgrounds often generated from only a few lines of text. But I am taking about not just enhancing landscape photos, but changing weather conditions in photos and that is not so easy. Sure, you could use A.I. to quickly remove the sky and replace it with another but will it look natural? Almost cetainly not.

Turning a photo of a dull, rainy day into a bright sunny day is incredibly difficult, almost impossible because you have to not only change the sky but also add in highlights, shadow areas, shadow casts etc. Turning a sunny day into a stormy day is slightly easier because you can still utilise the shadows and highlights from the sunny photo and have it has a ray of light through the stormy sky.

But doing more sublte enhancements can be easier. For example, taking a photo of a landscape on a sunny day and making a flat blue sky look more textured and less featureless. Or just bringing out some of the features in a flat landscape. These types of enhancements can be done quite quickly and easily with modern software. So you will need quite a bit of skill to do large scale changes but not for more subtle changes, and the software is advancing quickly making it easier and quicker to do so.

Can you learn more from doing this?

I would argue that doing this does actually make you learn more about the qualities that make images appealing to the viewer. When you have a flat, lifeless image and you have control to make changes to that image, you really have to put the thinking cap on to find what can make that image more visually appealing, and also identify what makes the initial image visually unappealing. You have to analyse everything about the image; it’s colour, it’s composition, it’s subject, the interplay of lights and darks, complimetary and analogous colours, out of focus and in focus areas and much, much more. Wheras, when you just leave the images as they are, straight from the camera, you maybe don’t put as much thought into these things. You just give them a quick look over and pick the ones you instinctively think look the best, without giving too much thought as to why you like them. That’s just my opinion but I believe many people don’t analyse their captured photographs enough for the good and bad qualities of these images. However, if you commit yourself to doing large scale alterations to an image you really have to analyse that image and think hard about the changes you are going to make.

Recreating Nature or Creating Unique Art

So should we tamper with photographs and use software to artificially recreate the natural environment captured in the images? Of course we should. We have an abundance of advanced image manipulation technology at our fingertips which can be used to create not only beautiful images, but also to transform dull, lifeless images even if that means recreating nature within the photos. I appreciate photographic purists will scorn this opinion, but for me it is all about creating visually beautiful images using photography as the base for this. Not only can you transform otherwise boring, dull photos but you can learn so much more about the intrinsic factors that make images visually attractive. But more importantly you can create unique pieces of visual art tailored to your artistic preferences. So let’s use all the technology we have to recreate nature in our photographs and produce stunning pieces of art.

Thanks for Reading, Neil