fred weyman's photostream

Many years ago I started out photographing numerous subjects; sports, portraits, macro and tele nature, landscapes, studio etc. I gradually realized that although the results were satisfying, they were generally redundant with the plethora of photos that were being taken. However, my mind was changed when I backpacked into the less-photographed areas of the spectacular Sierra Nevada mountains, so remote and inaccessible that even mountaineering photographer Galen Rowell wrote of them, "While backpacking over passes and through valleys for days may reap spiritual rewards, carrying a tent, sleeping bag, stove, and photo gear for a single night out rarely passes the gumption factor of being worth the effort." Since then, I have many times enjoyed the simultaneous feeling of exhaustion and exhilaration that is unique to the mountains that the well-traveled John Muir described as, " The Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built."

I also realized that although there are many charming individual elements and abstractions in the Sierra, individual portraits of them don't convey the powerful and most prevalent sense of being surrounded by scenery in every direction, up and down, near and far. As John Muir said, "Thus every attempt to appreciate any one feature is beaten down by the overwhelming influence of all the others." Photos can't duplicate the smells, sounds, exhaustion, or the light, thin air that Twain described as "the air breathed by angels" but I think my broad landscapes transport the viewer and elicit the unique feeling of being surrounded by the visual splendor of the Sierra.

My technical approach to landscapes is to attempt to realistically recreate the natural beauty of a scene so that viewers have the best opportunity to experience genuine feelings rather than false ones created by departing from reality. I chose print film because it has more realistic contrast than slide film, with it's solid black shadows and blown-out highlights lacking detail. My most used lens is a wide angle that approximates my natural field of view. I take mostly horizontals because the eye sees more peripherally in the horizontal than the vertical. My tripod is usually raised to eye level so as to avoid the contrived, foreground-heavy, dogs-eye-view that too often lack smooth depth transitions . I used to carry a polarizing filter and split neutral density filter, but the results don't look realistic (eg: reflections lighter than the object being reflected, and unnatural brightness gradients) and also slightly reduced the sharpness, so I stopped carrying them. These days, in an attempt to recreate my memory of a scene, I use Photoshop to compensate for the film's and scan's shortcomings which are mostly related to excessive contrast and slight color shifts.

Comments etc. are always appreciated, but I don't have the time to participate in the gratuitous reciprocal comment groups.

foweyman@netzero.net

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