Whether it’s the lushness of open green fields, the intricate structural design of foothills or the vibrancy of a colorful orchard, I can’t get enough of captivating landscapes. If you follow my career, you know I love riding my Triumph Bonneville to explore scenery. It influences my creativity, inspires concepts and of course, it’s pretty darn fun too.

When I shoot landscape photography, I want viewers to get the same inimitable sensation I get from each pictorial experience. The world is full of breathtaking viewpoints. As a landscape photographer, there is also something to be said of being a part of the scenery and capturing the moment as well as the intensity of passing on my emotional connection to nature.

As I wrote in my book, “Collaboration and storytelling go hand in hand for me. A good number of my photos are conceptual…and those concepts are driven by my desire to tell a visual story.”  Whether you are a landscape photographer or a shutterbug at heart, nature makes our viewers want to be a part of the moment.

Landscape photographers are like the scenery they shoot; the memorable ones have unique stories to tell. Some prefer to travel to distant lands. Others climb mountains. Or swim under the sea. Many shoot the world as it is. And that’s a valid choice. The world is a profoundly beautiful place, so who can blame someone for simply capturing that? For my own landscape photography, however, I like to produce artistic abstracts and impressionistic imagery that offers the viewer the chance to imagine a suggestible realism.

Learning to shoot landscapes has taught me a valuable lesson about how scenic locations matter. The right scenery adds mood, character and strong conceptual consciousness to my photos. And that’s a lesson I carry into my commercial work.

The Fine Art of Fine Art Photography

Fine art photography is to imagery what a fictional novel is to literature; it’s all about the story. I form each storyline conceptually and visually to deliver a theme, a concept, a mood, and a message. Making beautiful aesthetics, décor, and artwork genuinely takes an artistic eye, but the end result can be both commercially valuable and a collectible asset.

A fine art photograph is not so much about the scene or the subject, but what I, as the photographer, want to reveal visually. The designation as a fine art photograph also connects to a viewer that the image was created with deliberate intent to not just use camera technique but a real conceptual vision. Each detail is designed to communicate an awareness that is open to interpretations because of appreciation for artwork.

There’s some debate about what photography rises to the level of fine art. In that, I’d say it depends on the individual observer and how they interpret a photographer’s vision, technique, artistic expression, concept and uniformity. I don’t differentiate my work as one genre or the other as everything I create comes from an artistic vision.

Viewing Fine Art Photography

Fine art rises to another level as the viewer finds direct meaning through a theme that I’ve intentionally conveyed. Collectors also feel passionate about the visual story in my photographs. It’s what generally distinguishes my photography as artistic since it comes down to the viewer’s subjective assessment and appraisal.

The reaction to my images is vital to an exceptional artistic designation because there’s a relationship between my creative poetic language, the image and a viewer’s subject arousal.  It’s a reality that all photographers think about when conceptualizing a shot because fine art photographers realize that our work will become objects reflective of an interpretative process.

More mainstream galleries are beginning to display photographic artwork. Much like some of the most prolific fine art photographers in history, modernists understand the value of lighting and staging to create a more dramatic effect.

As a fine art photographer, my collections are an experience of a body of work that defines who I am as a portraitist. I have a unique style that often includes color palettes, monochrome, or full framing that, as fine art, surges monetarily. It’s not the accolades I concentrate on but the impression I want my clients to feel when they view my work at prestigious art galleries like Fahey Klein, Edgar Varela, Louis Stern, Stephen Cohen, Bruce Lurie, and G. Ray Hawkins.