+++ The Weekly Landscape Thread - #1, 2025 02.07

As minniev says, it's all three and I agree with the "lacework" observation.
Having looked at this large, I think it's a colour image which makes the mono effect even more noteworthy.
Arvo, did you do any desaturating here? It doesn't matter for the image itself but rather I'm curious about what it says about the light where you are at this time of the year.

-Tranquility but with a burst of fire.
It has the rock. water, repeating round shapes that can be expected in Japanese gardens. Are we in japan?

No, this is in Georgia, USA. It is a Japanese garden in Gibbs Gardens which has 16 different gardens on about 300 acres. It has something for every time of the year. We have an annual pass and go there several times a year.

Yeah I just signed up. Givin' it the ol' college try, so to speak. :) Thank you for your lovely comment. I got really lucky that day. I live very close to that little walk and it's always pretty, but that day it was absolutely spectacular. The interplay of frost and fog and sunlight frequently took my breath away.

Welcome. Can't wait to see pictures of that walk in spring/summer/autumn for comparision

Tim

The pastel blue in these is gorgeous. The middle shot is my pick, nice foreground middle and background. I wonder if it would be even better if you swung around very slightly to the right? (And of course demolished the phone mast 😉)

Is that mistletoe in the trees?

I wish it was that easy. Sadly I will be moving away from that place very soon, so I won't be able to provide too many comparison shots :(.Only the ones I'd already taken previously.

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These are lovely pics and prove you don't need to spend thousands on cameras & lenses.

Welcome to the forum and I hope you show many more.

Alan
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I do sometimes wish the resolution was higher. The moment you don't look at them on a phone screen, you start seeing the issues. But yes, I think there are a great many things that phones have to offer nowadays and it has more to do with being willing to experiment and learning what the strengths and weaknesses of your instrument are and using them to your advantage :)

Yes! It is mistletoe. The trees are absolutely infested with it. I think the mistletoe balls might be my favourite part of my first picture. :D. And thank you for your kind words. I do disagree with you on the phone mast. I don't need them all the time of course, but I do enjoy some ugly man-made structures contrasting with the beauty of the natural world every once in a while. (But that's probably just me 😂) In this case I think it adds a bit of visual interest and balances nicely with the big dark tree on the far left.

I think these are really quite lovely. The way the mountains look like they were stamped out of the sky vs the soft blanket of floor clouds (fog) is delightful. Love the many layers, giving it very strong sense of depth.

You must have felt very fortunate viewing all that fog from up top. It's been similarly foggy where I am from recently, so it must have been amazing viewing all that drearyness from a birds eye view.

As you mentioned it is quite a busy shot. I think I might have tried to find a way to get rid of some of those long red twigs in the mid foreground. I've been known to push such twigs to one side with my Nordic walking sticks ;-)
I like the rest of the shot with the reflections of the tree trunks and the ripples on the water's surface. The curves of the gently sloping river bank are nice too.

Welcome to the Weekly Landscape Thread.
These two really show the beauty of that frosty morning. The second one is my favourite. Great pastel blue colours. Lots of layers here give depth to the image. The mist in the air in the midground is full of bright sunlight and it blends nicely back into the far misty mountains. The white frost on the branches is also lit up with that sunshine and they have a nice contrast to the much darker tree trunks. In the foreground there are two more layers with the river itself rushing by with splashing blue/white water and finally the last layer is given by the smooth looking rocks on this side of the river. Very nice!

Fire and ice!
A great shot with impressive warm and cold elements. Winter is a wonderful time of the year!
The framing of the setting sun with the branches curving over it is good

It feels as though it is trying to include too much and there's a conflict between vertical and horizontal lines. The glimpse of sea to the right and the curve of the bay get our attention but they are truncated.
The mountain peak, three tall trees and the foreground rock have the makings of a line of their own however the foreground red flowers get a bit lost.
I don't know whether it would work but if I ha a tripod handy, i think I'd have tried a portrait format with the peak, tall trees, rock and foreground red flowers and I'd have tried to take it much lower to the ground and closer to the flowers. It would need all the dof available.

Agreed. Or maybe to the left to give a little more space for larger far tree on the left.

G'Day Streamdream.
Check my comment to Fireplace about the weather and his shots. Ditto for yours. It will be 43C today where I live.
The blue in your shots isn't sky blue, it's the hue of ice. Most fitting.
Three possibly has more to each side and out of focus than it needs. Perhaps trim a bit from the right and a little from the left. The ice crystal details are lovely. Do you have software that would let you remove the wires? I feel they get in the way when looking at the crystals. Some software makes wire removal easy.
I'm another looking forward to seeing the same area in different seasons.

I'm largely echoing Fireplace here. The "business" isn't a problem but sometimes nature needs a wee bit of assistance. Your foreground frames the trunk reflection and adds a line to the far bank. The red stems are messing up the reflection though.
While thre is plenty going on, red stems apart, it all balances up nicely. The diagonal twig and the small falls link foreground and the far side and background lines. The foreground left and far right curves work together to give a predominantly circular composition. The blues of the stream/reflection complement the brown tones. A trout fishing spot?

The scene and sharpness are excellent, but it's washed out from the scattering of blue light. I think it would have been a lot nicer had a polarizer been used.

I like the scene a lot, but the photo is oversharpened (to my eyes). However, usually you want a lot of sharpening for BW conversions, so I'm thinking that it may have simply been how the photo was sharpened as opposed to the sharpening itself. When I downsample photos for web display, sometimes I have to play (a lot) with the sharpness settings to get the downsampled photo looking sharp, but not overly sharp. But, again, this is all a function of personal taste, and my aesthetics may well be different from yours and others.

Thanks GB 😊
as to the scattered blue light,…
We know it is a natural phenomena that light will scatter from particles in the air creating a bluish haze. That haze and the blue colour is not necessarily a bad thing. Painters will even add it deliberately to a painting to add the feeling and illusion of depth on their canvas, the further away an object is, the more blue and hazy it will be painted.
If it is excessive and distracting in a particular image I will usually reduce it to a certain extent, but usually not completely. It is a perhaps a personal preference for me that distant objects, especially in winter with some ice and snow, will have a slight bluish tinge in the image, that’s how they look for me in reality.
Sometimes, I’ll even embrace the effect and show mountain ranges with multiple layers that slowly fade away to blue into the distance. like in this one

Wonderful captures of a lovely place

This was not a conversion. It was taken with my Q2M. Since there is not interpolation process, the Q2M images will by sharper than say my Z8 converted images although they have the same number of "pixels." i saw an interest comparison between the 100 MP GFX converted to B&W and the Q2M - that concluded although the Q2M has approximately 1/2 the pixel count - it has the same B&W resolution. It produces a very sharp image right out of the camera. I processed this image for printing which means additional sharping. If I didn't back off for exporting the jpeg, it might appear overly sharpened. However, in general I don't sharpen the Q2M images much.

Down to the left of the flat area is the dam where I first found my fascination fixation with dragonflies. To the left of the distant rise is a large grazing area where I managed my first bird captures after moving to m43 with a 100-400mm. It was a good place but I did tire of walking around the same area every day.