Landscape Observation

[jimbob01]

I've been photographing for many years. My favorite subject is Landscapes. I've noticed since moving from film to digital that many landscape images on the web now have what appears to be a sky with a very pronounced shape. Instead of s smooth gradation from top to bottom it has the appearance of a smile. Is the becasue of the lens choice?


Thanks
Jimbob

[Murtasma]

That's because there are a bunch of people over using tone mapping processes that create areas where the image is way too sharp, mostly trees or areas where fine details are present. These details are then lost giving a muddy look. The sky muddiness also comes from halo's produced by the tone mapping process.

Tone mapping can be done correctly and look fantastic but, if you can't post process an image and make it look great with out tone mapping your really limiting yourself when you resort to tone mapping to correct something that should be corrected by getting it right in the camera or using a saturation or curve adjustment with masking. Creating a tone mapped image then placing the normally exposed image on top and using opacity to blend in it and make it look more natural works well in some situations but not all.

I use the term tone mapping here because that's what it is. Standard computer monitors are not capable of displaying true HDR images they need to be tone mapped to display in a computer screen. There are such things as HDR monitors but they are very expensive. I'm actually sick of hearing the term HDR, I wish more people would use term tone mapping because that's what your effectively doing when you start moving all those sliders around throwing data out.

Trey Ratcliff is a well know photograph who uses HDR / Tone mapping as a crutch for the lack of interesting subjects and compositional elements in most of his images.

Here you can see an example of images that have been heavily tone mapped.
http://www.stuckincustoms.com/

View the images large and you will see hardly any of his images are actually sharp at all. He has pretty good control over his halo's but his images have too much saturation, boring composition and creativity. Most of his images are taken at eye level or near ground level because that's the most convenient way for him to setup his tripod.

Also notice some of the images really lack depth because of the lack of shadows. Having dark shadows is not a bad thing it can help establish a mood in an image something many of his images lack. Some of his pictures have way too much mood and becomes over powering.

He does however have a few images I think that are really good but the tone mapping or photoshop texturing process ruined them because it distracts from the subject of the photograph.



Take everything I said with a grain of salt some people love it, some swore by it, others hate it.

To each his own but to answer your question that's why you see what you see.

[Doug Pardee]

Perhaps an example photo would help.

From your description, I would suspect that what you're seeing is from the widespread use of polarizing filters on wide-angle lenses. The result is that some parts of the sky are more affected by the polarizer than others are.

Polarizers are generally touted as a "must have" for landscape photos, and I think that does a disservice. Personally, I almost never use my polarizer for darkening skies. Proper exposure does the trick without introducing uneven effects across the photo.

And as bonus I can use a lower ISO, faster shutter speed, and/or tighter aperture since I don't have the light loss from the polarizer.

[Murtasma]

Originally Posted by Doug Pardee

Perhaps an example photo would help.

From your description, I would suspect that what you're seeing is from the widespread use of polarizing filters on wide-angle lenses. The result is that some parts of the sky are more affected by the polarizer than others are.

Polarizers are generally touted as a "must have" for landscape photos, and I think that does a disservice. Personally, I almost never use my polarizer for darkening skies. Proper exposure does the trick without introducing uneven effects across the photo.

And as bonus I can use a lower ISO, faster shutter speed, and/or tighter aperture since I don't have the light loss from the polarizer.

I stopped using polarizers on wide angle shots for this same very reason.

[sk66]

I've seen some cameras do similar...I think it may be an issue with using P/S or cheaper lens at max wide angle....not sure.

(it's kind of the opposite effect of vignetting, maybe refraction?)