Intimate Landscape Critique

In preparation for the Tring Interclub Intimate LandScapes Digital Competition 2024, our meeting on 1 February was a “critique” evening to assess some of our potential club entries for that competition.

Our guest reviewer was the winner of the 2023 competition – Stuart Fuertado LRPS from Princes Risborough Photographic Society.

There is no single definition of “Intimate Landscape. For the purposes of the Tring Interclub Intimate LandScapes Digital Competition the brief refers to “seeing the small picture” and provides the following further guidance:

“An intimate scape is one in which you’re selecting and isolating one small part of a scene that captures your interest and presents an ‘intimate feel’. It might be a smaller part of a wider scape, it might also be a smaller composition that focuses on shapes, lines, colours, textures or patterns. It is a view of a scene in which any object of focus, is surrounded by its context.

We encourage the celebration of the beauty of the natural world. Thus, the scape can be land, sea, water or city but, whatever the content, it must be an ‘intimate’ scene.

The challenge encourages creative submissions – close up and macro; black and white or colour; multiple exposure and other creative techniques.”

Emphasising the inherent lack of specifics in all of that, Stuart suggested that “intimate scape” could include a close up (maybe a scene within an object), a self-defining space, and an extraction of one area of a larger scape. He showed us examples of each.

He reckoned that good intimate scapes usually show a scene which has a “point of focus”, is simple, and uses lines, form, textures, hues/colours. They seldom include the sky (except if foggy or misty) as that is unlikely to feel “intimate”. And they are never a picture of a single thing (eg, a single flower or butterfly) as this is not a scape. He showed us some more examples.

All CACC clubs are eligible to enter the Tring competition and each club must enter five images, each taken by a different photographer. The are two judges whm independently pr- score the image and then meet to agree a final score for each image. There are awards for best club and the photographer of best image.

Full details are on www.intimate-landscape.com

Stuart showed us some great examples of his own intimate scapes.

Then he critiqued a selection of LBPC images.

Out of 130 images originally submitted, Stuart reviewed 52 images from 18 members. And he provided a thorough analysis of each one.

The most frequent difficulty he found was that pictures were insufficiently intimate – usually because they had too much depth of field or they covered too wide a view. Perhaps this seemed unduly restrictive. But maybe we just have “intimacy issues”!

At the end, Stuart selected “Stuart’s Favourite Five”: