I like these three for a reason that may sound wrong – technology. I took them with a cheap digicam last summer. If there is one area where digital compacts don’t work at this point, it is certainly landscape: The files cannot resolve remote, small details. But that is not the worst part – I have seen a number of excellent landscape images where the lack of detail does not matter at all (this from someone who, admittedly, finds the current large format craze increasingly uninspired). It is the digital mess of remote, small details that makes the files, at least at this point, so painful to work with – the artifacts are just plain ugly.
While I had these three images on my hard drive for a couple of months without touching them, software has been catching up a lot. Noise removal in the latest Photoshop version has become very efficient, and there are plugins that will do the rest (no secrets here, only the usual suspects: Noise Ninja, Alien Skin BlowUp, and the likes). Now, technically it still does not make a lot of sense to do landscape photography with any of the current digital compacts. But give it two or three more years, and you’ll be able to get very good gallery prints from these kinds of devices, without as much post processing effort as you have to put into them now.
