Author: JH

I have worked with some pretty well known designers and many of them have surprisingly feeble websites, because they never find the time to take care of them (maybe it is a good idea to avoid designers with extremely elaborate sites – they simply may have too much time on their hands…). Anyway, it somehow feels wrong to put much effort into such stuff when it is about yourself. On the other hand, what can you do when your site ages to a point that feels embarrassing. So, last night, I re-designed mine. It’s only half way done (I still use popup windows because the code of the various “ibox” variants floating around on the web doesn’t work with all browsers). The rest has to wait until next winter (or a very rainy summer day).

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.

Well, I feel a little spoiled: I can’t really state that I have suffered a lot for my Mountain Project (just the opposite – nothing keeps life’s dirt at a distance better than to make photographs in a snowstorm at 7.500 feet!). Yet, the project has become sort of popular with, as of today, over 6.000 views over at issuu, given that I have put it there only very recently.

If you have a fairly up to date flash plugin, you can flip through the book above, or click on it and look at the larger version at issuu. This is still an ongoing project and I’ll go back to the Alps later this year. After all, topographically the Italian mountains are not that different from Manhattan – only the food is much better…