Give Civilization to the Landscape - A Landscape Photographer's 2023 Shooting Summary

Happy Chinese New Year, everyone!

In today's photography sharing, Thomas will share some of his selected landscape photography works from 2023.

Give civilization to the landscape and blend the era into the photo - how did I try and think about this?

Video

▶ Watch the video tutorial on Bilibili

This is the illustrated companion to the video above — Thomas's 2023 year in review under the theme 'giving civilization to the landscape'. He noticed last year's photos increasingly place people, buildings and traces of industry inside grand scenery. Four chapters below follow the video: the shock of pure nature, travelers in the landscape, dwellings adapted to terrain, and the dialogue between industry and nature.

01 Pure Nature Still Startles

Having traveled so far, ordinary sunrises barely move him anymore — yet nature still offers unrepeatable moments: caught in a sandstorm at Mingsha Mountain, Dunhuang, where visibility collapsed to ten meters thirty seconds after the shutter; and in July, Iceland's summer eruption, where the drone risked a crash to hover near the crater as magma burst (at 1:28 in the video).

The tundra of Iceland's highlands glows green after rain; the sea arches of the Faroe Islands stand solemn under dark clouds. These pure-nature frames remain the year's favorites — only now they are bought with luck and risk (at 2:06 in the video).

02 Travelers and Teammates in the Frame

Why more people in the pictures? His answer: time without a witness is void — landscape needs a reference. Sometimes the figures are travelers and teammates: Iceland's highland tracks admit only 4x4s and river crossings have no bridges; flying the drone a kilometer out, he framed a teammate alone before one of Europe's most powerful waterfalls (at 3:33 in the video).

People are also scale and echo: a figure makes a canyon's layering measurable; under the stars of Heidu Mountain a teammate's flashlight lights the rock, the bright patch behind lifting the figure out of the dark. Self-portraits go to the interval timer — one frame every three seconds while he walks and climbs naturally below (at 4:56 in the video).

03 Dwellings Adapted to the Land

The other recurring element is local architecture — buildings are the answer terrain and climate wrote. Tropical Yunnan villages use local materials, light and airy; in the material-poor Faroes, people grow turf on their roofs for warmth and drainage, and it became the islands' signature (at 6:07 in the video).

Small props create story: shooting an Icelandic church, he used the car window as a second frame, two worlds in one picture; with drone telephoto work, villages, terraces and mountains spread out like ink wash at home (at 6:44 in the video).

04 Civilization in the Landscape: Industry Meets Nature

The new theme of 2023 puts industry inside wild scenery. Transmission towers on ridgelines are no longer clutter to avoid but the subject itself; classic landscape photography tends to condemn what people do to nature, yet he believes the relationship is far more complicated (at 7:12 in the video).

The relocated oil town of Lenghu now grows wind turbines; Dunhuang's solar-thermal plant converges ten thousand mirrors into one artificial sun; an ultra-high-voltage tower colored like the classical 'A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains' stands in Kuqa's canyons — plants use light in photosynthesis, and human photovoltaics and solar-thermal are equally primal ways of using it (at 8:31 in the video).

Last December he boarded CNOOC's offshore platforms in the Bohai Sea: steel giants a dozen stories tall, oppressive up close yet tiny against the vast sea once the drone pulled back; in deep winter, icebreakers cut shipping lanes through the thick Bohai ice. Civilization into landscape, the era into scenery — that is his summary of 2023 (at 9:22 in the video).

1. Time without a witness is void — people in a landscape are witness, reference and scale; 2. Architecture is the answer terrain and climate wrote; photograph it and you photograph adaptation; 3. Industrial traces need not be avoided — wind turbines, mirrors and pylons can all become the subject; 4. Place your work in the dimension of society and time, and it will mean more than beauty.

HD video:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Vm411D7VH/

The 2024 album-grade weekly calendar "Seeing the World 2024" (《看见世界2024》), which collects Thomas's works from the past two years, is now available on Taobao. Everyone is welcome to visit the Posts & Telecom Press Taobao store to purchase!

Selected Works of 2023