Thomas's 2018 Landscape Photography Selection (Including New Year Desktop Wallpaper Bonus)

Thomas Chu Photo

As a travel landscape photographer, Thomas visited many places in 2018, spending more than half of the year on the road.

This year I mainly shot extreme natural landscapes represented by high mountains, as well as indigenous people and adventurers in extreme environments.

This year I also made many new attempts. No longer confined to conditions like sunrise, red clouds, and the Milky Way, I began creating photos with different atmospheres in non-traditional time slots like noon, afternoon, and moonlit nights, and in ordinary weather like overcast days, hazy days, rainy days, and cloudless sunny days.

In shooting, I began to make heavy use of phones and drones, focusing more on the structure and content of the frame rather than image quality or trivial details. In post-processing, I also tried using different tones and colors to present different emotions.

The road of future exploration is still long. Chinese New Year's Eve is approaching. Thomas has selected 19 photos from last year, wishing everyone a happy 2019 Lunar New Year, and hoping you'll see more moving landscapes and shoot more satisfying photos in the future.

The 2K HD desktop wallpapers of these photos (long edge 2560 pixels) can be downloaded from the links at the end of the article.

Mountains

Landscape photography enthusiasts generally don't like moonlight, because it makes the Milky Way and stars dimmer. But moonlight is actually a very soft natural light, and mountains under moonlight carry a charming atmosphere.

This photo is of Pakistan's Paiju Peak under moonlight, wrapped in clouds and mist, very dreamlike — it feels like a scene from an animation.

The Trango Towers are famous in the mountaineering world. These giant rock spires over 6,000 meters stand like towers in the Karakoram range. Due to the steep terrain and violent winds, almost no snow accumulates on these peaks.

I was fortunate, on an overcast morning, to capture the light that pierced through the clouds and illuminated the peaks. In post, I further made it a low-key image to highlight this light crossing the darkness and the magnificent layers of the snow peaks. This photo also had the honor of winning the Landscape Grand Prize of the JD.com Photography Gold Award.

In February 2018, I went to Beijing to attend black-and-white photography courses by Teacher Duan Yueheng and Teacher Li Tao. In a world without color, Teacher Duan could always discover innovative compositions and present the frame with delicate texture and rich tones, from which I benefited a lot.

In November, I went to Guilin to shoot with Wen Ming and several other brothers. After a full week of rain, on the last morning of the trip, we finally waited for the magnificent sea of clouds and sunrise.

I flew my Mavic 2 drone high to overlook the sea of clouds and mountains, then made it black-and-white in post, focusing on expressing the layering under the shining sun.

At Lake Pehoé in Chile's Torres del Paine National Park, on the first day Zhou You and I went this April, we encountered a sky full of red clouds. Anxious, I ran back and forth, shooting several compositions, and finally found that the simple reflection was actually the best — serene and natural.

In post, I removed a lot of detail from the ground and, combined with the natural characteristics of the sky clouds, made many areas look like brushstrokes of a painting. I hope this is a masterpiece of nature.

Adventurers

This is the end of an 80-kilometer-long fjord. When our speedboat arrived here, the huge mountains on both sides blocked the wind and waves of the open sea, and the water became completely calm, like a mirror.

In the distance is Greenland's vast ice sheet of nearly 2 million square kilometers, where the ice cap exceeds 1,500 meters in height. Our boat could no longer go north — it was as if we'd come to the end of the world.

Who would have thought there's another world beneath the earth's surface? There, too, are lakes, high mountains, and forests, but inside a giant cave 200 meters below the ground.

This photo was taken in Vietnam's Hang Son Doong Cave. The 3 figures in the image are all our outdoor guides. Perhaps readers can feel the awe of this underground world through the scale of the people against the cave.

In post, I unified the colors into the complementary pair of cyan and orange, to create an atmosphere of an alien world and a mystery that seems to belong only to the depths of the sea.

Friends often ask me how I photoshopped the sun and the Milky Way together. Actually, during the crescent moon phases, when the light of moonrise and moonset isn't too strong, it's possible to photograph the moon and the Milky Way appearing in the same frame.

This photo was taken during our Pakistan trek this year. The foreground is a mountaineering team's high-altitude tent, and in the distance is the world's 22nd-highest peak, Mashabrum.

What is it like to look up at the starry sky from underground? Though it looks like a sci-fi scene, this was indeed really shot.

We used high-brightness searchlights to light up the underground cave, 50 meters high and 150 meters deep, presenting the underground world beneath the starry sky to everyone.

In middle school, we all learned that only a small part of an iceberg is above water; 90% of its volume is submerged beneath the sea.

Using a Mavic drone, we can truly see its huge base from the air (the cyan part of the iceberg is underwater).

The iceberg in the image would only count as a small-to-medium iceberg in the polar regions, but compared with our little boat, it's already a behemoth.

The image shows Son Doong Cave's skylight No. 1. A million years ago, the cave ceiling collapsed here, forming this 150-meter-deep underground garden. Only at noon in February-March each year does the sun's angle reach the position in the image. Thanks to the humid, cloudy weather, we were fortunate to encounter god rays here.

Besides the light in the foreground, a person is standing on a small hilltop in the distance, letting everyone feel the vastness of the cave.

I also shared the post-processing process of this photo as a video in the tutorial "Unveiling the Shooting Thinking and Post-Processing Process of IPA Photography Contest Winning Works."

Inhabitants

Greenland's living environment is extremely harsh. On more than 2 million square kilometers of land, fewer than 80,000 people live. The image shows an Arctic village of only 50 people, 60 kilometers from the nearest large town (population no more than 1,000), with only a handful of ferries running between them each week.

This can be said to be truly isolated from the world, with a unique sense of stillness in the early morning.

I really enjoy shooting those plants beneath the snow mountains. Besides their beautiful lines, I'm moved by the vitality of their lives in the harsh environment.

This photo was taken in late autumn in Patagonia. Though the distant shrubs are still vibrantly red, some branches up close have already shed all their leaves, entering a winter state.

This is a long-dead withered tree we found in Torres del Paine National Park.

Though the photo was actually shot at sunrise, I prefer to post-process it into a dusk atmosphere, as if the earth were about to sink into deathly stillness and darkness, leaving only the last bit of color.

I've always wanted to try shooting and post-processing on a rainy day. When shooting this photo, I held the camera by hand and placed it on the ground, simulating a view like a little rabbit's. At that moment, the low plants and grass looked like a dense forest.

The "dense forest" in the rain is full of mystery. In post, I adjusted the colors to cool tones to further render this atmosphere.

Others

This photo is one of my favorites this year.

A seaside beach under strong noon sunlight — no complex light and shadow, no delicate texture, and no magical atmosphere.

What remains is only large blocks of color, curved lines, and a few perspective-filled accents — a purely structural beauty.

This photo is one of the sample images I shot in Singapore in early this year, before the DJI Mavic Air drone was released.

Drones free the photographer's perspective, letting us fly to places impossible to reach on foot to complete entirely new compositions.

This photo was shot when my friends and I went to Gouqi Island in Zhoushan this year. The haze hid many details of the sky and the ground. But under this environment, people appear even smaller.

When composing, I also placed the horizon almost at the edge of the frame, to further highlight this wonderful feeling.

In October 2018, I attended Hasselblad Master Ben Thomas's workshop, beginning a street shooting journey in downtown Shanghai.

I really enjoy learning and understanding other photographers' ways of thinking, seeing how different photographers observe this world. During the 2 days of street shooting in Shanghai, I found some dramatic symbols, contrasts, and absurdities in the streets and alleys.

This photo is a sample image I shot in Australia with HUAWEI's new Enjoy series phone. Even for a phone costing around a thousand yuan, the current image quality is fully acceptable to me.

Moreover, the phone's flexibility and inconspicuousness far exceed a bulky camera, letting me stand at a pre-selected position and, without drawing a crowd or attention, wait like a farmer waiting by the stump to capture interesting moments.

HD 2K desktop wallpaper download addresses (choose any cloud drive):

Baidu Cloud:

https://pan.baidu.com/s/18kmIc9VCNeXiYPRjFeXzZQ

Tencent Weiyun:

https://share.weiyun.com/5Wcfb57

In the new year, Thomas looks forward to unlocking more ways of observing the world with everyone, while completing some more systematic yet down-to-earth shooting and communication projects.

Friends who haven't joined the group needn't worry: the group's highlight content will be shared on the public platform. And the second group will also open in April; those who have already filled out the form don't need to fill it again.

Thank you all, happy new year!