A while ago I started reading a book about Klimt's landscape paintings. It's pretty boring, which is disappointing because the Modigliani book in the same series was good. But there was one point in it that I've been thinking about. It was that while the french impressionists were doing a very impersonal art, about light and color and perception, the art that was being made a ways east in the german speaking world was much more heavily based in psychology and allegory, landscape was a medium for expressing ideas and states of mind. I flipflop about whether my landscape photography is more similar to the french or german sensibilty.

I have a number of photographs that I like that I don't post on here because I think that they need to be big to be seen. Dependent on texture, and therefore resolution, for the feeling I wanted to capture in them. But you could argue that I don't have a strong sense of composition if my images don't stand up if they are merely 1000 pixels wide. I don't know. If you look at thumbnails of Klimts versus thumbnails of van goghs, the latter are better in thumbnails because of their simple, bold compositions. Klimt's paitings have a lot of fine detail that needs to be reproduced at some reasonable size to be seen.

I like to mess around with Photomatix and I'll use it with images that don't really need it, purely from the dynamic range standpoint. I like the sort of ethereal or surrealistic effect you can get, and make an image look like a Klimt forestscape, or maybe something out of Tolkien.