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Comment by herodotus | Hacker News Reader

I am sure that many people will love these photographs. And there is no doubt that the photographer is talented. But there has been such a trend in the last several years to photographers that are highly saturated and heavily processed that, to me, they are no longer interesting.

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I agree about heavily processed photographs - but what actually sets apart "professional" (or let's call them "serious") landscape photographs from those people like you and I take is the photographer's willingness to plan ahead and wait for juuust the right moment for a photograph. Let's take this image of Lake Bled in Slovenia: http://aurelm.com/wp-content/uploads/Gallery-Bled-lake-sunri... - ok, maybe it's a bit too saturated, but what makes it look impressive is the dramatic lighting, which can only be captured at sunrise (if you're lucky and the sky isn't completely overcast, of course). If he wanted a perfect photo, he could have also photoshopped out the crane behind the castle in the background, but he didn't...

No, lots of the lighting flare on the right is most likely edited in like most photos on the internet these days. It's a nice shot but people keep pushing the limit and trying to out compete each other... the best way? Add interesting "lighting".

Some great photos, but I have to agree, many of these just feel "too photoshopped" to me, too much saturation, too much HDR processing, not natural, almost cartoonish.

What does the full res photo give you without any open/free license? At most a desktop wallpaper. It would be more interesting to see the raw or unprocessed images under a free license.

Unfortunately Instagram has become the primary vector for photographers to get their work out there, and the small size basically demands flashy over the top editing to get anyone's attention.

And iPhone default camera settings lean toward the same direction. All my iPhone shots look like they are targeting Insta (which makes a kind of sense).

One fun activity (for me, anyway) is to take the same landscape scene with my phone, my m43rds (crop sensor camera with very opinionated JPEGs and neutral RAW processing), and my full frame mirrorless camera (just RAW here as the JPEGs are more neutral).

And then compare them (the iPhone is definitely more opinionated that even the m43rds JPEGS) and try to post process the full frame RAWs (which even without HDR have 14 stops of range) to match the iPhone.

It's often surprisingly hard (iPhones auto do HDR, for instance) and points out how much the photos I get on my phone don't reflect what I'm seeing (or reflect it in a post-straight-photography way).

Yeah most people don't realize their iPhone is already "photoshopping" the heck out of their image.

Google Pixel is also overdoing the postprocessing, some people are altered so much that they are almost hard to recognize. Luckily, you can save the rates directly

These pictures are works of art, it's taken countless hours to create such a huge portfolio of pictures. What you are saying is, these are not to my taste, and fair enough. But putting them in same basket as other "highly saturated and heavily processed" is simply not fair.

No, it's not "these are not to my tastes", it's saying "I love pottery, but pottery made entirely or on the most by machines is not nice." in a world where the latter is getting more and more common and the people seem to be blinded to source.

Not only that, but apart from a wallpaper or something to hang on an Ikea style apartment wall - I'm not sure what else I can use this content for. They're actually pretty, i actually like though?

I would love if the photographer would make his RAW photos available. I love seeing different edits of a good photo. /r/EditMyRaw is a great subreddit for this.

Yeah this photos and most shared on the internet these days are all heavily edited to the point where you can't tell if they've been run through several apps or even had new elements like birds, lighting or even clone stamped all impurities out.

It's quite depressing, this is coming from another photographer. Real photography is circling the drain.

> last several years

Velvia film has a reputation for producing very saturated photos, so this has been going on for a long time.

As a photog who leans heavily on contrast and saturation, images without this touch just feel amateurish and incomplete. My edits are what separate me from the smartphone-wielding, blinded-by-computational-photography masses, and I like for my images to pop in a way that AI and automatic color fixes can't achieve.

Do you mean the photographs are highly saturated and processed?

I like my coffee just I like my photographers, saturated and highly processed.

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