articles/Landscape/on-landscape-page2

OnLandscape - The Meeting of Minds - part 2 of 1 2

by Mike McNamee Published 02/02/2015

Within our own, social sector community, the situation seems quite different. For example at the last WPPI, the attendance demographic shows 48% female, 52% male with an expectation that the number might actually flip over next time. Social/ wedding photography is arguably more photographically complex than landscape - you have to deal with people, poses, lighting and then camera controls (and that is before the drunks arrive from the bar!) - it makes banging a camera down on a tripod and shooting through a grad filter look like a cakewalk to me!

Another possibility is that digital has to some extent demystified wedding photography. It is not for a moment that women can't grasp the esoteric concepts in photography it is more that they don't care - perhaps their minds stray to loftier pursuits? You may not get a masterpiece, but most DSLRs will deliver a technically competent image when used on auto or P mode, despite what we might like to think. The proposal here then is that women, with their higher ability to connect with their clients are simply using the camera as it should be - a tool.

So is it a self-perpetuating cycle, perhaps? Traditionally, the backbone of landscape photography has been camera club photographers (ie non-commercial) and they, demographically, have tended to be 55-year+ males. Almost all of the lecturers speaking at the OnLandscape conference earn a substantial part of their income lecturing to other photographers and taking them out to wild places, thus we have 55+ males, taking 55+ males out to improve their landscape photography and, surprise surprise, some of then become good and start to repeat the cycle.

And why over 55 years? Is it because landscape is inherently a slow process that requires time - time that does not become available to the child-rearing mother, household running wife, carer of the elderly mother, baby-sitter of the new grandchild? (this one might run and run , it's getting controversial!). Males have traditionally wandered off and done their own thing - that is why fishing is so popular.

http://www.crionnaphotography.com/blog/2013/4/rarespecies-the-female-landscape-photographer

• OnLandscape - The Meeting of Minds page 1
  
• OnLandscape - The Meeting of Minds page 2
  

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