When we think of views in pictorial terms we usually we tend to think romantically of beautiful landscapes of rolling hills and valleys extending as far as the eye can see or mountain ranges or coastlines and sea. However, how many times have you aimed you camera at such views and been disappointed by the resulting photograph in the sense that it just doesn't appear to be like you saw it. The reason for this is that the human eye is very selective. You may think that you are seeing the whole picture but you are not. The eye is moving around the scene and picking out individual areas and objects. Furthermore the eye can shrink the distance between the foreground and the horizon by alternatively focusing first on one and then the other in rapid succession. This is how we see things in three dimensions. On the photograph can only record the scene two dimensionally on a flat surface.

The landscape artist can bring into play all sorts of illustrative devices to create the illusion of the third dimension such as heightened perspective. He can also introduce compositional elements to keep the eye moving around the picture without roaming off the edge. I am not about to enter into a discussion about these things. There are plenty of articles written in photographic magazines on the subject of landscape photography although, with the advent of powerful image editing programmes, I tend to think that landscape and seascape photographs get manipulated to the point of fantasy. Perhaps you like that kind of thing but don't lose site of the fact that such images fall into the category of illustrations rather than photographs which is OK if you are in the business of producing illustrations for design which I often do in the course of my own work.

I don't see any harm in a little bit of subtle tweeking just to make a photograph more pleasing as long as it stays as a photograph.

This photograph of part of the Cornish coastline at sunset was taken with a relatively inexpensive compact digital camera. With the sun coming directly towards the camera. There was a great deal of ugly lens flare seen in the viewfinder and the way to eliminate it was to wait for a very brief patch of cloud to hide the sun and then take the photo. Using Photoshop I then put the sun back in minus the lens flare. In other words this picture is faithful to the scene that I saw with my naked eye and therefore tells no lies. I just used a little technology to achieve it.

From time to time I like to produce panoramic photos by taking a succession of frames and stitching them together. In the days before digital technology I would the paste prints onto card matching them up in much the same way as you would match up patterned wallpaper. Now we can do this digitally and later editions of Photoshop have a powerful feature called Photomerge which will stitch frames together seamlessly and you really 'can't see the join.'

The photo seen in the banner at the top of this page was produced in this way from these two frames stitched together.