Hi,

I recently saw a comment by a chap in which he mentioned that he had “broken the rules” by softening an image. I very often deliberately soften or diffuse my images in order to try and get a more atmospheric, dreamy look in my landscape work as I find that one gets a result bordering on the clinical when the images are tack sharp. Of course this is purely a personal thing and, for a lot of subjects/genres very sharp imagery is what’s desired. I’m not talking about “bokeh” here, that’s different, I’m talking about the image as a whole although one could argue that using bokeh has become a sort of rule in it’s own when it might be more interesting not to habitually isolate the subject and remove it from the context of the surroundings.

I’ve always believed that there aren’t any or, maybe better put as shouldn’t be any rules in creative arts, it seems to run contrary to the very nature of things and the antipathy of experimentation. In an age where advances in AI are causing such concern in general and, specifically in this context, in photography, if ever I get replaced by a robot landscape photographer, I can only hope that someone gives the thing an artistic soul and programs in that rules are very often made to be broken or, better still, there are no rules. 🙂

Kind regards

Leigh