Look at the passage below. Underline/highlight the main points and then reproduce them in note form, using any system you prefer.

 

Romantic Landscape Photography

Romanticism is one of the most widely popular styles of landscape photography. Within the romantic style there have been many different individual styles which have been more or less fashionable at any one time.

Early pastoral approaches, such as that of George Davies, followed painterly influences and are still popular with some photographers. A certain amount of softness is often deliberately introduced by a number of means. Soft-focused and diffused lenses are an obvious method. Others include shallow focus, soft-printing and the use of fast film for graininess. The subject malter tends to be comfortable, familiar and rural rather than wild and unusual.

Drama and grandeur are other versions of the romantic theme, and are generally more acceptable to modern tastes because they appear to be less contrived and dominated by technique than the pastoral photographs. Yet the apparent impression of spontaneity is often false. Ansel Adams, for instance, visualises his photographs as closely as possible before taking them. This is evident in both the timing and the precision of his composition, which tends to exploit the dramatic potential of views to the full. A more extreme presentation of drama in subjects (such as mountains and deserts), lighting (low sun, dusk and dawn), and design (extreme focal length and high sky-to-land ratios) is common in modern magazine photography.

(M. Freeman, The Encyclopaedia of Practical Photography, London: Quarto Books, 1994.)

 

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