Waltzing

Landscape photography in my hometown means to make the best of the conditions, that we find on location. We do not have hills and mountains, we have only one nature protection zone, our wonderful Buelter Sea. But this sea is inside a moor in a nature protection zone, and i do not want to disturb the animals too often, so i search inside our woods for motives, which is a bit difficult. We do have mostly pure plantation forests there, where each tree is looking equal - big oaks and beech trees are getting more and more a very rare view, especially since the oil price is high and the people need firewood for their chimneys. Very sad, what they are doing to nature in my hometown, really. :-(
But i have to make the best of it, and the more ugly and monotone the location is, the bigger is the challenge for us photographers. Am i right?! ;-)
So what can we do, in case the landscape around us is ugly?
First of all, we can try to shoot in the right light. Almost everything can look good in the right light. Fog is also a wonderful "beautifier" for every landscape, and if you have a good sky (a big dramatic sky), this is very helpful either. We also can play with our camera, with long time exposures (in the last time i tried such shots free hand (inspired by my british colleagues at Flickr!), or with open aperture. Tele focal length is helpful to crop unwanted elements out of the composition.
Sometimes it is even an advantage to shoot in a coniferous wood, because you get good vertical lines (wherever man has "designed" something, you find these artificial clean even lines - that is the reason, that i like Friedensreich Hundertwasser that much... ;-)
In some cases you can use the ugly surrounding for melancholic shots or as background for posed model shootings in a special atmosphere. Or you shoot it as a documentary image as ugly as it is, for later comparisons, when it will look probable even more ugly then. If you don't think, that this is possible: Come to my hometown Heerstedt, and you will see, that this is part of the sad development, that i have to face each day, when i am out in the fields.
So it is possible to use the ugliness in a photographic way - but i would like it much better, if our people would not do such a big damage to our "Feldmark", as we call the countryside in german.