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Welcome to nickgallery. I've been taking landscape photographs seriously for the past fifteen years, mostly in monochrome using 35mm and 6x7cm format cameras. I even got as far as becoming an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society based on a portfolio of landscapes of the Welsh mountains. However carrying large amounts of heavy camera gear and a tripod through the mountains lost its appeal after a while and I stopped taking 'proper' photographs.
In my photography I'd always concentrated on achieving very sharp and grain free images that could be enlarged to exhibition size - I guess the influence of Ansel Adams was pretty strong. Consequently I'd never really considered digital photography as a viable option; in my mind the results from a digital camera couldn't possibly match up to my expectations from film in a monster medium format camera. However I eventually came round to the view that an image taken with a digital camera had to be better than no image at all. I also realised that digital files could provide the starting point for assembling images that by combining files or other manipulations could be the equal of conventional photographs.
After working exclusively with a digital camera for a year, I was a total convert. The quality of digital images easily matches or exceeds film in an equivalent format, but that is not the main benefit in my view. I believe the key advantage of the digital approach is the ability to manipulate, blend, and optimise, not to create contrived images, but to recreate the image visualised at the time the shutter was tripped, and just maybe to convey the sense of that particular place and time. nickgallery is a selection of these images exploring what can be achieved starting with digital input.

Breithorn

Self-portrait on the summit of the Breithorn (4160m) in Switzerland. This is a example of using digital manipulation to create an image that existed but couldn't be photographed (there wasn't anyone around to take it but me). Its a composite of three images, two for the background and one of me taken by holding the camera out at arms length. The reflections of my arms and the camera in the sunglasses were removed in Photoshop and replaced with reflections cloned from the sky area.