Mehmet Özgür has simply stunning landscape photography and the most amazing studies of smoke.
This is an unusual award in this series, because it is really just about the work, rather than the website you can view it on.
An engineer by education and profession, Mehmet is also an avid photographer. His work spans a substantial range of subject matter and technique, from the landscape panorama to normal format landscape, digital compositions and his amazing smoke works. It was his smoke series that caught my attention, seeing an excellent profile of his work in the Nov-Dec 2006 issue of LensWork magazine. His smoke series comprise stunning images of incense smoke, mainly in monochrome but some in color. These, as all of his work, are digitally manipulated on the computer to provide the effect he is after.
Beyond the smoke series that first caught my attention, Mehmet has an amazing body of landscape photography. These range from his minimalist ‘Thin lines’ series of mainly monochrome images of trees that are significantly abstract pieces, in my view, to more ‘normal’ tree portraits to rich and detailed landscape panoramas, which are mainly in color. All these works appear to have some degree of digital adjustment, though this ranges from the not visible subtle adjustment of tonality that one might do in the darkroom, to the much more obvious crafting in Photoshop.
All of Mehmet’s work is strong, striking, beautifully composed and, frankly, divine. You can learn a lot about the crafting of images from a careful examination of Mehmet’s work. Unlike so many photographers who are hesitant about the powers that Photoshop offers them, Mehmet rather embraces the power of PS as yet another manipulative tool in an art form which is all about manipulation and confidently runs with it.
Mehmet does not have his own web site, but rather has an extensive body of his work on photo.net.
Do yourself a favor and spend some time carefully examining his work.
All images provided by Mehmet Özgür with his permission.