Archives › 2010 › November

Alistair Lee is primarily a climber but has been carrying a camera since his early outings and with this his fourth book (Eyes Up was his first followed by Forgotten Landsacpe and then Pendle Hill) he has concentrated wholly on the mountains of the Lake District and it works treat. I suppose this makes him [...]

Beauty pains and when it pained most, I shot. Ernst Haas A debate almost as old as photography is whether we take or make photographs. I’ve always felt strongly that we make images, that it is a creative act. `Take’ has always seemed too passive, too casual, as if the images were lying around waiting [...]

David Clapp, TIm Parkin and Dav Thomas met up in the Peak District just as Great British Landscapes was being formulated. That first interview had a couple of problems (the Canon 5Dmk2 only recorded 12minutes at a time and the Panasonic GH1 only recorded 30 minutes but with bad sound, the main audio ended up [...]

Picture at 100% digital but increased to 200% in order to show the differences (see below for more details).. Here is the 100% only version I’m not one to engage in the film vs digital debate from a ‘religious’ point of view. I happily use both (which makes me multi-faith I suppose) and own more [...]

Autumn has finally come to an end here in Argyll. As I write this article sleet and rain lashes against the window and strong winds strip away the remaining colour from the trees, the leaves giving up their tenuous grip having been weakened by hard frosts earlier in the week and Snow has made a [...]

“In all things we describe we merely describe ourselves” Voltaire. We all ask profound questions about life from time to time from “why is there suffering in the world?” to “why do I have to die?” They are deep and meaningful questions, imponderables that unify us in life. So why does most landscape photography aspire [...]

For photographers of a certain (ahem) age, the aspect ratio of 35mm film, 24mm x 36mm (ie 2×3), was fed to us like mother’s milk. While there were alternatives, we tended to develop the assumption that 2×3 was the best all-rounder. Since I had my first eastern block slr back in 1976, I have gone [...]

Padley Gorge is well know in photography circles, mostly for Burbage Brook, the small stream that flows through the length of this wooded, miniature valley. The brook can be intensely peaty, giving the water a deep browny-red colour which contrasts wonderfully with the mossy environment and in autumn gives it a remarkable beauty. However, there [...]

As I had mentioned in the news from the previous issue, Joe and I gave a interactive session at the National Media Museum on the 16th of October as part of the Photocamp project. The talk was ostensibly about film and digital but we quickly meandered around a few different topics as questions were asked [...]

Colin Prior is one of the the original British landscape photographers. If you had wandered into a Borders or Waterstones at any point in the last decade, his Scotland, the WildPlaces and Highland Wilderness books would probably have kept First Light, The Landscape Within and Seeing Photographs company. Originally an underwater photographer, Colin’s hard work [...]

For every ‘famous’ photographer that you may hear about through our esteemed photographic press or via ‘exploring’ the photo sharing websites, there are many more who just go about their photographic business with little attention. It should therefore come as no surprise that for every ‘brilliant, famous’ photography, there are other ‘brilliant, unkown’ photographers. One [...]

We’re continuing Joe’s “First Light, Still” continues on with a series of pictures from Scotland’s Coast. As you can imagine, Joe took many more pictures than were included in the book and we’re talking about two of them here. We’re also featuring what must be one of Joe’s most well known and creative pictures and [...]

Antony is a deserving winner of Take a View 2010, his capture of Corfe is original and well seen and his other commended images are, in my opinion, even better (especially the lavendar sunrise shot which is mentioned here). We spoke to Antony on the Monday after the winners were announced. Presumably you entered more [...]

Eliot Porter, born in 1901; the beginning of a century that would transform photography. From the age of 11 he was discovering his surroundings via a camera but his career started in chemistry at Harvard university. He never lost the love of photography and was taking photographs of the East with his Leica in his [...]


