Archives › 2011 › May
This article is written in response to that by Julian Barkway on Beauty, which had a wilderness connection, and as a result of Joe Cornish’s report from the great wilderness trek in NW Scotland. His book Scotland’s Mountains could be regarded as a homage to what remains of Scotland’s wilderness areas. Torridon, Cairngorm, Glencoe, Rannoch [...]
Dav Thomas sent me an email recently saying to take a look at Joe Wright’s photographs as he saw something interesting going on. After looking myself I had to agree and so called Joe for a chat. He’s only been taking photography seriously for about four years but there has been a major change in [...]
There has been some interesting discussion on the history of saturation boosting in photography in recent days, notably David Hyde on the excellent Landscape Photography Blogger website talks about “Did Velvia Film Change Landscape Photography“. His topic was about how the use of hyperreal film such as Fuji Velvia and whether it fundamentally changed the [...]

Looking in Amateur Photographer this week shows healthy signs that film is nowhere near dead yet. They have featured a whole host of vintage great recently and the current issue has a ‘Bigger Pictures on a Budget’ which includes medium format cameras available second hand – although some aren’t quite so budget as the recent [...]
Well we’ve introduced the two most important aspects of composition, balance and flow, what next. Well, we could talk about these two alone for quite a while – the idiosyncracies of each of these will be part of our discussions in future episodes. In this issue I’d like to talk a little about taking photographs [...]
I’ve been asked by a couple of people to write some notes about black and white conversions and although I may not be the expert in this area, I thought it would be a good one to tackle and hopefully get some feedback from some people with more experience than me. 1) What to [...]
We recently took a look at a fantastic photograph by Joe Rainbow of Gunwalloe Scales and asked Joe Cornish to critique it and also asked him how he would approach the post processing of it. The results, whilst not far from Joe Rainbow’s version, show some interesting aspects of technique and style. The original picture [...]

Most people are familiar with the way that a shift lens can ‘fix’ the perspective (verticals) in buildings or trees, even if they haven’t tried these lenses themselves. How these lenses work is often not completely clear and even those with experience typically don’t know how to make the most of them. Hopefully this article [...]
If you’ve read around the outskirts of photography for while, you can’t help but have come across the occasional use of music as a metaphor for some part or other of the photographic process. Whether you have or not, I’m hoping this article will give you a bit more to think about. The most famous [...]

Simply, Peter Dombrovskis The only book readily available from Peter Dombrovskis is ‘Simply’ which although reaching the end of it’s print run, can still be bought from a couple of places in Tasmania (see Peter’s website for details) – I bought mine from Book City in Australia. The book is a gem and many of [...]

I found out about Peter Dombrovskis when I was on a large format photography course with Joe Cornish and David Ward. Joe had a couple of books by Peter and both of them became very popular ‘hand arounds’ whilst whilst we enjoyed the few rare moments of downtime on a very intense course. Following the [...]

This issue we’ve been chatting with photographer Doug Chinnery, a very talented photographer who works across a variety of styles. Hope you like.. In most photographers lives there are ‘epiphanic’ moments where things become clear, or new directions are formed. What were your two main moments and how did they change your photography? Yes, I [...]

How does one review a hefty tome such as this? With over 500 pages of 250x250mm, this is a collection of some of the most memorable photographs taken by National Geographic photographers. The text is written by one such photographer, Annie Griffiths. Maura Mulvihill (Vice President at the NGS) in her Foreword, explains how they [...]

What is ‘beauty’ in landscape photography? On the face of it, it’s almost a question that doesn’t even need to be asked. We all know intuitively what a beautiful landscape looks like, don’t we? But is it so intuitive? And what makes the landscape ‘beautiful’? Why do we respond better to certain types of terrain [...]

