In the last few articles in “On Landscape”, I have been reviewing the particularities of using photography as a way of personal expression (see part 1, part 2 and part 3). Landscape photography can be used not only to record literal depictions of places but also to convey ideas, emotions and connoted symbolism and metaphor. By using photography in an expressive way, we can tell stories and shape the way these stories will be deciphered by the observer.
Obviously, the most important thing to make our photography expressive is having something to express. But even if we know what we want to say, we need to decide how to do it, which, in turn, will need to be informed by the why. Photographing with intent means allowing that intention to guide the whole photographic process, so that every single decision is coherent, informed and justified.
In this article, I am presenting one of my personal projects, “Totems”, made in the framework of my MA in photography. I hope the reader will not feel alienated by the eventual academic jargon and frequent quotes to critics and other practitioners. If you feel bogged down in the details when reading this article, I urge you to focus on the overall idea: how the project is critically justified always coming back to its message and intent. The purpose of this article is to provide a case study where the overall message and intent are specified, and the subsequent decisions along the photographic process are critically justified; from the fieldwork to the decision of the ideal surface of dissemination.
In this respect, the article ends up discussing about the creation of an Artist Book made for this project. I succinctly describe how every single decision related to its design and construction was, again, aligned with the original message and intent of the overall project.
Additionally, this article also shows how important it is to know where our project stands, in terms of the History of photography and of the contemporary practice of landscape photography. This is not only important to avoid repeating what others have already done, but also to realise what we as individuals have to say in a genuine way. Obviously, we never create in a vacuum, and it is also important to acknowledge possible sources of inspiration while justifying our decisions in the light of criticism already given to similar work.
These “Totems” are just remnants of what used to be a productive farm. These figures of anthropomorphic nature are displayed in a typological way. Thanks to the psychological phenomenon known under the name of Pareidolia, we see human traits, faces, gestures and poses in these figures.
"Totems"
At the very root of the project “Totems” lies a critical opinion about the unsustainable relationship between human beings and their environment.
These “Totems” are just remnants of what used to be a productive farm. These figures of anthropomorphic nature are displayed in a typological way. Thanks to the psychological phenomenon known under the name of Pareidolia, we see human traits, faces, gestures and poses in these figures.
Whatever we may think, traces of our upbringing always persist to shape us, and at some stage manifest themselves in our photography. That’s certainly true for Jenifer Bunnett, raised a free spirit in Pembrokeshire but presently – temporarily she hopes – living away from the sea that she loves. Not that that has stopped her from developing a portfolio based around the elements that resonate most: earth, wind and sea. It just takes a little determination and some good planning, plus a willingness to allow for life’s interruptions. In contrast to the energetic frenzy of her good friend Rachael Talibart’s photographs, Jenifer’s images show a quieter side of the sea, though not without the potential to occasionally take her feet from under her.
Can you tell us something about where you grew up, and the extent to which that has shaped you?
West Wales was where I was lucky enough to be brought up. My father fell for Pembrokeshire while doing a holiday job rowing guests to Thorn Island on which sits an old fort. At that time it was run as an alternative (sic Pembrokeshire) hotel. When my parents discovered I was on the way, my mother, a London girl, had to be convinced that Pembrokeshire would be the ideal place in which to raise a child. In those days there was a lot less motorway and Pembrokeshire was decidedly remote. They set up a sailing school, rather ahead of their time. Our cottage, though quite charming, had no electricity or running water. We obtained the latter from a nearby spring. It was indeed the perfect place to raise me; a world of echoey bridges clad in emerald green seaweed, mournfully clinking boats, the ever stirring wind and looming layers of cloud, variously disquieting or reassuring, heightening the senses.
Your father was a photographer. How did this influence your education in the subject, and tastes? What kind of images did you initially set out to make?
Yes, he was. After a few years of running the sailing school, which I gather was successful in a free spirited kind of way, my mother put her foot down. I had a younger brother and another on the way, and she wanted stability, running water and a social life! They headed six miles inland and bought a rambling old farmhouse. It probably seemed as bonkers as the old cottage to some, but it had amenities so my mother was OK with that. Dad had been one of a team of scientists who’d sailed to Spitsbergen to prove the Earth’s tectonic plates had moved and that trip had galvanised his nascent interest in photography. So, photography it was! One room became a studio, another a darkroom. A few years on, he opened a studio in the town centre where his business really expanded. I now had three brothers and specialising in one genre wasn’t really an option; he did it all. Weddings almost every weekend, portraits, industrial and commercial shoots and lots of press photography. One of our favourite childhood memories is of Dad trying to get a roll of film onto the train to arrive in Cardiff for publication in the next morning’s Western Mail, and missing the train, so whizzing along to the next station to try and catch it there. We’d glimpse the train sometimes, jubilant as Dad tried to race it. Occasionally we’d miss all the trains and end up in Cardiff!
Perfection in design is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.- Antoine de Saint Exupery
Saint Exupery’s dictum is exemplified, par excellence, by McCloskey’s image of Devil’s Island, taken one foggy morning in Killarney National Park, County Kerry, Ireland. On a superficial level, we see an image which has been stripped back to its essentials: an island, its reflection and the merging of water and sky to create a uniform background to the image. It seems simple, simplistic even, a perfect example of the cliché saying about minimalism: less is more. But this is to underplay the power of this particular image, and the impact of minimalism in general – it is anything but simple!
Devil’s Island, Killarney National Park, County Kerry
If we approach an image like this from a compositional point of view, then we already begin to understand some of the interpretative choices that the photographer has made. For example, we are presented with geometric shapes – the island and its reflection create a (rough) circle which has been placed centrally in a square frame.
If we approach an image like this from a compositional point of view, then we already begin to understand some of the interpretative choices that the photographer has made. For example, we are presented with geometric shapes – the island and its reflection create a (rough) circle which has been placed centrally in a square frame.
(Geometry is always so powerful in image making…) Such a central composition suggests neutrality & impartiality – it deliberately avoids the dynamism of a focal point which might be placed anywhere else in the image. Put the focal point on the thirds and it would immediately introduce tension in the image which would detract from the minimalist aesthetic. It creates a ‘weightiness’ in the middle of the image, heaviness of the centre, like a magnet pulling the eye towards the island. The geometrical circularity of the focal point is, of course, a function of the island’s reflection which completes the circle.
This is a pictorial effect created by the deliberate decision of the photographer to shoot when the water is still. Not also how the space around the island and its reflection is devoid of texture. The viewer can’t really tell any difference between water and sky. They are tonally equal, there is no pattern or surface structure for the eye to rest on. The blending of water and sky is emphasised by the restricted colour palette, blues and slight greys. That’s it. Even the island only manages a hint of brown and green, a dab of white. All very sparing, austere and simple.
Why is this sort of minimalism an attribute of perfection as suggested by Saint Exupery? I think this comes down to a balance of the aesthetic choices the photographer has made, and the emotional impact that derives from those choices. I’m not particularly interested in how the image came about – perhaps the water was really that still, the fog obscured the horizon line, or McCloskey used a ND filter to smooth the texture, it doesn’t really matter. The effect, so common to minimalism, is to focus the eye on one point, to make the viewer stop, and to force a contemplation. It is a stilling of the everyday reality. Imagine for example what it actually must have been like when McCloskey stood on the shore. There would have been waves, movement, noise, detail – we all know as photographers how the moment of making an image can be full of adrenalin and excitement. But all this has been excised. The rhythm of reality has been slowed down and stopped, this image creates an unreality, something the eye cannot see, but only the mind of the photographer can perceive and demonstrate to the viewer.
And so, to the emotional impact: What does this image convey to you? A feeling of peace, calm and quietness? Does it suggest tranquillity and harmony? Perhaps a meditative feeling, of a sense of emptiness? I wonder if this existed at the moment of making the image…? More often than not, I suspect it doesn’t. Rather this is the minimalist aesthetic: It is the photographer’s decision to strip away, to get rid of colour, of objects, textures, to blend everything into a formal static composition, to flatten time, that brings us back to Saint Exupery’s insight: there is nothing left to take away, and to be left with perfection…
Salt piles both white and brown, excavation by way of evaporation, the semi-arid desert located basins exposed to the prevailing northerly winds and summer heat. Salt production from the sketchers’ imagination, an environment extremely hostile to life revealing through the frame a kind of atavistic visual austerity.
Some 30 years ago I had read about Saharan Salt and the caravans transporting it up from Algeria and Mali into Morocco. Salt literally worth its weight in gold. I can't be sure whether I had read or imagined desert towns made entirely from blocks of salt. The notion of such a wild inhospitable place appealed as a place to write about. Many years later, I found myself much closer to the Saharan source of salt, living in Morocco.
The small pockets of Morocco’s salt production located on its western coastline had been on my radar for years but photographically it seemed too unstructured and harsh to make any images there.
It has come to me of late that comparing one man’s work to another’s, naming one greater or lesser, is a wrong approach. The important and only vital question is, how much greater, finer, am I than I was yesterday?
- Edward Weston
Part I of this article gave a historical context to the current debate in post-processing (click here to read).
The Dilemma
Nearly everyone would agree that digital files, especially raw files, require some degree of post-processing, i.e. editing. The essence of the current debate is, at what point does post-processing cease to approximate reality as it was and begin to depict reality as the photographer wished it to be? Whilst the photographer is obliged to use some software to process images, at what point does an image become “Photoshopped,” which for some is a euphemism for mendacious.
The essence of the current debate is, at what point does post-processing cease to approximate reality as it was and begin to depict reality as the photographer wished it to be? Whilst the photographer is obliged to use some software to process images, at what point does an image become “Photoshopped,” which for some is a euphemism for mendacious.
Some have argued in a variety of forums that truth is neither necessary nor important, nor even possible, in a photograph.1,2 Others feel that the photographer should strive for veracity in the image even if truth can never be fully achieved, kind of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You can never photograph what you see so the photograph must be untrue.
Choosing a favourite image is an almost impossible task for me, given that my mood and tastes have shifted quite significantly over the past few years. Still, when approached by On Landscape to consider this, it did give me a chance to look back over the photographers who in one way or another have helped shape my own journey thus far.
I, like most, when first starting out in landscape photography, was drawn to the grander view: colour; drama; impact. Wide views which pulled you into the scene. Those, and I mean no disrespect to the photographers or their work, where you didn’t have to go looking too hard for the image. Beautiful, but nonetheless often a literal representation of the scene in front of them. Work from the likes of Adam Burton, Neil Barr and Mark Bauer was part of my regular morning fix of photography over coffee.
It wasn’t until I had returned to landscape photography (after several years working as a sports photographer) that I realised my tastes had shifted and my eye was now drawn to quieter moments in the landscape. Whilst the view could still be grand at times, the palette was more muted, sometimes almost devoid of all colour. Work from the likes of Benjamin Graham, Rohan Reilly and Jenifer Bunnett were permanent fixtures on my browser’s toolbar.
My tastes have once again shifted, this time more to the intimate view of the landscape, with work from the likes of David Ward, Russ Barnes and Hans Strand being a joy to peruse. A number of these images make me question what I am looking at and that helps me linger longer, sometimes revealing even more hidden beauty.
Are we looking at the mist in the woodland, or do the colder tones, along with the sparse nature of the leaves, represent the last throws of autumn and the onset of winter? I love it when an image makes me ask such questions, as it ensures my gaze will linger and I will return to it time and again.
Today, while all of the above still holds a place in my heart, especially for the intimate landscape, I now find myself drawn more and more to those photographers who are taking their work further than a single straightforward image. For me, one of the standout names in this field is Glenys Garnett As someone who also posts videos on YouTube, I first became aware of Glenys’ work via her series ‘The Making Of’
Lack of opportunities to travel for landscape photography has caused me (as well as many others) to look closer to home for subjects to photograph. I’ve been inspired by seeing the daily social media posts by Valerie Dalling of the cloudscapes from her window every morning since lockdown began in March. I had the idea of capturing evening cloudscapes as being complementary to Valerie’s project, but unfortunately, I was never organised enough to do it systematically. Nevertheless, I have been irregularly collecting cloud photos since late March. Those included here were, with the exception of the first photo, taken outside the front door of my home.
Living under the flight path of Luton airport means that my usual sky is a mass of aircraft contrails, both from Luton and from Heathrow. The huge fall in air travel since late March seems to have brought out cloudscapes which I’d either never noticed before or were hidden by the crisscrossing contrails. Perhaps both.
Why are clouds interesting as photographic subjects? Their ephemeral nature, constantly changing and never repeating, an unending series of ‘decisive moments’ which are sometimes difficult to catch
Why are clouds interesting as photographic subjects? Their ephemeral nature, constantly changing and never repeating, an unending series of ‘decisive moments’ which are sometimes difficult to catch, forcing the use of manual focus by someone who usually lazily relies on autofocus. Wistfulness, threat and other emotions seem to be expressed by different cloudscapes.
Something that was in my mind as I took these shots was their lack of scale, conferring an abstract nature. In contrast, I looked back at a shot I had taken a few months ago where a sunset cloudscape was firmly anchored against the trees in the foreground (the first photo).– very ‘safe’ and its scale can be easily judged.
The more recent examples are a mixture taken with a long telephoto or a mid-range lens – but lack of inclusion of any terrestrial fixtures means it’s impossible to know whether they were close-ups. Lacking a knowledge of photography history, I’m grateful to have been pointed by Tim Parkin to the work of Alfred Stieglitz, who published a series of cloudscapes he called ‘Equivalents’ in the 1920s and 1930s (read more here).
It seems that these were recognised as among the earliest intentionally abstract photographs, in that they (mostly) excluded any reference points that would give them scale. He aimed that the viewer would take from them not so much that they are photos of clouds, but draw on the feelings that the cloud formations evoked.
The British Romantic artists also employed clouds to project sentiment. Constable’s ‘Cloud Study’ of 1821 has a degree of overlap with some of the images I’ve presented here (says he, modestly!) although it’s probably the other way around.
p.s. in the last few days air travel seems to be opening up again, and the skies over Herts are returning to the familiar pattern of crisscrossing contrails.
Basically, therefore, photographers wish to produce states of the things that have never existed before; they pursue these states, not out there in the world, since for them the world is only a pretext for the states of things that are to be produced, but among the possibilities of the camera’s program. To this extent, the traditional distinction between realism and idealism is overturned in the case of photography: it is not the world out there that is real, nor is the concept within the camera’s program – it is only the photograph that is real.”
“We are dealing here with a reversal of the vector of significance: it is not the significance that is real, but the signifier, the information, the symbol and this reversal … is characteristic of the post-industrial world in general - Vilém Flusser, 1983: The Gesture of Photography
And then, straight after submitting my last article to On Landscape1, I started reading a book by Vilém Flusser2(1920-1991) that expressed views almost completely opposed to what I had suggested in that article about the representation of reality. Flusser suggests that it is only the photograph that can be real; it cannot be the reality that was photographed (see the leading quotation above3). That is, of course, true to an extent. I had already noted in that article that our images depend on technology outside our control but had expressed the view that they might be representations of reality as experienced, in so far as they do not stray too far from what the eye saw at the time.4
"Quick Definitions"
Semiotics - study of signs and symbols Post-Structuralism - the idea that things need analysing in their proper context, not in isolation Post-Modernism - A rejection of turn of the century 'big thinking' around art. - Ed
The book by Flusser, Thoughts on a Philosophy of Photography, was written in 1983, so well before the proliferation of digital imaging, but at a time in philosophy when semiotics, post-structuralism and post-modernism [were in full flow. He wrote about photography as a post-industrial activity in which the camera as a machine or apparatus was used to produce images to satisfy the photographic program. The photographic program he envisaged (already in 1983) as the potential to produce images of everything and everywhere: “the sum of all those photographs that can be taken by a camera”. He does not define a philosophy of photography as such but rather sets out what a philosophy of photography would have to deal with in the post-industrial age. In particular, he suggests that rather than the photographer using the camera to provide information, one of the features of the photographic program is that the camera is using the photographer as a means of continuing its development (and the continuation of all the industrial complex that lies behind it). This is certainly an interesting alternative perspective on the modern memes of gear acquisition syndrome and the manufactured demand for ever more megapixels when most images are not shown at greater resolutions than the humble phone or computer screen.
Using new technology is always a dilemma for a photographer. I was interested to read about Martin Longstaff's musings on using drones for landscape photography (Issue 201). This is a debate I have had recently. With cameras being technology based, they are constantly evolving. Some tools that we now take for granted, in their day were contentious. Take the lowly flashgun for example. When it was introduced it sparked a whole debate about ethics. When asked about its use, W. Eugene Smith, the celebrated documentary photographer remarked, 'Available light is any damn light that is available!'. This sums up my approach to using technology. It is about using the right tools, to get a job done. This article looks at my experiments using drones for landscape photography.
Shortly after moving to the Peak District, I was invited to talk about my work at one of the local camera clubs. I had recently finished a project that documented the long-term effects of the 1984 Miners' Strike on mining communities, so I was talking about that. As a guest speaker, I was also asked to review some of the members work, in preparation for an inter club 'print battle' that was coming up.
The talk went well, however judging the prints, was a little more challenging. It was a strange position to be in, none of the work could be classed as straight documentary, but I did my best. Being in close proximity to the Peak District, a large proportion of the images were Landscapes. One member named Geoff, proudly showed me his picture of a sunset over the Goyt Valley. Technically it was faultless, a classic example of the 'rule of thirds' but with a little too much Photoshop, post processing, for my tastes. I asked him about the image. He explained that it was a favourite walk of his. He loved this area of the Peak.
In the lower third of the image, the rolling moors stretched out into the distance. However, the whole landscape was covered in pock marks, like a strange disease. These peculiar manifestations are man-made. It is where heather is either cut or burnt back on grouse moors. The resulting regrowth becomes a key food source for red grouse and deer.
I remarked how alien it looked, but from his blank response, I could see that he didn't really understand my point. I asked him to tell me the story behind the picture. He explained that he had been walking his dog and had just got back to the car, at the same time as the sun was setting. He then detailed the equipment he had used and then went through the steps he had taken in Photoshop to make the image 'pop'. It struck me, that at no point did he actually talk about what was in the image. This was a classic case of 'looking, without seeing'.
My interest in the Peak District started 12 years ago when I moved to the area. I was lucky to meet, the respected photographer, Paul Hill early on. Paul was running an MA at a local university. His seminal book, White Peak, Dark Peak, was a major influence on my own approach to landscape work. He didn't capture pretty scenes, he documented what he saw. He collected evidence, to tell stories. We would go for day long rambles. He was a mine of information about everything. Every walk was an education.
It was during these trips that I began to understand how the National Park had evolved. Far from being a natural place, it had very much been shaped by man.
It was during these trips that I began to understand how the National Park had evolved. Far from being a natural place, it had very much been shaped by man. With a background of documenting three decades of industrial disputes, I became acutely aware of the industrial heritage of the Peak District. There was evidence of lead and copper mining. The Industrial Revolution started in nearby Cromford. The site of the world's first water-powered cotton spinning mill, developed by Richard Arkwright in 1771.
Whilst numerous Photographic books on the Peak District books existed, few other than Paul's, tried to show anything other than pretty pictures. A much richer source of information came from local history books. One day in a local bookshop I came across 'The South-West Peak: History of the Landscape' by Eric Wood. This was a revelation. It detailed how the landscape had evolved and been shaped by man, right from the beginnings of time. It changed the whole way I 'saw' the landscape. Finely manicured hills were a sign of intensive agriculture, not just a tourist attraction. In this area grazing by sheep and deer had been the main factors in sculpting the landscape. The hills were this shape because of economics, not nature.
On one trip, being trapped in the car waiting for the rain to pass, I started doodling in my notebook. I was beginning to sketch out ideas for a new body of work. From a mind map, two phrases leapt from the page: 'There are no straight lines in the wilderness' and 'Just because a landscape is green, doesn't make it natural'. I realised that these two statements could form the basis of the project. I wanted to create a set of images that would engage people, but also make them think about what they were seeing.
At this time, I was becoming increasingly aware of some of the ecological factors effecting the landscape. With issues such as Climate Change and Brexit, Britain as a country is having to consider/re-evaluate land management and its consequences in some detail. A growing body within the scientific community and activists have begun to explore the concept of Rewilding and managing the British Landscape, to enhance its ability to absorb CO2. In addition, as the UK is now set to leave the European Economic Union, as a country we are now reassessing how a post Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) landscape will look. This includes changing incentives from maximising agricultural production to other goals, such as conservation and increasing biodiversity. All this means that land use and its management are increasingly coming under scrutiny.
At a certain point in a photographer's career, you get the urge to get serious. All rationale goes out the window and you buy a large format, film camera.
At a certain point in a photographer's career, you get the urge to get serious. All rationale goes out the window and you buy a large format, film camera. It's as though the suffering of carrying a 15 Kilo tripod and using film, will give your work some form of gravitas. Equipped with my 30-year-old mahogany and brass camera, I ventured out into the storm blasted hills. I came back with very little to show for my efforts, other than a bad back. Whilst I had begun to develop the concept behind the work, the images I was producing were not working for me. I showed them to friends and colleagues, but they did not elicit the response I wanted. I could pre-visualise some of the images I wanted to take, but the equipment I was using, wasn't getting me there.
The breakthrough to my approach came on a trip to North Wales. I was walking in the hills above Taly-bont. As I descended the hills above Llyn Irddyn, I could see two perfectly parallel walls. In this wild isolated area, they just looked so incongruous. Why had someone bothered to take the time and effort to build these structures? From my vantage point high on the mountain I could see the image, but no matter which lens I selected, I couldn't frame the shot. As I descended the advantages of a high viewpoint were lost, at ground level I just couldn't make the picture work. It was lunch-time, so I pondered the problem whilst eating my sandwiches. Out here in this wild and barren place, was geometric evidence of man shaping the landscape, but with conventional photography, I couldn't get the photograph I wanted. What was needed was a high, controllable vantage point. The obvious answer was aerial photography, but hiring a light aircraft would have broken my budget!
A few years earlier I had used a drone for a project, this was the perfect solution. However, my experience of using drones was a frustrating one. I had built a couple of big drones, capable of lifting DSLRs off the ground. This was before 'off the shelf' versions were available. The problem was that I spent more time building and maintaining them than actually flying. In addition, with early flight controllers there was an ever-present risk, that your drone would develop a mind of its own and fly off into the sunset! In frustration I gave up. However, in the intervening time, a number of 'out of the box' solutions have become available. Whilst it was a bit of a gamble, I decided to try one out. A fortnight later I was back in the same area, flying a drone 80 metres above the walls. As soon as I saw the images, I knew I had found the solution.
Out here in this wild and barren place, was geometric evidence of man shaping the landscape, but with conventional photography, I couldn't get the photograph I wanted. What was needed was a high, controllable vantage point.
Whilst there have been a number of photographers that have used aerial landscape images, including Edward Burtynsky and Yann Arthus-Bertrand, their work explores shape and form in a more ambiguous way. When writing about Burtynsky’s work in the Washington post, Columnist David Segal is quoted as saying, "Do Ed Burtynsky’s Photos Glorify Industry or Vilify It?". When asked about his own images, Burtynsky responds, "I don’t want to be didactic. I’m not trying to editorialise and say this is right or this is wrong. Either extreme is too simplistic". My work has evolved from a different heritage. An approach shaped by artists such as Richard Misrach, highlighting the ecological damage caused by the military on the American landscape (Bravo 20) and before him photographers from the New Topographics movement, whose images focused on a Man-Altered Landscape. This is work that is issue based. Whilst the images use composition and aesthetic forms, to draw in the viewer, their ultimate aim is to go beyond that and act as a catalyst to stimulate debate about contemporary and future land use.
Thinking back to my experience at the Camera Club, Geoff became my target audience. I wanted to create a set of images that would be appealing aesthetically, but would make people think about what they were seeing. I suppose that with a background in Social Documentary photography, it is not surprising that my landscape work is issue based as well. Using drones is just one way to achieve these goals.
I came across David Foster on Twitter, where he was sharing beguiling photographs from his project 'everything seemed to be listening'. David has previously been drawn to edgelands, wastelands, and borderlands, and to ruined, derelict and abandoned places (which you can see at davidfoster.photography) but for the last three years he has been creating images and videos in response to the places in which the artist Paul Nash lived and worked. For the still images, David has chosen to work with double exposure photographs, made in camera, seeking a dialogue with what Nash referred to as ‘the life of the inanimate object’. David’s images and videos are titled with a grid reference giving the location where the work was made, but he talks about the way in which he reaches these places as being equally important.
SU530920 (2020)
Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up and what your early interests were?
I was born in Aldershot in Hampshire but spent my childhood from the age of four in Northumberland, first in a house on the edge of the old coal-mining village of Acomb, then in my teenage years in a house in the centre of the nearby market town of Hexham. The main interest that I had as a child which has extended into adulthood was that of music, which I loved making and listening to from a very early age - something that is still very much the case today. As a young boy, I think I did a fair amount of solitary wandering of the woods and fields just outside Acomb. I also used to regularly walk the two miles to school in Hexham, in order to avoid the bullies that tyrannised the school bus. Those early experiences of solitary walking – and indeed of the alienation and search for solace that so often prompts and fuels that kind of activity – perhaps shaped to a considerable degree some salient aspects of the outlook and sensibility that I have today.
We have interviewed Al twice in the past, once as a featured photographer in 2013 and then in 2018 to talk more about the projects he was working on at the time (click here for interview). Richard Earney wrote an end frame in December 2019 that caught my attention and I got in touch with Al to find out more about his Graveyard Bins project.
It’s been two years since we spoke, tell us what you have been doing photographically over this period?
Wow, that's a lot of time to cover. I'll try and be concise.
I've had two books published, been part of several exhibitions here and abroad, made a short film, published some new zines with my friends at Inside the Outside, recently finished a series of Polaroid lifts which were to be exhibited at the end of March but that's postponed, started doing some workshops with my friend Fleur Olby called the 'Art of Walking', probably given a talk or two but don't quote me on that and started two new long term bodies of work to run concurrently. I've probably forgotten something but that's the gist.
Richard Earney wrote a fantastic end frame about one of the images from this project. Do you want to recap on how this project came about? Where did it all start? What's your personal interest in this subject?
It started roughly 5 or maybe 6 years ago. And it wasn't something I ever thought would be a project or body of work. The flowers were just something I noticed. That tiny tiny moment of 'oh yeah'. And that's all it was. I had my phone with me and I stuck it over the bins and made one or two photographs. I think I might have put them up on social media assuming no one would look at them and I was right, no one did, and quite rightly so. They weren't very good. And in a way the fact that no one looked at them kind of made me want to make more of them. But I didn't really. Not for a while. And that's where it all begins, I guess. By noticing something that maybe someone else misses. Everyone can see something that's invisible to others.
The concept of ‘beauty’ often seems to be a dirty word to those photographers from a ‘contemporary/academic’ background. The use of beauty is considered too bright a light to be seen direct for fear you go blind to the meaning behind a work. To those wishing to create works that reflect the natural beauty of nature, such an attitude seems anathema. Robert Adams strode a middle ground between these two camps and his book “Beauty in Photography” is an essential source material for anyone wishing to look more closely at the subject. His writing is accessible and concise without being dry, and his prior experience as an English professor pays dividends for the reader.
About 10-12 years ago there was a revolution. Social media and digital photography created new ways and opportunities to record and share our lives, experiences and adventures. All of a sudden, we could see where our friends and relatives travelled. We saw images of places we had been to in our dreams, we saw what our friends ate for breakfast on the other side of the planet, we could ride with them a boat through beautiful or harsh surroundings.
Then it changed. We started to put ourselves into the images, together with the landscape or a famous landmark. We moved ourselves into the foreground. We didn’t go to beautiful places solely to experience the magnificent historical sights, the manmade constructions, the natural wonders, or beautiful landscapes. No, we went there to make a selfie.
There is nothing new about this. We have always made images of ourselves. Portraits, for the family albums, Christmas cards of the family and portraits to hang on the wall, to remember our ancestors. It’s a way to define our identity. With the development of social media, a totally new way of thinking about self-portraits developed. We are now able to share an image the instant it happens. While there used to be a delay due to processing, printing and publishing, we can now go live as long as we are connected to a network.
The life span of most photographs has become shorter. How does this affect the photographer? Have the intentions and motivation behind the creation of an image changed? How do all the different ways a photograph is being used to influence our creative process? If the "function" of a photograph is more diverse now than what it used to be, how can we take advantage of this in the process of making better images of the landscape?
I had been looking forward to my trip to Lewis and Harris for ages; at last, I was getting the chance to get to one of my bucket list photographic destinations – and for a whole 9 days – I was so excited!
As well as a fabulous destination, I was also looking forward to 9 days of photography just for me, what a privilege to be able to do this, and one that is very rare for all of us. So, my expectations were very high even though I was striving to keep them in check. I knew that the Hebrides in winter was likely to be frequently rainy and windy, but I come from Anglesey, which is the same, so I thought I would be prepared for this. I had all sorts of plans in my head for photographing in the rain – lens hoods, rain covers, umbrellas, even experimenting with deliberately allowing the rain to smear on the lens (a UV filter I hasten to add, not my actual lens), so I really felt prepared for this too.
Image 1
How wrong can you be!
So, do you remember Ciara and Dennis – how can you not?! Sod’s law would have it that I managed to coincide my trip with these two storms, arriving just before Ciara and managing to get away on the last ferry before Dennis really started to do its worst. Consequently, my trip was a pretty constant battering of very high winds - at least in the high 40’s and mostly in the 50’s and 60’s - rain, hail and snow. I had one day of calm - the penultimate one – and one of just high winds with no precipitation – the first one.
We have a strong Dutch tradition of landscape painters such as Aelbert Cuyp, Jacob van Ruisdael and later in time Vincent van Gogh. In the middle ages and the renaissance landscapes were just backgrounds for biblical and mythological paintings. However, in the Netherlands, the landscape genre in paintings started in the 17th century because then there was a market and it became very popular. Dutch painters travelled to Europe to study the landscapes or just use their imagination. Aelbert Cuyp for instance never visited Italy in his life, however, he painted landscapes in an Italian style, a combination of bright yellow Italian light with hillsides and hazy backgrounds. No photoshop in those days but the freedom of painting and the result of his imagination and craftsmanship. Nevertheless, we don’t really have a tradition of landscape photography. On the mainland, the landscape photography is more a part of nature photography than a single discipline.
You can’t beat local knowledge and insight, and we’re delighted in this issue to have as our featured photographer Iceland’s Daníel Bergmann, who is also one of the speakers for our postponed ‘A Meeting of Minds’ landscape photography conference on 5-7 November 2021 at the Rheged Centre in Cumbria. We have a selection of images from Daníel that show that there is much more to his homeland than the icons that dominate social media.
Can you tell readers a little about yourself – your education, early interests and career – and the places in which you grew up and now live? How and when did you first become interested in photography? What kind of images did you first set out to make and how did it become a career?
I grew up in Reykjavik. From when I was ten years old, we lived at the edge of the city and there was vast moorland right outside our house leading to distant hills and mountains. I got my first camera when I was a teenager and one of the things I found exciting to photograph were the moorlands birds, such as the Golden Plover, Whimbrel and Snipe, which were all breeding around the house. I set up a darkroom in the basement and from the moment I developed my first film I knew that photography would be my path in life.
Right out of college, where I studied journalism, I started working in photography. In the beginning, I mainly did editorial work for newspapers and magazines but eventually, I took a leap of faith and fully concentrated on nature.
A photograph is the end product of someone caring about something ‘out there.’ The best photographs exude this caring attitude in a manner which is not definable, but which is very evident. ~Bill Jay
Our motivations precede anything we do, and not only in photography. In creative work, our motivations not only prompt us to create but also pervade and carry through every step of the creative process. Our motivations influence the choices we make, set the technical and ethical boundaries we set for ourselves, affect the rewards we experience and the ways we engage with our audiences.
Our motivations influence the choices we make, set the technical and ethical boundaries we set for ourselves, affect the rewards we experience and the ways we engage with our audiences.
In the last few years there has been a welcome flourishing of writings about the many and varied reasons why people photograph. Of course, not all reasons apply to all people and what may seem obvious or proper to some, maybe anathema to others. For example, I recall almost giving up on Robert Adams’s book, Why People Photograph, after reading the first page in which Adams proclaims that one’s own photographs are never enough, and that those who stick with photography do so in large part due to a sense of community. This has never been a consideration to me. In fact, photography as I practice it is satisfying to me in large part because its rewards, to me, are largely independent of the works and judgments of others. Then again, Adams also mentions dogs as a reason to photograph, which I relate to very much.
Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted from our subscribers. Each portfolios consisting of four images related in some way.
Submit Your 4x4 Portfolio
Interested in submitting your work? We're on the lookout for new portfolios for the next few issues, so please do get in touch!
This year I decided to go and catch autumn colours and shapes in Connemara (Ireland). I spent several weekends between October and November 2019 and this is a selection that I hope could represent my intimate vision of this spectacular landscape under the mood of truly autumnal colours.
I am fascinated by water in the landscape: seas, rivers and ice/snow-scapes.These four images explore some recent encounters with moving water using ICM as a creative aide. They are intimate landscapes which is my preferred approach to landscape photography. The first image, a wavescape, is by way of homage to Morag Paterson who first inspired and instructed me in using ICM some five years ago. It was captured on a more recent workshop she lead with Ted Leeming to their new Ligurian homeland. The in-camera movement was initiated with a moderate zoom on a 24-105mm Canon lens whilst panning the camera along the breaking wave.
The other three images were made, much closer to my home, on the River Cocker at its outflow from Crummock Water in the Lake District. It was in full spate and I wanted to capture the threatening mood which it conveyed. They follow a sequence of: menace; a gathering of elements on the brink; and finally, annihilation (a white hole rather than the cosmological black hole!). To me they were not photographs of water, but rather they were about the metaphorical primordial memories carried by the water in this agitated state. A tad pretentious, perhaps, but therein lies the problem with words. Much better to look at the images!
There’s a growing theme in the landscape community around what we can collectively do to mitigate climate change.
The idea of travelling far and wide for stunning experiences and landscapes has long been an uncomfortable contradiction for me and the majority of my photography has, for the last few years, focussed on creating the best possible landscape photos within Kent, where I live. I’ve found this a very rewarding, challenging and creative experience and one location I’ve come to love is Reculver.
Originally a Roman fort, it was then adopted by Saxons and turned into a church. Today it stands tall overlooking the Thames Estuary and it inspires me every time I’m there. It’s a versatile location that has something to offer throughout the year from various angles and it typifies my journey exploring Kent as a fresh hunting ground for creating landscape photographs away from the well beaten track and without travelling far from home.
On the C&O Canal in the Maryland side of Great Falls is a section of the canal that has wide water, forming almost a lake. We love arriving early morning for sunrise and are always excited when we are driving across the bridge over the Potomac River from Virginia to see mist/fog hanging over the river. We arrive just before light and head down to the canal which runs parrell to the river. When we see the mist/fog hanging over the canal we know we are in for a magical treat!
Welcome to the first instalment of “Portrait of a Photographer!”
As an avid reader of On Landscape and through having conversations with photographers from all over the world on my podcast, it has occurred to me that there seems to be fascinating differences in styles, philosophical approaches, post-processing, colour grading, compositional techniques, and even an acceptance (or rejection) of conformist attitudes between landscape photographers residing in the United States versus those residing in Europe. Now, I am obviously generalising a great deal; however, these trends seem to be confirmed on a regular basis through my study of this artform and various in-depth conversations I have had with other photographers over the past several years. Indeed, some photographers from Europe, especially the United Kingdom, seem to have the (often accurate) view that many U.S.-based landscape photographers have a style that is over-the-top, overly colourful, and perhaps even outlandish or extreme in presentation. On the other side of the coin, I have found some photographers in the U.S. find the work of photographers in Europe to be bland, lacking excitement, and muted in presentation. In speaking with Tim and Charlotte at On Landscape, we decided that it would be a worthwhile endeavour to explore and perhaps close this divide by showcasing vignettes of featured photographers from other parts of the world and show their work shown here in On Landscape. Once a month, I will be featuring a photographer whose work I admire a great deal in the hopes of introducing this magazine’s audience to a broader array of work in other parts of the world.
For the first iteration of this column, I decided to feature the work of Jimmy Gekas, a landscape and portrait photographer residing in San Diego, California. In my opinion, Jimmy has a way of seeing the natural world that few others possess; he is not afraid to reject conforming norms to present his work in a way that is unique, creative, and with a voice that only he brings to the table.
Jimmy has a way of seeing the natural world that few others possess; he is not afraid to reject conforming norms to present his work in a way that is unique, creative, and with a voice that only he brings to the table.
I have admired his work for many years and have had the pleasure of photographing with him in the field. To make things even more fascinating, I think that Jimmy mostly flies under the radar of other photographers and quietly continues to make beautiful photographs year-after-year. I am always amazed that he seems to always find things to photograph that I never see myself and he does so with such a casual yet playful attitude. Honestly, that is one of the things I admire the most about Jimmy’s style of photography – he might just be the most laid-back nature photographer I have ever met.
Like hardly any other artistic discipline, photography is confronted with the expectation of being – or being able to be – "true to reality" and thus producing representations of this reality. In nature photography, too, the supposed adherence to reality is often treated as a high value. Heavily manipulated images, on the other hand, are separated from documentary as another genre. In this essay, I intend to reveal the complicated relationship between photography and reality as well as the multitude of illusions and misconceptions that can come across attempting to tie the world of photographs and the real world together.
For centuries, visual artists have used canvas, brush, paint, hammer, and chisel to give lasting form to their perceptions of the world. It is no coincidence that in looking back at these important works, we find that the artist is the focus of our attention rather than the subject, because the process of perception, reflection, processing and expressive realisation is attributable to the artist. Despite their different relationships to reality, for example between painters of the Romantic period, Impressionism or Surrealism, no one would think of viewing the works of art exclusively as images of reality – the accompanying circumstances of subjectification by the artist, through the limitation of artistic technique or social values of the time of creation, play at least as important a role as the "factual" nature of the represented subject. This applies without restriction to works of high culture as well as to profane commissioned art.
With the advance of photography from the middle of the 19th century onwards, this centuries-old tradition of subjectivation through art began to falter. The new technique allowed the creation of supposedly incorruptible, objective images of reality. While the first artistic photographs still attempted to emulate painting by means of technical tricks or elaborately staged backdrops, photography also established itself as a documentary medium around 1900 at the latest.
With the advance of photography from the middle of the 19th century onwards, this centuries-old tradition of subjectivation through art began to falter. The new technique allowed the creation of supposedly incorruptible, objective images of reality.
Many times, I have questioned what it is that inspires me to be out with a camera. The most straightforward answer to this question is being out in the landscape. I love it and always have, and to make photographs of landscapes is my main inspiration. I really do want to share with others what I have seen through the medium of photographs.
To be honest, if this was my sole form of inspiration, then I think it would have worn thin some time ago because I have never been particularly good at sharing my work, certainly before social media existed, which has been in existence only a short part of my career. Therefore, there were other forces in place making me get up and explore with a camera, as opposed to simply enjoying my time being in the wilderness. Having thought about this, I have not simply made photographs of the landscape, but I have made photographs of different parts of the landscape, each of which has excited me.
I vividly recall the excitement of being at the coast, and with an unstoppable desire, assigning all of my free time with my camera to simply heading away from land until it had all but ran out. I remember travelling to different beaches and bays to experience the white sands or the textures of the geology. I have an inventory of locations, all marked on maps that I returned to time after time, but which somehow are now left alone - but not for good.
I still have the maps, all marked up and folded away just like the memories I can draw upon when gazing at them.
I arrived at the same conclusion with mountain landscapes.
Another instalment of the lockdown podcast where Tim Parkin, Joe Cornish and David Ward discuss a few questions around photography including "How is the easing of lockdown affecting you?", "How do you make the most of a photography workshop?", "What makes a good photography book?", "How do you see your photography changing over time?" and "Do you have any other non-photography creative outlets during the lockdown?". Here's a clue to the last question - you can guess whether it's from me, David or Joe.
I took this shot, which I was delighted was selected as the overall winner of the Scottish Nature Photographer of the Year competition 2019, from the lighthouse at the Butt of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in October. I was staying in Aird Uig which in itself is spectacular and fascinating due to its connections with the Cold war. Located on the west of the island, Uig (also known as West Uig and in Gaelic, Sgir Uig) has a multitude of breath-taking beaches, bays and coves on the doorstep. However, the weather forecast was for wind and heavy showers so where better to experience and capture these conditions than at a lighthouse?
The lighthouse at the Butt of Lewis marks the most northerly point of Lewis. The drive from Uig to the Butt of Lewis took me past the Callanish Stones. The stone circles here are captivating and awe-inspiring. Dating back to around 3400 BC, they, of course, raise the questions of Why? Why here? How? What for? The sense of past and present being inextricably linked is palpable here. But for the photographer, the stones provide both opportunities and challenges. Trying to capture – and do justice to- the overall scene is very difficult. Instead, focusing on detail and pattern within the groupings often produces some striking results. However, it takes time to really capture the essence of this place, and this was not the day for such an endeavour.
Moving on took me across a flat and in places, quite desolate landscape, but with small roads off to the left leading down to rocky coves such as at Borve (not to be mistaken with Borve on Harris). A wide sandy bay with smooth sand dunes at Eoropie/Eoropaidh beach was also enticing and is certainly worth exploring. But the wind was picking up and with it my determination to reach The Butt, recorded in the Guinness Book of Records as the windiest place in the UK.
The lighthouse was built in the mid 1800s and is unusual in that it is of red brick rather than painted white as is more common in Scotland. At the time of building, there was no road access and so all materials had to be brought in by ship.
The lighthouse was built in the mid 1800s and is unusual in that it is of red brick rather than painted white as is more common in Scotland. At the time of building, there was no road access and so all materials had to be brought in by ship.
One such ship came to grief on the rocks before the lighthouse was completed. In fact, until as relatively recently as 1960 all supplies for the lighthouse still came in by sea. The lighthouse only became automated in 1998 finally losing its last lighthouse keeper. To take a shot of the lighthouse itself, there is a spot beyond the lighthouse from which you can look back. From here you see it standing as a protector atop the cliffs, still warning unwary sailors of the treacherous rocks that lie waiting to wreck.
However, for me, the starring role is played not by the lighthouse but by the rocks themselves rising up from the tumultuous waters below. These are ancient rocks, Lewisian Gneiss, formed 3000 million years ago and some of the oldest rocks in Europe. The textures and patterns, angles and structures are visible amid the many seabirds that cling to the rocks and swoop in and out of the waves. The cliffs on which the lighthouse stands are between 60 and 80 feet high so are not the highest of cliffs, but looking down from them and across to the surrounding rock formations, is nevertheless a highly vertiginous experience. I cautiously approached the edge to find a suitable spot from which to shoot, wary of the gusting wind which threatened to take me towards, and perhaps over the edge. Fortunately, there were some safe flat spots to set up my tripod and begin to consider composition. The Butt of Lewis is wild and unforgiving. It is here that the raw force of nature is truly evident.
Trying to capture this essence is a challenging task.
Trying to capture this essence is a challenging task. This was especially the case as due to heavy showers blowing in, much of my time was spent performing the photographer’s Cha Cha Cha: cover-uncover-wipe, cover-uncover-wipe!!!
This was especially the case as due to heavy showers blowing in, much of my time was spent performing the photographer’s Cha Cha Cha: cover-uncover-wipe, cover-uncover-wipe!!! However, standing through these bursts of rain gave me time to look for the shooting angle where the texture of the sea and the rocks complemented each other but where the rocks were also clearly distinct in their own right rather than merging together. The three rocks seemed to me to do just this. For those of you interested, the photo was taken on a Nikon 810 with Nikkor 24-70mm lens at iso 64 f11 exp 1.30 with a 0.9 medium lee grad plus a 1.2 hitech ND filter and Gitzo systematic tripod.
A range of other shots were of course taken during the day spent at this iconic spot which accompanies this article.
Driving back, I stopped off at the Comunn Eachdraidh Nis, a museum, gallery and café set up to collect and preserve local history and to create a community hub. This has fascinating photographs and other materials relating to the history of the area and its inhabitants and is well worth visiting. While enjoying my tea and home-made cake, I had no idea whether any of the many shots I had taken would be of any quality given the ferocious conditions. Despite this, I felt the warm satisfaction that comes from spending a day truly getting to know and appreciating a location, which of itself is a wonderful experience.
‘The Hill’ will not be found in any guidebooks or lists of ‘must-visit’ places. It will remain unknown, unvisited, even by most of the people who live nearby. It is of modest height – barely topping 1,000 feet – and from afar has no distinguishing features to separate it from other rounded forms in the West Pennine Moors. A housing estate encroaches upon its south-western slopes, a golf course to the south. It is usually a wet, soggy place of wind and rain. And yet, it is a remarkable unremarkable place that plays an important part in my photography, though not necessarily in terms of actual photographs.
‘The Hill’ is Cheetham Close, a hill that lies at the northern edge of Bolton,
'The Hill’ is Cheetham Close, a hill that lies at the northern edge of Bolton, the southern fringe of the West Pennine Moors, and within a 30 minute walk from my front door
the southern fringe of the West Pennine Moors, and within a 30 minute walk from my front door I can be at the summit trig point enjoying a view that ranges from the Clwydian Hills of North Wales, across the Cheshire Plain and Manchester towards the Peak District, over the nearby moors and on to the Bowland Fells and even Ingleborough & Whernside in the far distance. It is where I go if I need to stretch my legs, get some fresh air, go for a wander. It is where I go to remind myself of the natural world when everyday life has made me forget. It is where I go to think and explore ideas.
A stroll up the hill acts as a seasonal reminder of the constant, subtle changes in nature that can often pass unnoticed. As I write this in early March three lapwings have just returned to the horse field to begin their acrobatic courtships while higher up on the moor the skylarks are tuning up, ready to make a mockery of Vaughan Williams. The plaintive call of the curlew occasionally haunts one’s passing along the summit moor and very rarely I may be lucky enough to hear the bizarre sound of a snipe drumming.
The moor itself can frequently appear bleak, empty, unchanging until you observe the transition of the moorland grasses from the vibrant, urgent growth of spring, through the dull established green of summer followed by a few weeks of intense orange before settling into the pale straw of the long winter. And then there is the glory of cotton grass. For a few weeks in May and June the bobbing white heads of swathes of cotton grass are a sheer delight. Every year I await the display with anxious anticipation, wondering if there will be much of a show or even wondering where the best displays will pop up as the cotton grass appears to travel along the moor.
The moor itself can frequently appear bleak, empty, unchanging until you observe the transition of the moorland grasses from the vibrant, urgent growth of spring, through the dull established green of summer followed by a few weeks of intense orange before settling into the pale straw of the long winter. And then there is the glory of cotton grass.
Wandering through the rough pasture below the hill one can observe the growth of the trees planted 15 years ago – the birch, hazel and hawthorn growing slowly, slowly; the empty green tree guards marking where the struggle was too much. The sudden burst of hawthorn blossom will remind me to explore the fells of south Cumbria and the Dales while the succession of wildflowers – lady’s smock, bilberry, bluebells, tormentil, batchelor’s buttons, and spearwort – hint at the potential displays elsewhere. In July I wait in anticipation of the foxglove stand that grows near the bench – some years extraordinary, others a sad disappointment. Of an evening you can startle a deer, spot a fox skulking through the long grass or, most magical of all, follow the silent quartering of the pasture by the elusive barn owl. The only constant on my walk is that there will be something different, something to observe, some reason to say, ‘Hey, look at that!’
The Hill played an important role in the development of my photography. My first ever magazine competition win was with a photo of an old wooden gate on the shoulder of the hill under snow on a gorgeous winter evening; my first cover photo for Lancashire Life was a view towards Winter Hill from the summit and my first Viewpoints article for Outdoor Photography was of Cheetham Close. Ideas for photo projects or articles (including this one, of course) are often born while enjoying the freedom of thought on the walk.
These days I rarely take my full kit out on the hill but my Sony compact sometimes accompanies me and I enjoy the spontaneous freedom it provides. Ultimately, though, the influence of the hill is the exposure on the walk to the constant changes in nature that help to reignite my curiosity and rekindle my desire to explore, even if that may be elsewhere.
Postscript
And then there was lockdown.
No more jaunts to the Dales or Silverdale. I am restricted to ‘The Hill’. How lucky I am!
I composed the article in early March and now a lot more people are familiar with ‘The Hill’. Initially, I was very proprietorial, objecting to all these ‘Johnny-come-latelys’ spoiling my sense of exclusivity but now I realise that it has become an important part in the daily lives of many people in the area along with the reservoirs and strips of woodland currently bursting into life. So many more people are now enjoying the beauty on their doorstep and I’m sure this is being repeated all over the country – small pockets of nature providing essential contact with the natural world. Remarkable unremarkable places.
This can only be a good thing. People are becoming more connected to the natural world and feeling the benefits of a simple walk in the countryside. Furthermore, the regularity of that contact means that they are observing the variety and daily changes of spring that they would most likely miss in more busy times. One can but hope that there will remain a sense of the importance of nature and a desire to look after it a little better when things get back to normal.
In the meantime, I myself am exploring paths I’ve not walked for over 15 years (or at all in some cases) and reacquainting myself with some of the natural delights of the West Pennine Moors, compact camera in my pocket and enjoying the freedom of taking a few snaps on the way.
I don’t think that Colin Prior (watch Colin's presentation at the Meeting of Minds Conference 2018) needs an introduction to anybody with a certain degree of interest in landscape photography. And surely not to the profound readership of On Landscape. Hence, I consider the opportunity to express my feelings towards his unrivalled body of work a true honour.
The chosen photograph shows the mountains of Assynt, Scotland, on a wintery evening. In this image, you can see how wonderful evening light accentuates the peaks of Stac Pollaidh, Suilven, Cùl Mòr and Cùl Beag. The illumination seems to be one of these special theatre lights that bath the actors on a stage. It is a photograph in which light is a tangible character thanks to its presence on the mountains. It is a true frame of genius, and exemplary for all his stunning 3:1 panoramic work. Browsing through his Magnum Opus “Scotland’s Finest Landscapes”, any photo would deserve to be exhibited here. Let us just regard this particular image as a metaphor for his masterful skill to capture a unique moment in time – his rare ability to understand nature and all contextual elements which are part of these huge canvases.
Colin can arguably be considered the reference when it comes to ultra-perfectionism in landscape photography. This is not only because of his extraordinary attention to composition. Beyond that, it is his perception of light and how it interacts with the natural world which results in images that have an almost tangible, dynamic feel. Moreover, what is striking is his capability to capture the authentic spirit of place, and by doing so, his place within that place. He offers some of the most natural interpretations of a landscape. And, as we all know, this is so hard to achieve. Par excellence, nature opposes any means of control. And that includes arranging elements. We need to move around to organise chaos and transform nature into the beautiful composition that awakens in our mind. Studying his images with care makes you realise what is important in landscape photography, and what is indeed trivial.
When writing about the Sublime it’s first necessary to establish what we mean by it. In contemporary speech, sublime is often a slightly elevated version of delightful, or delicious, as in, “You look sublime in that dress/suit,” or, even more annoyingly, “The profiteroles are just sublime, darling!” This is an undignified home for a word which in its artistic origins was used to distill the awe-inspiring, life-threatening, edge-of-catastrophe thrill of nature’s power and beauty.
The philosopher Edmund Burke who defined the idea of the sublime understood the importance of people being made to feel small and insignificant as a way of putting daily life in perspective, and to counter the inflation of the ego. Religion is one of the ways that this could be achieved, and art was another. But nature was/is Sublime’s source.
(For those seeking something more scholarly, there is endless interesting material on the Sublime in libraries and on the internet, as always.)
The philosopher Edmund Burke who defined the idea of the sublime understood the importance of people being made to feel small and insignificant as a way of putting daily life in perspective, and to counter the inflation of the ego.
Arched Iceberg Greenland All icebergs are ultimately doomed, and when they are as delicate and fragile as this one their demise is near. So near, that just a few seconds after this photograph was taken the arch collapsed, scattering shards of ice as dangerous projectiles either side of the impact zone. Luckily for us, we were not in the line of fire.
Arch Berg Collapse Greenland Not long after, the remains of the decaying berg collapsed again in a less spectacular version of the arch fall. We remained safe, but it was a sobering moment. Undoubtedly a video of the event better helped describe it than any still photograph could.
To have a close encounter with a hurricane/tornado/erupting volcano/avalanche/earthquake/thunderstorm and survive, was to have a sublime experience.
A few weeks ago, during one of our lockdown podcasts, I challenged Joe Cornish and David Ward to take a few photographs as a 'mini lockdown project'. The idea was to produce a set of four photos on any subject matter but that had to be taken inside your house. We also opened the idea up to our readers to have a go. The idea was definitely not meant to be a real 'competitive challenge' but to motivate us into picking up a camera, if only for a short while. With the lockdown relaxing in England (and possibly in the devolved nations in the next week) we thought it a good time to edit them into together for your enjoyment.
Astrid Preisz
Shadows on the Wall
When Austria started its lockdown in mid-March, I started to take photos of scenes inside my house - objects, reflections, shadows, abstractions. As a nature photographer, I look for the small things, the patterns of nature and always try to see the beauty in the mundane. As a lockdown photographer, I tried to transfer these principles to my house and found the shadows the sun cast on my kitchen and living room walls during different times of the day most enticing - the sun being the artist and the random objects in my house the props.
David Ward
Colour and Luminance
I wanted to experiment with some intense colours on a high key field.
Ed Hannan
Kiwi
During this coronavirus lockdown period, I set up this wooden Kiwi model on my dining room table and added various other objects to try and put the bird into some kind of imaginary habitat. The images were made on my Nikon D800e fitted with a Sigma 150mm f2.8 macro lens and lit with Bowens studio flash.
Graham Cook
When a home is not a home
There is nothing conventional about how my imagination views our home. It is very much like a Time Machine, my very own Tardis - often I’m travelling through space or finding myself surrounded by microscopic detail from the natural world. For some years I’ve been cooking up abstracts for what’s become known as my 'Kitchen Collection’. It has opened my eyes to another world, one that’s created through looking at things differently and responding to the unexpected or inconsequential. The consequence of cooking, of opening a store cupboard, freezer door, dishwasher or refuse bin is never dull, it’s always tinged with excitement and expectation as I’m never sure where in our universe I may end up. The four images are simply representative of that journey, all iPhone and processed in Snapseed. As ever, no explanations, but they do or did exist in and around the kitchen.
Ian Meades
Bringing Outdoors Indoors
My wife is a fibre artist and our house is filled with the materials of her craft - this includes dried leaves, seedpods, rusty bits of metal, small tree limbs in various states of decay... So with a bit of hunting around, it was relatively easy to photograph things that one would normally find outdoors, in our indoor environment. With the added advantage of being able to do at least some of it in my pyjamas.
Joe Cornish
Anxiety
Hand-washing is one of the most obvious symbols of our current predicament, lots of it, and especially after every excursion into the world beyond our front doors.
Daydreaming
A strong memory for me of the crisis is our son Sam being at home, a joy for us, and a highlight is to hear him improvising on the piano
Homegrown
We have eaten extremely well during the crisis, much of it from our garden; Jenny has nurtured our asparagus plants devotedly for several years now.
Mourning light
The view through a window is meaningful to many and although we are so lucky to have a garden the sense of virtual imprisonment in our homes can be hinted at by the window. I also associate windows with Matisse and Derain, two of my favourite painters… and still-life and windows seem essential. I have lost several good friends during this period, although strangely, none to coronavirus; the title also refers to that.
Kaare Selvejer
Shells
The pictures were all made with old manual focus Carl Zeiss 120 mm F 4 APO Macro Planar (for Contax 645). The shells were placed on a black glass plate in my living room using ambient light from a window softened by a white curtain and a piece of white cardboard as a reflector.
Lizzie Shepherd
The Senescence Of Tulips
Tulips have long been one of my favourite flowers to photograph - they have a certain elegance throughout their lifetime and, it seems when all signs of life are long gone. These tulips are from the last cut flowers I bought - just before lockdown. Originally I planned to document their blooming and gradual demise, only to find that their demise lacked the usual elegance. However, several weeks later, they had one last gift to give and several of the flowers were looking wonderful in their deteriorated state. Above all, it was their texture and translucence that piqued my interest and at last, revived some feelings of creativity. I've taken a whole series of them, in various poses, some single, some as pairs, sharing a last slow dance. All shot with natural light, backlit by a bright (but draped) window and with the odd reflector bouncing light back onto the flowers.
Madeleine Lenargh
Home Portraits
I started this series back in March when we went into lockdown. Frustrated, because my favourite landscape location was closed to the public, I started noticing how the play of light, shadow, and reflections transforms familiar objects in the house. The project became a way to share with others how you can view ordinary things with new eyes.
Robin Jones
A Beach in a 16x12 developing tray
I have been keeping occupied during isolation by learning to make Cyanotypes and it was while washing out a print that the idea came, to make a seashore in the developing tray. I had used the same tray just a few days before to wash some shells for an earlier image idea, but 4 related images called for something more ambitious. The idea was for the "tide" to come in, with the help of a hosepipe and to show the backwash and the shell beach both wet and then dry as the tide went out.
Steve Williams
Lockdown Studio
Taken in my 'home studio', in truth a simple background of white card on my dining table, lit from the side via a big window. Sometimes I use off-camera flash via a remote, but I try to use natural light with silver foil reflectors instead. Plants are from my garden - mainly weeds. I'd always want to try some macro work and this enforced social distancing and 'stay at home' has given me time to do it at last.
Tim Parkin
Barred
I was thinking about was missing during lockdown and I collected a few items together that represented them. The glass was the invisible limits (and also the thing I was drinking out of when I came up with the idea). I was trying to use random backgrounds from the house but with my iPad in hand, and a quick experiment with a tilt-shift lens, this came about.
Viv Davies
Tracing a Path
Every morning - sunny ones at least - the sun traces a path across the staircase in my house by means of a patch of orange projected light. During lockdown I have watched the locus of colour gradually shift as the sun's path shifts towards summer. But it never reaches the mountains beyond. The colour is a result of a decorative glass plate sitting on the windowsill above. The mountains - a watercolour of Glen Nevis painted by a good friend.
David Cole
Road Signs
And we had one more entry that wasn't indoors but we liked it so much we let David Cole off...
Frédéric’s interest in, and study of, ethology and ornithology shows in his images. Instead of an empty landscape, he shows the animals, birds and insect life of the forest in its setting. He’s an advocate for nature and its restorative effects. When we think of rainforest, we frequently do so in the context of tropical or sub-tropical regions. It’s easy to forget that there are temperate rainforests too and that these are just as precious and just as vulnerable. We even have our own remnants of Atlantic rainforest on the south-western fringes of Scotland (and having spent time in it in the rain, I can vouch for the fact that ‘rainforest’ is not a misnomer). While many of his images are in colour Frédéric also likes to work in black and white, enjoying its ‘soul’, so we’ve included a number of monochromatic images with an emphasis on mood and texture within and without the trees.
Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, your education and early interests, and what that led you to do as a career?
I was born and raised in Brussels where I still live. I was lucky to grow up in a neighbourhood next to the Sonian Forest, the green lung of the European capital. My childhood home overlooked a large wood of several hectares (now classified as a Natura 2000 reserve) where I made my first observations as a naturalist. Squirrels, amphibians and newts of the small pond, birds at the feeders in winter. I quickly became passionate about ornithology, a passion that has never left me. From an early age I devoured naturalist books and magazines. My field guides about birds never left me and each family trip and vacation gave me the opportunity to discover new species and new biotopes. Around the age of 8-9 years, I took my first pictures of robins, tits of all kinds (the crested tit was a favourite), nuthatches, wrens, woodpeckers, finches... I had fun recording my observations on the computer. But I never figured out that photography and nature would take on such importance until much later in my personal and professional life...
How did you first become interested in photography and what kind of images did you set out to make?
I made my first hides in my garden - the great spotted woodpecker was by far the most eagerly anticipated bird! It was, therefore, my passion for birds that led me to photography, probably motivated by the need to keep track of my observations. At the age of 12, I received my first serious equipment, a Nikon F401 film camera with a 300mm lens. A few weeks later I fell from a weeping willow into a pond near my home while trying to photograph a couple of great crested grebes…
It wasn't until around the age of 25 that my early interest in photography resurfaced in my life. At that time I was passing my final qualifications to become an airline pilot (my passion for birds probably made me want to fly like them) but an accident put an end to this career that had been set for me. Passionate about extreme skiing, I fell heavily while jumping over a rocky barrier because of a misidentification of the track. It was a big blow because I was no longer physically able to take the commands of an aeroplane, mainly due to a loss of sensitivity and motor skills in my left hand. But in hindsight, it was a great chance to return to my first passions of nature, forests, and the animal world.
I then worked in an office specialising in real estate acquisitions, but one Monday morning I resigned because I realised that it was much more interesting and fulfilling to run through the woods and to chart your own course.
I then worked in an office specialising in real estate acquisitions, but one Monday morning I resigned because I realised that it was much more interesting and fulfilling to run through the woods and to chart your own course. I found no sense in spending time in a job that I did not like; in fulfilling objectives contrary to the interests of the planet, the biosphere, our survival... A dog shared my life at that time and thanks to many walks I rediscovered the Sonian Forest which became almost my second home as I spent countless hours exploring every corner and focusing on different subjects over the seasons. Wildlife photography, landscapes, but also a lot of macro.
We’re on some surreal timeline just now, deserted streets, empty malls, closed bars, cafes and coffee shops. Even the landscape we once worked and played in is essentially inaccessible to us. So much of what we took for granted is now a luxury we can only look back on and reflect. Maybe the person I was isn’t the person I should be, perhaps my attitudes weren’t always as noble as I would like.
From the cage, the horizon is infinite.
Today, Ann Kristin and I drove to Fort William for the first time in a month. It was quite the trip, having only been within walking distance of the house since mid March. The rush of driving along a road at 60mph, the vistas that used to be just passing by, now appeared intensely interesting. A herd of Red Deer grazed low in the glen, and as we sat waiting for the ferry to arrive, 6 Black Guillemots were engaged in heated territorial squabbles on the deserted pier. For certain, the deer and the birds were both there because, on the whole, we aren’t.
The road was deserted, save a few people like us, making essential trips. A far cry from a usual Easter Holiday weekend when the roads would be packed with excited tourists and frustrated locals.
I had a deep and moving notion as I noticed nuances of light on a distant hill, big patches of snow looming as the view opened down to Glencoe. Our thoughts rested on our dear friends Tim and Charlotte (I think they read these articles!) - all the plans we had to go climbing together, curry nights and just hanging out and laughing. As someone accustomed to studying the landscape, I was looking at it with fresh eyes, suddenly aware that without a camera in my hand I was looking for the sake of looking; feeling, engaging, fascinating, imagining and being inquisitive.
Abstract art can be the most frustrating of art forms, but it can also be the most rewarding. There is a simple reason for this I think: the responsibility for finding ‘meaning’ in an image is thrown entirely on to the viewer. Rather than being presented with a depiction of what the artist saw, we are asked to see completely for ourselves. Most ‘realistic’ photographs make cognition easy: the subject is recognized and the viewer’s reaction to that subject is mediated by the photographer’s treatment of that subject. When we move into the realm of abstraction, however, that link to reality is broken - which of course seems particularly perverse in a medium such as photography which relies so emphatically on the object being photographed. And with truly abstract images meaning is no longer literal, there is no correct interpretation. Humans always seek definition, solidity, coherence, so abstraction runs the risk of frustration…
So how does abstract art become rewarding? The trick, as a viewer, is to relinquish the desire for meaning, or rather, to allow the mind to wander, to see relationships between form, colour, pattern, tone, texture etc, and to take pleasure in these relationships for their own sake. This can imbue an abstract image with an emotional charge which can be hugely pleasurable. Stieglitz is perhaps the earliest exponent of this with his Equivalents series from the 1920s when he photographed clouds but deliberately didn’t include the land so that they were void of reference points. No internal evidence to locate them in time and space. Stieglitz intended for them to function evocatively, like music. Emotion resided purely in their form, and it’s up to the viewer to feel their way to their own emotional interpretation of the images.
How does this work when we view an image such as Marianthi Lainas’s Tidal Traces #4? It is certainly abstract – there is no grounding in reality, no clear link to an object. Not only is the subject matter unfathomable, but the medium itself is also open to question. Is this actually a photograph? We don’t really know. (On her website Lainas explains that this is a cyanotype using light sensitive papers on the strandline, exposing them to the seawater and sand, and then selectively incorporating other media into the images). But what gives this image its beauty is, I think, the intrigue it evokes in the viewer specifically because it has no link to reality.
My own personal reaction to the image was first to see shapes that did have an echo of the landscape. So I noticed the delineation between blue and orange which suggested a horizon line.
I relaxed my desire to interpret literally and I started to enjoy the colours, shapes and textures within the image in and of themselves. Blue and orange/brown are complementary colours, I warmed to the richness and vibrancy. I noticed the granularity of the white and blue elements in the lower third, and how that physicality contrasted with the softer darker ‘tree-like’ shapes above.
This was further emphasized by vague outlines of fir trees on the left hand side and above them an almost full moon. But then I noticed other elements of the image and my interpretation flipped. I no longer felt the image reflected a horizontal perspective (hence horizon and trees), but rather that I was looking straight down from a great height.This second interpretation now suggested sea and a beach – the colours beginning to predominate in my reading of the image. Finally however, I relaxed my desire to interpret literally and I started to enjoy the colours, shapes and textures within the image in and of themselves. Blue and orange/brown are complementary colours, I warmed to the richness and vibrancy. I noticed the granularity of the white and blue elements in the lower third, and how that physicality contrasted with the softer darker ‘tree-like’ shapes above. My eye was caught by the flow within the image – the white area at the bottom seems to come from right to left; the central line runs fully from one side of the image to the other; above that the line in the brown/orange area runs from left to right. So my eye was taken backwards and forwards zig-zagging through the image.
As I look at the image, I am able to hold all these readings of it in my mind at the same time – the desire to impose a literal reading plus the pleasure at just looking at shapes and colours and noticing contrast and similarities. Perhaps this is why Marianthi’s abstraction is so powerful because it allows the viewer not only to see what s/he wants to see but to do that on a multitude of levels, all at the same time…
Below is another from the same series. I see the coast, space, sea spume, colour contrasts, lines vs shapes and on, and on. How rewarding is that…! What do you see? For more of Marianthi’s work see http://marianthilainas.com
My passion for the planet has for a time refocussed on compassion for humanity. COVID 19 has us frightened for family and friends, has us watching bewildered as we observe the best and the worst of mankind and has us struggling to understand. Originally, I had drafted this article as my response to Ted Leeming's and Morag Paterson's questioning our responsibilities as Landscape photographers. I had written about the difficulty of making tough decisions in order to live sustainably. It now seems this is being forced upon us and we have an opportunity to reshape how we live.
However hard I tried to reduce my environmental footprint I realised I was still part of the problem! What more could I do? I asked is it worth it? We are living in a world where the USA permits new drilling for oil in the pristine Arctic, (Carter, 2019) where China has negotiated extensive coal mining in Africa (Obura, (2017) and where Brazil's government 'shrugs off' the burning of the Amazon rainforest (Hockaday, 2019). We live in a world where populations are pushed into extreme poverty needing cheap food and clothing (Nixon, 2011:40), a world where multinational corporations not only commit massive environmental degradation (ibid) but also send out enticing glossy advertisements tempting me with even faster camera lenses and 'high tech' fabric to wear whilst waiting for the golden hour. Yet locally, a group of youngsters plan to clear plastic from Orford Ness shores (see fig 1 & 2) and another group plan rewilding patches of land in Ipswich. I too need to believe my own actions can help reverse the processes which are taking us to a global climate tipping point.
However hard I tried to reduce my environmental footprint I realised I was still part of the problem! What more could I do? I asked is it worth it? We are living in a world where the USA permits new drilling for oil in the pristine Arctic, (Carter, 2019) where China has negotiated extensive coal mining in Africa (Obura, (2017)
Orford Ness
Orford Ness Montage
Although I am less and less enticed to buy new equipment, I still need to question the carbon cost of my photography …. especially those taken in faraway places. Whether it is 400 miles return to the Peak District or 4000 miles return to the Arctic where I toured a couple of years ago (see fig 3 & 4) or the 12000 miles to the Galapagos, my cancelled photo tour booked for April. As I learn the high climate cost of air flight, even with 'offsetting', I ponder more and more about the carbon footprint dilemma of landscape photographers who love all that is beautiful on this planet.
Arctic Travel
Arctic Montage
Over the past two years, I have been researching the science, politics and economics behind the underlying tensions and resistance to climate change. I have been asking what does this mean for the photographer? When I voice my concerns, the responses are very much about the hopeless task in a world which is governed/controlled by those listed in my opening musings.
Over the past two years, I have been researching the science, politics and economics behind the underlying tensions and resistance to climate change. I have been asking what does this mean for the photographer? When I voice my concerns, the responses are very much about the hopeless task in a world which is governed/controlled by those listed in my opening musings.
Sometimes I feel very alone with my quandary and my conviction that the scientists' forecasts are correct. 'Climate warming is urgent' advised the IPCC Special Report and the activist such as N. Klien, T.J. Demos, Chris Packham, Greta Thunberg and XR teams. I researched world acclaimed environmental photographers and tried to distil what is needed for a photographer not only to feed their own creative soul but to make a difference. I have to believe photographers can help.
Photographers have a global perspective and we care intensely about the beauty of the landscape. We also know our own localities as well as anyone. Could we be a powerful force to encourage local sustainability? Everywhere there are small parcels of important ecological niches under threat. It was the rate of loss of salt marsh along Suffolk coastlines, as important to the world's ecology as the Amazonian rainforest, that started me on a local photographic project. I explored my perspective of ecology and buried my prints for 10 weeks (see below). I spent hours in the salt marsh recognising what is at stake which gave me the courage to write this. I got very muddy but returned home a different person.
Suffolk Salt Marsh
Suffolk Marsh 'Project Unseen ' Experiment submerging prints for 10 weeks in the Salt Marsh
This was my final photographic degree project, after 7 years of study with OCA. At age 70, which now has a new significance, I realise I am rather late to emerge as an artist (new graduates are called emerging artists so I found out recently!), but I may not be too late to start a discussion.
With my time speeding up I offered to share more about my own project at the 'Meeting of Minds' On Landscape Conference 2020. I have also been thinking what next and how could landscape photographers act locally but link together to increase our impact. Could we use our creativity and skill, our dedication and commitment, to raise the profile of specific issues and/or might we link in with the scientists from Wildlife Trusts, conservation bodies and local universities? There are numerous studies evidencing how artists raise the impact of scientific findings.
Here is an idea for a shared photographic project to while away our summer days close to home! I read about the importance of 'leaving the grass to grow 8-10cm (3-4in) tall which means clovers, daisies, self-heal and creeping buttercup can also flower.' (Weston, 2020) The article went on to cite Memmott 'You can’t personally help tigers, whales and elephants but you really can do something for the insects, birds and plants that are local to you,' (ibid) The global mass of insects is falling by 2.5% a year and 40% insect species are threatened by extinction within a few decades, according to a global scientific review last year. (Sanchez-Bayo, 2019). We have all heard how bees are essential to our survival.
Grass Uncut
Grass Uncut Montage
Rather than spending our extra time at home tidying the garden, could we look to see how we can help sustain the survival of vital creatures? By default, last year, at home I did less mowing and was amazed at the increase of insect and birdlife. (see fig 7 & 8)
Could we pull together a portfolio of our landscape work – both wild and cultivated - showing the benefit of letting flowers bloom and seed heads ripen? Our photographs just might encourage less mowing, less highly trimmed gardens and parklands and wilder local verges in the future?
Could we pull together a portfolio of our landscape work – both wild and cultivated - showing the benefit of letting flowers bloom and seed heads ripen? Our photographs just might encourage less mowing, less highly trimmed gardens and parklands and wilder local verges in the future. Could we encourage all to love dandelions? Dandelions, which have just begun flowering, are rich in nectar and the early food for bees and butterflies. What do you think?
In time I am hoping to set up an East Anglian ecological art resource and approach environmentally aware organisations to offer an 'art for science' service ...whether this will work we shall see! But I would very much like to learn from anyone who has done anything similar within their community. It is likely to be a tough and sometimes disappointing road but do I have a choice? As Dr R. Macfarlane wrote in 2016,
We are living in the Anthropocene age, in which human influence on the planet is so profound - terrifying - it will leave its legacy for millennia. Politicians and scientists have had their say, but how are writers and artists responding to this crisis? (Macfarlane, 2016)
IPCC. (2018) Global Warming of 1.5degrees [online] https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ (Accessed on 17 March 2020)
Klien, N. (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster
I'd never really had the confidence to think of myself as a landscape photographer, even though taking photographs of landscapes had been part of my job for years. It took tragedy, a process of maturation, and several pairs of worn-out boots to find a path to self-expression in what many would consider a bland and very agricultural part of the UK.
Nowadays, many jobs – especially creative freelance ones – involve elements of professional photography but not the whole package. That's certainly been the case for me. I've been a regularly published outdoor writer since 2015. When I submit a feature about backpacking or mountaineering, the editor expects quality photographs that document the trip and illustrate the story. I soon optimised my photography for what editors want: obvious mountain landscapes with a human element and composition that would make a good double-page spread.
There never seemed to be anything of interest to photograph in my local Lincolnshire countryside. At the time, landscape photography was all about 'epic' mountain scenery and maximum drama.
There never seemed to be anything of interest to photograph in my local Lincolnshire countryside. At the time, landscape photography was all about 'epic' mountain scenery and maximum drama.
While I love the photographic side of my job, it didn't take long for me to figure out that I was rarely creating images for myself. I didn't know how. I was working to a brief, and because this side of my career began to take off in parallel with my development as a photographer, I never got the chance to figure out what my own vision was beyond taking pictures that looked 'good'. Did I have anything of personal value to say with my images, or were they just illustrations?
I'd had some positive feedback, and I knew that editors liked my photography, but I had no idea what it meant to me. By late 2017 I had figured out that validation in the form of likes on social media meant nothing. Although I didn't know it at the time, I was desperately seeking for an artistic vision.
Opportunity
In 2017 I began a new habit: I started to walk five miles each morning before breakfast. Over the months, this repeated immersion in my local area started to change my way of seeing. I noticed more. What had once been a bland patchwork of fields and scrubby woods became something entirely different. Slowly, a delicate enchantment began to illuminate this place.
Of course, light helped. My slot for walking was 6.30am to 8.00am. At certain times of year, I'd catch the sunrise, and I started to learn where the Belt of Venus would fall, which sections of my walk spoke to me in different ways. I carried my camera, but it took time before I started to capture anything more than visual experiments.
One particular dead tree I passed every morning stood out as an obvious subject. This grand old staghead, isolated in the Gunby parkland, delighted me with its various subtle moods. It soon gained the nickname of 'the Poet'. I realised early on that I wanted – needed – to say something about the Poet, but I didn't know what it was communicating to me, and that's why early attempts to create an image at this spot were failures.
Hundreds of miles of hiking through this small patchwork of woods and fields, over a long period, had given me the fuel I needed, but I lacked a spark to ignite it.
As I learned to listen, I started to see the potential for personally meaningful images here. Something was missing, though. Hundreds of miles of hiking through this small patchwork of woods and fields, over a long period, had given me the fuel I needed, but I lacked a spark to ignite it.
Grief
In February 2018, tragically, I lost my dad to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. A lot changed for me and my family during his long illness. Before his death, I struggled with anxiety, flirted with burnout, earned my first grey hairs, and asked my girlfriend to marry me. Afterwards, I felt like a completely different person.
It's no coincidence that I created the first personally meaningful image of the tree I called the Poet one week before my dad's funeral. The so-called 'Beast from the East' had carpeted Britain in deep snow that February. In its aftermath, I'd gone walking in the Gunby estate with Dad's old Spotmatic loaded up with Fujifilm Superia 400, and as I studied the Poet something seemed to click in my head – a harmony of my familiarity with this subject and my renewed perspective.
I knew what it was telling me now. It was telling a story of infinity and ephemerality, of isolation and connection, and a frank, unsettling look directly into death's face. I'd been walking past this skeletal form for so long without really thinking about the fact that it was a dead organism, braced against every passing gale, casting shadows and soaking in rain, etching patterns against the sky, whispering verses to passing walkers. Dead but very much alive. As I began the long process of sorting through my father's photographs and writings, this resonated with me.
I'd been walking past this skeletal form for so long without really thinking about the fact that it was a dead organism, braced against every passing gale, casting shadows and soaking in rain, etching patterns against the sky, whispering verses to passing walkers.
This moment with the Poet was the catalyst. A personal maturing had combined with photographic opportunity to change how I saw this landscape.
Looking for the glow
I planned two more images of the Poet that express some element of what this subject means to me.
The first, 'Summer swift', was captured after several weeks studying the swifts that would perch in the Poet's upper branches. I wanted to capture a swift soaring at the tree's uppermost apex against broad brushstrokes of cloud, preferably in light that showcased the interesting textures on the branches. I succeeded in August 2018. To me it speaks of hope and rebirth – again, it's no coincidence that Hannah and I got married three months earlier – and maybe also something about this subject's remarkable breadth of emotion.
The second, 'The Poet, embracing infinity', had been previsualised more or less since that first image of the tree in the snow. I wanted to capture the tree against the Milky Way – an otherworldly form, again representing permanence while accentuating the subject's more alien and unnerving qualities. I light-painted with a green torch during the exposure to add detail to the trunk and shift the mood.
Since then, I've begun to collect images that might be considered riffs on a theme. My subjects are almost always trees. I look for ephemeral light that infuses an otherwise ordinary landscape with fleeting magic, and I often seek to render the organic components of the scene as stark silhouettes, playing with structures and framed skies, looking for hidden portals and pathways. There's nothing original in this, of course – better photographers than me have been doing it for a long time, but this has become the way I interpret a landscape others might consider dull. There's so much magic here.
I am trying to say something about fragility and vulnerability too. Not just my own, but that of the landscape itself, which is threatened by development and habitat destruction, and all the more so because most assume there is nothing of value here. A wood I walk through each morning was partially bulldozed in early 2020. This affected me more than I thought it would. The images I've captured in this place can never be recreated.
I am trying to say something about fragility and vulnerability too. Not just my own, but that of the landscape itself, which is threatened by development and habitat destruction, and all the more so because most assume there is nothing of value here.
The path ahead
Even now, I struggle to think of myself as a 'proper' landscape photographer. Most of my mountain images are still created to a loose brief, although I have begun to find a more expressive way of doing this. It still takes effort to put myself in that more contemplative frame of mind required to create images for myself alone. Crucially, I feel that I am breaking away from trying to recreate images I've seen online, because I don't particularly care whether others see technical perfection or artistic merit in these photographs – they're about fulfilling a need within me, not seeking approval or meeting external requirements.
That said, I am becoming more discerning as I seek to improve my skills. Technical merit is a side I've long ignored because I saw it as largely irrelevant. Being agile and capturing emotion are more important, but achieving higher technical standards will be my next area of development as I seek to improve my composition skills. In the mountains, it's all about keeping kit weight down and capturing the images I need at a good enough level of quality without breaking the rhythm of my hike, but I can afford to be more deliberate for my personal work. As I grow and learn, it's my hope that my artistic vision will become more refined too.
Two years after my dad's death, the Poet withstood Storm Ciara, which brought winds of over 70mph to the Lincolnshire Wolds. Not a single branch on the old tree was damaged.
We finished our reader questions in the last Lockdown Podcase and so in this episode, I thought I'd ask about composition and whether Joe and David thought it was possible to teach, learn and how they go about it. We had a wide-ranging conversation and a few recommendations of book resources at the end. We hope you're enjoying the podcasts as much as we're enjoying making them.
I've always loved the theatre. There is a minimalist approach to portray everything. The approach is like an ideograph as the theatre, film and opera director, Julie Taymor, puts it. An ideograph is like a brush painting, a Japanese brush painting. Three strokes, you get the whole bamboo forest. In her most famous work, "The Lion King", she uses the essence of the story. The circle. The circle of life. Very effectively. Ever since I saw the nineties Disney movie, "The Lion King", I have been hooked. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to make images, still or moving, that evoke emotions? is the question I’ve asked myself often.
I knew, someday when I'm able to afford it, I will buy a camera and start making images. And so, it all started when I got the Kodak KB 10 from my first salary of being a graduate engineer. It was fun. Of course, buying a film and developing it for small prints was still a luxury. I had it for a couple of years and kept making images. Most of them could only evoke emotions or memories for myself. And that is okay. I think. I moved to Germany as an exchange student on a decent scholarship and that KB10 became a Canon 500N. I eventually got to know about the “larger film” cameras.
It all started when I got the Kodak KB 10 from my first salary of being a graduate engineer. It was fun. Of course, buying a film and developing it for small prints was still a luxury.
Over the next 4-5 years, I moved from 35mm to 120 (Mamiya 645/Pentax67) and then to 4x5 large format. It took a lot of courage and saving to invest in the large format system. But there it was, my precious Tashihara 4x5 with the only lens for it, the 150mm Schneider. Unfortunately, while making a photograph in Harz national park near Göttingen I slipped over a mossy boulder. In the panic, I decided to hold onto the next standing thing. My tripod. Both of us took a slide I will never forget and ended up in the cascade. The lens and most of the wooden parts were broken and I could never muster the courage of buying another large format camera. In fact, for over a year all I was using was a Yashica Mat 124G which I bought in a German Flohmarkt (Flea market) for some €30.
Well, this was 2005/6 and Canon had released their shiny and able EOS 5D. It was way out of my budget so I was happy to stick to the film media which was incredibly cheap compared to today’s standard. I mean, I used to pay €1 per 120 roll film development in Sauter, München. That soon changed though. And I eventually succumbed to the “dark side”. I bought a digital SLR and it became my main camera for all things photography, family, portraits and landscape included. My research institute was also selling all the “old” equipment including some really fine Hasselblads and I bought one for a really small amount. I was having buyer’s remorse for a couple of years but never sold it. It stayed in the pelican case it came with for years. Fast forward to another 10 years or so and while going through all the remaining moving boxes I found that case with many rolls of Ilford Pan F film. Around the same year, I was also thinking about my ever bulging lightroom catalog. Agreed that the majority of it was personal family images however, I did make quite a few landscape images with various digital SLRs I had kept buying in search of a silver bullet.
The fact was I had lost the mojo and the enthusiasm. It had become an automated process. There were few decent ones I could have printed, which is my litmus test for a good image still, however, the percentage was really low single digits. I was also hearing a lot about film resurgence. I was very sceptical though as most of these were “YouTubers” who I thought wouldn’t exist in a couple of years. Most of my heroes - Joe Cornish, Guy Tal, David Ward and many more had moved on to digital.
I missed the 2016 Meeting of Minds Conference so I have only been able to watch Bruce Percy’s talk on YouTube. I had stumbled upon his work on-line, possibly following up on the many mentions he gets from other photographers in On Landscape and became an instant fan.
There are very few of Bruce’s images that I do not get a lot of pleasure from, not to mention the learning and inspiration they provide. He clearly takes great care in setting up his photographs in the field but, as he says, he does not like the term ‘post processing’ but sees the darkroom, digital or otherwise, as just another element of the image making process. His care and skill in subtly managing and manipulating the range of tones and colours in an image make a huge contribution to the success of his pictures. As does the way he guides the viewer’s eye around an image with curves and diagonals. I find myself increasingly interested in the design of images and the way their visual elements, in terms of shapes, colours and tones interact to affect the viewer’s experience and perhaps this is why I find his work so compelling.
Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted from our subscribers. Each portfolios consisting of four images related in some way.
Submit Your 4x4 Portfolio
Interested in submitting your work? We're on the lookout for new portfolios for the next few issues, so please do get in touch!
Recently I have lost my mojo so to speak for photography in general. I think a lot of Photographers go through this at some point in their journey. So to overcome this, I purchased a small walkabout camera and ventured out.
This set of images were taken in York (England) just after a heavy period of rain. I decided to take advantage of the newly fallen rain by looking for interesting reflections in the numerous puddles. I really enjoyed the challenge of finding the compositions and then trying to capture the images on my newly purchased camera.
The air is part of the mountain…as soon as we see them clothed in air the hills become blue. Every shade of blue, from opalescent milky-white to indigo is there ~From The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
‘Gorm’ is the Scottish Gaelic word for blue - ‘Cairngorm’ meaning ‘blue mountain’. The light in this area bathes the landscape in a surreal array of blues as described in the above quote by Nan Shepherd who spent a lifetime exploring, engaging and connecting with this wild and inhospitable highland region.
This set of images is very much inspired by the above quote and has been created using in camera multiple exposures and ICM (intentional camera movement) techniques to reveal the area's unique spirit of the place by creating abstract representations of this beautifully bleak location and in particular what it felt like to be among the colours, contours and coldness of the Cairngorms.
Iceland is a landscape photographer's dream with dramatic scenery and big skies at every turn. For me, the individual elements within the landscapes are just as fascinating as the big vistas. The details are worthy of a closer look in their own right.
I love the strong colours within the landscape, the yellow lichen growing on the hillsides, the fluorescent green of moss growing on wet rocks, the stark contrast between the black lava and the remnants of snow, the golden shimmer when a sunray hits the volcanic ash, or the different colour shades of the soil - ideal conditions for someone like me who loves in equal measures the outdoors and abstract and landscape photography.
In my 40 years of surveilling for special locations to self advantage colour imaging, I happened upon several "sacred" places, temples if you will, which provided an opportunity for a wide colour gamut of reflected light on fluid surfaces. Stained glass windows, if you will. These are unusual treasures for the image maker as in a variety of seasons and lighting, they offer almost infinite variety with an application of specialised technique and appropriate visual acuity i.e., the ability to previsualize outcomes after assessing light, proper exposure, and the notorious nemesis, the wind. Why bother trying to obtain proper photos in such fleeting circumstances? The simple answer is the complex colour schemes which result that at times approach 2d abstract painting, even to a verisimilitude of brush strokes.
Thankfully digital tech allows for multiple images in short order, as outcomes do shift dramatically in nanoseconds, subject of course to the vicissitudes of wind impacting surfaces. Certainly, the direction, angle and strength of sunlight provides the diverse possibility in hues.
In my experience, the most subjectively beautiful effect is when strong "big blue" light at lower angle hits those natural objects surrounding and the informed light indirectly passes to the calm water's surface, as if one is knowing and viewing their god obliquely. A temple of exquisite beauty seen infrequently in fleeting moments (and I used to believe photographing birds was difficult).
In the last two articles of the series “The path towards expression”(see part 1 and part 2), I tackled the particularities of using photography as a tool of personal expression. As we saw, when a clear intent leads the way throughout the whole photographic process, we increase the likelihood of ending up with a coherent body of work that transmits concept, emotion and a clear message to the observer.
In this article, I will analyse a case study, using one of my personal projects: “Septentrio”. For once, the importance here will shift from the photographs (the end result) to the process and its coherence.
Even if most of the time we will work intuitively in the field, it is important to be able to consciously and rationally approach our work before and after it has been done. In these moments of conscious awareness and analysis, it is a good practice to identify our reasons to photograph, the underlying concepts, the emotional connotations we want for our work, the context in which it stands, its potential audience and how and where we want it to be disseminated.
Being able to “defend”, theoretically, conceptually, emotionally and artistically our work is one of the best ways to scrutinise its coherence, relevance and genuine character. As expressive photographers, we enjoy total artistic freedom. But with freedom comes the responsibility of choice. Being free means we can take any path we want, and that is why it is so important to know why take one path and not another, and how to remain coherent along the way.
Forcing ourselves to verbalise our reasons to make a certain body of work, and describe our intent, register, objectives and sources of inspiration allows us to “test” our work. If our work is more than a shallow visual exercise and not someone else’s work in disguise, we will be able to answer the three questions that according to Robert Adams a critic should ask: What was I trying to do? Did I successfully do it? Was it worth doing?
Introduction
The project « Septentrio » (North in Latin language) represents a subjective and personal rendition of what the Far North means and feels to me, its elemental character and the emotional and conceptual “Equivalences” (Steiglitz 1920) that I see associated to the Northern landscapes
The project « Septentrio » (North in Latin language) represents a subjective and personal rendition of what the Far North means and feels to me, its elemental character and the emotional and conceptual “Equivalences” (Steiglitz 1920) that I see associated to the Northern landscapes: tension, edge, mystery, precarious balance and threshold to the unknown (last frontier).
Few topics in landscape photography generate as much emotional debate as digital post-processing. The fascinating thing about the current debate is that it closely parallels a similar debate that occurred nearly 100 years ago. Since Guy Tal pointed out that many photographers are unfamiliar with the history of photography as an art,1 this article will discuss that debate, where it led, and what we can learn from it.
Historical Context
The highly technical craft of early photography made it inaccessible to the masses. Mastery of the mechanics, chemistry, and optics of large, heavy, bulky and expensive equipment, not to mention coating glass plates and developing them in mercury vapours, was practised by only a few. Many saw photography as a technical craft used to record the world, whilst others tried to establish it as an interpretive art. Regardless, the number of practitioners was limited; most people did not own a camera.
That all changed in 1888 when George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera with the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” Advertisements proclaimed, “No previous knowledge of Photography necessary.” Suddenly, overnight, anyone could take a picture and photography became a popular national pastime. Two years later, the less expensive Brownie camera democratised photography, reducing it to the snapshot, which further challenged the idea of photography as an art.
In response, professional photographers, who wanted to maintain control of “serious” photography, developed advanced techniques whilst making the exposure, as well as during developing and printing. These techniques, which were beyond the knowledge and capability of casual photographers, included the use of soft-focus lenses, physically altering the emulsion, and replacing the silver halide crystals in the emulsion with oil-based pigments. The idea was to give the images an ethereal, painterly quality to mimic the higher art and was called Pictorialism.
A few weeks ago Alex Nail approached me to propose recording a video with the goal of trying to explain colour management and provide some guidelines for photographers who may find the subject a bit of a challenge. We spent a while looking at different ways of demystifying the subject and coming up with some broad recommendations. We had a bit of a technology nightmare in the process but I think it probably helped us rehearse the topic well. There will be a second instalment coming soon where we answer a range of questions submitted by our contacts.
I've included a comparison photo showing the two rendering intents we talk about in the video with circles showing places that demonstrate the differences. A big thanks to Alex for driving this and editing the final video! If you have any questions, they might be answered in the next video but drop them in the comments below anyway.
We put a call out for question for our third lockdown podcast with Joe Cornish and David Ward. We managed to get through half of the questions last time and this issue we managed to complete the set.
As mentioned in last episode, we are looking at having a mini 'in your house' photography challenge. All three of us are going to give this a go (me and David have done something, Joe is still cogitating) and we invite anybody else who wishes to take part to submit some work. The deadline will be Monday morning and the only rules are that it has to be inside your house, not in your garden or out of a window.
We also mentioned last time that we're having a mini book club chat next week where myself and David Ward are going to talk about Edward Muybridge, in particular the book "Motion Studies" and me and Joe Cornish are going to talk about Robert Adams book "Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values". We'll be discussing these in a weeks time, starting with Robert Adams, if you'd like to read them and ask us questions about them, please let us know.
The Earth is talking
Go & listen…
…the voices from storms have been talking for millennia.
From ‘Earthwords’, a poem by Alisa Golden.
Each of us, through our uniquely individual landscape photography, offer our viewers a window into the soul of the earth and the messages it has for us about ourselves and our wider world.
Finding how we can best articulate what we want to say through our landscape work isn’t easy though because it makes us ask ourselves tricky questions; ‘why am I photographing this? What is it saying and what does it mean to me and the viewer?’
I believe this is a line of enquiry well worth the effort though. For it helps us consider how we might express something on any number of ideas, subjects, themes or concepts through our landscape photography.
The Lake District is where I enjoy exploring themes of the sublime and picturesque as I follow in the footsteps of both paint and photo heroes of mine. It’s life affirming and exhilarating to enjoy this scenery and my work embodies this thrill and personal pleasure. What it means to someone else is for them to decide.
After all, once we’ve figured out how to use a big stopper, how to compose well or mastered techniques like ICM or multiple exposures, the challenge for landscape photographers is to find and communicate something meaningful through our work.
In this issue, we’re catching up with Kyle McDougall, who Tim interviewed for our Featured Photographer series six years ago. At the time, Kyle described himself as a landscape photographer and was finding himself drawn more towards the intimate details of nature. At the same time, he was happy to follow whichever path his photography took him on. There were, in hindsight, hints… Kyle talked about the importance of creating images for himself, of the experience, and of stripping ourselves of pre-conceived ideas and rules. Over the last three years, Kyle has pursued a more contemporary form of the genre, sparked by a year-long road trip across North America, and he now describes himself as being driven by a fascination with society, time, and our ever-changing environments. He’s also been working solely with film.
Our ‘Featured Photographer’ interview with you was published back in 2014 and there have been some significant changes in your photographic practice and output since then. We obviously want to talk to you in detail about ‘An American Mile’, but perhaps you can set the scene for readers by telling us a little about how you came to move away from nature photography? (You’ve referred to creative burn-out, and it taking a while to both get past this and to recognise that you needed to move on from those things that had previously held your attention?)
First off, thanks for inviting me back to talk about my work. And yes, a lot has changed since then.
In 2015, after focusing purely on traditional landscape photography for the previous ten years, I started to struggle to create work that I was happy with.
In 2015, after focusing purely on traditional landscape photography for the previous ten years, I started to struggle to create work that I was happy with. It didn’t seem to matter what the location was, or how amazing the conditions were, my experiences and images were lacking the excitement that was so present throughout most of my career.
It took me a long time to accept things, and for the next two years, I basically forced myself to try and get through the ‘creative burnout’ that I thought I was experiencing.
Looking back now, I’ve realised that I was having a hard time removing the label that I’d put on myself. A landscape photographer is what I knew myself as, and I figured that’s what people expected me to be. I was essentially stuck inside a box that I’d created and I was hesitant to make or share any other type of work.
I ended up getting to a point where I decided I had two options: Quit photography entirely (which I considered on multiple occasions), or, move on from my old work, follow my curiosity, and focus on whatever truly excited me regardless of how I thought it may be received.
The star of this story is a rock – schist – a hard, sometimes beautiful, rock that has greatly influenced the lives of the people who live on it and who exploit it to create fascinating buildings.
It has always been my belief that the landscape is not just something beautiful and fascinating to look at; it is also a major shaper of human activity at multiple levels, and is in its turn moulded by the decisions and actions of people. In fact, the landscape we see today in much of the world, certainly in most of Europe, is the outcome of the interwoven stories of nature and the human exploitation of the environment. In this sense, our appreciation of a landscape is enhanced by some awareness of how it got to look this way. Landscape photography and environmental awareness are natural companions.
This article and the accompanying portfolio try to examine some of these connections for just one place – a small village, a hamlet we’d call it in Britain, in Central Portugal called Cerdeira that was completely abandoned before restoration efforts began about 30 years ago.
The star of this story is a rock – schist – a hard, sometimes beautiful, rock that has greatly influenced the lives of the people who live on it and who exploit it to create fascinating buildings.
Visitors to the village today find beautiful renovated stone houses (used as tourist accommodation) and other restored buildings (including a thriving centre for the arts, especially ceramics). Cheek-by-jowl with the restored buildings is the remains of houses in all stages of disintegration and reconstruction. It is a striking juxtaposition, allowing visitors to gaze out from a stylish and comfortable house onto ruins that would delight the heart of the 18th-century creators of follies in English country estates. On Landscape is not the place for an extended dissertation on geology or social history, but understanding how the village comes to look like this provides a context that throws light on how people interact with the landscape. But first, a few words about the images themselves.
The images
The photographs here can be thought of as my tribute to the schist. The character of the rock defines the region and I made three brief visits (2 to 5 days each) in 2018 – January, May and December. I had chance to see the buildings and ruins of Cerdeira in many moods, from the almost absurdly golden light just before a winter sunset to a summer thunderstorm. What kept attracting me was the rock itself. There is an irregular, almost mosaic, character to the walls of the buildings. The highly diverse beauty of the stonework contrasts with the more regular geometry of the tile roofs, though even up there, slabs of schist are left on top of the tiles, as the traditional methods of roofing are flimsy and the blocks provide extra stability.
I would describe the resulting images as highly detailed semi-abstracts. Like millions before me, I feel that the essence of each photograph goes back to Ansel Adams’s concept of “visualisation”. As he put it, this involves seeing a photograph “in your mind’s eye”, knowing the finished image you wish to create, and then taking the steps needed to make the photograph that corresponds to this internal image. In an interview late in his life, he was very clear: “The picture has to be there, clearly and decisively.”
I would describe the resulting images as highly detailed semi-abstracts. Like millions before me, I feel that the essence of each photograph goes back to Ansel Adams’s concept of “visualisation”.
The “external” experience of seeing a landscape is accompanied by an “internal event”, and what is recorded is both what I saw and how I felt. Among modern authors, I have been greatly influenced in my thinking about photography by the writing and images of Guy Tal. His interpretation of “expressive photography” feels exactly right to me. I am not trying to portray a scene but rather to record the impact the scene had on me. Like any landscape photographer, I aspire to capture something of the genius loci, the spirit of a place, but there is no universal reality - we each recall a scene in subtly different ways. So these are images of what I remember - photographs of memories.
In practical terms, I also follow Guy Tal’s advice, as expressed in his book The Landscape Photographer’s Guide to Photoshop, i.e. I do not try to create the image that corresponds to my visualisation in the field, but rather I take a photograph that will enable me to reproduce that inner vision once I work on it on my laptop. I use Photoshop, but in fact, I find that my visualisations can be found using just a few of its features. Most of the editing goes no further than the tools available in Camera Raw, along with selected dodging and burning. Of course, processing was also a feature of Adams’s methods, so the approach goes back almost a century, even if today we use software when Adams relied on chemicals and length of exposure. The key element for me in the field is the composition; that is the essence of my visualisation. I should also note that these photographs, like all I make, are handheld. I have never been able to work comfortably with a tripod. In the past, this meant accepting that much of landscape photography was beyond my grasp. However, with modern sensors and stabilized lenses, the extra stability of a tripod is no longer needed for a much wider range of images.
The idea that an artist is someone who looks at the same world but sees it differently is a cliché of such long-standing that I have never been able to identify an initial author, and there is at least tentative evidence from cognitive science to support the contention.
The idea that an artist is someone who looks at the same world but sees it differently is a cliché of such long-standing that I have never been able to identify an initial author, and there is at least tentative evidence from cognitive science to support the contention.
I am not sure I can claim to be an artist, but a couple of anecdotes from Cerdeira stay in my mind. I showed some of my images to one of the team who run the village. Looking at the first photograph of this portfolio, she said, “I know where that is: I walk past there 20 or 30 times a day. But I never looked at it like that.” The next day one of her colleagues asked me where I had taken the image of the crumbling wall, and was surprised to learn that I made the photograph standing just outside the café in which we were chatting. It is perhaps revealing of the transitional nature of the village that both those scenes were no longer visible a few months later as the slow process of rebuilding and upgrading goes on.
The rock and its impact
In traditional, pre-industrial societies locally available resources are critical; the nature of the bedrock determines what building material is available. Schist is hard, created when softer sedimentary rocks were squeezed and baked, deep in the earth hundreds of millions of years ago when continents collided. Hard and impermeable, schist splits easily along the grain of the rock, but it cannot readily be cut into regular blocks. So, buildings traditionally were assembled from irregular-shaped pieces. With the ingredients needed for mortar hard to come by locally, the walls were largely made of solid uncemented stone, pieced together like a three-dimensional jigsaw or mosaic and mortar limited to filling in holes. Schist also varies greatly in colour, both from quarry to quarry and over time as it weathers. Freshly cut, it is often blue or purple, but can also be yellow or orange, and it weathers to a great variety of shades and textures. In the humid climate of Portugal, the stone also acquires a patina of lichens, further enriching the palette of colours. The result, to my eyes, is one of the most diverse and beautiful building materials to be found anywhere, and the specialist builders who now reconstruct the old houses have an eye for this beauty that leads me to think of them as artists rather than artisans. But the rock has an impact that goes far beyond house-building.
Obdurate schist resists erosion and makes hills and mountains with poor soil and steep slopes. In Portugal people have lived in these regions for thousands of years – they were already long-established when the Romans arrived over 2,000 years ago. But these hills have always been tough, marginal places to live in compared with the more fertile lowlands. When opportunity arose to move to towns and cities, or even abroad, people did so, especially after World War Two. Gradually the schist hills began to empty and by the 1970s Cerdeira was a ghost village, its houses abandoned and crumbling, its farm terraces, created with so much effort on the rugged slopes, returning to nature. Rural depopulation of this kind is a widespread phenomenon; across whole swathes of Southern and Eastern Europe farms, villages, even small towns are emptying.
Visiting these abandoned villages, or ones where a handful of residents still linger, is a poignant experience. These are places where people have struggled to make a living for hundreds, even thousands, of years, often in unforgiving conditions. Now they are neglected and decaying. Centuries of effort left to fall into ruins - especially saddening in places where the traditional buildings are often so beautiful. Walking through Cerdeira on the single, carefully graded, schist footpath that connects the rebuilt houses reveals scene after scene that speaks of decay. A doorway that once was the way into someone’s home, now just leads to a tangle of brambles and weeds. A wall, with a niche in the stonework that once might have held an oil lamp or a candle, is falling apart on an almost daily basis. A door ajar, facing one of the reconstructed houses, only opens to reveal heaps of rubble and a roofless, collapsing interior. In many deserted villages it feels impossible to imagine anything other than gradual decay and disappearance. But the schist has one final, and optimistic, role to play.
Visiting these abandoned villages, or ones where a handful of residents still linger, is a poignant experience. These are places where people have struggled to make a living for hundreds, even thousands, of years, often in unforgiving conditions. Now they are neglected and decaying.
After so long making life difficult, in the era of ecotourism and sustainable development, the rock has given the communities that live on it a new identity – the Schist Villages. Some two dozen communities have come together to work collectively to establish themselves as a destination for “green tourism” with an emphasis on traditional design, access to nature, and high-quality local produce. In Cerdeira, after decades totally abandoned, it is not fanciful to speak of resurrection. Guided by the creative instincts of ceramicist Kerstin Thomas, the village has become a lively focus for the arts as well as a tourist centre. The photographs here try to give some hint of this transformation.
This article was written in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. I wish to make it clear that at the time of writing the places I was photographing were open to local residents under certain "distancing" conditions. We are now under stricter closure orders, regrettably due to too many non-locals ignoring pleas from local communities to stay away (we have very limited medical and emergency services), and I have shifted my efforts to indoor activities for the time being.
Both you and I are incapable of devoting ourselves to contemporary social significances in our work; […] I still believe there is a real social significance in a rock—a more important significance therein than in a line of unemployed. For that opinion I am charged with inhumanity, unawareness—I am dead, through, finished, a social liability, one who will be “liquidated” when the “great day” comes. Let it come.” ~Ansel Adams (in a letter to Edward Weston, 1934)
During the turbulent days of the early 1930s, around the time of the founding of Group f/64 (by, among others, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston), Henri Cartier-Bresson is rumoured to have commented, “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!”
To me, Cartier-Bresson’s comment exemplifies an unfortunate philosophical prejudice that pervades many of our arts, sciences, and other pursuits—the prejudice of humanism—suggesting implicitly that the welfare of the human species and qualities of the so-called “human condition” must always be considered of supreme importance over any other subject. It’s a notion that has never resonated with me, as a person and as an artist. The natural world has enriched my own life more profoundly and in more ways than any human-centric enterprise. Much as I respect the life and work of Cartier-Bresson and so many others whose world views are different than my own; and much as I enjoy the visual poignancy of “decisive moments,” and the skill and genius required to photograph them; photographs of rocks, and the legacies of photographers such as Weston and Adams, have been considerably more important and consequential to me.
Much as I enjoy the visual poignancy of “decisive moments,” and the skill and genius required to photograph them; photographs of rocks, and the legacies of photographers such as Weston and Adams, have been considerably more important and consequential to me.
Although I respect those who feel otherwise, so much photography amounting to humanity gazing into its own navel, fascinated by its own oddities, superstitions, rituals, shortfalls, and miseries; has never interested me as much as the vast world beyond the vanities and tragedies of our species, and generally less so than all the stories, lessons, and metaphors to be found in rocks, and in photographing rocks. As E.O. Wilson points out, “The main shortcoming of humanistic scholarship is its extreme anthropocentrism. Nothing, it seems matters in the creative arts and critical humanistic analyses except as it can be expressed as a perspective of present-day literate cultures. Everything tends to be weighed by its immediate impact on people. Meaning is drawn from that which is valued exclusively in human terms. The most important consequence is that we are left with very little to compare with the rest of life. The deficit shrinks the ground on which we can understand and judge ourselves.”
I can't remember the exact moment in time when I became aware of Murray Fredericks work, but I have very distinct sensory memory recognition of the first pass through his ‘Salt’ gallery. A red desert, a green tent, dark skies, pastel skies, mirror reflections, stars, abstracted but equally tangible and definable. Balanced simplicity, with incredible colour combinations, nothing and everything all at once. Putting my finger on one single image is impossible. They worked as a collective, and for me, this was much more powerful than any single image could ever be.
Delving deeper into Murray Fredericks ‘Salt’ I discovered the incredible lengths he went to for his art. Over an eight-year period Fredericks made sixteen long, physically and emotionally challenging solo journeys to the surface of Lake Eyre in the Australian Outback. Lake Eyre, also called Kati Thanda, is a great salt lake in central South Australia, with a total area of 4,281 square miles (11,088 square km). It lies in the southwestern corner of the Great Artesian Basin. Normally dry but susceptible to occasional flooding, the lake constitutes the lowest point on the Australian continent. I managed to grab a few quotes from Fredericks on the Hamilton’s site about the environment:
It is the harshest environment I have ever seen. Windswept and devoid of fresh water, temperatures range from freezing to the high forties. While some rare species of animals live there, generally it's not an environment that is conducive to life.
The project arose out of a desire to work in the most barren landscape that I could find. Lake Eyre was chosen as an appropriate location since its perfectly flat surface and razor sharp horizon provide a landscape devoid of features, which extends, once out on the Lake, in every direction.
Carrying a range of equipment, including a 10 x 8 view camera loaded with sheet film, a small tent, food supplies, a bike to drag his gear across the lake surface, the physical and mental commitment required to create this body of work is astounding. Watching his documentary, simply entitled ‘Salt’, is a must for anyone looking for a greater insight into the demands of this project. It’s listed on Australian iTunes, which I couldn't download from Ireland, but I did manage to locate the documentary on YouTube at the link below.
Photography and minimalism are ideally suited to one another. The act of making a photograph is all about framing the essential, removing the extraneous, and using the tools of the camera to focus the viewer’s gaze on to the subject. So, the photographer has a double intellectual challenge: to strip away and to concentrate the eye and the mind. Jonathan Chritchley’s image from the Languedoc in France (Sea Wall, Collioure) does exactly that, exquisitely.
What do we actually see here in this picture? Four elements: sea, sky, the breakwater and the horizon, all rendered in monochrome. The sea has been smoothed out and given a glowing sheen by the use of a Big Stopper, the sky is featureless and toned down towards the top of the image. The breakwater is slightly more complicated – the contrasty juxtaposition of the black and white stones and steps pulls the eye. Note too the subtle echo of the steps and the stepped back wall, one light, one dark, one sloping acutely, one more gradually. The horizon boldly bisects the image. That’s it. Simplicity itself. But what a satisfying and beautiful simplicity!
We put a call out for question for our third lockdown podcast with Joe Cornish and David Ward and the response has been fantastic. We're going to have to split the questions across two chats so sorry if we miss your questions this time.
As mentioned in this episode, we are looking at having a mini 'in your house' photography challenge. All three of us are going to give this a go and we invite anybody else who wishes to take part to submit some work. The only rules are that it has to be inside your house, not in your garden or out of a window.
We also mention that we're having a mini book club chat next week where myself and David Ward are going to talk about Edward Muybridge, in particular the book "Motion Studies" and me and Joe Cornish are going to talk about Robert Adams book "Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values". We'll be discussing these in two weeks time if you'd like to read them and ask us questions about them, please let us know.
Last month we set up a survey to find out a little bit more about our subscribers and also what they think about current and potential future content. We were blown away with the number of responses and we promised to give you an update on the results. The following post shows the results and some conclusions we can draw from them.
Q1 How long have you been a photographer
Looks like the vast majority are over 15 years - we’re an experienced bunch in general!
Q2 Country of Origin
More than half of the respondents were from the United Kingdom, out of the remainder, 1 in 6 were from the US, 1 in 6 from the rest of Europe and 1 in 20 from Australia with a smattering of respondents from other countries. Here’s the top results
Q3 How long have you been a subscriber to On Landscape
It looks like most of your were early adopters so a big thanks for sticking with us! We’re still gaining subscribers and there’s a natural churn where people leave for a while but many who have left have since returned.
Q4 My photography is mostly outdoors/landscape
Well, this is a bit of a ”well.. duh!!” question but we thought it worth asking if there were a significant number of your for whom landscape isn’t your primary choice. I think we’ve confirmed expectations though.
Q5 I don’t care about the technical side of photography
This one is a bit of a curveball as personally I figured people would still care about technical matters, even if they fall strongly on the ‘artistic’ side of photography. After all the technical stuff is the craft of our passion. It turns out that this is true, very few of our readers strongly agreed with the premise with the vast majority either disagreeing or not expressing an opinion either way. Intelligent analysis of the technical side of photography is still on the menu.
Q6 What other websites/magazines do you read?
We had a selection of answers, here’s a sampling of the more common ones.
RPS Journal
The Online Photographer
PhotoPXL
Outdoor Photography
Lenswork
FujiLove
Minimalism
Black and White Photography
Petapixel
Better Photography
Amateur Photographer
Outdoor Photographer
DigiLloyd
Brooks Jensen
Aperture
BJP
Lenscratch
byThom
Q7 How many On Landscape articles do you read per issue
Looks like most of you read most of them. We always planned on having a broad range of articles where readers might pick and choose what they want to read, hence why we publish such a range of content. The logic follows on a metaphor we use from music magazines where a reader may only read about the bands or music style that matches their own tastes.
Q8 Let us know what you think of the current or new types of content
We wanted to know what sort of articles you liked or might want to see more of in the future (and conversely, what you could do without). Not too many surprises but we’ll see some more book reviews, critiquing, composition, printing and post-processing in the future.
Q9 Where should we focus our efforts to improve the content of the magazine?
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A huge thank you for the hundreds of you that took the time to complete the long survey and so many of you who wrote detailed text answers to the open questions. We'll keep trying to improve things without breaking the current general approach to the magazine. And you can let us know how we did in another five years!
Arguably, one of the hardest tricks in photography is to make genuinely different, interesting photographs of extremely well-known – iconic (for want of a better word) – places. An important question now that the world according to Instagram has only served to amplify the popularity of popular subjects.
But isn’t it rather tedious to shoot well-known places? I recall telling friends many years ago that I would never photograph Eilean Donan castle in Scotland because it was mercilessly exploited by shortbread manufacturers, jigsaw puzzle makers and every industry looking for a quick and easy commodification of Scotland’s history and landscape identity. It was – is – an icon.
Eilean Donan, Scotland
Arguably, one of the hardest tricks in photography is to make genuinely different, interesting photographs of extremely well-known – iconic (for want of a better word) – places.
Eilean Donan, Scotland
Perhaps I was frightened that I’d be unable to do something different with it. But then I was commissioned by VisitBritain to photograph it, and while I might like to think I am principled, I am not principled enough, yet, to turn down genuine employment as a working photographer!
I swallowed my anti-commercial pride and shot the castle over the course of a long winter morning. I did have to rise around 4.30am in order to drive there from Glen Coe and still be ready to scout before sunrise. And having made pictures from a slightly elevated position of the moon setting behind the castle it occurred to me that an alternative perspective might be provided by the steep sides of Creag Reidh Raineach directly behind me. It’s still Eilean Donan. Just seen differently.
It is, arguably, the problem-solving nature of seeking out the new, or ‘original’ view on a much-loved, familiar and over-photographed subject that makes the endeavour still fun, and worthwhile.
For this issue, we’re catching up with Magnus Lindbom, a landscape photographer from Sweden who featured in Issue 53. You’ll find Tim’s original interview here. Magnus spends a lot of his time in the Swedish Mountains, punctuated by assignments to Norway and Iceland.
What has given you the most enjoyment, photographically speaking, since Tim spoke to you in 2013?
The more photography I do, the more I enjoy digging deeper into things, and I think what’s given me the most enjoyment in the last few years has been to explore different areas (and seasons) here in the Swedish mountains. Not only is it fascinating to see new places but it also inspires me to try new things photographically. I guess as a landscape photographer you really are the sum of what you have experienced, right?
You’ve assumed a lower profile online over the last couple of years. Why did you decide to give yourself some breathing space, and what have you been up to?
I just felt that I wanted to focus on the photography and experimenting with new ideas, and not be distracted by social media etc. I must admit that it was quite liberating, although in the end not sharing what you do becomes somewhat suffocating. As with everything, you have to find a balance between doing the work and sharing the work.
To me, the adventures have always been the foundation for my photography, but of course, as I have developed as a photographer over the years my way of doing them has also changed. The adventures have become more focused on a theme that I want to explore photographically.
In the current lockdown, it's no surprise that there aren't many people 'passing through' Glencoe (although there are still quite a few being turned back by the local police). So this issue we had a chat online with Andrew Tobin, who has recently moved to the Highlands, and talked to him about his background in professional football photography and how he became enamoured of the landscape. We go through some of his favourite images including a couple taken near his house on his 'lockdown walks'.
The Ledmore river meanders lazily into Cam Loch, with Canisp in the background lit by a setting sun.
Detail of trees near Lael, Assynt, Scotland.
Skimming light illuminates silver birch trees on the far bank of a small loch near Lochinver, Scotland.
Photographers gather for dawn at Mesa Arch, Utah. Picture by Andrew Tobin.
A silver birch tree leans at an awkward angle in front of a pine forest near Wisley, Surrey.
Glowing sandstone lit by the morning sun at underneath Mesa Arch, utah. Picture by Andrew Tobin.
The River Wharfe rises at Beckermonds in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Flowing roughly south-east for 65 miles through some of England's finest scenery, it eventually meets the River Ouse near York and then flows into the North Sea. A third of the way along its course, it meets the little town of Ilkley, with its fashionable shops, pubs and eateries.
Ilkley is a nice place. Two thousand years ago a Roman fort (Olicana) was built here. Thereafter, not too much happened for nearly 2 millennia– until that is, a gentleman in Queen Victoria's time decided that the spring water coming off the moors was good for your health. A spa was erected and the town boomed!
An ancient track over Ilkley moor
Apart from the spa, Ilkley is famous for another thing: a little ditty entitled On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at – which is meant to be sung in Yorkshire dialect – and is translated to mean “on Ilkley Moor without a hat.”
In local legend, Rombald was the name of a giant who stomped his way over these moors, often followed by his quarrelsome wife (who is always nameless). She is famous for chasing him across the miles of moorland with a skirt full of stones, dropping them occasionally.
It was reputed to be composed during a Victorian church outing to the moors and is the unofficial anthem of Yorkshire.
Ilkley Moor rises steeply to the South of the town and levels out at 1320 feet. Combining with other high moors of Baildon, Hawksworth, Bingley, Burley, Morton, Addingham High, Silsden, Kildwick, Bradley and Skipton Moor, it is collectively known as Rombalds Moor. In local legend, Rombald was the name of a giant who stomped his way over these moors, often followed by his quarrelsome wife (who is always nameless). She is famous for chasing him across the miles of moorland with a skirt full of stones, dropping them occasionally. Some of these piles of stones are known as the Little and Great Skirtful of Stones – and are in fact prehistoric burial mounds. There is an article that I once read saying that one of these mounds had over 300 cartloads of stones removed from it, to repair local walls. It is a shadow of its former self…
In reality, Rombald was probably a corruption of Robert de Romille, the first Norman Lord of Skipton, although some have suggested he may be a remembrance of the Old Norse giant 'Raumr' (meaning 'big and ugly').
To the North of Ilkley the moors of Blubberhouses, Denton, Askwith and Barden rise up and continue on to neighbouring Nidderdale and beyond. They are bleak, wild and utterly captivating.
Autumn. An explosion of colour and a season that many wait patiently for, so that they can try to capture it in all its splendour. For the last few years, I have done the same, but my vision and desires have changed a lot recently. I am drawn more and more towards working in black and white, driven in part by using film and printing in the darkroom, but also through enjoying the challenge of being a landscape photographer, who surrounded by colour, choose to piece together the landscape photography puzzle through a limited pallet of tones.
Autumn seemed as good a time as any to try and see whether I could capture the essence of Autumn in the Woodland without the presence of colour. Working almost exclusively in two areas that I have easy access to, I shot consistently over the months of October and November with the aspiration of creating a final gallery of images that captured Autumn in Monochrome.
The project became a good lesson and exercise in using limitations and constraints to produce a final series of images that felt cohesive, and with a unity of vision.
The project became a good lesson and exercise in using limitations and constraints to produce a final series of images that felt cohesive, and with a unity of vision.
The series was predominantly shot at two locations; Rushmere country park and Aldenham woods, which are near to home and work respectively. Rushmere country park is my home from home, and somewhere I could happily walk around every day, and still feel like there are new images to be made. Aldenham Woods provided me with a place to go on the rare occasions I had time to shoot before work. Shooting locally not only allowed me to get out regularly, and be flexible depending on what the weather was doing, but I could also revisit compositions with ease if I needed to. I did manage a trip to Bolehill Quarry in the Peak District, which allowed me to add a few images that contained a different type of geography, but that was still within the brief of the project.
Black and white work has been a staple part of my photography ever since I picked it up five years ago, and I wanted to complete a project that was solely black and white. I’ve been using medium format film cameras and using Ilford black and white films, for a few years now, but I decided to shoot this project in digital. Predominantly, this came down to wanting to work quite quickly and I hadn’t yet decided on subject matter and style of shooting. Therefore, I decided to shoot the series on a Digital Monochromatic camera, which ended up being the Leica M Monochrome. Using a monochromatic camera helped create a limitation by forcing me to consider my compositions differently to how I would if shooting in colour. The camera doesn’t capture any colour data at all, only luminance values. You can also use colour filters (yellow, orange etc..) to boost the contrast. I have become very familiar with using filters in this way since starting to shoot black and white film again a few years ago.
I only used 3 lenses throughout the project – a Voigtlander 35mm 1.4, Voigtlander 50mm 1.2 and a Zeiss 100mm F2 Makro. The Zeiss was connected via an adaptor and the majority of the close-up images were taken with this superb lens. I like using fast lenses, shooting with a shallow depth of field where possible, and all 3 lenses were ideal for this project.
Where possible, shooting in conditions that were slightly flat in light, was preferred. This gave me more flexibility in post processing because I wasn’t dealing with high contrast files.
Where possible, shooting in conditions that were slightly flat in light, was preferred. This gave me more flexibility in post processing because I wasn’t dealing with high contrast files.
I eventually settled on an aesthetic for the final images, which was a result of both post processing and choices made in the field. A yellow filter was used the majority of the time, because of the effect it would have on helping pick out the bright yellows of the changing leaves, as well as give the overall image a boost in contrast.
Every session spent on the project was approached with an open mind, starting off with just walking and seeing what the weather was doing, and trying to feel what compositions I was being drawn to. Inevitably there were a number of shots that focussed on the wider landscape, but I also wanted to capture a broad range of images. This resulted in a number of close up and detailed shots, as well as using triptychs, being included in the final project.
There were a few compositions which I’ve shot in the past that I ended up re-visiting. This did result in one of my favourite images of the project, of the one brightly coloured tree on the other side of the lake, illuminated against the dark of the pine trees behind.
The woodland and forest floor offer a whole world of opportunities for those wishing to explore it. Working with a Macro lens, I would often be found pointing my camera at the ground, trying to capture the details of the leaves which had already fallen, or the textures of the pine needles and lichen.
On a particularly flat morning when I just couldn’t seem to make sense of the wider landscape, I was drawn towards the bark of a tree. Exploring the different patterns and possible compositions consumed me for the next hour or so. My favourite of these was of some bark that resembled a tribal tattoo on top of the stripped wood.
Triptychs run throughout the final set of images and it’s a technique I find myself using frequently, in particular when dealing with smaller details or slightly abstract viewpoints. The triptych allows me to examine a subject from different viewpoints or to show separate, but related elements that complement each other. Displaying images in such a way also asks the viewer to consider the relationship between each ‘panel’.
Many of the limitations were applied right from the beginning, but some were also set when I started to select the images that would make up the final gallery.
From the outset of the project, I applied limitations and constraints on myself; Shooting in Black and White, limited lens choice, two locations etc... Many of the limitations were applied right from the beginning, but some were also set when I started to select the images that would make up the final gallery. Over the course of a couple of months, I built up a catalogue of c.200 images that I thought had potential and I printed all individually on 6x4 paper. Seeing all the images laid out really helped with the shot selection process, and I found it much easier working with mini-prints away from the computer screen. Relationships between images and themes started to emerge as I moved the prints around on the desk. I would often think of a theme and work through the images to see if it ‘worked’. More often than not it didn’t, but a new idea would form by completing this process a number of times.
The final limitation presented itself during this stage of image review, when I decided that the images would only be of the woodland interior. Any images that included the sky were excluded, with the only sky that’s visible being in the reflections of puddles or bodies of water.
Working in a project mindset, complete with self-imposed constraints, really helped me focus in a way which I’d been lacking over recent months, and I am now on the lookout for what my next project will be. I have a sneaking suspicion it may be in black and white...
Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted from our subscribers. Each portfolios consisting of four images related in some way.
Submit Your 4x4 Portfolio
Interested in submitting your work? We're on the lookout for new portfolios for the next few issues, so please do get in touch!
Last year I had some ideas for a photographic project in Autumn. But things weren't as planned, and I couldn't take pictures.
Suddenly, I realised that I had to wait one more year for taking pictures in Autumn. One more year! So long!
I had a sort of Time Consciousness, the subjective experience of my own mortality, as Rafael Rojas wrote quoting Roland Barthes in his article Time and Photography. In the world we live in, in a year everything is possible, even neither we nor the world itself exist anymore.
But at the end, the Autumn has arrived with his colourful magnificence again, I had the possibility to take pictures, and the world still exists, although sad to say, crazier.
In two or three weeks the Autumn will be gone. And I have taken some pictures.
While I’m sipping an East Frisian tea and looking through the window how Autumn ends, I say: play it again Sam. And Sam, behind me, sings:
You must remember this
A Fall is just a Fall
A shot is just a shot
The fundamental things apply
As seasons go by
~ Free adaptation from Herman Hupfeld
For years I have been passionately focusing on wildlife photography, mainly during vacation travels to exotic and exciting locations. But alas - This left a gap in the many months that I am at home with a photographic itch I need to scratch.
Unfortunately, for many years I thought that in order to capture beauty it is necessary to travel away from home. And how wrong I have been…
Fortunately, we live in a beautiful location in Switzerland and my newly found appreciation and love for landscape photography have allowed me to finally discover this fact. The Seetal is close to Lucerne and being close to the alps and with several lakes nearby it is the perfect location for landscape photography endeavours.
And so the project 12x12 is born… Twelve photos were taken loosely in twelve months all within a maximum of twelve kilometres radius from home. I love the rather cinematic and uncommon format 6x17 (or as I jokingly call it 12x34). To top it off it is my objective to adorn a wall with the selection in printouts twelve inches wide.
The river flows a little over 100 metres from my Herefordshire living room. It is only just over 12 miles long and rarely 3 metres wide. In fact, in other places, it might be known as a stream. Over the centuries man has been unkind to it, channelling its waters to encourage grassland fertility in the seventeenth century, diverting its energies to power four corn mills for centuries and, unkindly, straightening it over long stretches in Victorian times to ease railway construction.
Being small, it tends to hide away and whilst a key feature of the landscape it doesn’t readily show itself. As such it doesn’t lend itself to the wider scene preferring to stay hidden amongst the trees, the fields of rape and maize or in deep channels in the grassland. This group of four photographs are part of a sequence I am developing that are designed to show the character of this small watercourse. Using a square format helps focus attention on detail whilst conversion to black and white emphasises pattern, form and texture. Colour is another story. I have used a Canon 5D Mark III/IV and Photoshop for processing.
With a photographic philosophy of pursuing more abstract, shape oriented compositions, and a wild west approach to what can be done in ' post ' ( digital retouching in computer, not camera ), I have often created finished works that far more resemble pop art, than the original scene he had actually hiked to. I like to create imagery with more unique qualities, than often the case with such beautiful, but accurate, photo imagery that has already been done. Trying new ways to manipulate an image, both in camera, and later, in post, is the challenge, that keeps this artist returning to the hiking trail, as often as possible.
Where to start?! To try and pick my favourite landscape image was going to be a hard task. It has made me think about my own photography and the connection with what I like to see in an image. I started by thinking of photographers whose work has influenced and inspired me since first picking up a camera in 2012.
There are too many to mention but I will name a few. Valda Bailey, whose abstract landscape and nature images take me to a new imagined world. Her Unbroken Spirit images of Camargue horses galloping through the marsh take me back to the days of daydreaming about horses while in class at school.
Jo Stephen, whose woodland images make me imagine fairies will pop up and make an appearance any moment. Her silver and gold tree and Sakura images are just beautiful. She proves that artistry and creativity are more important than an expensive camera kit.
I love the stark contrast between the shingle beach and the sea and the ethereal quality it has. The use of a longer exposure to smooth the sea just adds to the effect, giving a clear defined line between the sea and beach that your eye follows up to the cottages.
Bruce Percy, whose Hokkaido images are mystical yet stunningly simplistic.
They are all very different styles, ranging from simplistic black and whites to beautiful, soft colour images but they all let your imagination go and transport you to another world.
After going around in circles for a long while, the answer was staring me in the face, on my wall.
I had been lucky enough to win a copy of Lee Acaster’s, Shingle Street image, At the Edges, in a charity print auction a number of years ago and it has been hanging on my wall since then. (Read Lee Acaster's Featured Photographer interview).
If you haven’t been there, Shingle Street is about eight miles south-east of the Suffolk town of Woodbridge, across the marshes on the far side of the village of Hollesley. It is a desolate and eerie location and despite the name, it’s probably the only settlement in Suffolk without streets of any kind, just a long line of bungalows and cottages facing directly onto the beach and the North Sea.
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. In concert, its landscape is changing irrevocably. This landscape of ice is dynamic, an attribute that means the Arctic is probably the hardest place in the world to make observations of the climate system. Yet it is this dynamism that makes this landscape so fascinating—for scientists, photographers, storytellers and consumers of stories and art alike. The changes in the Arctic demand the attention of climate scientists like never before, but they can also speak to all of us, and we should listen.
Why is it so difficult to observe the Arctic? For much of the year, the Arctic Ocean is covered in a pack of sea ice, made up of millions of individual ice floes that shear, break apart and buckle, propelled by winds and currents in almost perpetual, destructive motion. Nothing can be considered permanent atop the ice. The ocean beneath it, meanwhile, is cast in a satellite communications shadow—the autonomous underwater floats and gliders that have revolutionised global oceanography cannot work there.
The best way to make observations in the Arctic is to be passive, to drift with the dynamic frozen ocean. The German Icebreaker Polarstern has been doing exactly that since the start of October 2019. Polarstern is the fulcrum of the MOSAiC expedition, the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate. The expedition is bringing together scientists who study the ocean, the atmosphere, sea ice, ecosystems and biogeochemistry, to deliver the most comprehensive dataset yet of the Arctic climate system. I was lucky enough to be involved in the first leg of the MOSAiC expedition as one of 20 postgraduate students on the MOSAiC School, based on partner research vessel Akademik Fedorov.
RV Akademik Fedorov enters the ice
The proof of concept for a drifting campaign like MOSAiC came from the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen’s bold attempt to reach the North Pole for the first time in 1893.
The proof of concept for a drifting campaign like MOSAiC came from the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen’s bold attempt to reach the North Pole for the first time in 1893. A decade prior, American ship USS Jeanette was crushed by ice northeast of the New Siberian islands, and its wreckage discovered on the coast of Greenland three years later. Nansen thought to capitalise on this newly described drift of ice across the central Arctic—now called the Transpolar Drift—in a ship that would stay intact. The hull of this ship, the Fram, was designed such that rather than being crushed by converging ice floes, it would rise above them.
The MOSAiC comms team draws frequent links to Nansen’s Fram expedition. And these links are apposite: the Polarstern will follow a similar path to the Fram, and the comparison recognises Nansen’s own contributions to Arctic science. But there will also be stark differences. The ice is thinner and much more mobile now; Polarstern’s ice-bound journey across the Arctic will take just one year — the Fram took three.
Polarstern, before she tethered to the central floe
Working in cold conditions, you do your best to prepare the instruments for their future. We would struggle with motors that wouldn’t start and fingers that lost their dexterity. But it is after deployment that the instruments face their biggest challenges. They can be consumed by convergent ice in a pressure ridge, or topple into a newly opened crack in the ice—a lead. They can become an object of curiosity for a polar bear. Or, if their GPS fails, their position might become untraceable, especially if deployed by helicopter at a distance from the ship. Arctic pack ice can drift 10 kilometres in a day, and you might never find that bit of silver machinery in a sea of white to fix it.
At the central floe, the first big winter storm sheared part of the floe in two. The scientists onboard Polarstern had to battle the elements to recover instrumentation and reassemble one of their observational ‘cities’. These cities, populated by finely-tuned instruments, are vulnerable to icequakes.
It is this dynamism of the ice which shapes the landscape. On the Fedorov, we could climb to the very top of the ship, where every surface was covered with ice as thin as the wings of a fly and arranged into big triangular sails and bristling Christmas trees. It really felt like Coleridge’s secret ministry of frost, coating the spires of satellite towers. From there, we could look out over the sea ice.
It is this dynamism of the ice which shapes the landscape. On the Fedorov, we could climb to the very top of the ship, where every surface was covered with ice as thin as the wings of a fly and arranged into big triangular sails and bristling Christmas trees.
Perspective over the ice
In the early winter, it is a wind-scoured plain, with interlocking plates of ice creating an uneven patchwork of grey and white, occasionally cut by thin slivers of light where leads lie. At the margins of these plates, the ice is deformed, low jumbled walls of ice are constructed. Those that are remnant from the previous winter are softened by wind and snow, with long fluted snowdrifts, or sastrugi lying in their wake. At most a year old, these ridges look like ancient remains. In the subdued light that often characterises polar twilight, a band of colour on the horizon resides between two oceans of white and grey. Towards the sun, the band is pink and orange, and the ice beneath looks dark. Turn 180 degrees, and the band in the sky is a deep milky blue; the ice beneath it glows. In between these poles, there is a zone where sky and ice are matched in lightness.
Towards the sun, the band is pink and orange, and the ice beneath looks dark. Turn 180 degrees, and the band in the sky is a deep milky blue; the ice beneath it glows. In between these poles, there is a zone where sky and ice are matched in lightness.
Full moon over the frozen ocean
The dynamism of sea ice also gives it a special place in the human imagination, because of what it can do to us. As dwellers of lower latitudes, our vision of this environment is shaped by the stories that the whalers and explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries brought back—or the stories we infer from their remains. Stories of becoming helplessly trapped in the ice, listening awake at night to the desperate straining of timbers against converging ice. The terror of the mortal grip of sea ice was rich subject matter for artists of the sublime. Caspar David Friedrich’s 1824 painting The Sea of Ice was entirely a creative vision; he only had accounts of polar exploration and the ice on the surface of the river Elbe, near Dresden, as subject matter. But the work communicates the devastating power of sea ice and gives us an insight into how this environment crystallised in the collective imagination.
Ripples in nilas pinched between blocks of older ice
Carving through sea ice on the Fedorov, the sound of scraping became background noise.
Carving through sea ice on the Fedorov, the sound of scraping became background noise. But when we were stationary one night, the ice started to lock us in. It was a deep, reverberating sound—the stick-and-slip of slabs of ice squeezing against the hull.
But when we were stationary one night, the ice started to lock us in. It was a deep, reverberating sound—the stick-and-slip of slabs of ice squeezing against the hull. Although I felt in principle safe, I knew how cold it was out there and my mind made links to those whalers who in an explosion of timbers would be battling for their lives in the darkness.
In Arctic Dreams (1986), Barry Lopez writes that modern venturers through the ice do not sleep ‘free of the stories that have been passed down’. Lopez reminds us that ‘the frozen ocean itself still turns in its winter sleep like a dragon’. And it will continue to turn, its sleep more restless than ever, as the ice is more mobile. But it is less impassable now, and curiously, it is younger, too.
The decline of Arctic sea ice with climate change is most pronounced in summer. The summer sea ice extent has reduced by 50% during the satellite era (since the late 1970s), and its average thickness is also down by approximately 50%. Its age, too, has decreased dramatically as less and less ice survives the summer months before being carried out of the Arctic Ocean or melting in situ. Ice more than four years old used to dominate the central Arctic; it now constitutes about one percent of the sea ice area. Nan Shepherd noted in The Living Mountain how hot summers in 1932-1934 put paid to year-round snow in the Cairngorms: ‘Antiquity has gone from our snow.’ And so it is for sea ice. This decline in age is also integrally linked with the appearance and character of the landscape. To understand this, we need to consider the growth phases of sea ice right from genesis.
The Sea of Ice
MOSAiC was launched at the very start of the freeze-up season so that there would still be enough light to assemble instrumentation and to maximise the observational coverage of the winter. The timing also gave us the opportunity—and light—to see new ice grow. Sea ice begins life as individual crystals of frazil ice, which coalesce into thin films and soups of grease ice. In the lightly rippled open water between ice floes, you might see these early stages of growth by looking for the absence of ripples. In as little as several hours, grease ice can thicken into a dark elastic layer of nilas ice. As the Fedorov moved through leads with a new covering of nilas, we would spend minutes at a time watching the bow wave emanate away in gentle, tubular waves under the nilas. Squashed between two converging floes, nilas can bend into ripples. Windblown snow picks these ripples out, creating soft stripes that run parallel and coalesce. Nilas can then thicken and become grey ice, which can be thick enough for polar bears to walk on. As the ice continues to grow it gets whiter, and progressively rejects more and more salt from its crystal structure, become harder and more brittle.
Sea ice begins life as individual crystals of frazil ice, which coalesce into thin films and soups of grease ice. In the lightly rippled open water between ice floes, you might see these early stages of growth by looking for the absence of ripples. In as little as several hours, grease ice can thicken into a dark elastic layer of nilas ice.
Polar bears walk on grey ice
Converging layers of nilas interfinger with surprising geometric regularity, tracing the outline of castle ramparts in the horizontal plane. Later in the life stages of ice, this same convergence causes great upheavals and the formation of real, vertical ramparts. Sea ice that has survived at least two summers is called multi-year or old sea ice and can be fresh enough to drink, thicker than three metres, and increasingly hard. The reduction in brine content means it has different electromagnetic properties to first and second-year ice and can be distinguished from space. On the ice too, the difference is more pronounced than the rather prosaic modifiers multi-year or old would suggest.
A polar bear guard stands atop a pressure ridge in residual ice
Working on residual ice (sea ice that has survived one summer*) the horizon is generally distant. From a human perspective, then, old ice is another landscape altogether. The horizon is as far as the nearest pressure ridge, which might loom over you by several metres.
Sea ice may never be as vertically impressive as the great architecture of freshwater ice. Ice sheets and glaciers are built from hundreds of thousands of years of snowfall, the air slowly squeezed out or trapped in bubbles. Where they meet the sea, they calve, releasing this crystallised history of snowfall into the ocean as icebergs. By contrast, sea ice is made in haste, under the freedom of the wind rather than the crushing weight of snow. And our oldest, most architecturally rich sea ice is departing in haste, too. Icebergs will continue to cascade into the high latitude oceans as ice sheets calve. But multi-year sea ice is on the ropes. It is now little more than a tenth of sea ice area and only survives where it is swept by winds against the North American continent. Nor does it exist in any significant measure in the Southern Ocean, where winds blow ice away from the polar continent, and heat fluxes from the ocean are greater. This old terrain of sea ice is soon to be consigned to that part of the imagination where the unreal resides.
The sun approaches the horizon
It was polar night when we headed south from 85 degrees north to leave the ice behind. Around midday, on the 20th October 2019, we got the first real vivid colour on the horizon. That evening we came through the marginal ice zone and gathered excitedly to see pancake ice, c. 50 cm discs of thin ice, colliding against one another under wind and swell. It was a black and white leopard skin sea in the dark. Two days later in open water, amidst a three metre swell that opened and closed the drawers in our rooms, and made the sink pipes gurgle, we finally saw the sun again. It was a joyful return, and people hugged on the deck and smiled into the light.
Two days later in open water, amidst a three metre swell that opened and closed the drawers in our rooms, and made the sink pipes gurgle, we finally saw the sun again. It was a joyful return, and people hugged on the deck and smiled into the light
Scientists gather to look at pancake ice in the marginal ice zone
There was also a certain sadness, too. We started to think about how in a decade’s time we might be able to sail through open water to the North Pole. How in the future, as Arctic scientists, we might be leading expeditions in an ocean essentially devoid of ice in the summer. How different it would be. How different it already was.
Rings of light, Barents Sea
The loss of sea ice has significant implications for the climate system; within the Arctic and beyond it. The ice-albedo feedback is one well-known example. The replacement of reflective ice with darker ocean leads to more solar radiation being absorbed, and more warming at the Earth’s surface. It is often championed as the main reason for enhanced warming in the Arctic or Arctic Amplification, but the full picture is more complex. Arctic amplification is most intense in the winter when there is little or no solar radiation reaching the surface.
The loss of sea ice has significant implications for the climate system; within the Arctic and beyond it. The ice-albedo feedback is one well-known example. The replacement of reflective ice with darker ocean leads to more solar radiation being absorbed, and more warming at the Earth’s surface.
Likely more dominant is the lapse-rate feedback: the stable inversion layer** that characterises the winter Arctic atmosphere acts as an envelope for warming near the surface. This bottom-intensified warming is not compensated for by greater space-bound radiation higher up, where little or no warming has occurred, so the surface warming becomes intensified.
Stormy weather, Barents Sea
The influence of the rapid changes in the Arctic are spilling out of the high latitudes; by changing the Earth’s energy balance and temperature gradient from equator to pole, the Earth’s atmospheric circulation can be altered. The jet stream is powered by this temperature gradient, and the loss of sea ice appears to be connected to the propensity for wobbles in the jet stream to pause, prolonging extreme weather events at mid-latitudes.
The Arctic Ocean is also changing dramatically. Declining sea ice has gone in tandem with a more energetic circulation in the Beaufort Gyre, a wind-driven circulation north of Alaska that stores a vast quantity of cold and fresh seawater. A persistent shift in the winds could flush much of this recently accumulated freshwater into the subpolar North Atlantic, with potential implications for the large-scale ocean circulation of the Atlantic and midlatitude weather. Scientists across the world are working, through MOSAiC and through other initiatives, to better understand our climate, piece by interconnected piece.
A sea of change
As landscape photographers, we should sit up and take note that a unique landscape is literally being lost from the face of the Earth in the Arctic. We cannot replant it, we did not exploit it for resources; its loss is due to the integration of all greenhouse gas emissions and land use changes through recent history and across the world. As people who care about the landscape, we should mourn this loss. But we will have much, much more to mourn if we do not listen to the warning that its loss represents. We can all listen to the Arctic, and treasure the natural world in our actions as well as our imaginations.
*after Jan 1st it becomes known as second-year ice
** inversion layers are characterised by an atmospheric temperature profile that goes from cold at the surface to warmer higher up
RV Akademik Fedorov enters the ice
Polarstern, before she tethered to the central floe
Deployment of instruments on the ice
Perspective over the ice
Full moon over the frozen ocean
Ripples in nilas, pinched between blocks of older ice
The Sea of Ice
Polar bears walk on grey ice
A polar bear guard stands atop a pressure ridge in residual ice
The sun approaches the horizon
Scientists gather to look at pancake ice in the marginal ice zone
I was having one of our regular chats with Joe Cornish last week to catch up on things, and we both talked about making the most of the fact that we were both available to record some audio content for our readers. We’ve tried having online chats before but had problems with internet bandwidth when we were based in East Yorkshire. However, now we’re in the Highlands, we were hoping that our increased bandwidth would let us do more (a quite surprising 30Mbps instead of <1Mbps near York).
Sorting out the technology
We also ran the idea past David Ward, who was positive about it and, like most of us, didn't have anything else to do. So, we recorded our first episode using GoToWebinar. Unfortunately, there was a bit of lag/delay on the connection, which made for a stilted start, and the final audio quality wasn’t great. However, we enjoyed the process, and I went away with the task of trying to work out a better process for next time.
We ended up sending separate audio recorders to Joe and David and although we had our conversation on our phones, which got rid of the nasty lag, we used the recorders to get a good quality record in each location and also used video conferencing software with the audio turned down to make sure we had the visual cues that conversations sometimes need. The end result of this was much better and we'll stick with this going forward.
All of this description of our process is by way of explanation of why our second conversation is actually our first proper one. However, the first conversation was still interesting and so we’re including it here with the quality warning.
What did we chat about? Well, for our lower-quality chat, we challenged each other to choose a question to ask of ourselves and the second, better quality chat we had a discussion about what we have been doing since the lockdown started and how it's been affecting us
Questions for Joe, David or Myself?
What we really want to do is to continue having these conversations but make things more interactive with our audience. So if you have any questions you’d like to address to Joe or David (or myself) then please add them to the comments below, send a message via our Facebook page or via email to submissions@onlandscape.co.uk.
We also want to include other photographers in our chats and if you have any suggestions for these or want to nominate yourself, please let us know!
Contrary to what some may think, I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all that has gone before in On Landscape, and it was only after I came across Jodie’s work on Rfotofolio that I rediscovered Thomas Peck’s critique of Rocks and Old Oak in Issue 131 while researching the interview.
Many of Jodie’s images feature trees, for which she developed an early love. The format of the photographs often draws on their subject – panoramas of windswept landscapes, vertical portraits of the trees themselves, or triptychs to echo the form of multi-stems. While many of her images are monochromatic, she also works in a soft colour, choosing this where it amplifies the mood.
Can you tell us a little about where you grew up and now live, and the extent to which place has shaped you and your interests? Time spent outdoors had a formative influence on you from an early age, and you developed an early affinity for trees?
I grew up in San Diego, California, and still live there. People associate San Diego with beaches, surfing and warm weather. However, the county of San Diego is very large and is home to several different environments: ocean and coast, chaparral, oak and pastureland, mountains and pine forests, and lastly the desert.
My family loved this backcountry. We spent a lot of time there as well as in the mountains near Los Angeles and in Yosemite National Park. I have fond memories of camping, hiking and days spent in rustic cabins. So even though I grew up near the beach communities, my love has always been for the mountains. For some reason the sycamores, oaks and pines of the backcountry have been special to me from a very young age; I remember crying when we had to leave them and go back home.
What did you end up studying, and what did that lead you to do as a career?
My studies ran a winding course. I started studying Chinese and Asian Philosophy but ended up with a degree in Art. When I was in college the photography department was not a part of the art department, but rather it was embedded in the Industrial Arts department. I didn’t pursue it because I couldn’t imagine myself in Industrial Arts. So I ended up in the Art department, majoring in Textiles and Fiber Arts.
My other love was Art History which has had a huge influence on my artistic vision today. My art degree, however, eventually lead me to teaching art and working with students with disabilities, which became my career for almost 30 years.
Last spring, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust launched a striking marketing and fundraising campaign: Give Peat a Chance. Although a member of YWT for many years, I have to confess the relevant mailer lay hidden under a pile of other post in my kitchen for some weeks and it was actually the social media side of the campaign and, specifically, a number of powerfully worded tweets that first grabbed my attention.
There were the references to Yorkshire’s peatlands being akin to the Amazon rainforest, there was hard hitting aerial footage showing the bleak and silty wasteland that covers extensive areas of our peaty uplands. Most striking from my point of view, however, was to learn that globally, peatlands are the largest store of carbon on land. I had no idea.
Perhaps that’s ignorance on my part but I suspect I was not alone in focusing all my attention on trees, trees and more trees. Woodland is of course hugely important, and it’s one of my favourite environments in which to wander and photograph, but it is just one of many invaluable habitats. Peat bogs probably don’t rate so highly in the glamour stakes but, the more I read, the more I learnt just how vital they are. In particular, I was blown away by two statistics:
Although peatlands only cover 3% of the world’s surface, they store 30% of the soil’s carbon - twice as much carbon as all of the forests in the world.
The UK’s peatlands store over 3 billion tonnes of carbon – that’s roughly the same amount as all the forests in the UK, France and Germany combined.
These are seriously powerful facts and were the catalyst for me to do what I’d been meaning to do for a while – start to give something back to the landscape I love. Better late than never, so last year I donated 5% of my Yorkshire based workshop profits to Give Peat a Chance.
It was as a result of this and subsequent conversations that led me to spend a fascinating day last summer with Lyndon and Jenny from Yorkshire Peat Partnership. For the best part of six hours we wandered around Fleet Moss – once covered in a rich peatland habitat, but now much of it is a desolate landscape, in parts resembling a First World War battlefield. It’s the worst peatland site the partnership has discovered in the Yorkshire Dales and as such, it’s one of the areas being prioritised for restoration on a massive scale.
There are a number of reasons why sites like Fleet Moss are in such a bad state but the major contributing factor is almost certainly the agricultural policy of over 50 years ago when farmers were encouraged to drain boggy sites to improve the land for grazing. The policy was well intentioned and it is only in more recent times that this has been shown to be misguided and extremely damaging.
The resulting ditches, or grips as they are known, are mostly devoid of vegetation and only serve to increase erosion. There is also a thought that an ancient boundary marker has exacerbated this problem on Fleet Moss, with a likely congregation of both human and livestock footfall along this area. As a result, a significant area of the moor is covered in hags – mounds of peat raised high above the surrounding channels and ditches.
There are a number of reasons why sites like Fleet Moss are in such a bad state but the major contributing factor is almost certainly the agricultural policy of over 50 years ago when farmers were encouraged to drain boggy sites to improve the land for grazing.
These channels and ditches simply aid the flow of water off the moor and cause massive problems in the dales below. Extreme weather is part of the issue but the extent of flooding is exacerbated by the inability of the uplands to provide the kind of natural flood defences of which it is capable. The problem can also be seen in the likes of Semer Water and the Wharfe, with staining and silt from the peat. Peaty water must be filtered before it can be safely treated to become drinking water. This is an expensive procedure and the cost is, of course, passed on to us, the customers.
A number of different factors have contributed to large areas of the moor being worn down to bare peat and, in places, even down to the rocky mineral layer below the peat. Some of the channels are several feet deep and work has started to begin to shore these up. Hundreds of coir logs are used in this process, with hundreds more to be flown in this winter. The beneficial effects of these are evident, with vegetation already starting to grow back in some areas. Cotton grass plug plants have also been introduced and it was encouraging to see these starting to sprout new and healthy growth.
It was interesting to see the range of other plants growing on Fleet Moss and to understand their place, or otherwise, in this habitat. Of course, Sphagnum moss (and there are countless varieties) is one of the most important plants you will see growing in a peat bog. Apparently, the plants hold over 20 times their weight in water! Much of the Sphagnum moss was dry and yellow, having been deprived of the water on which it thrives. Conversely, star moss typically thrives in a drier environment and is something you would not wish to see growing in abundance on Fleet Moss.
Sphagnum moss (and there are countless varieties) is one of the most important plants you will see growing in a peat bog. Apparently, the plants hold over 20 times their weight in water!
By the same token, it was not a good sign that we saw a patch of harebells growing in one area – I tend to think any native wildflower must be good – but of course, they are all associated with particular environments. Other plants that thrive in peat bog are crowberry (not a plant I knew other than by name), bilberry and, much to my surprise, cloudberry. I had eaten cloudberries in Norway a few years back and had no idea they grew in the Yorkshire Dales – sadly we saw no berries, only leaves – but it was great to learn they exist here.
We also saw masses of bog asphodel – I don’t recall ever seeing such a spread – so this was encouraging and perhaps shows what is possible. Likewise, we saw an abundance of Deschampsia grasses – a favourite of mine to photograph. I was also shown a wonderful clump of sundew plants – again, I don’t recall ever seeing so many in one small area.
There were clumps of heather but nothing widespread and, although we photographers tend to enjoy photographing endless carpets of heather, blanket bog covered primarily in heather is not a good thing. Biodiversity and balance are key.
Of course, it’s not just about the plants. Wildlife thrives on healthy peatland and, even in its degraded state, Fleet Moss is home to countless insects, as well as short-eared owls, golden plover, curlew and many other birds. It was wonderful to see and hear many of these during the day. Perhaps most exciting was to be taken to a wonderful little oasis in the middle of Fleet Moss – a saturated area of mosses and grasses, very wet an example of what more of the area can and, in time, will look like again.
It’s also great to see other restorative work going on in Yorkshire – for example, the National Trust is currently repairing the raised bog at Malham Tarn Moss. It’s another area I love to photograph and is home to one of our most exotic flowers – Bogbean.
The landscape around Malham Tarn has changed a lot over the years, due to the intervention of man, and the Trust is having to balance the demands of the various habitat types present in the area to ensure the most sympathetic restoration.
The landscape around Malham Tarn has changed a lot over the years, due to the intervention of man, and the Trust is having to balance the demands of the various habitat types present in the area to ensure the most sympathetic restoration.
I’m aware my account of my day with YPP and of the work that is going on is necessarily simplified, I’m sure I’ve made a few too many generalisations and there are things I’ve not even touched upon. However, I hope I may have helped to open a few eyes, in the same way, mine was opened when I first became aware of the true value of peat. As well as continuing to contribute to the ongoing work, I hope to find ways in which my photography can perhaps shed a little bit of light on the hidden charms of the peat bog. It will be a challenge, but I’ll give it a go!
Further reading
There are some excellent articles online, where you can read more about the work going on and about why this kind of conservation is so very important. I’ve included links to just a few of these at the bottom of the page.
and asked 'Do we have a Voice? And does being an outdoor photographer inevitably lead to environmentalism? And if so, what if anything are our responsibilities?'
"If you want to share your ideas or suggestions, or feel you could write or contribute a piece on what we as a community can do collectively to help the causes of landscape, ecosystems and the wild world then please do contact Tim (via the contact page), who is keen to spotlight what has become the issue of our time. And how we might use our photography to best highlight the importance of nature, with joy, irony, anger, sadness or humour…whatever that voice may be."
We all get excited when an opportunity arises for a trip to somewhere special for photography. The chance to photograph something new and fresh excites the mind. Let’s face it however unless you are able to afford the costs and time for these trips, they are not a regular opportunity. Most often we settle for what is within a short distance of our home. How do you stay “fresh” and enthusiastic, at the same time making imagery that is of a high personal standard that others will appreciate and find meaningful as well?
Niagara Panorama Frozen mist from the falls coats the trees and shoreline of Goat Island just above Niagara Falls in this winter panorama of the river.
Most of us have a specific location that we choose to visit and photograph over and over. For some that location may be a destination such as a national park or a city. Others like myself may be fortunate enough to have such a location near to us. Having local access to a location allows us to photograph in a variety of seasons, light and weather conditions. But how do you take advantage of this, getting more than the standard “iconic” shots and personalising your portfolio of work? This is what I call “Capturing The Essence” of a location, taking images that represent the feeling of the place through detail and action shots.
I am fortunate to live within ten minutes of Niagara Falls, in western New York State. This is truly one of the natural wonders of the world. It is also one of the most visited and photographed natural parks, being located on the border between the United States and Canada, an hour and a half from Toronto, Canada and a half hour from Buffalo, NY. This makes it a year round tourist attraction and sometimes difficult to photograph without jostling with tourists. With all of my gear, I am frequently stopped and asked to take family photos with various phones and cameras, making it a wonder I get any photography of my own accomplished. Niagara Falls changes with the seasons as well as a time of day and weather conditions.
Whirlpool Rapids The rapids leading into the Whirlpool State Park area of the Lower Niagara River. Accessed from a trail that runs down the face of the gorge and along the river, this location is a popular area for hikers. There are numerous trails that access both the US and Canadian sides of the gorge.
Over The Edge Waters rush over the edges of the American Falls at Niagara Falls State Park.
When I mention Niagara Falls I am sure that a picture instantly springs to mind. We have all seen the standard iconic images of Niagara Falls a thousand times. If not, just Google the park and you will see a screen full of nearly identical images. I have a number of these in my portfolio as well because they sell, but I strive as well to capture images of the park that are original and representative of how the park makes me feel in the moment. If these shots are meaningful to me then they hopefully will have a similar effect of others. When you have the luck of being able to see a location in many different conditions you begin to see things like autumn leaves on the ground in Zion, rock formations, animals, etc. that are specific to that location and have just as much emotional value as the iconic shots. Grand sweeping vistas are wonderful but sometimes the more intimate images convey as much emotion as the wide angle shots. Having a body of work that is singular and representative of your vision will set you apart from others, demonstrating your compositional and story-telling skills.
Niagara Falls is so much more than a huge waterfall. The Niagara River is a very large river connecting two of the Great Lakes. The upper river is wide and flat as it flows from Lake Erie, and the lower river is narrow, powerfully rapid, and passes through a gorge before emptying into Lake Ontario. The water at the Falls is a beautiful blue-green, due to minerals picked up off the rocks below. There are wondrous rapids that dance with the power of so much water moving through the narrow lead up to the falls. Below the majestic waterfalls, begins an entirely different world. The deep and narrow nature of the river below the falls makes for rapids and whirlpools that race through the first half of the deep Niagara gorge, before slowing as the river once again widens.
Niagara Falls is so much more than a huge waterfall. The Niagara River is a very large river connecting two of the Great Lakes. The upper river is wide and flat as it flows from Lake Erie, and the lower river is narrow, powerfully rapid, and passes through a gorge before emptying into Lake Ontari
Winter’s Strength The American Falls up close in winter. This late afternoon image had so many soft colours throughout, from the warm light of the setting sun, the magenta light of the falls lighting that had just come on, and the soft green colours of the water's sediment. I love how the ice builds over time, causing constantly changing sculptural formations on the rocks and plants.
In the spring and summer, everything is surrounded by lush green plant life and the sun glints off of the moving waters. Autumn brings variable skies and changing colours as the oaks and maples lose their leaves for the coming winter. Niagara Falls in the winter is like a crystal fairyland as snow and ice coat everything around falls. The rising mist from the waterfalls coats everything, both natural and man made. The longer the freezing cold lasts, the thicker the ice builds up. Additionally, because the river doesn’t freeze, we are blessed with migrating ducks, geese, Tundra Swans and a variety of gulls that winter here. This makes the area a hot spot for birders, year round.
With such a variety of changing conditions, I never lack compositional opportunities. Additionally, seeing a spot that might offer possibilities under different conditions is easily noted for future visits. Travelling to other national parks around the country means accepting the conditions found during that window of travel. Lady luck combined with advance prep work will get you great images, but you get what you get.
I try to make at least two trips during the year to other areas so I know how it is to come away with just average images. I am both a landscape and wildlife photographer, so my chances of finding interesting subjects are better. I always take notes and iPhone images to keep track of interesting spots for future trips. In the end, though, nothing beats having the source in your “backyard”. Keep an open mind and finding fresh images that keep you from losing sight of the changing beauty and impact of your local spot will always be there for you.
Turquoise & Gold
The turquoise waters of the Niagara River Rapids at Niagara Falls, offset by the orange warmth of the morning sun as it rises above the horizon. Christmas eve morning at Niagara Falls State Park, NY. I loved the bookended gulls on the log.
Strength – Summer
These two images were taken in the same location above the falls. This rock never moves and during the summer has plants and moss growing on it, making for an interesting study of the water moving around it. 1/6th of a second is perfect for moving water and texture here.
Soft Niagara Sunrise
sunrise view of the Horseshoe-Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The colours were brilliant as there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun was nicely diffused by the rising mist. I know this shot is probably a very cliche view of the Falls but it never ceases to impress. Every visit is different.
Winter
These two images were taken in the same location above the falls. This rock never moves and during the summer has plants and moss growing on it, making for an interesting study of the water moving around it. 1/6th of a second is perfect for moving water and texture here.
Niagara Panorama Frozen mist from the falls coats the trees and shoreline of Goat Island just above Niagara Falls in this winter panorama of the river.
Whirlpool Rapids
The rapids leading into the Whirlpool State Park area of the Lower Niagara River. Accessed from a trail that runs down the face of the gorge and along the river, this location is a popular area for hikers. There are numerous trails that access both the US and Canadian sides of the gorge.
Over The Edge Waters rush over the edges of the American Falls at Niagara Falls State Park.
Niagara River Rapids #5
Number five in a series of Autumn images taken at Niagara Falls State Park in western New York. The focus of these images is on the flow of water and it’s interaction with the land.
Winter’s Strength
The American Falls up close in winter. This late afternoon image had so many soft colours throughout, from the warm light of the setting sun, the magenta light off the falls lighting that had just come on, and the soft green colours of the water’s sediment. I love how the ice builds over time, causing constantly changing sculptural formations on the rocks and plants.
A while back, Guy Tal and I spent a while on the phone chatting about landscape photography, art, psychology and much more. I also asked him about how he got started in photography and his interest in the outdoors. We've transcribed the interview for your reading pleasure and if you have any other questions for Guy, please let us know and we'll try to do a follow up.
How did you start living a visual life?
I started photographing when I was a teenager. I lived in Israel at the time, and I always liked spending time outside in the fields, on the beach, in pine forests, and other natural places that were within my reach. For reasons I can’t remember, I decided one day to take my father’s camera along on one of my explorations, and I was absolutely fascinated with it. To study the world through a viewfinder, looking intently at things I loved and trying to compose them in appealing ways, was an incredible feeling; and then the sense of gestation, waiting to get my pictures back from the lab to see how well I’ve done, sometimes even to rediscover things I forgot, only prolonged and intensified my interest. Oh, and that first roll of film, not a single exposure on it was usable, but the experience for me was just addictive.
Although I had no way of knowing it at the time, I feel fortunate today that during the first decade I’ve been using a camera, I didn’t know any other photographers. I didn’t know anyone I could talk to about photography other than the people that worked at the lab; I couldn’t tell you who famous photographers were; I’ve never even heard of Ansel Adams in my first 10 years or so of practising photography with ever-growing interest. I was doing photography by myself, for myself, as my default mode; I didn’t have to tune anything out and I didn’t have anything to influence me; I just went about it in the way that was most intuitive to me.
What were the sorts of other media were you interested in? Were you a film buff or did you read novels?
I’ve always been a reader. At one point in my young teens, I had read all the books in our town library’s kids section and so they allowed me to borrow from the adults’ section just so I had something to read. So that’s always been a part of my life and gave me a lot of ideas. For much of my childhood and adulthood, I never really liked my life in Israel, never really connected with the place, the culture, and the politics, which is kind of odd because it’s a place where you’re raised to have a deep connection with the land and its historic and cultural significance. In hindsight, I can say that it always felt alien to me, but I didn’t really have any other point of reference until I left in my mid-20s.
For many years, books were my world and allowed me to imagine going to all kinds of places I never thought I’d see in person. And I had the natural world to spend my days in, away from the confusion of human affairs. At the time I had a lot of fields and orchards around my home, some that were abandoned by former Arab and Palestinian residents who were driven out when Israel became a state (before that it was a colony under a British mandate). I was never very social, so I just roamed these fields by myself a lot of the time, often with my dog. And then the camera came along. For me, photography was always part of an immersive experience, not just a means of taking pictures.
At the time I had a lot of fields and orchards around my home, some that were abandoned by former Arab and Palestinian residents who were driven out when Israel became a state (before that it was a colony under a British mandate).
Going back to the relationship I have with pictures, at some point I started looking at coffee table books and magazines with nature images which I didn’t have access to as a very young person. My fascination grew even more—I could actually see places that previously I only read about and could only imagine. I’ve always had this thirst for exploring, roaming natural places looking for flowers and animals, butterflies and nesting birds and anything else I could find. With access to magazines and books of fine photographs, I started seeing all of these exotic places and exotic wildlife. I started reading about incredible adventures people were going on and it became a passion for me. In truth, I didn’t think that I would ever be able to do or see most of these things for myself, but then a series of unexpected opportunities came that ultimately allowed me to pursue a life of writing and photography in a place I never expected to fall so deeply in love with. It was the culmination of a lifelong interest, yearning, and love for pretty much all things wild.
To those that know me, it will come as no surprise that my choice for this issue’s end frame is a woodland image. One of my more popular lectures is based around woodland photography, during which I talk about some of my influences. I include some of our classic 19th century English landscape painters such as Gainsborough and Constable.
Amongst my more contemporary influences is the photography of Shinzo Maeda and Christopher Burkett; it is Christopher’s image titled ‘Glowing Autumn Forest, Virginia’ that is my chosen end frame. As well as being a master of woodland photography he is also a consummate printer of his work, still preferring to create stunning Cibachrome prints for many years after its demise.
Last year we had a spate of planning applications in the Glen Etive/Rannoch Moor area. Firstly the King’s House hotel was sold to the Black Corrie’s Estate and, with a lease to Crieff Hydro negotiated, a rebuild of the newer part of the King's House was proposed. The design was disliked by most in the extended community but still, the planning officers waved it through. With my eye already on planning applications in the area, I also noticed an application for run-of-river hydro developments in the Glen Etive area. This was not just a single small weir in the commercial forestry area of the Glen, which would have been annoying but acceptable, but the damming of every single significant water flow into the river Etive.
Beinn Fhionnlaidh and Meall a Bhuiridh, Allt Mheuran - Colin Prior
I linked up with a group of people online, a ragtag bunch of writers, walkers, environmentalists (i.e. a bunch of normal people who really care about the landscape) who were brilliant to work with and with whom we developed a plan of action to try to protest these applications.
One of our first priorities was the development of a Facebook page and website to raise awareness of the issues and try to inform the public of what they could do to submit their own objections. I should point out here that we weren't being NIMBYs here, we reluctantly agreed that half of the schemes in the forestry commission areas were acceptable but those within the multiply designated wild land areas were not.
It fell on myself and David Lintern to do most of this work on the website as I have the IT/design experience and David is excellent at writing. It quickly became apparent that one of the primary resources to raise initial awareness of what might be lost was inspiring photography. Fortunately, one part of the Glen has been popular with a few photographers for a while and so I was able to recruit a few photographers to share their photographs (see the website for details). Big thanks to David Ward, Colin Prior, Michael Stirling-Aird.
But this didn’t cover all of the tributaries and so I spent a few days wandering up and down the three rivers on the wild status land side of the Glen (the North side) in order to collect both video and drone footage for use on the website. Here is an example of the drone footage we used.
Because of the website and Facebook page, we managed to raise a huge amount of support and had petitions with over 10,000 signatures which we were able to supply to the planning officers as well as drone footage of the most at-risk river locations. We also managed to get an interview on the BBC news (which you can see here).
We were also able to create ‘simulations’ of how and where the weirs and pipes would go and the visual impact of them. They're very amateur ones but they were done in a hurry - better something rough and ready that shows clearly where things will land than just an abstract technical drawing.
Sadly, on the first pass through the planning system, it was approved on the basis of community support (despite the fact that all of the six people in the community are employed by the developer in some way).
One of our local councillors managed to get enough support for a full hearing at the Highland Council in Inverness and our website and drone footage was used to support our objections. Again though, the planning was approved and so we thought that was the end of things.
However, the action continues and as developments start to happen, the photography will be used as a reference for the location before development as well as recording any out of 'planning' procedures.
Although the proposal is withdrawn at the moment, I will be ensuring the area is well represented photographically in preparation for a possible planning objection.
Using your photography to help support objection campaigns
Despite being unsuccessful at stopping the Glen Etive application, it made me realise just how important photography can be in raising awareness of the constant encroaching of our landscape. Although I live in a fairly spectacular part of the country, the use of photography to show the beauty of less spectacular areas can be a major tool in ensuring the unwarranted development of publicly accessible open areas, parks and countryside.
So how can you go about trying to help in your local area?
The easiest way to do this is to subscribe to your local paper and keep an eye out for campaigns. Alternatively, contact your local councillor or MP. They will have had various issues raised to them and a quick request via email and you will probably be put in touch with one or two local groups that campaign on such matters.
Once you’ve found such a group, ask them what they might need in the short term. In the longer term, the following types of photographs will be useful
Showcase images to be used to show the beauty of a place
Reportage images of ‘action’ happening around a place
Ongoing rephotography campaigns to show changes in an area
Showcase Images
These are the bread and butter of most landscape photographers work but make sure you capture images that show the extent of the area in question, not just details.
Allt Mheuran - David Ward
Reportage
You might not be a reportage photographer but you’ll still probably have more skills and understanding of photography in general than the people campaigning or of people enjoying the space. Don’t underestimate how useful environmental portraits can be too. I haven't taken any of these but David Lintern, who worked with me on the website took a few good ones and here's another of kayakers contributed by Paul Crossan.
Rephotography Campaigns
Showing the way a landscape changes naturally and by the hand of man will help to demonstrate what is happening in a way that the written word can struggle with. This may be river bank erosion (in Ballachulish we have an issue where the local water authority changes the flow of the river slightly and in so doing changed the water so it starts to destroy a local path), changing water levels (showing how floods may cause problems in developments), etc.
Tell us How You've worked or Campaigns that you might help with
If you’ve helped in campaigns like this in the past, we’d love to hear from you. I’m no expert and only got involved in the Glen Etive and Ballachulish campaigns when I realised if it wasn’t me, there would be nobody else.
Many years ago as a university student studying humanities I had to get used to writing ‘Compare and Contrast…’ essays. The format was quite strict: take two authors, ostensibly writing about a similar theme, and then discuss in what ways the novelists were similar, and how they were different. The same subject, different techniques, leading to a different outcome. I guess this analytical approach stuck because as I look at these two photographs by Finn Hopson, I can’t help but react in exactly the same way. They both have the same subject – woodland scenes with mist and fog. They are structured very similarly – strong verticals bisected by flowing horizontals. But their mood is completely different. The first is aloof, serene, receding. The second is warm, enthusiastic and inviting. How is it, when so much is similar, that we can have such a visceral variation in reaction to an image?
Let’s deal with the comparative elements first. Whilst there is obviously a difference in format (square vs rectangle), both compositions are built around the same basic framework. The trunks of the trees create a structure that feels ordered – not an easy thing in itself to achieve in woodland usually so chaotic! They anchor the images, forming an authoritative background arrangement. True, in the square image, there are horizontal branches coming off the trunks, but to my eye, these seem to disappear – there are two trunks that dominate, creating a grid-like pattern. In both images, my mind notices the verticality of the trees.
We see a lot of images of trees and woodlands, but less often of large-scale forests enveloping the landscape of Europe. Perhaps this is inevitable given where we are. As the mists rise in Jean Discours’ photos, you can almost sense the earth breathe, the respiration of the trees made visible. We asked Jean to tell us more about the landscapes of L’Aubrac in south-central France, and his explorations with a camera.
Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, your education and early interests, and what that led you to do as a career?
I was born in the south of France, in the Gard department, close to the Cevennes mountains, and I grew up there. After studying mathematics and music for some time in Montpellier, I started teaching in elementary schools. My mother was a teacher in contemporary dance and this art accompanied me throughout my childhood. Yet it was classical music - I learned to play the transverse flute - which had an influence on my artistic career. My ear for music became more acute and after several trips to Ireland, I took to their way of passing on music and started to play Irish music. Along with my passion for music, and even before, I enjoyed roaming the country looking for minerals or mushrooms, both activities that led me to take an interest in geology and meteorology, scientific fields which are very useful for landscape photography.
It is about 10 years ago, in love with the country places I went to in summer to get some fresh air or to pick wild raspberries or mushrooms, that I had the desire to capture those precious moments, and my interest for photography developed then. I am essentially self-taught; I have acquired my knowledge in books on photography, from discussions with other photographers, during workshops on photography, and in exchanges with my friend Christian Astor who is a painter. Since 2014 photography has become the main activity for me. I live in the Rhône valley where it is often hot and sultry in summer, and as often as I can, up I go to the hills of the Massif Central with my photographic gear on my back.
Back in January, Mark was in between two workshops he as running based in Kentallen. This village is on the coastal road from Ballachulish to Oban and approximately 25 minutes from Glencoe. Tim and Mark met at the Joe Cornish Gallery when Tim had just started using his large format camera and since then Mark has transitioned from using large format to digital photography. In this podcast, Mark talks about how and why he transitioned from large format, the challenges, and why he enjoys printing workshops.
For you — the blind who once could see —
The bell tolls for thee…
~Neil Peart 1952-2020
In 1982, Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist with the Canadian rock band Rush, wrote these words for a song called Losing It (on the album called Signals, 1982). The verse refers to Ernest Hemingway, who finding himself in poor mental and physical health and unable to write a short RSVP to an invitation from the White House, shot himself. A bitter end to such brilliance. The meaning of a life distilled into seconds and then memory.
As a lifelong Rush fan, I can truly say I was devastated when, on the 10th January, it was announced that Neil Peart had died at the age of 67 following a three-and-a-half-year battle with brain cancer. As an introverted and somewhat geeky teenager, the lyrics of this man gave me hope that being different was ok; the self-validation of an individual was valid, and the meek may inherit the Earth! I felt infused with a sense of right and wrong, a strong moral compass and a dedicated work ethic. Neil and his two bandmates shaped my young mind and the subsequent life I have led thus far. I can assure you, I am truly grateful.
For the last 20 years, I have lived that life with a camera in my hand, and the hobby of which I was once a passionate amateur, has become a profession and a lifestyle. But what role does photography play in this life, and why is it so important, not just to me, but to millions of others around the world as well? Have we lost sight of this meaning, and can we get it back?
what role does photography play in this life, and why is it so important, not just to me, but to millions of others around the world as well? Have we lost sight of this meaning, and can we get it back?
Now I’ll admit, as starts to an article on landscape photography go, I would understand it if you decided to go and read something else, but I hope you’ll stick with this, as I have something that I believe is worth hearing. Trust me!
Grace Under Pressure
Much has changed in this last 20 years; digital has become by far the most common medium for photography, both in capture and output. Our lives are online 24/7, bombarded by a million photographs, or should I say images?
For many, landscape photography has become a competitive sport. Why should my life a as landscape photographer be stressful, when really, it’s all about a walk in the woods?
I picked up a camera all these years ago to relieve stress, and now my life seems full of it. Isn’t that odd? This pressure we are under to perform, to be seen performing and to compete is relentless. Social media demands content from us on a daily basis with the lust of a physician’s leeches. For many, landscape photography has become a competitive sport. Why should my life a as landscape photographer be stressful, when really, it’s all about a walk in the woods?
Part of the answer is that we’re an odd species: Social, yet competitive - intelligent, yet irrational - developed, though primal! It would appear that we’re at constant war with ourselves, knowing one thing and acting in another. Advertisers and marketers understand these juxtapositions all too well and exploit our fears, desires and insecurities for their profit. Your typical photography magazine is mostly advertising - propagating gear and location envy. Self-doubt, fear of failure, the constant comparing with our peers and judgement of others whose images are more popular than ours! As Marlene Dietrich famously said - “I want to be alone!”
In this article, I want to look at the symbiotic relationship between Landscape Photography and a meaningful life. One feeds the other, or rather they can! It’s about having grace under pressure, a clear head in the maelstrom, an inner knowledge that we are true to ourselves. What does this look like?
This project began several years ago when I first noticed the notation ‘Mud & Sand’ on an OS map of the Bristol Channel. I couldn’t work out why these beaches should be so muddy and I was curious to find out what they looked like.
To be honest, my first impressions were not very positive. As a stock photographer, I am aware that I often look to idealise the landscape in my work, and most people think of idyllic beaches as having golden sand and bright blue sea. The mudflats and brown sea that typify the beaches of Somerset and Newport, in particular, do not fit this vision.
It was only when I was listening to someone express their strong opinion about how ugly they found the Somerset coast that something changed. We Osmonds can be contrary folk; prone to exploring different angles when a strong opinion is presented to us (my younger son, in particular, is a master at this). I was suddenly determined to explore this subject and prove them wrong.
The reason these mudflats exist is that the Bristol Channel, whose waters are rich in sediment from the several major river systems that flow into it, deposits the mud in the vast inter-tidal zones created by its famously large tidal range.
The reason these mudflats exist is that the Bristol Channel, whose waters are rich in sediment from the several major river systems that flow into it, deposits the mud in the vast inter-tidal zones created by its famously large tidal range. But that is not all. The mudflats are at the centre of a constant battle between the erosive forces of tide and weather, and the stabilizing forces of halophytic plants trying to establish salt marshes. The huge array of patterns created by these opposing forces, in addition to the wet surfaces that reflect whatever drama is playing out in the sky, are what make the landscape here utterly intriguing.
It was perhaps because of the wet, reflective surfaces that I acquired a taste for those vile winter days with showers blowing in from the sea. On such days, the light is constantly changing and in conditions like that, photos just appear instantly out of nowhere and are gone the next second. This is where I find photography as a medium really comes into its own, because it can capture brief moments like that and the satisfaction in doing so, as well as that feeling of having endured tough conditions, really appeals to me. I also found quite early on that the pictures I was getting in those conditions were very monochromatic, so it was a natural decision to continue the project in black and white.
It was perhaps because of the wet, reflective surfaces that I acquired a taste for those vile winter days with showers blowing in from the sea. On such days, the light is constantly changing and in conditions like that, photos just appear instantly out of nowhere and are gone the next second.
The biggest challenge with this project has been simply getting access to the subjects I’ve wanted to photograph. You have to take great care as the signposts on the beaches here all attest to. You cannot simply walk to the sea at low tide otherwise you’ll get stuck. I’ve had to think creatively and use stable ground in whatever form it comes, be that as man-made concrete flood defences or patches of salt marsh, whose root network stabilizes the mud enough to walk on. There has been an awful lot of studying maps, studying tide tables, visiting and revisiting locations in order to get all of the elements aligned for the pictures I wanted. As a result, I have come to know certain key locations such as Sand Bay and the River Parrett Estuary extremely well.
Once I had a collection of images that sat together coherently, I started to think about publishing a book of the project. I’d had a book published a couple of years previously by Frances Lincoln, but that was more a celebration of Somerset as a region. This was a very different body of work focusing on an unusual subject and its aesthetic qualities when photographed in a particular way. Not many publishers really dealt with this sort of photography but I’d been collecting some of the magnificent titles released by Triplekite Publishing, particularly David Baker’s Sea Fever, and I thought I’d approach them.
You get so many rejections as a photographer that it’s always a bit of a surprise when someone says yes. I had to redouble my efforts that winter and get out at every opportunity to make sure I had enough depth of coverage in time for publication. Although Triplekite is sadly no longer publishing, there are still copies of Mud|Sand available online both in the UK and America, as well as signed copies direct from myself (jamesosmond.co.uk/art). Book publication usually signifies the end of a project but I’m never able to lay anything completely to rest and I do continue to revisit the Somerset coast working in both colour and monochrome.
Do you have a project that you are working on that you'd like to write an article for us about? We'd love to hear from you, so please do get in touch.
It was an unexpected surprise when Charlotte invited me to contribute an End Frame… but, like many before me, my initial enthusiasm took a dive when I started to think seriously about it – a favourite image – just one – out of the hundreds of favourites that delight and inspire me – some created by famous photographers, others by undiscovered genius’s who I am fortunate to count as friends – how could I do that?
I was on holiday when I got the call, so had time and space to think about my choice. It didn’t help. But once I got home, inspiration took hold and suddenly I knew what I would present to my fellow readers.
So, here we have an image from Ray K. Metzker, an American photographer who throughout a 60+ year career (born 1931 – died 2014) pushed so many boundaries to create four or five bodies of amazing work – any one of which would have been enough for most people.
Apparently, he was a quiet man. But he had a bold vision. He studied at The Institute for Design in Chicago in the late 1950s and then took off to Europe. The time he spent travelling fixed his creative point of view. He decided that ‘light’ would be his subject and that he would seek complexity over simplicity. If you look at any of his images – exclusively black and white – from then on you will see that singular purpose.
He is primarily known for his urban cityscapes – deep blacks, bright whites, structure and angles, silhouettes and anonymous passers-by. He pioneered selective focus and multiple exposure, and developed a technique of ‘composite’ images where he created a tapestry print from a whole roll of film!
But I learnt all this later. I first came across his photography in a book called simply ‘Landscapes’.
Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted from our subscribers. Each portfolios consisting of four images related in some way.
Submit Your 4x4 Portfolio
Interested in submitting your work? We're on the lookout for new portfolios for the next few issues, so please do get in touch!
Photographing forests and trees belong to the main areas of interest for me. It is an exciting and rewarding challenge in my opinion to explore the possibilities of framing a scene within the square format. There are different compositional principles compared to other formats.
For example, it is often more appealing to place a subject in the centre of a square image than in a rectangular one. Yet a decentered placement may work as well in other cases. But this is only one aspect. There would be a lot to discuss I think.
The agricultural landscape that I do most of my photography in does not lend itself to a minimalist approach. The landscape is dotted with farmsteads, grain silos, wind turbines, and a host of other distractions. Isolating a subject in such a busy environment is not impossible, but it is difficult enough to be frustrating.
When fog sets in, frustrations and background distractions disappear. Driving through an all-too-familiar landscape on a foggy day becomes a trip through undiscovered country. The windmill in a field that – on a bright, sunny day – would border on the trite now is a great photo opportunity. The rolling hills covered with crops and a windbreak become useful graphic elements.
At the same time, fog is concealing distracting details it is revealing a fresh perspective. It encourages a new look at old things. It’s easy to develop lazy seeing when driving past very similar views. A fog-enshrouded landscape helps me “restart” my seeing by providing a different context to the familiar. Looking at my environment in a different light encourages me to be more mindful of the things around me when the fog disappears.
Each year here in New England a marvellous transformation takes place. As days shorten and the nights get colder, the green chlorophyll that lets leaves provide nutrients to the trees all summer gets put away for one last flourish. In some species, the seasonal change induces a flush of sugar production, which is restricted by the cold nights from reaching the trunk of the trees. But in these trees, the pigment anthocyanin allows the trees to access the produced sugar by minimizing oxidation before the leaves fall. The reds of maple, dogwood and oaks are due to the presence and protection of anthocyanin.
But the yellows, oranges and browns of birches, poplars and hickories come from another process. The carotenoid pigments that colour these trees’ leaves are always present in tandem with chlorophyll. The shorter days of fall trigger a reduction of chlorophyll production, causing it to dwindle until only the bright colours of carotenoids remain.
So those of us who love the colours of fall should take a few moments to give anthocyanin and carotenoids their due…
Walking softly and carrying a large tripod, I explore the woods and waters of my native New England and beyond to experience and share the amazement of their subtle beauty.
This mini-set of photos features three different locations: Kauai (Hawaii), Lake Louise and Herbert Lake. They are among my favourite spots in the world.
"Water's Alive" pays tribute to one of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring subjects that I have ever photographed - water.
In my five years as a professional photographer, I have documented water in many ways. But every time I look at it, I see something different. I learn something new. Whether I freeze its movement or let it flow through long exposure, it always speaks to me in a unique way.
"In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans; in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence." - Khalil Gibran
Last autumn Stephen Gledhill, who is one of our subscribers and contributors, suggested we got in touch with Stu Levy. He had just got back from a trip to The Lake District with six photography friends. Most of them have known each other since a large format monochrome landscape photography workshop in Bluff in Utah in 2001. One of the newcomers Stu is well known and highly accomplished, respected and published photographer based in Oregon in the US. We got in touch with Stu to find out more about his photography and his time as an assistant instructor with Ansel Adams.
Tell me about why you love landscape photography? A little background on what your first passions were, what you studied and what job you ended up doing.
Photography and rock music were my twin passions during my teenage years in the mid-1960’s. I was doing documentary photography in high school and college, but also photographed musicians, both for publicity use and in performance.
There was no art in my home, and my only exposure to art was through school trips to the Art Museum, where I was attracted to surrealism – my favourites being Miro, Magritte and Escher.
I was given the book Family f Man as a high school graduation present, and learned about Karsh and Cartier-Bresson while in college, but knew nothing of the West-Coast Landscape tradition in photography.
I started Medical School and had almost no time for photography for the next 6 or 7 years.
In Joe's previous article (Looking for Landscape Photography), he wrote about a definition of landscape photography as a means to probe his own motivation, curiosity and creativity as a photographer. In this article, Joe looks at one of these genres of landscape photography - the geographic landscape.
One of the great virtues of photography is its ability to stimulate our interest in the subject photographed. Admittedly, a good or great photograph may be more likely to achieve that than an average one. But even so, any well-executed photograph that reveals detail and space, form and shape – the content of a scene – in a moderately interesting way, can be described as geographic.
It was gratifying to discover that the Wikipedia definition of geography provides much evidence to support this assertion, beginning with a translation from Greek: γεωγραφία, geographia, literally "earth description”.
It is a month since we launched tickets for the 2020 Meeting of Minds Conference and we have sold more tickets so far than we had in total for our first conference back in 2014! This year is also our 10th birthday, so the conference is a true celebration of how On Landscape has grown, our diversity of contributors and the landscape photography community.
We're delighted to announce more speakers for the conference, with Yan Wang Preston, Daniel Bergmann, Jackie Ranken and Mike Langford adding to the line up.
We are also pleased to announce a few of our exhibitors for the event with Fotospeed, Teamwork Photo and Beyond Words joining us this year.
The early bird ticket offer runs our tomorrow and we will announce more offers throughout the year. There are only 15 dinner tickets left so if you'd like to attend the dinner, please hurry! Click here for ticket information.
Announcing More Speakers
YAN WANG PRESTON
Dr. Yan Wang Preston is a photographic artist interested in the contested states of nature in contemporary societies. She has completed two large-scale projects - Mother River and Forest, both of which won many international awards such as the 1st Prize, Professional Landscape, 2019 Sony World Photography Awards.
Her solo exhibitions are shown at venues including Gallery of Photog-raphy Ireland and the 56th Venice Biennale and Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum. Her monographs Forest and Mother River are both published by Hatje Cantz in 2018. Find out more about Yan and read the article she has written for On Landscape.
DANIEL BERGMANN
Daníel Bergmann is a nature photographer from Iceland. Most of his field effort has focused on documenting and interpreting the landscape of his home country. Daníel’s fascination with wide open spaces, rock and ice have increasingly brought him further north into the Arctic, mainly Greenland and Svalbard, where there are also not as many tourists to avoid as there are in Iceland. Find out more about Daniel.
JACKIE RANKEN
MIKE LANGFORD
Jackie Ranken is an Australian born, landscape, art photographer now living in New Zealand. She has over thirty-five years’ experience within the visual arts and has been an international awards judge since 2002.
She combines her art practice with teaching and is a presenter in workshops and seminars internationally. Her passion is the creation of multi-layered narratives via in camera multiple exposures and intentional movements.
Mike Langford is a New Zealand born, landscape and travel photographer. He has been a professional photographer for over 35 years and an International Awards judge and lecturer for 25 years. Mike’s passion is travel/Landscape photography and travel book publishing, with over 26 books to his name.
They are both Grand Masters of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography (AIPP) and a Grand Masters and Honorary Fellows of the New Zealand Institute of Professional Photography (NZIPP). They are also both Canon Masters and EIZO Ambassadors. Find out more about Jackie & Mike.
Exhibitors
This year at the On Landscape Meeting of Minds Conference we are using the new gallery space at The Rheged for our exhibitors & coffee breaks. This is on the top floor of the building (there is a lift available for disabled access).
This will give us unprecedented space for our exhibitors and delegates to mingle during coffee and lunch breaks.
Inspired by image makers around the world, Fotospeed began life manufacturing quality darkroom chemistry and specialist fine art printmaking processes. www.fotospeed.com.
With 35 years of technical experience and as the world of traditional darkroom made way for the digital revolution, Fotospeed utilised its wealth of expertise and understanding of image making to engineer and develop a comprehensive range of exceptional digital inkjet papers, inks and accessories.
With a respected reputation for quality and service, Fotospeed is now an established distribution company for worldwide market leading brands such as Hahnemuhle Fine Art Papers, Kaiser Photographic equipment, Herma Adhesives and Canson Infinity Papers.
Teamwork Digital is the premier Phase One partner in the UK, and digital medium format photography has been our specialism for over 20 years.
We offer sales, rentals and technical support of Phase One camera systems and Capture One software, as well as running open house events so people can get hands-on with Phase One equipment.
In representing Phase One, we offer solutions and support to professional and enthusiast photographers, cultural heritage institutions and industrial businesses looking for the ultimate image quality.
Arrange a demonstration of medium format system
If you are curious about digital medium format, Teamwork Digital will be on hand throughout the conference to provide personal demonstrations of the Phase One XF and XT camera systems. This is a great opportunity to demystify what can be achieved with a medium format system and to have all your questions answered in practice, and with expert guidance.
If you wish to arrange, please contact Al Simmons on al@teamworkphoto.com or 0207 323 6455.
Beyond Words is a specialist retailer of photographic books. After 12 years trading as a shop in Edinburgh, Beyond Words now operates as a mail online business. We also sell a range of the best photographic remainder titles at about a third of their published price. For this conference, we will have a selection of the latest landscape photography books along with classic and hard-to-find titles.www.beyondwords.co.uk.
Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create… Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Introduction
This is the second article of my series about Expressive Photography. In the first article, I tackled the common evolution of the photographer towards the path of personal expression (click here to read the article). In this article, I would like to ponder: what is expressive photography? What does it take to reach this level in your photography? Which traits or characters tend to define the philosophy and modus operandi of the expressive photographer?
Personal and expressive photography
Photography is a medium that offers limitless possibilities. We can use it for very different reasons, with very different purposes and in order to reach very different audiences.
When it comes to music, writing, or painting, we tend to make a clear distinction between the different ways in which these mediums work. We instantly grasp that a poem has a different purpose, motivation, and target audience than an obituary in the newspaper.
For some reason, however, many people tend to put all forms of photography into the same bag, as if all photographic images are made with the same purpose and motivation. This is, of course, not a good idea. The definition of the word “photography” is “writing with light,” and in fact, that is what we are doing every time we press the shutter. Just like when we are writing, we are using a language, visual this time, which instead of using words, syntax, and grammar, uses visual elements like tone, colour, contrast, shapes, lines, and textures.
I’m not sure if Hamlet would have really ever had this dilemma. He was also unlikely to ever change his ‘point of view’ on Claudius, his uncle/ stepfather. He may, however, have liked to see what the castle at Kronborg (Elsinore) looked like from above, but that was not really possible at the time. Kronborg sits at the water’s edge and towers above everything else around it.
This analogy is a bit of a stretch perhaps, but the point is fair. Until recently, you could not frame a landscape image from altitude unless you had a convenient hill, mountain or building to climb. (helicopters and planes notwithstanding). Then along comes the drone and a sudden burst of creativity is fueled. Competitions, books and social media are now filled with images captured from above while the ‘photographer’ stays rooted to terra firma. It is an exciting development in an art form that has always morphed and ‘improved’. But should we jump in and ‘take off’?
To Drone
A new Perspective
Without a doubt, the main reason to own a drone is to unleash the opportunities that it provides for creativity. Views, scenes, angles, speed etc. They are all fresh and easily accessible without too much effort (or danger).
Without a doubt, the main reason to own a drone is to unleash the opportunities that it provides for creativity. Views, scenes, angles, speed etc. They are all fresh and easily accessible without too much effort (or danger).
Imagine for a moment that you cannot separate the two sea-stacks in your chosen view. You want to present them without the overlap, but there are always limitations as to where you can stand. You try left, right, backwards, forwards, perhaps it is a cliff edge, the sea itself, an ugly building etc.. A little more height, however, and the sea-stacks separate nicely, and perhaps now they do not ‘cut’ the horizon either.
While it becomes more difficult daily to find unique ‘terrestrial’ compositions, the novel opportunities for drone photography are much greater. Think how many abstract views of river deltas you have seen recently, or images of a lighthouse from out to sea. Projects such as ‘The Wall’ (Read Simon Butterworth's article about his project) show their potential, either on their own or combined with more conventional photography. Indeed, the ILPOTY TOP 101 photos for the last few years have had 10-20 images each year taken from an aerial perspective.
Then, of course, there are also those incredible video sequences. Who does not enjoy watching as the videographer sets the scene. Around those mountain tops, up the waterfalls, over the iceberg, backwards through the forest. The timing of the emergence of drone video has been perfect for the relatively recent boom in vlogging.
Expense?
To be sure, drones that are ‘landscape photographer worthy’ are not cheap. But neither are they really that expensive. Leading examples of drones capable of solid 4K video and very reasonable (20+Mp) still images, can cost less than a new telephoto lens, and only slightly more than the latest smartphone. Compare that to buying a new camera system complete with a set of lenses.
Easy to fly
Control is actually relatively simple and easily learned. Like all new skills, mastery is developed over time. But the manufacturers make starting out very straight forward. They throw in automated controls that make certain tasks seem elementary. Image stabilization, collision avoidance, flight levelling, follow me, autopilot and waypoint navigation are just a few of the more common standards. Yet there are also more hands-on skills that can be assimilated and used for a more personalized cinematic experience.
Control is actually relatively simple and easily learned. Like all new skills, mastery is developed over time. But the manufacturers make starting out very straight forward.
Weight
By definition, almost, these incredible technical devices are really light. The units themselves have to be to fly efficiently and maximise battery duration. There is a trade-off for size, stability and payload (what camera they can carry), but typically the drones themselves do not represent a great burden.
Not to Drone
Expense
I have myself seen a favourite lens roll down a rock and plunge into a river in flood, never to be seen again. Yet accidents are infrequent and generally do not result in the loss of a whole camera system. Drones, on the other hand, are a little less forgiving. Repeated damage and/ or complete loss seem to be inherent risks that the photographer must take into consideration, especially when operating over water. There are ways to mitigate risk, but those big sweeping vistas from mountain tops and other dramatic landscapes bring with them a vulnerability that the operator must accept, or keep things to a much lower level.
Weight
Drones are light, but that is not the full story. Batteries do not last that long and their recharge is not a simple matter ‘in the field’. Generally, a stack of pre-charged additional batteries will be required for extended flying. In addition, there is a controller. This typically weighs about the same as the drone itself, and it needs a battery too! Finally, when out and about, the drone is not likely to be a landscape photographer’s only piece of equipment. There will be the main camera for stills, with appropriate lenses, tripod, filters etc, etc. Then a vlogger may also have a separate camera (and tripod) for video capture. Suddenly that is a lot of equipment. For any real distance away from your vehicle, you will need to be making choices of what is essential and what to leave behind.
Nuisance
Perhaps the biggest negative of drones for many people is the nuisance factor. That whirring noise from those high speed blades travels a long way, especially in the calmer conditions that are needed to fly. Understandably, people visit wild places of outstanding beauty to immerse themselves. To see the sights and to be at one with nature. Most ‘pilots’ are very conscientious and will not fly while others are around. But there are always a few who flaunt the rules and ignore the impact on others.
No fly zones
This is more problematic than it may at first seem. On a recent backpacking trip to hike the Timberline Trail on Mt Hood in Oregon, a friend brought his drone. He had done extensive research and checked all official online ‘no-fly’ sites. What he did not know, was that there was a tiny clause in the small print of the local backcountry permit. That’s a lot of extra weight he carried for four days for no reason. Again, there are those who would flaunt the rules, but if you want to play by the book, it can be difficult.
Perhaps the biggest negative of drones for many people is the nuisance factor. That whirring noise from those high speed blades travels a long way, especially in the calmer conditions that are needed to fly.
So, what is the answer?
Alas, poor Yorick...
It is, of course, a very personal decision and I can understand the answer will be different for different folks. No right or wrong. I fear there is also a little bit of NIMBY in this dilemma.
The opportunities are great, but these ‘wishes’ are not critical to my craft. I am on a continual journey of discovery and there are many other opportunities for me as well. While I might consider a drone in
As a landscape photographer and occasional vlogger, I am excited by the opportunities that a drone could provide. I would love to include some epic, cinematic footage from the places I visit on my adventures. I am also often in a situation where I would love a little more height on my tripod. Further, I truly enjoy some of the footage I see on YouTube etc., so I am a current avid consumer as well.
Yet, I have also been in the situation where a drone operation has not only disturbed my ‘peace’, it also has made still photography very difficult. This is perhaps nothing more than the inconvenience that you expect at a popular viewpoint. Try finding a spot at Driftwood Beach, Jekyll Island for sunrise. But did we also really need a drone buzzing along the curve of the beach, 20’ above the heads of a dozen photographers, just as the sun ventured above the horizon?
The point is, I like what I see, but not when I am there.
So for me, I always come back to the ‘nuisance’ factor. I know that I never like to hear a drone going overhead, especially when I’ve gone to great effort to reach an isolated pristine destination. So should I be a part of the problem, even if I don’t think there is anyone else around? I just don’t like the idea that I could upset even one person. The opportunities are great, but these ‘wishes’ are not critical to my craft. I am on a continual journey of discovery and there are many other opportunities for me as well.While I might consider a drone in the future, it is just not right for me at this time.
