It wasn't until just over six years ago that I had not even heard the words 'Digital Single Lens Reflex'.
'Digital Single Lens Reflex, what? what does that even mean?'
The Apple iPhone 4 had just launched in 2010 bringing revolutionary specs to the handset:
Backside-illuminated 5 megapixel rear-facing camera with a 3.85 mm f/2.8 lens with LED Flash.
A true step forward for smartphones. I was very fortunate to own one. The brand new Apple iPhone 4 - white with 16GB of memory. It was mine, my prized possession and I was excited.
An application called Instagram was entirely in its infancy, having just launched the same year on the Apple app store. Word was spreading that it is going to be the next big thing since Facebook.
For me, I truly think this was where my passion for photography began. It was the very fact that I was able to take a photograph, edit it in the app with sliders and then finish it with a personal touch ( that being a film like a border which everyone was doing at that time ) to then upload to this social media application via 3G...It was liberating.
I could express myself via a 5MP digital image ...it was apparent anything was possible with the device I had in my hands.
My best friend of twelve years now - I owe an awful lot to. Ryan Introducing me to The Peak District in Derbyshire. I had known of The Peak District however I never really had the desire to visit only being just over an hour's drive.
One evening over a beer and a burger, he did an excellent job of talking me into walking Kinder Scout. A moorland plateau and national nature reserve in the Dark Peak of the Peak District. The location sounded fanciful - too good to be true.
As both Ryan and I made our way up Grindslow Knoll, through the moorlands both being overwhelmed with every step - memories were captured with each press of the digital shutter button on the screen of our iPhones. They were secured and those photos were ours forever. To show everyone where we had been and what we had discovered.
That was it, landscapes and photography was all I wanted, needed.
Three years later, our knowledge, passion, and desire for hill walking - mountain climbing and the outdoors, in general, had converted us. No longer did we want to spend our weekends in pubs, clubs, and cities - it was the mountains where we wanted to be. Quiet with solitude.
Various mountain paths conquered on Snowdonia and The Lake District, all captured with my smart device. After extensively using the camera on my iPhone for three years - I began to understand it's limitations. I wanted more control - more creativity and to improve my photography. I was ready for the next step.
Fast forward to the present day. Landscape photography and photography, in general, is huge - it's massive. Instagram is the second biggest social media platform after Facebook. We also have Flickr - 500px & Twitter which is also fantastic to share our images online - converse with fellow friends & like-minded people.
And of course, not forgetting YouTube. YouTube is used by 1,300,000,000 people. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute! Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day. YouTube gets over 30 million visitors per day. Each one of us uses Youtube if we want to know something? reminisce? be inspired?
Being inspired is important. It drives us, motivates us - it is what makes us as photographers get up at a ridiculous time in the morning to see the day start and have it all to ourselves whilst everyone is still sleeping.
For some time now I have been watching the likes of Thomas Heaton, Ben Horne, Simon Baxter and more, for education, entertainment, and inspiration.
Whilst they are firm favourites, professionals who go to the best locations with the best gear and sometimes capture images that you can only dream of, it can be a little doubting and unrelatable.
''Oh, I am never going to be able to afford to go to Patagonia?''
Out of the blue whilst browsing on Flickr, I discovered the work of Matt Oliver. I was instantly drawn to his account. I found myself scrolling through his images frantically. One thing I had noticed straight away was that he photographed in The Peak District. I had now fallen in love with The Peak District after numerous visits time after time in all weather conditions with a greater understanding.
If I wanted to see heather in The Peak during the summer, Matt had nailed it. If I wanted mood and drama during Autumn, Matt had nailed it.
It was becoming clear time had been spent with the subject Matt was photographing by really studying the landscape - using his foreground effectively to draw you in immediately.
It was becoming clear time had been spent with the subject Matt was photographing by really studying the landscape - using his foreground effectively to draw you in immediately. Beautiful light splashed against the far distance to make the image come alive. These images were taken, they weren't just a quick snap for a meaningless upload to Instagram for likes, the image had story and heart behind them.
Matt Oliver's work is fantastic but why? Personally, for me, this is the one image I find myself coming back to. One glance and I am instantly transported to Padley Gorge in Autumn. The millstones that have been left behind years and years ago are now 'Reclaimed' by mother nature. The vibrant green moss and what looks to be dead bracken slumped next to an old stone wall barely supported. As a viewer of the image, I have so many questions but I don't want the answers, I'm transfixed by the mystery.
Which brings me to my final thought, my final emotive feeling. I am instantly spired to pack my camera bag to head to The Peak the following day, not because I want to copy this image - not because I want to try to do better than Matt, simply because it is accessible, it's relatable, it's my very own Patagonia.
Location guidebooks are something I have a mixed reaction to. Being directed to the exact location of an image and sometimes being given the tripod holes to work with is something I feel is anathema to the creative aspects of our trade.
However, I can understand that many of these are already common knowledge and so the books merely compile what is already available. This Idaho guide intrigued me, however. The idea is to provide information on off road drives in the area that can be accessed without 4x4 vehicles. There is no real UK equivalent as far as I can tell (these aren't the green lanes of our bucolic countryside for instance) and this sort of off road travel seems a given if you want to explore in the US. I asked the authors, professional photographers and artists Linda Lantzy and Shari Hart for some more information.
Idaho is packed with gems of breathtaking photogenic scenery that can't always be found on a freeway drive, or even scouting the back roads. Unless you know where you're going, you might never get there. The solution, we concluded, was a thoroughly researched, comprehensive guide with detailed directions to little-known areas, complete with colour photographs of what you'll likely find when you go.
With that in mind, and after photographing the wonders of Idaho for more than 10 years, we decided to share our experience in finding these hidden locations in a new guidebook.
"As seasoned back-roads artistic photographers, our experiences have led us to hundreds of photographic gems. Among these are old barns, abandoned antique vehicles, and pioneer cabins, along with many other unforgettable locations," Linda said.
The book is designed for travellers who want more from their treks than museums or tourist traps. Most of the selected routes can be followed without the need for high-clearance vehicles, and none require four-wheel drive vehicles. But they do take you to locations most folks don't know, she said. Expect to find waterfalls, canyons and mountains, farms and ranches and iconic landscapes among the destinations.
Most route directions include the ideal times to start your journey for the best morning light and end with the best sunset locations available. Inevitably, some will be passed during less than ideal light, so Linda recommends marking those locations on your GPS for a return visit.
The authors have driven every route to ensure each trek's accuracy and attractions, from breathtaking scenery and landscapes to barns, antiques, railroad trestles and artefacts that still occupy these unique spaces and speak to Idaho's fascinating history. Journeys can run from 2-6 hours, and some recommend overnight stays to get the full value of the experience.
The authors have driven every route to ensure each trek's accuracy and attractions, from breathtaking scenery and landscapes to barns, antiques, railroad trestles and artefacts that still occupy these unique spaces and speak to Idaho's fascinating history.
The routes guide you from the nearest highway exit or town while providing valuable advice on the best vantage points. They also include cautions and warnings for trickier routes and other suggestions for making your journeys as safe, rewarding and comfortable as possible.
The guide is conveniently separated into regions. To the north, you'll find alpine lakes and hidden waterfalls, and winding rivers draining the snowpack from forested peaks, among other attractions. Central Idaho is a land of contrasts, with towns such as McCall and Stanley anchoring a region featuring some of Idaho's highest mountain peaks. To the south and west, the Owyhee Mountains and desert, towering sand dunes and deep canyon views, and a historic ghost town dominate the journeys, with showy spring wildflower displays to add delightful colour. To the east, the majestic Teton Range and Caribou Mountains reveal their secrets, along with a wildlife refuge and historic Chesterfield. It's a geological smorgasbord.
Shari has served as the Artist in Residence for the Idaho office of the Federal Bureau of Land Management in the Owyhee backcountry. She covers 10 routes in the guide, primarily in the south central region. Her wonderfully evocative images take viewers on "visual hikes" that reflect her deep love of the outdoors.
"I love the high desert, wide-open spaces and our deep canyon ravines with rivers and creeks to explore," she said.
Linda cites her deep love and appreciation for her home state and its geographic diversity for driving her passion.
"With every spare moment I can muster, I head out with my camera gear and my 4-wheel drive into Idaho's least-spoiled places," she said. "It is here, in solitude, where I gather my inspiration to find and photograph new routes and beauty along the way."
A North Idaho native and Coeur d’Alene resident, Linda began her photography career as a young teen and has been immersed in the medium ever since. She attended the Commercial Photography program at Spokane Falls Community College in 1987-1988, but gets her best training in the real world, in the field. Linda explores the roads less travelled, often in solitude, to capture the wild beauty and diversity of her home state. Her images reflect the region’s most breathtaking scenes, captured with striking and dramatic composition.
"I've wanted to be a landscape photographer for about as long as I can remember. As a 12-year-old I would take my little Kodak 110 pocket camera and climb the hills on our eastern Washington farm. From the top, I had a fantastic view of the valley where the mountains converged near the bottom and the mighty Columbia River was barely visible on a good day. My parents weren't too keen on paying for developing countless pictures from a 12 year old, so I learned to be selective about when was a good time to take another photo."
Light, of course, is the most important element in a photograph, and "nothing is as exciting as being in a great location and having amazing lighting conditions. I hope that this is translated to the viewer through my landscape photographs."
Family time pushed photography to the back burner for the next 15 years while she raised two boys.
Looking back at this time in my life I realise how I continued to learn, by always studying light and practising compositions in my mind even without a camera in hand.
"Looking back at this time in my life I realise how I continued to learn, by always studying light and practising compositions in my mind even without a camera in hand," she said. "When the time finally came to that I could re-devote my time to photography, I was more than ready. The next step was adapting my knowledge to the digital world. I spent three years making that transition and building a portfolio before testing responses to my work in different venues. Today I have many art clients that include medical facilities and corporate offices. I conduct a limited number of destination photo workshops in Idaho and continue to produce my yearly Idaho Scenic Calendar."
Like most photographers, she said, "I've always wanted to produce a book of my work, one that appeals to a large audience. The idea just evolved from there to become a photographers guide to help others see what I have seen and share the locations of photographic interest in our great state. As I drive its back roads in solitude, the new routes and photographic finds I make inspire me."
Linda said this book is the culmination of many years of work in Idaho.
"I plan to travel farther and let creativity dictate what and how I photograph," she said. "I do have a new project in mind, but plan on taking a breather before embarking on that journey."
Written and photographed by Linda and fellow Idaho photographer Shari Hart, "Discovering Idaho's Scenic Drives and Backroad Treasures" will take travellers along 48 lesser-known routes into Idaho's most scenic and iconic locations. The book is packed with detailed, turn-by-turn directions, key features along the way, and what to expect when you arrive at each location.
"It's written and designed with photographers in mind, but anyone wanting to see Idaho beyond the highway will find this guide invaluable," Linda said.
The book is 11x8.5 inch, softcover, 48 driving routes, 288 full colour pages, includes non-expiring coupons, QR codes to online maps, detailed driving directions, photo tips, and more!
Over seven years Tina has photographed the Louisiana wetlands and the glacial landscapes of the Arctic and the Antarctic. The project Lamentations is a series of diptychs that function as stories about climate change, ecological balance, and the connectedness of things across time and space. We talk to Tina to find out about the project and how it all started.
What sparked your passion for photography?
My father was an avid amateur photographer, and my grandfather made early 35mm films of his travels (unfortunately on nitrate-based stock, so they self-destructed). During our family outings, my father always had a Leica with him, and later a Minox. When I was twelve, someone offered to teach me how to use a darkroom. I jumped at the chance, in no small part because the offer came in the middle of the hot New Orleans summer.
Tell me about the photographers or artists that inspire you most. What books stimulated your interest in photography and who drove you forward, directly or indirectly, as you developed?
My parents subscribed to National Geographic, but it was the black and white images in Life magazine that captured my imagination. I would devour Life as soon as it came through the mail slot, especially savouring the work of Margaret Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith.
While I was at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, I became enamoured with Western photographers: Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and, to a lesser extent, Ansel Adams.
In my early twenties, Irving Penn’s sumptuous work—still lifes, portraits, platinum prints, and his voluptuous nudes—called to me. In about 1977 Henry Geldzahler introduced us at lunch in the curator’s dining room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an elegant room to the left of the entrance, where the coat check is today. I had been making colour Xerox prints of my work and showed them to him. Penn seemed a bit horrified at the idea that the color Xeroxes of the time, which were far different from the colour copies we have today, might be around forever.
When Penn offered me a job as an assistant, I instantly accepted. But the universe conspired to complicate my decision. Shortly after the meeting, the New Orleans Museum of Art offered me the curatorship of the photography collection. Strangely enough, I don’t remember my process in deciding to go back home, but I did.
Your background is in interior and architecture photography. How and why did you engage with landscape photography and what inspired that move?
After I graduated from Art Center, I felt portraiture was the most challenging area for me, so I embarked on photographing just about everyone I met: David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Diana Vreeland, Paloma Picasso, and many more. Then at some point, I realised the interiors surrounding the people also made a type of portrait. I began to make portraits without the people, hence the beginning of my interiors.
I was working primarily in black and white. Then, in the 1980s, I began to do commercial magazine work, and the editors specified that I use transparency film. My first assignment came out of a cold call to Connoisseur, the jewel in the crown of Hearst publishing. I decided this was where I wanted to work; I made an appointment, and they hired me. My first assignment turned out to be a cover and 13 images of a chateau in France.
What set me apart in those days was my use of what looked like natural lighting. I was striving to make the interiors look like they did when you were in the room. The overall style then was to over-light, balancing the exposure inside with the view outside the windows. By contrast, I would use a very small Dyna Lite strobe box with three heads to ensure that I filled the shadows a bit. When I shoot interiors today, I still use this same strobe.
Who has helped you in realising your photographic ambitions over the past few years?
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press published the Artist Spaces book as well as Lamentations. The Ogden Museum of Southern Art and Curator Bradley Sumrall, as well as the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum and Director LouAnne Greenwald, exhibited Artist Spaces.
Susan Taylor, Director, and Russell Lord, Curator of Photography, at the New Orleans Museum of Art have nurtured the Lamentations project from its beginning, deciding a couple of years into the project to exhibit it and co-publish the book.
Your book "Artist Spaces New Orleans" gives a comprehensive portrait of the city's artists and their relationship to space. How did this series make you think about your photography and how interconnected that is with other aspects of your life?
I began shooting artists and their interiors in the 1970s. It was mostly portraits of the artists, but I was very aware of the interiors as well. In October of 1988, my photographs of Man Ray’s studio on Rue Ferou in Paris ran in Art and Antiques magazine: six images plus the cover. In August of 1988, in Connoisseur magazine, I photographed the very same interiors that J.M.W. Turner had painted in watercolours. This amazing assignment changed the way I saw my own spaces.
I photographed many other artists’ spaces before the book, but they were on film. It was easier to layout a book with digital images, so I used my first pro-level DSLR, starting in 2005 before Hurricane Katrina, and worked until 2014 on images for the book.
I was Curator of Photography at NOMA from 1977-1982. It was a heady time to be collecting photographs. The National Endowment for the Arts made a number of large grants that helped the museum purchase contemporary photographers’ work.
You were the Senior Curator of Photography at the New Orleans Museum of Art. What did this role entail?
I was Curator of Photography at NOMA from 1977-1982. It was a heady time to be collecting photographs. The National Endowment for the Arts made a number of large grants that helped the museum purchase contemporary photographers’ work.
I mounted numerous exhibitions including Diverse Images, an overview of the collection of the museum as it stood in 1978.
I was responsible for producing the following books:
Leslie Gill: A Classical Approach to Photography. New Orleans, La: New Orleans Museum of Art. 1984.
The Photographs of Mother St. Croix. New Orleans, La: New Orleans Museum of Art. 1982.
Diverse Images: Photographs from the New Orleans Museum of Art. Garden City, NY: Amphoto. 1979.
Also, I was responsible for numerous contributions to Arts Quarterly, New Orleans, La.
The photography collection in the NOMA is extensive, tell us more about the collection and a bit about the role of New Orleans in the history of photography.
The first documented photographs of New Orleans are daguerreotypes by Jules Leon made in 1840, only one year after Daguerre went public with the process in 1839.
My primary source for the following information is Russell Lord’s excellent 2018 book on the photography collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art, published by Aperture: Looking Again.
In April of 1918, the museum exhibited An Exhibition of Pictorial Photography by American Artists. The museum began its own collection of photography in 1973.
In 1932 there was an exhibition of Margaret Bourke-White’s work, and in 1936 and 1949, Clarence John Laughlin, the American Surrealist photographer, exhibited at the museum.
There were numerous exhibitions of photography in the 1950s and 60s. In 1973, John Bullard became the Director of the museum and began a collecting programme and by 1974 had a permanent Curator of Photography, making The New Orleans Museum of Art perhaps the first southeastern regional museum to have a permanent collection of photography. I was the second Curator of Photography.
The collection now numbers over twelve thousand images.
Over the past seven years, you have photographed the Louisiana wetlands, Arctic and Antarctic glaciers in your project "Lamentations" Where did it all start?
When I was about four, I went on a summer vacation with my parents to the mountains. The air was warm, however, pockets of snow remained in the shadows. I was terrified: this cold, white stuff made no sense. Perhaps this started my fascination.
When I was about four, I went on a summer vacation with my parents to the mountains. The air was warm, however, pockets of snow remained in the shadows. I was terrified: this cold, white stuff made no sense. Perhaps this started my fascination.
After working on Artist Spaces I was looking for another project. This series started with a trip to Antarctica in 2011 with about 80 other photographers. The undertaking was a huge commitment, but it opened the floodgates. I was utterly smitten with Antarctica and ice. I went on to visit Iceland, Greenland, Spitsbergen and again Antarctica on two more occasions.
I made the first wetland photographs on January 1, 2014, after a wonderful New Year’s Eve party at a duck camp near Morgan City, Louisiana. That day was magical, misty and mysterious. From that day I knew that the Louisiana wetlands were an under-appreciated subject and I wanted to do more work there.
In the project, you pair images from each place in a series of diptychs that function as stories about climate change, ecological balance, and the connectedness of things across time and space. How did you go about working out the pairings?
As I scoured the photographs I’d made of the wetlands and the ice fields, the pairs began to make themselves known. I had made hundreds of 4” x 6” commercial “drugstore” type prints, and I started matching pairs. Some that are in the book and exhibition are some of the first pairs and others were made as recently as a few months ago.
I taped the first groupings into a sketchbook, then I put them on my magnetic wall. For a year, I worked on them methodically.
How did you plan the images that you wanted to capture—both in terms of locations and messages that you wanted the stories to tell?
When I started shooting on location either in ice or wetlands, I was looking for a specific type of image. This iceberg is one of my favourites. I went looking for a pair and found it in.
The two locations tell the story without much interpretation. Louisiana‘s three million acres of wetlands are disappearing at the rate of about 75 square kilometres annually. Sea level rise is one of many factors. The melting of the glaciers contributes to sea-level rise.
The two locations tell the story without much interpretation. Louisiana‘s three million acres of wetlands are disappearing at the rate of about 75 square kilometres annually. Sea level rise is one of many factors. The melting of the glaciers contributes to sea-level rise.
Lamentations makes plain the crucial, threatening, and global dialogue between water in two physical states. How did this theme evolve as the key story of the project?
I am a native of Louisiana. When I was young, I went fishing with my family. We stayed on a boat in the marsh between forays into open water. My deep appreciation for the abundance, fecundity, and beauty of “my” wetlands started back then. As I became more enamoured with the places that produce ice, I realized the very close connection between the two landscapes.
For several years I sat on a national committee for conservation. As a member, I wrote two reports a year – for part of my time I reported on toxins and air quality. In researching the topic and listening to other reports, I became more and more aware of the changes that are taking place. I continue to write and present on the environment.
You have spent the past seven years on the project. Tell us more about how you managed the time on the project? What took the longest? What challenges were there?
When I photograph, I can never gauge the amount of time I have been working: Time seems to stand still.
The most significant investment was committing the financial resources to travel. Travelling for work was integral to my commercial photography in the 1980s. Because I was a location photographer, my clients were footing the bill. It was a shock to write that first check for my initial trip to Antarctica.
Perhaps my biggest challenge was learning to use my digital gear. There continues to be a learning curve, and I continue to swear I will go back to my trusty Hasselblad or 4 x 5 view camera. I am not ruling it out.
How did the project evolve? Did you have to refine the vision of what you wanted to achieve?
The pairs needed a lot of refining and repairing. Some images have up to three possible partners. At one point I wanted to maximize the number of pairs so I “speed paired” as many images as quickly as possible in about 24 hours. Most of those pairs didn’t work out. Several times I woke up and another pair had come to me in the middle of the night. The lasting work began to take shape after methodical processing. Eventually ah ha moments revealed an indelible communication between certain pairs.
What's your personal interest in this subject?
I was born in New Orleans and have lived here most of my life. When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, it became obvious that the storm surge was caused by the loss of wetlands and barrier islands. If we hadn’t lost 25 miles of our coast, south of New Orleans, the storm surge would have been 10 feet lower: every 2.5 miles of wetlands mitigate 1 foot of storm surge.
Your project Lamentations is exhibiting at New Orleans Museum of Art. Tell us more about the exhibition. How did it come about?
Originally the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press was going to publish the book. As we were readying for publication, Susan Taylor, Director of NOMA, and Russell Lord, Curator of Photography, offered to partner with UL Press, and mount an exhibition of the images.
Could you tell us a little about the cameras and lenses you typically take on a trip and how they affect your photography?
Getting used to the enormous kit usually carried by digital folks is difficult. That first trip to Antarctica I had a 24-70mm and a 100-400mm lens; that was it. I now generally have the 24-70mm and a longer lens and, lately, a wider lens. Changing lenses is a real problem due to dust on the sensor (yes, Antarctica has a lot of dust) so it is best to have two bodies. I have started renting the second body and quite often a long lens. That is the smart way for me, since I rarely use very long lenses, and the gear seems to change so quickly. That first trip to Antarctica was the first time I had shot serious images without a tripod.
How do you create the 'look' of your images (i.e. film, post processing, etc.)?
Having shot Fuji 400 ISO Provia for so long, I try to make my images look like the images I saw printed from transparencies; less sharpening, less contrast and less saturation than the typical digital image. I did a book on colour in 1992 (Color: Natural Palettes for Painted Rooms. New York, NY: Clarkson Potter) and after testing many transparency films, this one rendered the most accurate colour to my eyes.
Tell us more about the printing and framing of the images for the exhibition. E.g. paper, size, etc
There are 52 images printed in pairs on Moab Entrada Rag Natural paper – 26 prints of pairs, each pair printed on the same piece of paper. The prints are sprayed and mounted on Dibond and then framed without glass or plastic.
I want them to think about why the images are in pairs, and finally, to realize that the frozen water in one frame may soon end up inundating the wetlands in our backyard.
There are three groups of sizes: Large (31.375 x 81.375”), Medium (19.775 x 51.075”), and Small (12.175 x either 26.775 or 31.275”), plus one extra large image (21.875 x 89.375”) and one single image (27.275 x 36.075). There are 7 small images, 15 medium images and 4 large images along with one single image in the exhibition.
In the introduction Susan Taylor, Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of NOMA says “Living in South Louisiana, we are all familiar with the reality of a rising sea level and the impact that it has begun to have on our lives. Lamentations is not NOMA’s first project to address how our relationship to water here in the Gulf region links us to a global concern, but it is the first to define through images our connection to faraway glacial regions." Through photography, are you hoping that the urgency of climate change will influence people's actions? What messages do you want people to take away from the exhibition and book?
I want the images to seduce the viewer: first, I want them to see the staggering beauty of what surrounds us, to fall in love with our Earth, to view her fragility and seeming timelessness. Second, I want them to think about why the images are in pairs, and finally, to realize that the frozen water in one frame may soon end up inundating the wetlands in our backyard.
Tell me about your favourite or most significant two or three diptychs from the book.
The first pair I used for my cover mock-ups, until the very end when we chose another image, which I love. The left is a tabular iceberg in the Weddell Sea, famous for these huge bergs. The image on the right was taken on the first day of my formal shooting of the wetlands.
Ice seemingly seeking its pair in the water field. The iceberg on the left is one of my favourites, perhaps due to its odd sense of movement. I have printed it in many ways: Platinum/palladium, salt, B&W and colour.
If one of our readers were thinking about embarking upon a large project similar to yours, what insights and learnings would you give them?
As cliché as it is to say, it is mandatory to follow your passion. The passion is what makes it work.
I don’t know when it started for me, but I lose myself in the shoot. I once had an editor that said to me that I was the only photographer he had worked with that didn’t drive him to take Prozac.
I am grateful for an outside eye to edit. I have always known this, and I could not have done the series all by myself. I am especially thankful to Russell Lord at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
What is next for you? Where do you see your photography going in terms of subject and style?
For the last five years, I have been working on very large platinum/palladium prints with a master printer (due to the size). The plan is to have ten different images of icebergs.
For the last five years, I have been working on very large platinum/palladium prints with a master printer (due to the size). The plan is to have ten different images of icebergs.
The beautiful thing about icebergs as landscape subjects is that no matter how iconic they are, they change on a relatively constant basis. You can go to a museum or gallery or online and see an image of the “Yosemite Half Dome” and go photograph it for yourself. But you can’t do that with an image of glacial ice, it just won't be the same. I love that.
I am a “straight photographer”: what is there is there; what is not is not. Photographing the wetlands has its challenges — for instance, lack of an object like mountains in the far distance. Therefore, clouds and an interesting sky are mandatory. We have a lot of pure blue skies here in Louisiana that will rule out shooting on those days.
Generally shooting from equinox to equinox in the summer is not possible because of the sky, the heat, and the light. Being at 30 degrees north latitude, we are at the same latitude as the pyramids in Egypt. In the middle of the summer, there are no shadows; the sunlight comes straight down, and the shadows disappear – Fall and Winter are the only times to shoot. Then we go out at dawn and are generally back by 10 am.
I plan on continuing to make smaller images that will be palladium and gum prints. I want to change the tone of the prints subtly – the problem with printing icebergs with palladium is warm tonality; I am trying to shift that very slightly to cool.
I don’t feel I have been successful with printing the wetlands in platinum/palladium. Perhaps salt or another medium would be more appropriate.
I have always liked to tackle areas of photography that are a challenge to me. Some shots of birds were in the original pairs in Lamentations. They didn’t make the cut because they just weren’t as good as I wanted them to be, which prompts me to say that I might do some work with birds.
My friend and boat owner John Williams and I plan on continuing our exploration of Louisiana’s wetlands. Also, I am not finished photographing ice. Next summer I will be back in Greenland.
To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. ~ Elbert Hubbard
We live in an era of easily won praise. Post a photo to any of the online forums and you are guaranteed that some people will like it – your partner and your mother at the very least. Bingo! Our brains get a little hit of dopamine and our reward pathways are stimulated. Yay, we feel good! Well, so what? It’s natural to assume that this means your photograph is ‘good’. After all, likes are equivalent to a score. Right? It’s an easy leap to further assume that posting images that score better than the first will mean that you’re on the ‘right path’. You can discount those that garner fewer likes – even if it was only because your mum’s computer died.
Sadly none of that is true. More likes doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a better photographer. The image above is the most liked photo on Instagram. What this proves to me is that the ability to build social networks is more important than the artistic worth of an image. More likes might also mean that you’re good at making images with widespread appeal. Popularity doesn’t automatically equate to artistic ability. It may do, but it’s much more likely that it doesn’t. Indeed many in the art world consider the opposite to be true. One of my college lecturers told me that if thirty percent of my images receive popular acclaim I would be doing really badly. A five percent approval rating would be a much better sign of success. He was making the point that we shouldn’t be striving to be liked but rather doing our utmost to be the best photographer we can be.
The question is, how? Measured against what? The answers may not be popular…
Some consider this the ‘snowflake’ generation. Most people in the self-styled First World have grown up in an age without real hardship. Wars are distant affairs, famines even more so (in the West we are many times more likely to die of obesity than starvation). Hard manual work is rare, exercise a choice. Anything we want is just a few key presses away. Political correctness guards against our fragile self-worth being dented. (Don’t get me wrong, some things should NEVER be said.) Consequently, we are thought to be less resilient, more prone to taking offence than previous generations and less able to take criticism.
Fear our work is not appreciated leads to us being risk averse. A lack of “Likes” is seen as an implied criticism, although often with little justification. Yet we can only truly be creative if we take chances with our work.
Fear is the mortal enemy of originality. Fear our work is not appreciated leads to us being risk averse. A lack of “Likes” is seen as an implied criticism, although often with little justification. Yet we can only truly be creative if we take chances with our work. These phrases may be clichés but creativity is “thinking outside the box”, “pushing the envelope”, and “risking all”! There are no easy options for innovation; no failsafe recipes exist for making interesting and moving art. Any recipe is implicitly unimaginative. At least some of the time we should all opt to explore regions unknown to us, employing techniques untested by us.
There’s another fear that’s equally damaging: the fear of explicit criticism. The fear of critical comments about what we have created is also normative. This fear is closely allied to the fear of not being liked but subtly different. They are like opposite sides of a coin with two tails; whichever way up it lands you lose.
Canary Wharf – a mini metropolis, a civic transformation, an urban district, a home… however, we describe this unique east London enclave it is undeniably a feat in construction. Having celebrated its 30th birthday only last year the transformation from derelict wasteland to skyscraper city is incredible.
Over the last 6 years, I have studied the ever changing architectural landscape of Canary Wharf. I have not however sought to visually re-represent the buildings that confront us on a daily basis. Instead, I have looked to Canary Wharf’s other identifiable feature, and its raison d’etre; the mass of water that surrounds it.
Abstracted:Architecture is a study of the buildings in and around Canary Wharf as they relate to the bodies of water that surround them. Initially starting as pure reflections, already abstract in themselves, I have sought to extend the abstraction to create something the eye can’t immediately recognise. Using in camera multiple exposures and blending modes, my resultant images are intended to be peaceful and meditative – a stark contrast to the chaos inherent to the buildings from which they are derived.
The images themselves are produced purely from within the camera. Their abstraction a result of the prevailing weather, patience, skill and an understanding of subject matter for a successful image. My intense levels of vigilance enable me to notice things that would normally get missed. The whole process is a form of meditation and reflection, I often photograph the same area of water for 3 or 4 hours and producing over 1000 multiple exposed images just to get one “perfect” image, without the use of photoshop. Post production is limited purely to contrast and levels adjustments with the intention of presenting the viewer with an honest representation of what the camera saw.
Abstracted:Architecture will coincide with Anise Gallery’s participation in Open House London 2019. I will be giving two free tours of the exhibition as part of Open House, the details and times are below.
Artist talks as part of Open House London
Saturday 21 September: Artist Tour 3pm
Exhibition Open 10am – 5pm
Sunday 22 September: Artist Tour 12pm
Exhibition Open 10am – 1pm
Anise Gallery is located on historic Shad Thames near London Bridge station just past the former Design Museum building and opposite Conran’s head office. It is situated near to Bermondsey Street, the home of the Fashion and Textiles Museum and White Cube and within 5 minute walk of the fantastic Maltby Street Market.
Nearest Transport
London Bridge (10 mins) for Underground and National Rail
Where we start in photography is rarely where we end up. Education and career choices don’t always favour or follow our interests; the important thing is to maintain these until life and time combine to allow us to pursue them more single-mindedly. For this issue we’re returning to Colorado which is home to Dan Baumbach, to find out more about his photographic lives and loves, and how he is finding life after work as a full-time artist.
Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, your early interests and studies, and what that led you to do as a career? How did your father being an artist affect what you did, and didn’t, want to do?
I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, USA. My father was an artist and though he brought in some money from art sales and teaching, my mom was the main breadwinner of the family. I think that affected me a lot in that I initially went into commercial photography and then became a computer programmer and earned a good living for my working life.
Art was extremely important in our household. My parents would go to Manhattan most weekends to visit art galleries. For the summer we often vacationed with other artists in places like Woodstock and Provincetown. I was exposed to a lot of painting and painters, but I never saw myself as becoming a painter. Cameras and taking photographs always appealed to me, beginning when I was about 8 and my mom gave me her Kodak Brownie box camera. When my older brother took a photography course in high school, I too became more involved and started playing with candid photographs of people on the street.
I knew very little about the history and art of photography but I would use my 127 film SLR to shoot candids. One day when I was 15 I met this boy with two Nikon Fs on his shoulders doing the same. I was just playing, but Stephen was very serious. Steven turned out to be 16 years old Stephen Shore. He became a mentor and friend to me for a number of years, encouraging me to get better equipment, and opened up the world of street and art photography for me.
I loved the art of photography, but from my father and his friends, I wanted nothing to do with being an artist so when the opportunity to assist one of the top advertising photographers in NYC came up, I grabbed it.
This early love led initially to a career in commercial photography. What prompted you to move away from that, and then to again pick up a camera after a prolonged period away from photography?
I realised that success in my pursuits was not going to bring me happiness. Happiness or really contentment came from within and I was sorely lacking in that kind of happiness..
For a few years, I made a good living freelancing as an assistant to different commercial photographers. It was a lot of fun and it also gave me time to work on a portfolio. I was attracted to fashion photography because it seemed the most creative area of commercial photography. Even though I thought I was going to be a businessman, I was still more interested in doing art. I just didn’t want to be a suffering, broke, artist.
Today, a chilly autumn afternoon, I am taking one of my favourite walks. I’d like to say it is a regular walk but I take it perhaps only two or three times a year. Despite this, the focus of the walk is often in my thoughts and always in view as I draw closer to the village in which I have made my home in rural Aberdeenshire in the North East of Scotland. That focus is Barra Hill, an iron-age hill-fort that defines the landscape surrounding the village where I live, rising up a few hundred feet above the old cottages, narrow backstreets and new estates that make up the community’s housing. Even the name of the village – Oldmeldrum - is drawn from the prominent flattened dome of the hill.
The presence of the fort and the association with Robert the Bruce – first king of an Independent Medieval Scotland – lead some place-name interpretations for Oldmeldrum to mean old royal hill.
Meldrum is likely a derivative of an old Gaelic conflation of meall-droma, or the Celtic Mealldruim, both of which mean hill of the ridge. The original settlement was located on the hill from around 500 BC up to 400 AD. The presence of the fort and the association with Robert the Bruce – first king of an Independent Medieval Scotland – lead some place-name interpretations for Oldmeldrum to mean old royal hill. And regal it is, rising in a dignified sort of way above the village and clearly flattened and ridged at its crown: remnants of the ditch and earthen wall fortifications encircling the crest of the hill.
Once I leave the modern private housing estate in which I live, with the signature cul-de-sacs, driveways, neat frontages and expensive cars of suburbia, the view begins to open out and the full expanse of the hill lies before me. From here the flattened top is very obvious, and the old network of ringed ditches and walls surrounding it. On its western flank, a ring of trees sprout from a tumulus marking the burial ground of the long decomposed, prehistoric dead.
Before crossing the busy road leading to the centre of the village where I can pick up a farm track heading toward the hill, I pass a large boulder perched on a grass verge at the roundabout linking the B9170 from Inverurie and the road giving access to a small industrial estate. This is ‘Bruce’s Seat’: reputedly the very boulder Robert the Bruce sat upon to survey the progress of the Battle of Barra, and moved from its original position on the hill.
The Battle of Barra, also known as the Battle of Inverurie due to its closeness to the larger market town a few miles to the southwest, was fought on 23rd May 1308. Traditionally associated with the wider Wars of Scottish Independence, it was more accurately part of a bitter civil war fought for the Scottish Crown. It was a victory for Robert the Bruce over his enemy, the third Earl of Buchan, John Comyn, but amounted to an ignoble burning of the homes and farms of the district by Bruce’s men in the infamous Harrying of Buchan. And here lies his seat, from which he may have watched the proceedings of the battle that led to this slaughter, and to which we now attach the stories of bloody history. Here, it says. In this place, remember.
Leaving Bruce’s seat behind, I head for the farm-track which gently climbs away from the road and up toward the woods at the base of the hill. The air is cold, and my breath billows out ahead of me before being swept back and away across the fields, dispersing quickly to invisibility. Before too long I reach the end of the farm track and join a minor road heading roughly southeast to connect with another single track road leading to Bourtie, circling the woodland at the base of the hill. Another tree-ringed tumulus sits aside from the woods, and just visible, crowning the rise of a distant hill beyond a farm, are the heads of low stones arranged in a deliberate fashion.
This is Sheldon stone circle. Only six stones in the circle itself remain upright, but its total diameter of over thirty metres and its prominence on the hill suggests the location was an important place from the late Neolithic to the early Bronze Age. Originally it is thought that up to fourteen stones may have been in situ, and speculation exists about the possibility of there once being a Recumbent stone as seen in other circles close by.
The design is thought to be associated with beliefs and rituals centred on the moon since their alignments coincide with the arc of the southern moon. There are over two hundred such stones currently known in these two enigmatically linked regions, and the absence of one at Sheldon makes it relatively unique in the area.
Recumbent stones, that is, large monoliths placed lying on their sides within a ring of upright stones, are found only in Aberdeenshire and in Cork and Kerry in southwest Ireland. Why this unique feature should exist only in these two seemingly unconnected regions is still a mystery: whether there was a sharing of ideas between the peoples of these two areas in the Neolithic, or the parallel usage of Recumbent stones only a coincidence. The design is thought to be associated with beliefs and rituals centred on the moon since their alignments coincide with the arc of the southern moon. There are over two hundred such stones currently known in these two enigmatically linked regions, and the absence of one at Sheldon makes it relatively unique in the area. Two of the outlying Sheldon stones are known to align tantalizingly with the sunrise on the Celtic festivals of Beltane and Imbolc.
Beltane is the anglicised name for the Gaelic May Day festival, known in Irish Gaelic as Lá Bealtaine and in Scottish Gaelic as Là Bealltainn, occurring about mid way between the spring equinox and summer solstice. The May Day festival features in some of the earliest medieval Irish Literature and Mythology and marked the beginning of the pastoral season when livestock would be driven out to summer pastures. A great bonfire would be lit, the smoke and ash of which was thought to have special protective powers. The fires in the hearths of all the homes would be doused and relit with flame from the Beltane fire, and it is tempting to imagine the early people of Sheldon following similar rituals at the turn of the season, marked by the rising sun over one of these two outlying stones beyond the circle.
Imbolc marks the beginning of spring, midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox at the beginning of February. It was a festival widely observed throughout Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man. Like Beltane, Imbolc is mentioned in the earliest Irish Literature and has ancient roots in the pagan worship of the fertility goddess Brigid, later Christianised by being morphed into the celebration of Saint Brigid. At Imbolc, it was said that Brigid would visit each home. Folk would make up a bed for her, leaving out food and drink. A Brídeóg, a figurine representing Brigid, would be paraded from house to house to protect homes and livestock. Feasts were laid on and holy wells visited, themselves originating in the pagan worship of natural springs.
The road now steeply climbs in a southwesterly direction, skirting managed forestry land to the west and hilly open fields to the east. On reaching Bourtie, rather than turning off to head for the hill itself I continue on to the little kirk set back from the road. Bourtie is a tiny hamlet tucked away amongst trees and the folds of the fields. The humble kirk there claims over eight hundred years of Christian worship but the current building dates from 1806. Many of the stones extant in the small graveyard surrounding the church trace local families from the present day back to the 17th century. However, I have come to try to get a glimpse of a stone with older markings still. Built into the coursework of the church itself is a faded Pictish symbol stone, set high in the right hand corner of the south wall.
These enigmatic stones, incised and carved with symbols and other, more complex designs, are all that visibly remains of Pictish culture. The stones are found generally north of the Firth-Clyde line, east of the country to the Moray coast and into modern day Inverness-shire and Caithness. They reveal a transitional period in history between a now lost pagan culture and early Christianity, with earlier designs of unknown meaning becoming incorporated with Christian symbology in later examples.
I find the stone in the wall, but can barely make out the incised markings, which apparently consist of a crescent and ‘V-rod’ shape, along with a double disc symbol and the so-called commonly found ‘Z-rod’. There are also the remains of a comb and mirror outline. What these symbols mean is anyone’s guess, though studies carried out on common symbols by mathematicians at the University of East Anglia may suggest a form of writing which yet remains undecipherable. After squinting unsuccessfully up at the stone for some minutes, I leave the churchyard and Bourtie’s kirk to head for the hill.
The hill is steeped in mythology and lore, said to be the intersection of the country’s ley lines, and once held a colony of crofters on its lower flanks until the late 1800s. Tap o’ Noth, or ‘Hill of the North’, is another hill-fort with evidence of occupation from around 2000 BC to around 800 BC.
The summit is visible ahead, its dome rounding away from me toward the peaks of Bennachie and Tap o’ Noth to the west and northwest. Bennachie is the most famous hill of the area, and its most prominent peak amongst the three that make up distinct summits along the high ridge of the hill, Mither Tap, is the site of a once powerful Pictish hill-fort. The hill is steeped in mythology and lore, said to be the intersection of the country’s ley lines, and once held a colony of crofters on its lower flanks until the late 1800s. Tap o’ Noth, or ‘Hill of the North’, is another hill-fort with evidence of occupation from around 2000 BC to around 800 BC. It is a scheduled ancient monument, and with an elevation of 563 m is the second highest hill-fort in Scotland: the highest being found in total ruin at the summit of Ben Griam Beg in Sutherland. The stone foundations of more than one hundred houses have been found within its expansive vitrified walls, occurring through the after-effects of intense heat. This is a phenomenon found at many hill-fort sites; once believed to be the result of burning of the timber and stone wall structure in an attack, it is now thought that it was a technique used to strengthen the ramparts, fusing the rocks together in deliberate heating.
Bennachie
After passing through a short section of young woodland along the Meldrum-Bourtie community footpath, I climb the last rise across the open flank of the hill towards the summit. As I approach, the eastern entrance to the hill-fort through the earthen banks and ditches becomes visible, clearly defined in the ridges around the hill. I have an uncanny feeling of trespass as I move from the open hillside into what was once the fort, as though the ghosts of Pictish warriors still guard the ramparts, and there’s an eeriness to the emptiness of this old enclosure.
The slope of the hill falls away steeply on its western side down to the old battle site of Bruce and Comyn, now farmers’ fields, furrowed and ploughed. Oldmeldrum is also laid out at my feet: its old village centre, the new houses at its outskirts, and the small industrial estate slowly growing at its southern borders. Silent cars make their way around the new by-pass and I watch a passenger-jet traverse the sky in a wide circuit for the airport at Dyce as if in slow motion.
I think about the people that lived out their lives on the slopes of Bennachie, the Neolithic farmers at Sheldon and Bourtie gazing at the heavens, marking the seasons and their dead, the Picts, the medieval soldiers and householders who lost their lives here: the almost unimaginable thread of life stretching back, through and beyond this landscape. Then I stand, grab my rucksack and camera, and head down the hill back toward modernity and home.
I don’t know if it was before or after my trip to London that I decided to write an article on ticks and Lyme disease but since I did start writing, my level of Lyme disease paranoia has been a bit scary. As a photographer, I’m out and about in the landscape quite a lot and in the Highlands area where we live, we’ve had specific warnings about the prevalence of the disease. I’ve taken some precautions, I’ve treated my socks and trousers with Permethrin and rarely wear shorts (and have horrendous pale blue legs as a result) and thankfully have not had any ticks in the past couple of years. However, after hearing about a handful of locals being treated for Lyme disease and recently discovering that it’s the smallest, almost invisible nymph stage of ticks (about the size of poppy seeds) that are the most likely to give you Lyme disease, I thought it worth investigating further.
I mentioned London earlier and it was on this trip to help with the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition that I think I started my worry about Lyme disease. The day after arriving I suffered from a horrible case of sinusitis which included raised lymph glands and a stiff neck. During the journey back I picked up my ‘to do’ article list for On Landscape and picked out the ticks/Lyme article to develop (was this subliminal? maybe). As I worked my way through this I started to discover some quite scary things about ticks and the disease.
Lyme Disease and Ticks
Despite the rumours that Lyme disease was introduced by the US government, it is thought that it actually has a very long history, along with many other tick distributed infections. In fact, it is probably safe to say that ticks have been one of the primary distributors of illness in history (after mosquitos). We discovered the association between ticks and these infections early in the 20th Century but we only really learned some of the idiosyncrasies of how these infections work more recently. The type of bacteria that causes Lyme disease is called a spirochaete, a spiral shaped bacteria that is also behind Syphilis and other relapsing fevers i.e. illnesses that recur many times. It is also, possibly, the bacteria that cause Alzheimer's! Spirochaete have an extraordinary ability to hide within the human body (due to lack of proteins on their surface inhibiting immune response for instance), and they can also mutate away from immune reaction and return in force. It is also difficult to culture them outside of the body (two reasons why diagnosis is difficult - tests may take place between bouts or may not return enough material to diagnose).
One of the scariest aspects of Lyme disease is its resistance to antibiotics. Even if you catch the signs early and your doctor is aware enough to provide a rigorous course of antibiotics, there is still a chance (about 10%) of seeing symptoms for many years after (see Post Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome). The reason why isn’t totally understood but it could be the ability for the bacteria to get past boundaries within the body that are supposedly resistant to infection (the meninges for instance) which can give neurological symptoms even after strong antibiotics or it might be leftovers of the bacteria or neurological damage. And the symptoms can be awful, in some cases deadly. Memory loss, palsy, muscle failure, dementia, heart disease, coma, paralysis - you name it, Lyme disease seems to be able to cause it.
That such a virulent disease has no vaccine is quite odd. In fact, Lyme disease did have a vaccine but the ‘anti-vaxxers’ were so vehement and combined with the modern litigious nature of society, it soon became uneconomical. The only vaccine available now is for your pets - which is quite insane!
Symptoms
So, after my sinusitis and the start of my article, I started to feel odd aches and pains, especially an odd ache in my shins. As I was researching Lyme disease anyway, I looked up both sinusitis and shin pain and lo and behold, they are both symptoms! “OK”, I’m thinking, “Get your head together, you’re being paranoid. If you had Lyme disease you would get the target mark (see photos below).”. However, it turns out only about 60% of people get the classic bullseye mark. Oh dear - now I’m worried. Then I find an odd mark on my ankle with a bite in the middle which has a sort of ring shape. Fortunately, the aching and the marks could easily be explained by the large amount of climbing I had done in the previous week and I had also been shifting of logs from a forest nearby so is probably one of a bunch of bruises I got. The ring-shaped mark on my ankle could just be one of those bruises and the bite is almost certainly a midge bite (just like the other two nearby). As I’ve mentioned, the non-specific nature of Lyme disease just makes you paranoid. I wondered if I was just a victim of confirmation bias and so picked a random set of symptoms that I’ve had over my life and checked whether they were also symptoms of Lyme disease - and yes they were. It turns out that Lyme can cause a vast number of symptoms.
Here are the range of possible Lyme disease rash patterns. Not all instances of the disease have the bullseye rash!
The progression of the bullseye rash takes multiple weeks. A growing rash is the main thing to look out for if it's not a bullseye
Geography of Lyme disease
Lyme disease may have got its name from a town in Connecticut in the US but it’s a worldwide problem from the UK to Australia. It’s odd that it does have a geographic distribution within these countries (i.e. some places ticks carry it, some don’t) which is probably to do with the environment for the disease pool, small mammals, and the weather conditions for ticks (not too dry). Shown below are distribution maps of the US, Europe and details of the UK drawn from various sources. Within these country boundaries, the hotspots are probably grassy areas with leaf litter i.e. woodland and brackeny paths.
Preventing Lyme Disease
I now realise that because Lyme disease is so hard to spot, diagnose and treat and it’s subsequent debilitating symptoms, it’s absolutely essential to spend the time trying to prevent getting bitten in the first place. And don’t think that because you don’t walk in the wilderness that you’re not at risk. It seems the most dangerous activity is walking your dog in semi-urban areas! Many guidelines say to avoid grassy areas and stay on paths - like that’s going to work for us landscape photographers!
So what can we do to help prevent getting bit. The good news is that the transfer of enough bacteria to cause a problem takes an average of about 24-36 hours and so you have enough time to check for them and remove them. Symptoms don’t normally appear for a couple of weeks either so if you do get bitten, make a note of when you did so you can check later.
Understanding how Lyme disease hosting ticks find you might help also. Unlike many insects, they don’t chase people, jump or swarm, etc. In fact for most of their few years alive they just hide in the leaf litter. When they want to eat, once a year perhaps, they climb up the nearest plant, probably a blade of grass or a branch of a shrub, and wait for something to pass. They detect the heat, lactic acid and/or carbon dioxide and then wave their arms in the air in a process called “questing”. At the end of the arms they have articulated hooks. If you get within range, they ‘velcro’ themselves onto your clothes or hair. Once attached, they spend a few hours climbing, trying to find a nice warm crevice, quite often just a place where tight clothes meet skin, underwear line is common or a crease in the skin behind a knee or armpit. Once there, they then start of “dig in”. If you’re sitting in one place however, you may also encounter some nymph ticks as they wander in the undergrowth. Here’s a good video about how ticks ‘work’.
Avoiding Getting Bitten
You can take some reasonable steps to prevent them latching on in the first place. The most effective repellant strategy is to treat your clothes, especially your socks and trousers, with Permethrin and also to spray your ankles with DEET (or Picaridin e.g. Smidge but it doesn’t work as well as DEET against ticks). On top of this, be wary of picking up ticks from your rucksack or coat as you sit down to take a break. A buff treated with permethrin goes some way to preventing ticks reaching your hairline (where it’s hard to check for them).
This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive guide on what to do, I’ve decided to post this article just to raise some additional awareness of a few facts I’ve discovered that weren’t obvious from the literature out there.
You don’t have to be an adventurer to get ticks, more people encounter them in semi-urban areas and parks than in the mountains
You’ve got 24 hours to find those ticks after any activity so check (and try to get a partner to check perhaps - even if only occasionally for bullseye marks).
You’re more likely to have a problem with nymph stage ticks and they’re very easy to overlook. Wearing light clothing helps you spot them.
Permethrin on clothing is incredibly effective in killing ticks or making them drop off or quickly die if not. You can buy pre-treated clothing from Craghoppers - Nosilife brand socks, pants and trousers make sense, Buff also make treated Buffs. Alternatively, you can spray on Sawyer’s Permethrin to make any clothing insect repellent (be aware it can kill cats until it is completely dried out though).
Finally, don’t get paranoid like me, just be wary of odd, unrelated symptoms and keep an eye on odd skin marks (marking their boundary with a pen is useful. If they grow then see a doctor).
I’m 99% certain my own symptoms are unrelated but the power of the mind to make you worry is incredible. The vast majority of the time you’ll be worrying unnecessarily but it’s worth being aware of these things just in case.
I chose to write about this photograph quite simply because it is in my eyes completely beautiful. Sometimes as photographers we are so busy creating ‘the image’ that we forget to really appreciate the beauty of what we see as we take the image, surrounded by nature at its best, whatever the weather. Hengki Koentjoro is evidently very in-tune with his surroundings in Indonesia and the charm and atmosphere that surrounds him. As he writes about his gallery Altitude: ‘It’s one of the utmost forms of joy in life: the delight of waking up in the youngest hour of the morning, racing with the break of dawn to ascend the height of the earth.’
What I love about this particular image, Altitude 2, is the delicacy of the leaves, which contrasts against the solidity of the tree trunks as they rise up through the image while the light spreads mist-like down through the trees. This type of composition is seen often but rarely captured with such skill where the features work together to create an image which is greater than the sum of each part. It creates a sensation of warmth and air and has a gentle ephemeral feel. From a more technical point of view, I like the way this two-dimensional image creates three-dimensional space, moving the eye up and through the trees into the dawn light above. In this image, Hengki creates both movement and texture. The image draws you in and holds your attention so you look through and around the frame again and again. It’s the sort of image I would never tire of looking at in my own home or elsewhere.
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!
I visited Dail Beag bay on the West coast of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides on a dull grey day. Rather than the broader view, I found myself looking at the near landscape and more specifically an area a few meters square. Breaking waves and the subsequent receding water meant the golden sand and contrasting black rock grains were constantly rearranging into an infinite variety of patterns.
Taking around two dozen shots, I'd stood in more or less the same spot for only five minutes. Despite the restriction on time and location, the scene was incredibly dynamic, endlessly shifting with the rhythm of the sea. Not my usual type of images, but always aware of the need to match my photography to the conditions I was happy with them as a set.
While I still enjoy taking shots of grand vistas in dramatic lighting conditions my recent work has tended towards more intimate details of the landscape. I find this approach more personal and that it provides for better individual expression. These shots are taken in a number of locations including Glen Affric, Forest of Dean and Yorkshire arboretum but hopefully have a common feel about them. It is the relationship between the images that is more important to me than the particular location. I often use multiple exposures and ICM in my photography and unsurprisingly have been influenced by the work of Valda Bailey, Doug Chinnery, Sandra Bartocha and Nel Talen.
When I came to Alaska in 1981, a trip to Portage Lake to see glacial ice up close was a treat that everyone took for granted. The Portage Glacier was rapidly receding. It had retreated from its submerged moraine in Portage Lake and with nothing to support it, the portion of the glacier in the lake was breaking up. I began a project to photograph the Portage valley in the mid-1990’s with the intent of demonstrating that the valley was of visual interest even without the glacier itself.
Even after the glacier itself was no longer visible, I think that everyone assumed that icebergs would be discharged into the lake forever. Climate change was not part of our vocabulary then. Most people, myself included, didn’t realise that the glacier would continue to retreat until its terminus was sufficiently far from the shoreline that it would no longer calve into the lake except in rare circumstances. So it’s unlikely that anyone will make photographs similar to these for hundreds if not thousands of years.
The value of these images for me goes beyond their documentary value. I’ve always been moved by what I’ve seen in the valley, and I hope that you are, too.
From the time of the Vikings onwards, the settlements of man have been dwarfed by the magnificent mountains of Greenland.
Hvalsey is the site of Greenland's largest, best-preserved Viking ruins. Erik the Red, a Viking explorer, sailed to "a somewhat mysterious and little-known land" in 982. When Erik returned to Iceland, he brought with him stories of "Greenland". Erik deliberately gave the land a more appealing name than "Iceland" in order to lure potential settlers. The farmstead of Hvalsey on the south west coast was established by Erik the Red’s uncle in the late 10th century. The church, dating from about 1300, can just be seen as a tiny ruin the bottom right hand corner of the image, which shows the magnificent scale of the mountain behind it.
Aappilattoq is the only settlement in Prins Christian Sund, a waterway that separates the mainland from an archipelago at the southernmost tip of Greenland. The settlement was founded in 1922. Today there are about 150 inhabitants and their average age is just over 30. They make their living from hunting and fishing. The colourful settlement has a local authority service house, general store, general repairs workshop, fire station, school, church and heliport. The peaks that dwarf the village that clings to the water's edge are almost 2000m high but are unglaciated.
Over the last 30 years, many of the isolated smaller settlements without modern amenities have been abandoned and people have migrated to larger towns. This unnamed Inuit hunters’ colony in Kangerdlugssuak Fjord in East Greenland was abandoned in July 1987 (according to the graffiti). The people probably moved south to Tasiilaq, which is the largest settlement on the east coast with 2000 people and growing fast. The surrounding mountains were formed by magma from the earth's interior, forced into the earth's crust.
Nuuk is the largest city of Greenland. At 18,000 inhabitants, it accounts for one third of the population, and it is also growing fast. It is the most northerly capital in the world, just south of the Arctic circle on the west coast. The area was occupied by pre-Inuit people by about 2000BC. The Vikings settled there between 1000 and 1400. More recently it was inhabited by the Inuit. The modern town was founded by the Danish in 1728. The summit of Sermitsiaq, a 1210m tall mountain, is visible from most places in Nuuk.
If there is something I love about landscape and naturalistic photography, especially the most intimate, it is the possibility of being able to describe my mood in the images; the result of which is a photograph that fully describes my current or long term mood. I spent the last few years trying to study the best conditions in the field that could best describe my feelings and moods, such as fear, joy, happiness, sadness, etc., personal feelings and general sensations, which reflect private life, values and social relationships.
And here is how an expanse of sunflowers at sunset, which with its bright colours could mean happiness, can take on different colours, tones and meanings. Using the backlight, and with certain focal points that isolate the subjects, one can describe the solitude of some sunflowers full of life in contrast with other sunflowers that have completed their life cycle. The contrast that many of us live with constantly - a sense of surviving in a world surrounded by the collective malaise (perhaps thanks to political and social conditions, the human being towards self-annihilation). The photograph will be distressing, almost catastrophic, but at the same time, thanks to the subtle light that caresses the flowers, it will be wrapped in a veil of hope.
Technology has a way of getting in the way of our appreciation for our surroundings. It can be a constant distraction, practically requiring a short attention span in order to keep up with the rapid flow of information and imagery. More often than I’d like to admit, my wife reminds me to put my phone away when I should be paying attention to the beauty – or the company – around me. This is why going to remote places, where the option to connect is not there, is a healthy practice to help us refocus our attention. While some people can put away their devices and be really present, even given the constant option to connect, the majority of us can use some help in achieving this! Seeking out even bouts of life with no signal can help us to slow down, focus on the experience, and connect better to a place. This, of course, is likely to result in more meaningful images.
I strive to practice a slow approach to photography, enough to have recently launched a collaborative effort with other photographers centred around this idea Slow Photography Movement. Hence, I like to find places that force me to disconnect. One such destination is the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of northern Minnesota. In the BWCAW, you can lose yourself in the wilderness for days at a time, and cell signals don’t work, forcing those of us with mild (or less mild) addictions to our devices to turn them off… or better yet, to leave them behind!
Recently I spent four nights in the BWCAW, a significant accomplishment for someone who used to state, almost belligerently, that he didn’t like to “rough it.”
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness encompasses over a million acres within the Superior National Forest and includes over 1,000 lakes, 1,500 miles of canoe routes, and over 2,000 campsites.
When I first learned of my wife’s family’s camping tradition, I made sure to drive that point across! I didn’t want to create expectations that this air-conditioning-loving urbanite was going to turn into a carefree backwoods’ adventurer. It didn’t sound very appealing: you work really hard paddling and portaging all your things around, and stay at first-come-basis campsites which provide minimal facilities, while being devoured by mosquitoes. Yet now here I am, doing it. So, what changed? I became a photographer! Suddenly I developed a newfound willingness to step outside of my comfort zone if it meant waking up to the sunrise in a pristine, beautiful landscape. Not only have I survived our yearly BWCAW visits, but I’ve quickly discovered a deep fondness for the serenity of this place, which makes it feel much more remote than it is.
The BWCAW encompasses over a million acres within the Superior National Forest and includes over 1,000 lakes, 1,500 miles of canoe routes, and over 2,000 campsites. Permit at hand, you paddle in and get lost in the wilderness, alternating between canoeing through pristine waters and portaging all your gear between lakes. You have to carefully weigh the benefits of every item you are bringing in order to minimize the load you’ll bear on portages. Even so, since photography is the reason why I became amenable to this type of adventure, one camera body and a couple of lenses - plus my tripod (obviously!) - are essential parts of my expedition outfit.
The beauty of the BWCAW is in the experience as much as the landscape; everyday life quickly feels like a distant memory when you are surrounded by such peace and stillness. It makes you look around and recognize your surroundings, it forces you to be present, and it naturally encourages a slowing down of your attention to fully grasp its beauty.
Capturing this beauty, it turns out, can be challenging; the BWCAW is not about dramatic landscape elements and easily Instagramable locations. Its beauty is often in the details and in the subtle variations of natural elements that might seem very homogenous, even repetitive, at first sight, while paddling from lake to lake. My initial attempts often resulted in relatively boring captures, images which I felt failed to convey the serenity and the experience of this not-so-distant wilderness. Sometimes you need to get to know a place better, to identify what it is that makes it special to you, in order to better represent it. Then, you can say something about it through your photography.
Its beauty is often in the details and in the subtle variations of natural elements that might seem very homogenous, even repetitive, at first sight, while paddling from lake to lake.
For me, the BWCAW is about being enveloped in nature, and being observant of every variation and detail in the subtly changing landscape around you. As I’ve paddled along lakes with picturesque little islands scattered about, I’ve attempted to identify what I’m seeing and to understand what I want to capture.
Would the BWCAW be the same if cell phones worked? It would be challenging to enjoy it the same way. The lack of access to social media makes it easier to connect and foster real experience
The subtle layering of elements and the contrast in textures have jumped out at me: pebble beaches alternating with large smooth rock formations, deep evergreens juxtaposed with the delicate white lines of birch, and jagged cliff edges set against gentle forested hills. The often-crystal clear water adds another layer, as underwater boulders and driftwood play peek-a-boo through the surface, and the glimpses of submerged rocks and logs are juxtaposed with the reflection of pine tree shorelines above. Over the course of my trips to the Boundary Waters, I’ve come to realise that for me it’s about subtle discoveries, about observing patiently and seeing more - noticing more - the longer and closer you look. After a few visits, I feel that my images are finally capturing the layering of these elements and the almost meditative feeling that they provoke.
Would the BWCAW be the same if cell phones worked? It would be challenging to enjoy it the same way. The lack of access to social media makes it easier to connect and foster real experiences. Still, I do bring other technology with me: my photographic gear. While I often put it away when the sun is high, I focus intensely on the photographic pursuit at times, especially at dawn and dusk. This intensity makes me wonder, am I really enjoying this moment and place? Can I truly say that I left technology behind, or am I too focused on camera settings?
Most of the time I am indeed enjoying the moment, possibly even more than if I wasn’t photographing. If it weren’t for photography, I probably wouldn’t be in the BWCAW at all! And even if I were, I wouldn’t have crawled out of my tent at 5 am to see the sunrise. Photography sends me to places I otherwise wouldn’t be, at times I once would have found surprising. So maybe, it is possible that some technology, when used carefully, can make us feel more connected to the natural world; the Boundary Waters is the perfect setting to practice reaching that delicate balance. When done shooting, the option of immediately sharing an image and engaging on social media is not there. This makes it all that much easier to put the camera away and enjoy the company of your fellow campers, sitting around the bonfire beneath a beautiful night sky. After all, the only thing better than capturing the beauty of the Boundary Waters is to experience it firsthand, quietly and without distraction.
I find the keynote to whatever I have done has been unpreparedness. In reality, the only thing in which I have been actually thorough has been in being thoroughly unprepared. ~Alfred Stieglitz
When starting a photography workshop, my co-instructors and I ask participants to introduce themselves and to share with the group what they hope to gain from the workshop. Interestingly, some themes seem to recur more than others. Among these themes is an expressed desire to “learn to be more creative.” This is always music to my ears. I can’t think of many worthier goals for a photographer who has already gained a degree of technical proficiency and experience than to wish to produce more novel, original, and personally-expressive work. More important, that people recognise the value of pursuing such work, is validating. Whether they know it for a fact, or by intuition, being more creative can influence their lives in ways far and beyond just improving their photography. Upon further prodding, some express concern about not being creative (interestingly, often blaming such deficit on monotony in their chosen vocations, which is not entirely unfounded). If you are among those who fear you may not be creative, rest assured that you are. Creativity is a trait of the human brain—it’s not a gift that only some are fortunate to be born with; it’s a built-in feature. However, it is true that not everyone is equally creative, not because of any cognitive deficit but because of lack of practice. Creativity, like most skills, is a trait that can be nurtured and improved with deliberate and repeated engagement.
Creativity, like most skills, is a trait that can be nurtured and improved with deliberate and repeated engagement.
I will propose here some suggestions for improving creativity, but at the outset, I think it’s important to acknowledge two other built-in traits of the human brain that may get in the way of creativity, and that we often are reluctant to admit having. Resisting and transcending these traits consciously is as important to creative success as training yourself in any other skill that may improve your creativity. These traits, that we all possess, are these: laziness, and the desire to conform. Both traits likely resulted from the evolution of the human brain. Minimising brain activity was a priority when humans had little free time, and sometimes insufficient nutrition, to engage in complex thoughts and flights of imagination (by weight, the brain consumes more energy than any other part of the body). The tendency to conform improves social cohesion, which, in turn, improves a group’s odds of survival by encouraging teamwork, minimising internal conflicts, etc. Today, most of us have no existential reason to be too concerned about taking time to think creatively about our photographs, nor do we have to be too concerned about any existential consequences that may result from breaking with common sensibilities and expectations in our artistic pursuits.
Following on from our previous wander around Cornwall (via a relaxing chair in the Highlands), Joe is talking through some of the images taken on a workshop with David Ward. We cover a few topics including bits of Capture One and Lightroom, the use of Polarisers, black and white conversions and a few other bits and pieces.
We spend a lot of time plotting our escape from cities and towns, without necessarily recognising the role that they play in shaping us. It’s easier to say what we don’t like about them, rather than what we do, and to overlook what they can offer. Seeing the images that Verity Milligan shares online, her love of the rural and the remote is clear, but look a little deeper and it’s also apparent that the city that she calls home – Birmingham, UK - is very important to her too. Cars can give us freedom, but also often mean that we ignore what is on our doorstep; an inability to drive (at the time) led Verity to seek out Birmingham’s open spaces and green corridors and fostered an affection for the city as a whole that remains today. Add to that the mutual support offered by the city’s creative community and it’s easy to see how Birmingham and its people have helped to foster her career as a photographer.
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?
Hi. Well, I grew up in Corby in Northamptonshire under the shadow of the steelworks and their inevitable demise. It was a very industrial setting, a new town made of concrete and the sweat of Scottish immigrants of whom I’m a proud descendant. The town itself wasn’t much to write home about, but it backed onto rural Northamptonshire and I was given free rein as a child to explore. In that respect, although it was very humble, I had an idyllic childhood. My father, who was a steelworker, had a keen interest in nature and we would go birdwatching regularly. He also taught me how to watercolour, and I spent much of my youth drawing and painting the birds and landscapes I’d witnessed. Unfortunately, being quite a literal artist, I lost a lot of confidence during A-level art which encouraged me to be more abstract in my approach. I floundered amongst painters who were far more dynamic and ended up with the only ‘D’ I’ve ever got in my entire life. The experience broke my heart and all my dreams of becoming an illustrator or painter fell away. However, I was the first in my family to attend University and I’m still grateful to this day to my parents for breaking the wheel and facilitating my education despite having very little. I took a very academic route with a plan to become a lecturer (which I did), but I was always undertaking some creative endeavour, whether that was writing or drawing.
Forests are the breathing lungs of cities, therefore landscapes should be thought of as models for biodiversity.
As an architect, it is important for me to know how things around me are perceived. However, as a photographer, I try that my photographs portray a further aim. I believe that it is important to show people outside my profession what it is that they are really engaged in, and how unthoughtful ideas and decisions can have their effect on the environment when the balance between man and nature disappears.
Are there any borders in the first place? Where does excavation end?
Today, the tool is no more architecture, but rather a “consciousness architecture” where a more sensitive mindset is introduced. It is said that one way to understand a man-made environment is by examining the level of sensitivity put into that environment. It is also said that the measure of a place’s greatness is found in the quality of its planning. Unfortunately, by doing that, and despite all the advocating against climate change, global warming, deforestation, the reduction of carbon emissions and plastic consumption in addition to several other pressing environmental issues, unconscious planning still exists.
The complex notion of man-made settings in relation to their existing natural landscape has thus been misconceived. In a highly urbanised world that we live in, geography has become the modern element for the creation of conflict. When political and economic factors are involved, this often results in a framework with an undesirable outcome. The construction of this dam located in Mseilha, North Lebanon, is one example.
Aerial views show the irreversible damage that Mseilha's artificial dam has caused to the Lebanese natural heritage. There seem to be no limits for the excavation borders that are continuously expanding and eating up the surrounding existing landscape. The scale of the stone wall built to support the dam is, by itself, massively huge.
So my photos aim to raise awareness. They are boldly a reaction, a response to the profit-based distribution of supremacy in the governmental realm. Close-up photos stand alone to expose the radical disparities between natural and man-made borders, where the landscape’s parcelisation is slowly being transformed into one huge man-made grain clearly gaining prominence.
A “Terrain Vague” as Ignacio de Sola Morales would describe it, a discontinuity or an “urban negative”, call it what you want. Landscape territories must be reclaimed… from shapeless voids to fertile terrains, borders that portray “lines of resistance” against forceful landscape planning implementations.
The Lebanese heritage is at risk, not only in Mseilha’s dam, but in many other sites as well. We need new protocols, not only in legislation but also in developing “conscious” man-made environments, protocols that take into consideration the management of those kinds of landscape processes.
So, the question remains: what next? Little is left to say. We need to recover the place that has remained. There is no Planet B, fellow people, at least not yet.
Place: Mseilha, Lebanon Project Type: Construction (Ongoing) Camera: DSLR Canon EOS 200D EF-S 18-55 mm lens
From the earliest days of my journey in landscape photography, John Sexton has been an inspiration. As one of Ansel Adams’ former assistants, his dedication to producing fine art, black & white imagery using traditional materials is legendary. His workshops are always highly in demand. If you’re lucky enough to meet John, you’ll find him to be generous with his time, gregarious with a great sense of humour, ready with amazing stories and anecdotes about some of the photographic greats of our time and thoughtful and compassionate with his print critiques.
I can’t remember exactly how I became aware of John but when I acquired his first book Quiet Light, the images quickly resonated with me and definitely set a very high standard for composition, quality of light and technical excellence.
John’s second book Listen to the Trees was a revelation. I was spending a lot of time trying to photograph forests and trees so they were a favourite subject anyway and to have an entire book dedicated to them was very helpful and motivating.
It took me a while to realise that qualities of light are different in various parts of the country and the grand landscapes from the western US would probably not happen in Ohio.
One of the nice things about all of John’s books is he gives the technical details of each image: film type, development, filters, focal length and exposure settings. So careful study of the image along with that information can give a lot of insight into how to approach a subject.
Growing up in the midwestern state of Ohio in the US, I wasn’t getting the hoped for results in my images, like those I was seeing from the popular western photographers. It took me a while to realise that qualities of light are different in various parts of the country and the grand landscapes from the western US would probably not happen in Ohio.
We’ve got a couple of books to review in this issue, both by Kozu and both related to each other Paul Kenny has been featured in On Landscape before and it’s no secret that we love his work. His creations with saltwater, flotsam and jetsam are both fascinating and exquisitely crafted. Doug Chinnery has also been featured in On Landscape previously and has made no secret of the fact that his photography has been influenced by Paul Kenny’s artworks (amongst others).
Paul Kenny - O Hanami
All art must move forward to survive. I’ve had this conversation with Paul Kenny a few times and with many other artists (and musicians for that matter). Finding a popular success is as much a curse as it is a crutch; the pressure to continue creating works in the same vein (from your fans, your agent, your gallery representation, etc). Paul’s Seaworks struck an aesthetic vein that gave him crossover success. Both critics and the public liked the work, but possibly not for the same reasons. Paul has made it clear that his work follows its own path and if it leads away from commercial popularity then so be it.
The good news is that Paul is still producing work that is aesthetically beautiful and that reflects his ongoing joy in creativity. The new work is less alchemical (to borrow Francis Hodgson’s words in the foreword) and less transformational than the Seaworks chapter and has shifted toward the observational. Many of the pieces are re-presentations of found objects in Paul’s garden or objects found on walks, etc. The overarching theme is one of ‘transient beauty’, inspired by a trip to Japan whilst the cherry blossom celebration was happening. From geometric arrangements of flowers and buds to clean-cut and arranged leaves in various states from fresh to skeletally decomposed. This is a natural progression in his work and the book includes images from the 1996/7, 2011 & 2015 in addition to the work from last year (2018).
Paul Kenny’s work continues to evolve and contrary to the usual public opinion on artists, they don’t work in ‘periods’ or change style suddenly, they typically have many parallel ideas which ebb and flow at different rates. Some of these ideas mature into bodies of work, just as O-Hanami has, and I look forward to seeing many more in the future.
The book itself is exquisitely printed and Kozu should be proud of the reproduction and binding.
Doug Chinnery - Abstract Mindedness
When we look at the lives of historic artists, we often discover in retrospect that they suffered from mental illness of one sort or another. It seems that something of the self-analysis, the maniacal periods or the altered states are as stimulating creatively as they are destructive both physically and mentally. However, in most cases, we would have known little about these problems during the artist's life. Fortunately, in the last few decades, mental illness has included less societal stigma and today it is possible to admit to suffering without being shunned by society. It is only possible, not guaranteed, however. Some people will still attach irrelevant labels to those who do admit to such ailments and so it is not without a great deal of trepidation that people do ‘come out’.
Doug’s book is a bold artistic statement about the dark periods in his own life. Don’t expect all dark and gothic outlook though. There are as many images of resolution and recovery as there are inward contemplation and loss and the seasons passing ride along Doug’s presumed ascent out of the worst of his hurt.
To use Francis Hodgson’s words from Paul Kenny’s book, Doug’s images are alchemical in nature but not the physical alchemy of the salt and rust of Paul’s work but the digital alchemy of the camera sensor. The combination of layered images using blend modes found in the Canon range of cameras to juxtapose shape and texture to create something new, unclear, abstract, hidden. Leaves against water, plants against architecture, paint texture layered anew. These images work best for me when they hint at their origins but become something compositionally new, where textures and colour complement and contrast.
Kozu Books have again created a quality product for which all the proceeds will go to a mental health charity (Young Minds).
Both books play at the verges of the landscape and as such may not be to our readers liking but such is the way of all art. We form our own private tastes in life - whether it be our preference for jazz over rock, alt-folk over math metal, some preferring Aphex Twin to Kylie Minogue. Playing at the boundaries of the music industry for some time, I realised that I could appreciate and enjoy the best of all genres of music, even though I had my private tastes. As a photographer, I can see the quality of the work in both of these productions and am happy to have both on my bookshelf (as catholic a filling of Ikea bookshelves I challenge you to find).
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!
Every year the melt occurs at a different time in the Highlands of Iceland. Depending on the weather and snowfall over the winter the patterns and textures can vary wildly.
On a camping and photo tour of South Africa’s North Cape State (North West on the Atlantic and South of Namibia) I spent several nights in the part of the Richtersveld National Park that is home to Quiver Trees (Aloidendron dichotomum).
The park, with its desert, mountains, varied geology and unusual vegetation affords the photographer many opportunities to capture interesting compositions. I was particularly taken with the Quiver Trees.
In spite of its scenic interest, the park was deserted when I was there in March, a far cry from the hordes that visit better-known locations. The remoteness, searing heat, need to camp and truck in all supplies, and the challenging roads all, undoubtedly, contribute to the absence of visitors.
I took up photography when I retired a little over ten years ago. For the most part I press the shutter button as a sidelight to other activities, be it a morning walk, a holiday trip or a concert. Images of musicians playing in Mexican bars, sea lions as well as of landscapes are among my favourites.
This portfolio is about the journey of the two souls, who have found each other. The images express the process of the relationship between two souls, expressing their love in time and space. Their sincere and pure love made them who are today and helped them find their way, which they will go together.
Now they have a new life simple and peaceful. They have each other that's all it needs!
Humanity has an unsatisfiable appetite for exploration. And we are able to create tools that take our inadequate bodies further away from the limits. Both cameras and vehicles are instruments that facilitate freedom. My passion for travelling away from the frantic chaos of the cities has enabled me to find a satisfying experience many people can only dream of.
Since I was young, freedom was something that I was pushed to embrace. As we build such a connected world, feeling free gets scarcer every day. I've been close to nature my whole life, but photography really assisted in appreciating things from a fresh perspective. It was learning not only to see but also to breathe, feel, smell and hear differently. Nature itself became a complete aesthetic experience for me thanks to being able to record life in the format of an image.
Doing landscape photography is a humble endeavour that made me look at the environment in a novel way. We all know that nature is massive. But capturing it in a way that even light gets invited inside the scene is a whole different experience. If I was asked to pick one single theme from nature, seascapes would be it. The massive force of the sea striking into the shores makes you feel literally like a mere grain of dust.
Waking up way before dawn has never been a problem for me, and that is quite fundamental for a nature-oriented photographer. Getting up at early hours makes me feel like being ahead of everyone else in the world. The whole process of sort of commuting between my bed and the ocean at times where pretty much everyone else is still sleeping is a powerful relation.
We are surrounded by chaos, but we can record it. And that is the true power of photography. We can record everything in ways that are simply impossible for our eyes. The aspect that moves me the most about shooting seascapes is that I can't predict what will happen in the end. I simply can't. It is beautiful how I can be in control of everything, but the actual photograph. I can be certain of where the sunlight will be coming from, I can measure light, I can frame my scene meticulously. I can even try to control my shivering body, but I can't control how the waves will swirl and crash in front of my camera, and that's what I love most about doing seascape photography.
Here I've selected some of those photos that have made me feel free. I wish I could share with the world the huge joys behind what many consider to be a sacrifice or a luxury. Nature shouldn’t be seen in that way. Beyond the adventurous theme of this selection of images, I’m taking the liberty here of using the power of photography to at least make one single human being more aware of our environment. Many campaigns are now showing us dead creatures and plastic flooding us, and trust me, it is happening. Finding pollution free seascapes is starting to be a problem. And photography is the best tool I have for making others aware of the beauty of our planet.
Every single image that you can see here has a story of its own. And I bet they look quite peaceful in your screens. What I really wish I could share with you is all the huge adrenaline rush I get every time that I'm in front of these cold waters. Photography pushes me into savouring seascapes in an unmatchable way. Photography enables us to remember and to build identity. Let's start taking photography less granted. My memories get more vivid every time I have the opportunity of revisiting these photographs. These are small pieces of my visual treasure; so please, enjoy!
Our next two featured photographers are notable for their determination to improve their landscape photography, and their drive in doing so, although they have chosen different routes and, for now, outcomes (for one photography remains a hobby to fit around the day job, for the other photography is their livelihood). Both are active on social media, notably Twitter, which has witnessed and encouraged them both along the way.
In this issue, we catch up with Neil Burnell. If you still mostly associate Neil with long-exposure photography, you’ll learn how extended application in the form of year-long competitions has benefitted his skill set and broadened his interests and portfolio.
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 grew up in Brixham, Devon, and I’m still here today! It’s a lovely town on the coast of South Devon and I’ve never felt the need or wanted to move away.
Growing up, my interests were always sports, mainly football, but any competitive ball sports really. I also had a keen interest in sea fishing which would eventually lead me to a love for photography later in my life. At school, there were very few lessons I enjoyed in all honesty, but I did love Art & Design and decided to pursue a career as a designer at South Devon College by undertaking a Design & Photography National Diploma course. I did really enjoy the Photography part of the course especially the darkroom development side of it, but at this stage, I didn’t consider it as a career. Looking back now I kind of wish I had, although things could have turned out so differently and who’s to say I’d be enjoying photography now if I’d taken that career path.
I’m now working as a designer within the food industry, employed by Caterfood, a foodservice distribution company.
How did you first become interested in photography and what kind of images did you initially set out to make?
I’ve always owned a camera but I really lacked direction with my photography. It wasn’t until I started taking the camera fishing that I thought about shooting seascapes and landscapes. Initially, I shot images of friends holding fish they had caught, this then led to people fishing within the landscape and eventually I was looking for compositions purely of seascapes and it was at this stage I decided to put more time into photography rather than fishing. Before I knew it I had purchased a tripod and was experimenting with filters.
It’s not often that you can shoot amazing landscapes indoors, but the ghost town of Kolmanskop, Namibia, is just that kind of place.
The Namib Desert is relentless. On the drive into the little seaside port town of Lüderitz, sandwiched between the South Atlantic Ocean and the high dunes, sand blows and drifts over the highway like a scene from Mad Max, threatening to swallow it whole. Heavy equipment stands a way off, waiting to push the voracious dunes from the road. Give the Namib a chance, and it will quickly reclaim anything that human hands have built.
The diamond mining ghost town of Kolmanskop, a collection of skeletal buildings a short way off that same highway, is a testament to just that fact. Abandoned with structures and possessions largely intact by its inhabitants in a rush to a richer set of diamond fields to the south, for more than 60 years the Namib has been reclaiming the town, the desert now as much a part of the buildings as it is a setting for them.
That the Namib Desert gave this southern African country its name is no mere coincidence. Taken from an indigenous Khoekhoe-language term, ‘Namib’ loosely translates as ‘immense’ or ‘vast and empty’, which might qualify as the geographic understatement of the century.
Taken from an indigenous Khoekhoe-language term, ‘Namib’ loosely translates as ‘immense’ or ‘vast and empty’, which might qualify as the geographic understatement of the century.
Stretching for more than 2000km in a 200km-wide band spanning the country’s entire coastline, nothing defines Namibia more than this, the oldest and perhaps most spectacular desert in the world, its 400,000 square kilometres of area almost completely uninhabited.
I've taken up climbing in the past 2 years, so when Hazel sent some information over about her recent project which was inspired by Gwen Moffat the first woman mountain guide and her book ‘Space Below My Feet', I was intrigued. After an email conversation, I was delighted that Hazel agreed to an interview about her project and she talks about how she approached visiting these locations and creating her own experiences based on the stories from the book.
You studied a BA (Hons) Photography at Blackpool and the Fylde College (2006-2009) and undertook a MLitt History of Photography at St Andrews University (2012-2013). Tell us about how you chose this as a study path/possible career and how this shaped your approach to photography.
During high school I became interested in photography and built a darkroom in the loft at my parents' home. I quickly chose this as a pathway as I was fascinated by the power of photography. White balance blew me away! I later progressed to the local FE college to start my studying and soon was trapped in the journey.
Education allowed me to explore both the practical and theoretical aspects of photography and gave me a positive grounding. I am very thankful to every tutor I have had for their advice and direction. It also led me to develop a complex relationship with photography, through questioning the purpose and motive in image making. This fuelled my interest into the history of Photography but left a significant time gap in my portfolio of work. Only recently have I re-ignited my practice; this time I have ownership of it.
You are a lecturer currently teaching across a range of levels at North Warwickshire and Hinckley College, including delivering on the BA (Hons) Visual Media, in affiliation with Coventry University. You obviously lecture in different formats of visual media, so what drew you to landscape photography rather than other media or genres?
My greatest inspiration comes from literature. I always have a book about the environment on the go, and this fuels my energy to get out and explore.
For me, photography needs to be a natural act. With the fast pace of education, I enjoy escaping on weekends and holidays into the quieter hillsides. My passion for photographing in the landscape was ignited when I heard Jem Southam speaking at the Responding to a Landscape Symposium in November 2017. The symposium elevated the status of landscape photography providing the reassurance I needed to chase my own project. I previously had been struggling with building my physical strength to take on the outdoors walking and climbing challenges, and as such had no space for the photographic practice. As my physical strength has developed, my photographic practice has taken centre stage.
How do the other genres/approaches to photography inform your landscape work?
I feel like I react to the landscape in a similar style to a street photographer. I like to capture as I go. My greatest inspiration comes from literature. I always have a book about the environment on the go, and this fuels my energy to get out and explore. I am currently reading Robert MacFarlane’s Underland, and can already see my photographs are seeking out shelter and darker areas!
Tell me about the photographers or artists that inspire you the most. What stimulated your interest in photography and who drove you forward, directly or indirectly, as you developed?
I must give a great level of credit to Thomas Joshua Cooper. I was lucky enough to meet Thomas and see his studio space whilst I was studying in Scotland. I interviewed him for a paper I was writing on The Philosophy of Time in Photography. We discussed the concept of time, specifically human experience of time, in his own photographic practice. It is only recently that I have looked back on this meeting and realised its significance. Thomas’s approach to his subject reminded me of how important it is to take the photos instinctively, void of external influence.
Your previous work has fallen into two key themes; social limitations and expectations, and the function of man-made spaces. Was this by design or accidental? Tell us more about these two key themes and why they are important to your photography and narrative.
I identified these two themes when I was trying to categorise the bodies of work I have created for my current website. I am forever questioning the purpose and actions of mankind. I use photography to understand the world around me and as a tool to question. Recently this has been focused on the environment, and how this environment has an emotional and mental influence. Previously I have explored childhood and the way society impacts on individuality. In many ways, all these themes both seek a comprehension of how we can be most true to ourselves.
I am forever questioning the purpose and actions of mankind. I use photography to understand the world around me and as a tool to question. Recently this has been focused on the environment, and how this environment has an emotional and mental influence.
Your work is mostly project based with a number of different projects displayed on your website. How have you gone about forming, researching, working and finishing a project? (Big question, sorry!)
I don’t always create my photographs for a series, but I do like to share them in collections. I keep my Instagram account much looser and more of a visual journal. I feel a series helps present a narrative. John Blakemore describes images being choreographed. Each move works alone, but when they are put together, they can have a much greater impact. Although weak choreography is also a risk!
Is there a part of the process in a photography project that you like the most? If so what is it and why?
Yes, I like to be out in the environment. I like the moment before I take the photograph the most. The imagining of it. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to press the shutter.
Tell us about your current project ‘SPACE ----- MY ——‘ which was inspired by Gwen Moffat the first woman mountain guide and her book ‘Space Below My Feet’, first published in 1961.” How did you find out about her? What inspired you to do a project based on the book?
I found Gwen’s book in a book barn, just by chance. I like to go there because they do a great cake and have a roaring fire in the winter! I hadn’t heard of her before. I started reading it, and so did my husband Dan. She had been to so many of the locations we love to visit. We started discussing her when we visited these places. It wasn’t until later that I realised the connection between my images and her texts and began producing the outcomes for ‘Space ----- My ----.’
How did you go about researching the locations and which places to visit?
The places she went to are the places we naturally end up going so I haven't had to research or specifically target anywhere. Although, I have been known to enjoy hours crawling around the OS Map hunting for names of places in her book. The exact location is not of utmost importance. I have spent some time trying to work out where her cottage near Dolgellau is without any success, but every time we see a derelict building in the area, we joke that its Gwen’s house. I prefer it this way, not knowing! Our next trip is to the Isle of Skye, another one of her stomping grounds.
The places she went to are the places we naturally end up going so I haven't had to research or specifically target anywhere. Although, I have been known to enjoy hours crawling around the OS Map hunting for names of places in her book
You say about the project “Through delving into their personal encounters they encourage me to visit the landscape and create my own experience.” How did you go about this? Did you take the book on the trips and think about Gwen’s narrative and reflect on that?
Absolutely. There is always a book in my bag. Gwen, Robert MacFarlane, Nan Shepard, just to name a few. The links are never literal, just dancing away in the background. Gwen also wrote murder mysteries; I find these equally interesting. The way she writes has enabled me to see a more human side to her character; she likes a good gossip, or the village people in her books do!
I love your “What would Gwen do?” approach to life experiences. Please tell us about a couple of “What would Gwen do?” moments.
Mostly they involve me in tears! These environments that we go to explore deliver both mental and physical challenges. Edmund Burke’s theory on the ‘sublime’ scaffolds the project; the notion that romantic grandeur, intertwined with horror and terror, is never far away. The ‘Gwen’ moments can start fifteen minutes into the walk; this for me is always the hardest part when I remember it's going to be hard work. As my legs and lungs scream, I visualise Gwen stomping her way up, without stopping. Then when the routes get tough and I question if I can do a move on a climb, Dan shouts to me ‘Could Gwen do it?’ I imagine Gwen leading her way up the same bit of rock, and re-focus.
How do you approach the post processing of your work?
Bringing together the images and the text is my second favourite part of the process. I print out the images and I photocopy out the pages from the book, I spread it all out over the table and simultaneously delve back into the walk and literature. I revisit the pages and redact the words that don’t match my own experience of the walk, leaving behind the words that I share with Gwen. I initially used Tippex, but I was getting through too much, so I now circle the words and do a digital redaction afterwards. I have made a little paper frame that I use to select a fragment from the page. The image that syncs up with the text tends to reveal themselves without much thought.
Tell me what your favourite two or three photographs from the project are and a little bit about them.
Half-hearing the conversation
Very early on in Gwen’s book, she speaks of ‘Ordinary Route’, one of her first climbs in the Ogwen Valley, Snowdonia. She didn’t seem particularly taken by it, describing it more like walking than climbing. This would usually put me and my husband, Dan, off, but as my first wet, winter climb it became a whole new challenge! This image was created towards the end of the day following the climb. The route descended to the same area as the approach. Looking back up at the route we had just climbed, and seeing the clouds rolling in, I feel this image has captured all of my fear, elation and cold fingers! I did laugh as I redacted the text and found the phrase ‘hearing half the conversation’. This was such a true statement from the day, as Dan had led the way, and the wind and valley echo had prevented our communication!
Bewildered
Gwen walks at night, the dark does not deter. I have been terrified of ending up walking or climbing after sunset and can often get fixated on needing to be back at the car well before dark is on us. This winter I have made a conscientious effort to address this fear and have found the beauty of dusk almost an addiction. It’s amazing how our eyes adapt. After a walk up Cadair with Dan, we returned to my Dad’s house, in a nearby village, just before dusk. Dad was just leaving to take the dog out for a walk, so I said I would go to the edge of the forest to get a few images; an hour later I was still walking. The phrase ‘I don’t remember making any decision to go’, alongside the other three phrases, summarises this walk perfectly!
What is next for you? Are there any other projects, another exhibition or are you focusing on your teaching?
In the summer, the tables will turn as I become a student at Dartmoor Summer School of Photography. I have the origins of many projects fluttering around and hope this experience will help me focus in on my approach. Trees seem to be screaming at me for some attention!
The North Wales Project, of which I am grateful to be a member of, are collectively exhibiting at The Northern Eye Festival in October this year. As a collective, we aim to raise the voice of documentary photography in North Wales.
A significant proportion of my practice is created in Snowdonia. I hope my work will bring a comment about the rural environment into a genre that predominantly focuses on the streets.
In January of last year, I began photographing a body of work documenting Romanian NGO ‘Foundation Conservation Carpathia’ (FCC) as they strive to create a new European Wilderness Reserve in the heart of the Southern Carpathian Mountains. The project, entitled ‘Carpathia’, was initially funded by the Royal Photographic Societies annual Environmental Bursary scheme in association with The Photographic Angle. I intended to publish a project diary here at On Landscape after each seasonal trip. However, I was unable to publish any of the photographs until the Royal Photographic Society ran a ‘Carpathia’ feature in the print journal this year. Now that has been published; I can continue to release the work elsewhere. So, although the work was made throughout 2018 and early 2019, I still intend to publish my project journal here – albeit retrospectively…
Targului River, the proposed location for Beaver reintroduction programme, Raul Targului Hunting Area
About the FCC
When it comes to economic data, Romania is nearing the bottom of all of the statistics in the European Union. However, when it comes to environmental statistics, the county comes out on top. Boasting 6 million hectares of forests, it has the largest surface of virgin and unfragmented forest in the Union; the most significant population of large carnivores, where bears, wolves and lynx are still commonly seen in their natural environment; and over 3700 plant species, many of them endemic to the region.
It is said that “the forest is Romania’s brother”, however in recent years, this innate connection to the forests is being put under incredible strain. The restitution of formerly nationalised land, a process that began in 2004, eventually resulted in a new ownership structure of two-thirds of Romania’s forests. Communities and landowners associations received larger, contiguous properties, while the majority of private land consisted of smaller parcels with less than 50 hectares. In the years that followed, logging companies bought many of the privately-owned forests, and tremendous deforestation was the outcome. This resulted in large clear-cuts that have painfully scarred vast mountain slopes, leaving the area deserted. The only viable solution to protect these areas from greed and corruption was via direct purchase.
Farmland perimeter in Ciocanu Village
Founded in 2009, Foundation Conservation Carpathia (FCC) is spearheading efforts to protect and restore a significant area within the Southern Carpathians through the creation of a new European Wilderness Reserve. By purchasing large tracts of forests and meadows, FCC ceases logging operations and lease hunting rights to guarantee full protection of all natural elements. Over the past decade, FCC has succeeded in acquiring over 21,000 ha of forests for protection and has managed to create an entirely hunting free area of 36,000 hectares, in addition to planting over 1.5 million saplings and restoring more than 500 hectares of clear-cut land.
Founded in 2009, Foundation Conservation Carpathia (FCC) is spearheading efforts to protect and restore a significant area within the Southern Carpathians through the creation of a new European Wilderness Reserve. By purchasing large tracts of forests and meadows, FCC ceases logging operations and lease hunting rights to guarantee full protection of all natural elements.
The Romanian Carpathians provide a home to an incredibly diverse mix of wildlife – over 3,500 animal species thrive there, many of which are strictly protected by European law. With few exceptions such as bison and beaver, the entire mammal fauna is still present in viable numbers, including the large carnivores. After the fall of communism, however, numbers of large mammals have suffered from overhunting, poaching and disturbance through logging. I became fascinated in the story of FCC and after meeting the team on a reccy in September 2017, I returned to their project area in January 2018 to begin making photographs. These trips are covered in my On Landscape article, here.
Although there can be unique and broad interpretations, landscape is a major theme in all forms of art. One of them is photography. Landscape photography is a means to represent the places in which we live and a way to portray what we see around us. A landscape is rarely defined by its size but rather the phenomenon or ecological mosaic that is presented for us to consider. The physical elements often include landforms such as mountains, hills, lakes, or the sea. It could also encompass vegetation, buildings, structures, or even, transitory elements like weather conditions. Bottom line, it represents how we see and interpret our space from many perspectives. It can be as broadly varied as forests, tundra, deserts, cities, farms, ruins and riverbeds. However, what makes a landscape image emotionally effective is how it resonates within us, conjures a memory, or allows for a momentary escape.
Recognising that, there is something more than the traditional landscape that we see with our eyes. What I am referring to is the landscape that our mind recognises and interprets. It often appears at times and in places when and where least expected. It is one that once we chance upon it, we can barely see anything else. It is like the clouds passing overhead which present us with a dynamic display of subjective images that call to us and our imagination.
Imagine a sweet summer morning. You walk along the beach where the sparkling water meets the sand, breathe in the fresh air, hear the waves lapping along the shore, and feel the sand squish between your toes. The grand scene takes your breath away but there is also undiscovered magic happening beneath those sandy toes that can be equally beautiful and totally mesmerising. Like the clouds above, the scene is ever changing, developing, and disappearing. You take a closer look.
Over millennia, rock is broken down in tiny and varied particles of minerals which make their way to the shore by eroding rivers, glaciers, volcanoes, moraines and bluffs. These ancient minerals amalgamate with newer ground up shells and invertebrates to create one-of-a-kind blends of colourful sand and oxides reflecting each beach’s local geography in a magnificent palette. Every beach is eternally restless and adapting and is as unique as a fingerprint.
For me, as a photographer who loves creating abstracts, my core photography began with landscapes. It is impossible for me to walk past this natural and evolving sand art without seeking out the landscape. Hills, valleys, aerials, and abstract visions form and morph before one’s eyes as the water washes back and forth.
For me, as a photographer who loves creating abstracts, my core photography began with landscapes. It is impossible for me to walk past this natural and evolving sand art without seeking out the landscape.
The incoming waves and merging spring fed streams play with the often vibrant colours of the mineral particles and the reflected colour of the sky to shape and craft magical and dynamic abstract designs and illusory landscapes.
To the discoverer, this offers endless possibilities and fun. Camera in hand, or not, the display can be spellbinding. This experience is reminiscent of childhood hours spent rotating and flipping a frame of coloured sand sandwiched between two sheets of glass to create new and wondrous designs. Suggestions of magical lands emerge as the sand slips into shapes of mountain peaks and gorges only to be turned over to start again.
But it is not only the beach which conjures up such scenes. The suggestion of landscapes can be found in close-up photography of more static or slowly evolving subjects such as the rusting metal on abandoned cars, peeling paint on neglected walls, or decaying surfaces on old boats or buildings. There is so much that you can allow your mind’s eye to peer into and discover with merely a closer look.
Rust, another name for iron oxide, occurs when iron or steel is exposed to oxygen and moisture for a long period of time. As years go by, oxygen combines with the metal and eventually weakens the bonds of the metal itself. Although slower moving than that of a beach, the corrosion and decay forms unique designs in the paint and the metal beneath it. This is what makes the discovery of a single abandoned old vehicle in a field or an entire car wrecking yard so exciting. Amongst the deterioration and the incessant and tenacious recall by nature, there is a bounty of landscape illusions to be discovered.
Wood and glass of abandoned buildings and structures, long exposed to the elements of weather and time itself, takes on a patina that is unique and inviting to the mind’s eye. The organic enzymatic changes that occur in the wood as it rots change its composition while the addition of mould and mildew alter and decorate surfaces and form new and tangible textures. Cracking, peeling and bubbling of paint and varnish not only reveal the past before the ravages of time took charge but also show us that nothing is constant. It also reminds us that perhaps we should look at the old and decaying with a fresh perspective. There is often more than meets the eye. For me, as a photographer who loves creating abstracts, my core photography began with landscapes. It is impossible for me to walk past this natural and evolving sand art without seeking out the landscape.
Cracking, peeling and bubbling of paint and varnish not only reveal the past before the ravages of time took charge but also show us that nothing is constant. It also reminds us that perhaps we should look at the old and decaying with a fresh perspective.
When I first began photographing, I often sought out the traditional landscape. I now see landscapes appearing everywhere. Recognising this has led me to a deeper exploration of the landscape illusions that I stumble upon. The visual images that merely suggest a landscape, yet seem totally out of context, are what really tug at my wild imagination. I strongly believe that the subliminal part of our minds is also very busy at work in the background when we are making the image. Often it is in the review of the scene later during editing when the discovery takes place. Forests appear in the rotting boards of an old building offering a glimpse into its woodsy beginning. A seascape develops on the side of a drydocked fishing boat reminiscent of its life on the sea. A desert scene can be found etched on a piece of glass that has melted and fused in the blazing sun. A winding road can suddenly materialise on the fender of a rusting automobile. And a sand sculpted scene of hills and dales tells the story of the minerals that have wound their way down to water’s edge to decorate the beach with their kaleidoscopic colours. As paint peels and reveals the past beneath its surface, a new life takes hold. It is no longer just an ordinary wall with peeling paint. It is a land to be discovered and explored as history reveals itself, a coincidental connection is made, and a story waits begging to be told.
We spend a great deal of time rushing from one place to another, seeking the iconic shot, ticking the bucket list boxes. Sometimes in our haste, we even forget to breathe. We miss the moments that we don’t even know we are striving for. The connection with the world around us has become so tenuous and fleeting. In our quest for the next Instagram selfie, we fail to go below the surface and look inwards. We overlook the fact that we have a beautiful, curious mind that craves non-electronic stimulation of the senses and a chance to explore on its own untethered terms.
It takes discipline to slow down and smell the roses.
It takes time to see beyond the obvious. If we allow it, an enchanting world can be conjured up from something totally unexpected. But we need to allow for the unexpected to happen.
It takes time to see beyond the obvious. If we allow it, an enchanting world can be conjured up from something totally unexpected. But we need to allow for the unexpected to happen. Something as simple as the fleeting brush of light on found glass can send our imaginations soring, if only we take the time to notice it.
So, next time you go for that contemplative beach walk, remember to stop, look down, take some long slow breaths. Enjoy the moving magical show of nature’s sand art right at your feet. Breathe in the moment. Explore the details of the abandoned barn on the country roadside. Discover the drydock yards at the end of the harbour. Seek out the car graveyards being reclaimed by nature. Just let go and unleash your imagination. You won’t be disappointed.
I started photography a few years ago and have been following a select few photographers over this time who have always given me inspiration to me. I follow them purely because of their love and passion and skill in photography.
One of these is Erin Babnik. Her limitless exploration and intensive work in French Alps and Dolomites is extraordinary. Her endlessly amazing work has always given me the strength to go out and explore the outdoors for myself. The photograph shown here is a personal favourite and is an example of her profound work and her love and dedication to the craft.
As she says elsewhere, this photograph wasn’t an easy one to take and was caught in the glimpse of a sunray as it passed over the mountain. As a viewer and a photographer, it shows a beautiful combination of foreground and background. Those leading lines of wildflowers reaching towards the peaks along with its moody nature combine to give something truly enchanting. The photograph speaks for itself and whatever the weather was, there was much hope in capturing that special moment.
As a photographer myself, I understand that it is only possible to truly capture these moments when you enjoy your surroundings and are in tune with mother nature. If you have ever heard Erin talk, she has spoken about “The Balloon Story” a few times.
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!
These are the well-known mountain peaks surrounding Canmore, Alberta. A frequent site for travellers driving alongside the highway to Banff. I was pleasantly surprised when I found by accident the perfect weather conditions for some amazing photos. Combining the quality and direction of light, the type of lens, along with the perfect angle of the sun allowed me to show off the full textural detail of this remarkable mountain range.
The windy, cloudy weather of the mountains ensures that your shot will always be changing. Sometimes you’ll have a clear sky, twenty minutes later you might not. While this affects the background, it can also affect your subject, as the shadows of any clouds above can completely change how the mountains look. For the aspiring photographer, a cloudy day in the mountains can yield a cornucopia of photos.
The choice to convert in black and white is one that I’ve been experimenting with for a while. Without the distraction of colour, black and white photography allowed other aspects of the shot, such as the texture of the mountains, the light peeking through the clouds, and more.
It starts with that sound. At first, you can barely make it out, is that the wind? But as you get closer the subtle music becomes clear. The air is cooler. The moisture envelops. What only a few months ago chilled you to the bones, now feels delicious after the exertion. As the light starts to come up and bounce down the walls of the chasm, the contrast of white water and granite starts to emerge from the darkness.
While the mountains in Massachusetts lack the size required to produce waterfalls of the impressive scale of our neighbouring states to the north and west, I am entranced by the more modest intimacy of the falls of my home state. Each has a certain unique quality that makes it special.
The Icelandic south and east coast are varied, stunning, and formidable in its natural formation. I cannot say whether this mini portfolio gives a true image of Iceland, but it is my contention that Iceland can only be witnessed. It is an island that is full of natural events which awaken you from an unconsciousness to the huge forces at play under our very feet. Iceland experiences the full symphony of such events: glacial, tectonic, biologic, geologic, cosmic. These events manifest themselves most evidently in water all over the island. It flows seasonally through a multitude of forms: ice, snow, rain, river, glacier, steam, ocean. Its impact on the landscape is clear, as is its necessity to sustaining human life.
Iceland was the last major island to be inhabited in about 900AD, leaving the landscape mostly unscathed from human intervention. My experience of Iceland was, therefore, a real connection to the elements. These four images demonstrate the juxtaposition of the landscape: the scale and force with which these natural events occur, carving and shaping the landscape; versus the fragile cyclic symbiosis of the Icelandic environment. I do, however, find Iceland at such odds with itself - it places a high economic importance on tourism, ironically thereby endangering the very nature which people travel to see. I think these images tell the story of just how important it is to preserve such a beautiful, yet fragile, natural environment.
Last year, and unknown to me at the time, I was fortunate to get a place on what I believe became the last National Trust photography day that allowed participants to access inside the old Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) buildings at Orford Ness.
Tours now – the next is in August 2019 – do not permit interior access due to safety concerns. The buildings are certainly unstable.
All arts have their limits, and I admit that the limits of photography are rather narrow, but in good hands it can be made to lie like a Trojan. However much truth may be desirable in the abstract, to the artist there is no merit in a process that cannot be made to say the thing that is not.~Henry Peach Robinson
We’re all familiar with photographs showcasing magnificent natural-looking scenery, majestic and timeless and free from human incursions. Most of us also know that many such photographs depict places that are often crowded, managed as tourist attractions, where a wild-looking view may only exist in one direction while a raucous crowd may be just outside the frame.
Photographers working in such places, wishing for their images to convey impressions such as wildness, remoteness, or peaceful contemplation, often compose their photographs deliberately to exclude people, roads, and structures that might betray the true nature of the place and the true experience of being in it. Such photographs—even if presented as “unmanipulated,” or as, “straight out of the camera”—may cause viewers to accept as true an impression that is patently false. The Merriam-Webster dictionary uses the phrase, “causing someone to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid,” as a definition for the word, “deception.”
Photographers working in such places, wishing for their images to convey impressions such as wildness, remoteness, or peaceful contemplation, often compose their photographs deliberately to exclude people, roads, and structures that might betray the true nature of the place and the true experience of being in it.
Does it matter that a photograph is not “manipulated,” if the viewer is? In art, the answer is easy: manipulating the impression of the viewer is the very goal of art (at least of most art). But what of the vocal mob who decry manipulation of photographs with such terms as unrealistic, unethical, or immoral, but who have no qualms about deceiving their viewers, so long as some idea of purity of process is held sacrosanct? How is that ethical?
Sometimes you just need a little help. In this case, it was building a shed and who better to recruit than a top landscape photographer! Fortunately, the shed didn't take too long to build and so Joe was available to help me create some video content for you lovely readers out there. We managed to record two such videos in between trips out into the Highlands and the first is from his trip to Cornwall where Joe has some great light and beautiful Spring conditions.
For this issue, we’re slowing down and wandering around with Sarah Marino, a photographer, educator and writer who together with husband Ron Coscorrosa splits her year between home and a nomadic life in a trailer. From the latter, you might expect a portfolio full of iconic American scenery, but over time Sarah has found greater fulfilment through the changing conditions, intimate scenes and delicate details for which she is best known.
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 grew up in a suburb of Denver, Colorado in the United States. Although I did well in school and had a lot of ambition, I didn’t have a strong sense of what I wanted to do with my life and made some poor decisions as a young adult. I was the first person in my family to go to college and initially enrolled at a prestigious engineering school. I succeeded on the academic side but the cutthroat culture of the school was not a good fit. I transferred to another university and graduated with two degrees – one in American history and one in business. I was involved in political advocacy at the time and found my first professional job on a congressional campaign, with the plan of going to law school soon thereafter.
After an intense and mostly unpleasant experience on the campaign, I again realised that highly competitive environments are not a good fit for me and I decided against law school. Feeling rudderless, I applied for a wide range of positions and ended up accepting a job offer at a large nonprofit organisation. Finally, and mostly by accident, I found a culture that was welcoming, collaborative, and mission-oriented – a much better fit. This job led me to a happy, wide-ranging career in Colorado’s nonprofit community, including owning a nonprofit and philanthropy consulting business for almost a decade. While I still work with a few long-term consulting clients, I am getting closer to working as a full-time photographer each year.
A recent rain smoothed out and softened the surface of formerly weathered mud tiles in Death Valley National Park, California.
How did you become interested in photography and what kind of images did you initially set out to make?
About five years into my nonprofit career, I decided that I needed a graduate degree since I wanted to become a CEO and lead a large organisation. I finished a master’s degree in public administration while working full-time in an intense, high pressure job.
During those two stressful years, I tried to get outside for hiking and camping as much as I could because it was my only break. I started taking along a camera and soon realised that photography offered a chance to give my weary brain a rest.
During those two stressful years, I tried to get outside for hiking and camping as much as I could because it was my only break. I started taking along a camera and soon realised that photography offered a chance to give my weary brain a rest. The contemplative process of exploring, observing a landscape, setting up a composition, and crafting a photograph offered a chance for my racing mind to slow down. My initial photographic interests were quite similar to what I focus on now – small scenes, patterns, plants, trees, and an occasional grand landscape.
As I started taking my photography more seriously, I also started experiencing the thrill that can come with external validation. At the time, Marc Adamus was emerging as a driving force in the US landscape photography community. I decided that I wanted to take photos like Marc’s photos, mostly because those types of photos received the most attention. I completed three workshops with Marc and they were instrumental in my development as a photographer. During the first workshop, observing Marc’s adventurous spirit motivated me to build my outdoor abilities and skills (and I learned a lot from observing his creative process). During the final workshop about a year later, I realised that copying Marc’s photos and style offered little in terms of personal satisfaction and I started the slow journey back to focusing on the types of subjects that were among my initial inspirations.
Lightning strikes the mountains behind the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado.
Who (photographers, artists or individuals) or what has most inspired you, or driven you forward in your own development as a photographer?
My interest in nature is the driving force and inspiration that has propelled me forward as a photographer. As I spend more time outside, I find more things that fascinate me. The feelings of discovery, wonder, and awe inspire me to get outside more often, explore the same places more deeply, and experience new places.
While I admire many nature photographers, I actively try to keep the work of others from directly inspiring or heavily influencing my own work. When it comes to photography, I have an impressionable mind, especially with regard to visiting specific places. This led me to partially adopt a practice that photographer Cole Thompson calls photographic celibacy.
As I analysed how I was working, I came to the conclusion that when I studied another photographer’s work, I was imprinting their style onto my conscious and subconscious mind. And then when I photographed a scene, I found myself imitating their style rather than seeing it through my own vision. To overcome this tendency I decided to stop looking at the work of other photographers, as much as was practically possible.~ Cole Thompson
For about a year and a half, I spent very little time looking at nature photography, with the exception of occasionally seeing the photos shared by friends on social media.
I stopped looking at other photographers’ websites and never researched locations by looking at high-quality nature photography of the places I would be visiting. I decided that if I wanted to create photos that are more reflective of me
I stopped looking at other photographers’ websites and never researched locations by looking at high-quality nature photography of the places I would be visiting. I decided that if I wanted to create photos that are more reflective of me, I needed to stop spending so much time allowing other people’s visions to get imprinted on my own. This practice helped clear my mind and gave me the mental space to figure out what I wanted to photograph and how I wanted to photograph it. I cultivated internal motivations and developed significantly more confidence in my work during this period, as well. Now, I spend a bit more time looking at nature photography but still avoid looking at photos of a place that I will be visiting in the near future.
Almost every time I discuss these ideas with other photographers, I get strong disagreement so I know that this practice doesn’t work or isn’t compelling to most people. However, when I consider my biggest breakthroughs and periods of progress with my own photography, this approach was essential.
How have your experiences over the last 10 years changed your perspective on life and the necessity of making a living?
My only sibling passed away after a bicycle accident when I was 14 years old and it was an incredibly traumatising and consequential experience. I can trace most of my ambition and the constant feeling that I need to fit in as much as possible to this experience. This initially manifested as a drive to be a top achiever in school and then morphed into a desire to accelerate professional accomplishments. While this approach produced an impressive resume, it also left me feeling emotionally tattered and constantly stressed. I daydreamed about taking a year off to rest and focus on photography but given my situation at the time and my addiction to work, making it happen seemed impossible.
In 2011, I met my now-husband, Ron Coscorrosa, during a photography trip in southwestern Colorado. Ron had saved up so he could take a sabbatical from his work as a software engineer. While I initially had no romantic interest in Ron, I found his life choices to be instantly inspiring because, at home, I was surrounded by people who only defined success through career-oriented achievements. Getting to know someone who defined success in terms of enjoying life was a revelation and it motivated me to start making different choices. At the time, I had a busy consulting practice and selected projects based on things like prestige and visibility. I started instead of selecting projects that allowed me to work remotely and maintain a flexible schedule. I also went through a long, difficult process of crafting a new identity – one that wasn’t based solely on traditional career success but instead of actually enjoying life.
Getting to know someone who defined success in terms of enjoying life was a revelation and it motivated me to start making different choices. At the time, I had a busy consulting practice and selected projects based on things like prestige and visibility.
Ice formations on a backcountry lake in Colorado's San Juan Mountains.
Once we got married, we significantly reduced our expenses, moved to a small town with a lower cost of living, and figured out a way to travel a lot more (finding remote work, buying an RV, and introducing our cats – successfully! - to travelling). While I make a lot less now and still feel self-induced pressure to cram in as much as possible, I am much happier living a simpler, slower life with more time for travel, being outdoors, and photography.
Across the breadth of your portfolio, which places, projects or themes have the most resonance for you?
This is a hard question to answer because every natural place I have visited resonated with me in some way. Still, I feel most at home in wide-open desert landscapes. Exploring is easy since cross-country travel is allowed in many places. Desert landscapes also seem to hold more surreal surprises than other types of ecosystems. It is exhilarating to head out to a familiar place and not know what we might find since some desert landscapes can change dramatically after flooding or extended periods of dry weather. As noted in 1-star Trip Advisor reviews for places like Death Valley National Park, these landscapes can look like desolate expanses of brown at first glance. With a closer look, however, such places are often full of life and are transformed under different lighting throughout the day. All these things come together to make such landscapes feel magical.
I also spend a lot of time seeking order among chaos. This is probably the most common theme in my photography, as I find the greatest pleasure in finding patterns and repetition in nature. It is fascinating to see patterns repeat in all different kinds of subjects and at all different scales. Finding these subjects, being able to photograph them, and then presenting them in cohesive collections bring me a lot of joy.
Would you like to choose 2-3 of your favourite photographs and tell us a little about why they are special to you?
Edge of Light
The edge of a sand dune catches the last light of the day at a remote dune field (Death Valley National Park, California).
When comparing my black and white work to my colour work, I think my black and white work is a better representation of my interests in and affection for the natural world. I always feel constrained when working with colour photographs and my perfectionist tendencies often get the best of me. For example, I took this photo in the late afternoon. The shaded sand dunes took on an unattractive shade of brown. By portraying this scene in black and white, I could get past my issues with the brown dunes and accentuate the strong contrasts in a way that would look artificial if rendered in colour. This photo remains one of my favourites because of the frill of wind-blown sand – a little detail that makes the photo for me.
Seaweed Patterns
Glistening seaweed in a tidal flat in Iceland
I took this photo across the street from one of Iceland’s busiest photography spots. This is an interesting place to observe photographers because most people get out of their car, walk the short distance to get “the shot,” get back in their car and drive away. It is sad to see how few people explore since the area offers many subjects for photography – tidal flats full of this seaweed, extensive sand ripples, areas of standing water that reflect the surrounding mountains, and a series of pretty cascades all within five minutes of walking from the parking lot. When people ask me about my photography style, I say that I photograph by wandering around and my photos are the result of what I find while on these meanders. This is an example of how easy it is to find subjects just by wandering around. I continue to enjoy this photo because of the repetition of the beautiful, intricate patterns in this seaweed. The slight wetness also adds a bit of a silvery sheen, which I love.
Many photographers work in a solitary manner – at least while in the field. Can I ask you about the dynamic of working jointly with your partner Ron? How much do your vision and style have in common, and how do they differ?
Ron and I are fortunate to have remarkably similar interests when it comes to being in nature, like our mutual affection for desolate landscapes and spending a lot of time seeking out tiny subjects. Since our interests align, we are able to easily choose places to visit that interest us both. If we are visiting a place that requires hiking to access the spot we are planning to photograph, we almost always hike together and then split up once we arrive at our destination. If we are photographing from the car or a parking lot, we sometimes spend a little time exploring together but much more commonly go off in our own direction.
One of the most common questions we are asked is, “Who is the better photographer?” This question is confounding since we never think in these terms, as we are not territorial or competitive at all. If I see something interesting, I am often as excited about sharing it with Ron as I am about photographing it myself.
Fuzzy grasses capture fallen autumn cottonwood leaves in Zion National Park, Utah.
A frilly desert plant at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Florida.
Ron is a carefree person and just enjoys being outside. He never puts pressure on himself and rarely brings expectations to a place. I, on the other hand, sometimes feel the pressure of a moment. This last winter, we made a detour to Zion National Park because of a forecasted snowstorm. I have wanted to photograph this area with a coat of snow for many years and this happened to be the first time that everything aligned for us. The snow was magnificently beautiful but was already melting by the time we were up for sunrise.
I enjoy photography a lot more when I can move at a slow pace and just see what a place has to offer without the pressure of rare conditions or a lot invested in a once-in-a-lifetime trip.
Instead of enjoying the experience, I ended up feeling a lot of pressure and stress because of the uniqueness and fleeting nature of the conditions. Ron, with his more low-key approach, enjoyed it a lot more and is happier with his resulting photographs. This dynamic is why I am most happy showing up at a place without a lot of expectations or a plan I enjoy photography a lot more when I can move at a slow pace and just see what a place has to offer without the pressure of rare conditions or a lot invested in a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Comparatively, Ron can excel in both situations. The more time I spend with him, the better I am getting at adapting my inclinations to his style and it has improved both my photography and experience as a result.
Which bits of gear have survived you ;-) and can most often be found in your camera bag?
A few years ago, I had a rough phase with gear: dropping a lens onto a sidewalk, watching a lens slowly roll out of my bag and down a 30-foot hill before plopping into a cascade, and ruining a camera in heavy waterfall spray. Since then, I have tried to be more careful with my equipment although I do still joke that it is not the smartest move to buy used gear from any nature photographer…
I use Canon equipment including the Canon R mirrorless camera, plus 16-35mm, 24-105mm, 100 mm macro, 70-200mm, and 100-400mm lenses. With the exception of the 70-200mm lens, which I reserve for longer hikes since it is lightweight, I always carry the other four lenses in my camera bag and use them in similar proportions.
Extensive badlands in the early morning in Death Valley National Park, California.
Death Valley National Park’s flooded salt flats, which looked like ice on this cold morning in the desert.
Can you give readers an insight into your workflow from the point of image capture to output?
In the great debate about Photoshopping and “fakery,” I fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum. I want to present my subject at its best and will accordingly fine tune things during processing but also want to stay grounded in reality. For me, the power of nature photography is rooted in the idea that the photographer actually experienced the moment they are presenting. While dropping in a better sky or perking up a mountain might be a fully valid creative choice, learning that the photographer didn’t actually experience the moment of awe as they are presenting it takes away something valuable for me as the viewer. Thus, I want to maintain what I see as authenticity when presenting my work, especially with my colour photography.
Conversely, one of the things I enjoy most about black and white photography is that the starting point itself is a departure from reality. This provides significant creative freedom – a freedom that I more fully realise when processing my black and white photographs. This typically means building significant contrast into the scene, with strong light and dark tones, using levels, curves, and basic luminosity masks as my primary tools in Photoshop. My process also includes emphasising or deemphasising specific elements of a scene through dodging and burning. I use many of the same tools for my colour photography, just with a much lighter hand. I generally want my black and white photos to be visually striking and more aggressive whereas I want my colour photos to convey grace and elegance.
Layers of colourful mountains emerge from a clearing storm in Iceland's rugged and remote interior.
Workshops, done well, are an important source of income for many professionals but is there a danger that their proliferation encourages learners to think that everything they need to know or do can be achieved via this route? We learn a lot from experimenting and failing and following curiosity and resisting the pressure to get it right and show the evidence of this. Where might a balance lie?
The opportunity to learn from an experienced professional in the field can be invaluable and even transformational.
I think the field of nature photography and individual photographers would be better served if more workshop leaders took less of a checklist approach and offered more education on personal expression, how exploration can create unexpected opportunities, how to see beyond the obvious, how to cultivate curiosity, and how to adapt to changing conditions.
Unfortunately, a lot of workshops heavily focus on a checklist approach or have instructors that are too reliant on pre-determined plans or ideas. While this approach can result in a nice collection of photos at the end of a trip, it can also encourage some practices that are contrary to creativity and personal expression – adaptability, flexibility, curiosity, and an orientation toward exploration.
As an illustration, we were photographing coastal scenes one evening in Olympic National Park. We came upon a workshop taught by a well-known photographer. He planted his ten students in one spot, all facing the same direction and photographing the same subject in the same way. There were no clouds behind “the shot” but there were interesting clouds in other directions, plus a lot of other potential scenes and subjects up and down the beach. In watching this scene unfold, I was frustrated for his students that they were being taught such a narrowly focused approach to nature photography. In other settings, I have seen a similar approach to teaching, with workshop leaders talking about how a location always has one composition that is the best or telling students to focus on what they came for (the grand landscape) rather than what catches a student’s eye (some shiny mud patterns).
A good number of students want to be brought to the best locations and instructed on the best compositions. I fully understand that this approach meets the needs of a lot of instructors and their students. However, I think the field of nature photography and individual photographers would be better served if more workshop leaders took less of a checklist approach and offered more education on personal expression, how exploration can create unexpected opportunities, how to see beyond the obvious, how to cultivate curiosity, and how to adapt to changing conditions. The latter helps instil a set of skills that is perpetually useful and can help set a photography student on a more personally fulfilling path in the longer-term.
How would you advise readers who feel that you must have a plan – about where to go and what to photograph?
I always think about a particular story when discussing this topic because it is such a dramatic example of how expectations can eliminate opportunities and stifle creativity. A student came to a friend’s workshop with the goal of photographing waterfalls. The conditions were not conducive to photographing waterfalls but were excellent for forest scenes showcasing fall colours. The student ended up leaving the workshop early because she couldn’t see past her expectations while the rest of the participants enjoyed one of the best autumn seasons in memory. The simple lesson: minimise expectations, keep your plans flexible, and you will likely be happier as a result.
While this advice is simplistic, I think it is a key to finding more satisfaction in nature photography (excluding certain types of photography which require a lot of planning, like night photography). I offer this advice because following it has been transformative for me since I used to be heavily driven by expectations and pre-conceived ideas. Now, I try my best to minimise my expectations for a place, free my mind of specific photos I might want to take and open myself up to what I see one I arrive. I slow down and wander around, photographing the things that catch my eye along the way. I do not always succeed (see: Zion example above) but generally, have found this approach to be much more fulfilling than the alternative.
Many of the people that we’ve interviewed have come to photography through a love of the outdoors and outdoor pursuits but I guess it may now only be a matter of time before someone does admit that they got into photography through what they saw on social media. Visual outputs have always influenced us but they weren’t previously so obviously linked to statistics (popularity and ‘success’, whatever that means). How can we moderate the risk that nature once again becomes something to exploit for our own end? Is photography still a force for good, or are we now becoming part of the problem?
At least in the United States, nature photography has historically been a major force for good. Many conservation campaigns have been propelled forward and achieved success because nature photographers have helped create a compelling visual record of what could be lost without preservation. For previous generations, even photographers without a personal conservation mission often came to photography first through their love of and experience in wild places. This meant that a photographer would learn about Leave No Trace and other wilderness ethics along the way.
Now, many people are coming to nature photography through social media, especially Instagram, which has created the dynamic in which nature is seen as an expendable commodity. The recent poppy bloom in southern California is an illustrative example of how social media encouraged a lot of people without grounding in outdoor ethics to visit a place, treat it with disrespect (sometimes unknowingly and sometimes intentionally), and cause irreparable damage in the process. While it might not seem like a big deal for one person to step off a trail, the cumulative effect of hundreds of people doing so can be significant.
Bright maple leaves and a few green oak leaves stand out among a less vibrant bed of fallen leaves in Zion National Park, Utah.
Increasingly, individual photographers can reach thousands of people with a single post. With reach comes responsibility and the need to acknowledge one’s ability to impact behaviour for the good or bad through our photographs and messaging. Beyond individual photographers, news organizations, commercial brands, and tourism agencies bear a lot of responsibility for these trends, as well. For example, one major camera brand posted many photos of people frolicking in wildflower fields during the same super bloom, often with hashtags inviting people to share their own similar photos. This sends the message that such photos get attention and thus should be imitated if you want to be featured by that brand in the future.
To start addressing this swirl of complex issues and negative impacts, a group of Colorado-based nature photographers came together to create the Nature First movement, starting with 7 Principles that nature photographers can follow to help minimise our collective impact. The 7 Principles include:
Prioritise the well-being of nature over photography
Educate yourself about the places you photograph
Reflect on the possible impact of your actions
Use discretion if sharing locations
Know and follow rules and regulations
Always follow Leave No Trace principles and strive to leave places better than you found them
Actively promote and educate others about these principles
After launching on Earth Day in late April, more than 1,200 photographers from 40 countries have joined the Nature First movement. If your readers would like to learn more about the initiative and join for free, they can visit www.naturefirstphotography.org. Since we spoke about workshop leaders above, I also want to mention that the Nature First organising group offers some specific advice for workshop leaders and those with large audiences since we believe that such individuals have a special responsibility in modelling and educating others about these practices.
Steam from a nearby geothermal feature helps simplify this scene and show off the structure of this tree which has died due to its proximity to an encroaching hot spring. Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
Do you have any particular projects or ambitions for the future or themes that you would like to explore further? A while ago you mentioned that you would like to move from eBooks to producing a printed book.
One of the best things about working as a photographer today is being able to reach an audience without going through traditional gatekeepers. We started self-publishing eBooks in 2013 and eventually added video tutorials. The ability to develop and sell these products has been a key part of being able to transition from my consulting career to making a living through photography. We plan to continue expanding our offerings in the future; this summer, we will be working on three digital portfolios and possibly new video tutorials.
One of my goals is to publish a printed book – either educational or a portfolio book - but it feels like a daunting endeavour at this point. I have started researching and writing a book on composition and have considered approaching some publishers to gauge their interest. Still, I keep on feeling the pullback to self-publishing since I would have more control over the final product and it would likely be more financially viable. Even if the composition book doesn’t turn into a printed book, I still hope to publish something other than digital products in the future.
Is it important to you that other people see your work in print, and if so, how do you choose to print and present your pictures?
Printing has been my single greatest source of frustration with photography and remains the area in which I have the most to learn. I love photography because I find great joy in being outside.
Printing is an extension of the things I do not like about photo processing – it can be highly technical, entails a lot of time in front of a computer, and requires iterations that are expensive and frustrating without an on-site printing set-up.
I go through waves where I almost enjoy photo processing but generally see it as a less appealing part of the digital photography process. Printing is an extension of the things I do not like about photo processing – it can be highly technical, entails a lot of time in front of a computer, and requires iterations that are expensive and frustrating without an on-site printing set-up.
Without regularly sharing prints of my work, I know that I am missing out on a critical part of the photography process. We recently purchased a large format printer and one of my primary goals for this year is to significantly increase my knowledge of fine art printing and get to the point where I can confidently print any of my photographs.
A misty morning in Mount Rainier National Park.
If you had to take a break from all things photographic for a week, what would you end up doing? What other hobbies or interests do you have?
My main interests beyond photography include cooking and hiking, often while socializing with friends and family. I have slowly perfected my ability to bake a loaf of artisan bread, can now make an almost perfect pistachio gelato and have significantly expanded my ability to cook a good vegetarian meal from a broad range of worldwide cuisines. A few years ago, we moved from urban Denver to a town of about 1,000 people in southwestern Colorado so we spend a lot of time exploring this area. We have been choosing a region each summer and then hiking as many trails as we can, often without camera gear.
And finally, is there someone whose photography you enjoy – perhaps someone that we may not have come across - and whose work you think we should feature in a future issue? They can be amateur or professional.
Michele Sons. While I really enjoy Michele’s more traditional nature photography, as she has a talent for creating photographs that capture the elegance and grace of the places she visits, I find her Feminine Landscape series to be especially well done.
Thank you, Sarah. It’s been great to catch up with you.
If you’d like to see more of Sarah’s images, you’ll find her portfolio at https://www.naturephotoguides.com; she’s also on Instagram. You can read the blog post that Sarah wrote about minimising the impact of your photography here.
An up-close look at a Joshua tree in Joshua Tree National Park, California.
Glistening seaweed in a tidal flat in Iceland
The edge of a sand dune catches the last light of the day at a remote dune field (Death Valley National Park, California).
Steam from a nearby geothermal feature helps simplify this scene and show off the structure of this tree which has died due to its proximity to an encroaching hot spring. Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
A small waterfall flowing through moss-covered rocks in Iceland.
A high-up view of the amphitheater surrounding a waterfall in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge. The area surrounding this waterfall was heavily damaged in 2017 due to a massive wildfire started by careless people playing with fireworks.
A recent rain smoothed out and softened the surface of formerly weathered mud tiles in Death Valley National Park, California.
Colourful rocks below textured ice in winter in Zion National Park, Utah.
A tiny section of pretty moss growing on a downed tree in Olympic National Park, Washington.
A misty morning in Mount Rainier National Park.
Layers of colourful mountains emerge from a clearing storm in Iceland’s rugged and remote interior.
Lightning strikes the mountains behind the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado.
A frilly desert plant at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Florida.
Ice formations on a backcountry lake in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains.
Bright maple leaves and a few green oak leaves stand out among a less vibrant bed of fallen leaves in Zion National Park, Utah.
Fuzzy grasses capture fallen autumn cottonwood leaves in Zion National Park, Utah.
Extensive badlands in the early morning in Death Valley National Park, California.
Death Valley National Park’s flooded salt flats, which looked like ice on this cold morning in the desert.
Dappled light travels across a dense tropical forest on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
Gibraltar was a place I wasn’t overly familiar with, aside from the cultural icons we all associate with the place from the stories of others; Barbary Apes, Brits abroad, red post boxes and telephones boxes and the vernacular. I didn’t go to Gibraltar intending on producing a body of photographic work, it was an incidental meeting, but it has always been the concept of place which dominates the focus of my work.
A couple of years ago my fiancé and I went to visit a friend in neighbouring Spain, and we flew into Gibraltar as this was the closest airport. We’d heard horror stories of the landings there due to the Rock and the Strait and how this impacted upon the weather. We needn’t have worried, the landing was fine, but the Rock gave for a rather imposing and monumental greeting, its north face stands prominent next to the airport as if to assert its presence to you as soon as your feet touch the tarmac. From that point on I was captivated. We hadn’t planned on visiting Gibraltar as part of our trip, it was acting merely as a transitory place, somewhere to pass through. Looking back now, it’s hard to understand how I could have been so dismissive, but I didn’t know then what I do now.
It is quite difficult to describe the oddness of being in a foreign country, with my Euros, suntan lotion, travel insurance and Mediterranean climate to then drive twenty minutes along the coast, park our car and walk back into the UK. The familiar sights of Morrisons supermarket, Debenhams department store and the Union Jack flag anchor you right back at home, but there is something which disrupts that anchor from fully settling, such as the Gibraltarian flag alongside the Union Jack, the warm and balmy climate, the sound of locals conversating in their local dialect of Llanitos (a rather beautiful linguistic blend of cultural influences such as Spanish and Jewish) and the Spanish street names. It is an eloquent synthesis of those who have come and gone over time as a result of its military history, as well as those who move back and forth across its border with Spain every day for work and pleasure.
The familiar sights of Morrisons supermarket, Debenhams department store and the Union Jack flag anchor you right back at home, but there is something which disrupts that anchor from fully settling, such as the Gibraltarian flag alongside the Union Jack, the warm and balmy climate, the sound of locals conversating in their local dialect of Llanitos
Owing to its land border with Spain, it is no surprise that families are very commonly a mix of Gibraltarian, British and Spanish. A tight-knit residential community of just under 33,000 at the last count in 2012, and an area which measures approximately 2.6 square miles it is a place where people know each other well and are in close proximity. When General Franco closed the border in 1969 in an attempt to strangle the Gibraltarian economy, the family relationships were tested and owing to the ties with neighbouring Spanish communities, families of mixed cultures were forced to choose which side of the frontier to remain on when it closed, either detached from their families and friends or from their places of work. Franco’s attempts to bring the place to its knees was not successful and his actions only solidified the bond within the community, but the scars and trauma from that period of time still remain to the point where some have refused to cross the frontier since it reopened in the early 1980’s.
On my day trip to Gibraltar on that first visit, my initial observations were that it was very much a political landscape. Evidence of the multitude of battles and siege attempts is embedded in the land and terrain. We set about immersing ourselves in the popular tourist attractions, but I was more intrigued by everything other than these aspects. I wanted to unearth the parts of Gibraltar which we may not already know, and which offer an additional dimension to the place.
When I returned back home to mainland UK my interest didn’t fade. I spent a considerable amount of time doing research into Gibraltar whilst planning a return trip. I didn’t have a pre-conceived basis for a project, I always prefer to be in the place and to document what I see and what interests me and allow the narrative to unearth through the images. All I knew at this stage was that I was very interested in the place and wanted to be better informed before I returned to explore further.
Upon my return to Gibraltar some six months later I set about exploring the peninsula and chose to do this all on foot. I find it a much better way for me to absorb my surroundings and Gibraltar is not so big that this is too much of a challenge, or at least I thought! The evening of my arrival a storm arrived which demonstrated the ferocity of the infamous Easterly wind across the Strait. I could lean into it at times and it would support my full body weight. Walking and photographing with these weather conditions was a real challenge but I was on a tight timescale with a logistical plan in place to cover as much ground as I could whilst I was there and so hiding in the hotel was not an option; instead, I considered it part of the experience and embraced it.
Tunnel Exit
The strong winds lasted for 3 days but eventually gave way to bright sunshine and warmer temperatures, but this posed its own challenges as well. It was in this direct and intense sun that we hiked to the summit of the rock along roads with gradients so steep I felt I would fall backwards if I stopped. Much to my amazement, locals were running and cycling up these same roads. I watched them with an immense amount of respect and disbelief. I was lucky enough to have my fiancé with me as my support and assistant for this trip and we managed to hike the full height of 1,398ft with two full camera kits on our backs. I carried a digital and 35mm kit and my fiancé carried the large format kit. It was brutal and challenging, but very much worth the effort. There is a route you can take known as the Med Steps but the locals felt this would be unsafe with our equipment on our backs and so advised us against this and we listened to them, after all, they knew this place a great deal better than we did.
When reviewing the imagery from my trips so far, I became overwhelmingly interested in the information that the landscape held within it, what it could reveal. I had captured dynamite blast scars in the walls of the rock and discovered that there is a vast network of tunnels inside the rock for defence purposes which spanned from the Great Siege of 1779 through to the Cold War era.
When reviewing the imagery from my trips so far, I became overwhelmingly interested in the information that the landscape held within it, what it could reveal. I had captured dynamite blast scars in the walls of the rock and discovered that there is a vast network of tunnels inside the rock for defence purposes which spanned from the Great Siege of 1779 through to the Cold War era. The World War Two tunnelling activity saw the network extended from around 7 miles to 25 miles and even contained a five-storey hospital and the military occupants had to pass messages by motorbike.
Blast Scar
Europa Waterfall
Through the imagery, I had taken and through the research and information I was able to find, my project and the narrative really started to lean towards an interest in how the landscape had been utilised and shaped for the occupation of the peninsula and the subsequent defence of it. It was a constant jutting together of a natural force and a manmade force. The terrain also revealed to me the challenges in terms of water management and flow and how this also played into the natural forces and how our determination to occupy the peninsula meant finding ways to control this flow. There are no lakes or rivers in Gibraltar and so historically drinking water was obtained by water catchment on the slopes of the rock in addition to wells.
The Eastern side of the rock, owing to its flat surface, had at one point been covered in corrugated metal sheeting to catch rainfall as a water source but was to the demise of the plant life and wildlife which called it home. This area of the rock has now been restored and brought back to its former state, but remnants of this metal sheeting can still be seen today. Rainfall catchment soon became insufficient to support a quickly expanding population and so a desalination plant was formed, and the vast reserve tanks are contained within the rock. The waste product from this is sent back out to sea via a waterfall known as Europa Waterfall and despite being a manmade feature, appears entirely natural. The rock itself plays host to huge rooms of computer servers, taking advantage of the cooler temperatures and low fire risk and has more recently started to be used for wine storage but, it also offers spaces within it which are formed naturally such as St. Michaels Cave which provides us with a visual of how nature forms its spaces at a much slower pace and with a Cathedral-like finesse which far exceeds the brutal blasts of dynamite.
Forbes Quarry
The more significant discovery for me was surrounding the traces of the Neanderthals found in Gibraltar. At the back of an apartment, block carpark was a quarry by the name of Forbes Quarry. It was the site where a full adult Neanderthal skull was found in 1848 and was the first ever found. Traces of their lives were discovered in Gorham’s Cave where historic etchings were also uncovered. The quarry is now fenced off due to rockfall risk and is not accessible to the public. I felt profound sadness that this site was not able to be celebrated for its significance, it told us so much about ourselves, who we are and where we came from. This, for me, really underpinned the importance of what our landscapes can provide us with in terms of information, traces, remnants and scars. I hope at some point this site is given the status it deserves.
The longer-term goals for the project are that it is still ongoing, and I will continue to return to Gibraltar to conversate with its landscapes. There is still so much for it to reveal and this will always hold my interest. I have begun to exhibit some of the work this year and will be looking to expand on this in the near future.
Wearing a dress and high-heeled boots, I grabbed my camera, jumped in my truck, and took off down the street. I could no longer bear to watch the low clouds wrap around the mountains and the shadows dance across the sand dunes from my hotel room in Death Valley National Park in California. I had been waiting for a group of workshop participants to arrive but had just received a text message saying they were delayed in Las Vegas. I had time to chase the light. I had to hurry. The storm was clearing.
After turning up a dirt side road, I started making images. First, I made a tight vertical composition to add visual tension to what was already a dramatic scene. I did a little dance, waving my arms and hips from side to side, in pure delight. I waited. The light changed. I made a different image, a horizontal one with extra sky to emphasise the isolation of a distant peak shrouded in fog. I danced. I waited. The light changed again. I made 72 frames in a half hour during a blissful spell I didn’t expect to have.
My workshop participants finally arrived, and I started the workshop the same way I start most of my sessions, with an introductory presentation encouraging participants to connect with the landscape in their own way. As usual, I opened with my definition of what I believed a good photograph was: “An outward expression of what an individual photographer deemed meaningful enough to notice.”
As usual, I opened with my definition of what I believed a good photograph was: “An outward expression of what an individual photographer deemed meaningful enough to notice.”
I ran through key concepts like the Wallas Creative Model, conceptual blending, pareidolia, and metaphorical associations (e.g., “What else is it?”) hoping to trigger personal responses to scenes and subjects. We played an improv game to not only help get the creative juices flowing but to also get into the mindset of taking the current situation into account and building an orderly response from chaos—something we face when photographing nature.
During the next four days, we practised these ideas and techniques to achieve more deliberate, contemplative photographs in various locations, some iconic and some off the beaten path. The first goal of our outings was to simply enjoy and appreciate our surroundings. Then, if a scene moved the participants to make an image, we’d approach it with more engagement and less aimless spraying-and-praying (taking a bunch of photos and praying, usually at home while sitting in front of the computer, one turned out well); to go beyond the “I-was-here” snapshot that thousands, if not millions, of people, already had captured; and to acknowledge that an expressive photograph originates from the mind of a photographer and incorporates weather, light, and location but does not depend upon them. The act of photographing would then be a deliberate one, one resulting from an individually-defined deeper relationship with a place.
This photograph appears with the introduction to TJC’s book ‘Dreaming The Gokstadt’, (and if I wildly paraphrase) in which I think he describes the difference between elemental landscape that demands conventional immediacy, to catch a cloud, a ray of sun perhaps, against landscape outside of a conventional chronology of the moment, where the necessity is to gaze and absorb the landscape and to make a photograph to reflect this moment of contemplation.
At least that is what I get out of reading his introduction, that gazing is a way of seeing without expectations, and where composition and meaning are revealed by the place itself in gazing past the immediacy of the place.
‘Snowbird’ was made at Stanton Moor in Derbyshire, and I was there that very day as a student on a field trip organised while TJC was a visiting lecturer at Sheffield School of Art and Design, now Sheffield Hallam University. Just out of the minibus we students were trudging through the snow probably wondering how far we had to walk to get away from each other when I swear TJC let out an exclamation and encouraged everybody to ‘just move along’ while he set up his camera. To quell the general bemusement he had to show us all what he’d seen, and yes, it was ‘Snowbird’. So much for gazing and contemplation Tom, it was a photojournalists reaction to an event! But boy-oh-boy did it get me thinking about the landscape in a different way from that day to this.
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!
These images represent an ongoing project exploring the River Darent in Kent. The Darent is an ancient chalk stream that emerges at Greensand Ridge in Westerham. After passing through the Darent Valley, it eventually joins the Thames at Dartford. Whilst over the centuries, there has been a human imperative to interfere with the flow (through building bridges and watermills, etc.), only limited control over its power is ever achieved. In contrast with these infrastructural efforts, the flow of the river remains awesome and at times terrifying.
I have excluded any reference to context or scale within these images to make them generically representative of the flows that have supported life on earth since the beginning of time. Although the project is focused on a particular geographical location, I hope that the images of the river’s natural force take on a more metaphorical meaning, reminding us of our individual and collective journeys.
For many years I've been fascinated by country churches. They are some of our oldest buildings and are everywhere - there's always a list of those that I want to visit and photograph. Interiors I usually photograph in colour but I often convert those images to monochrome. Exteriors I photograph using a camera converted to capture infrared (830nm for the technically minded).
I find that infrared is the right medium to show the beauty of them and also adds an air of mystery. Many years ago I used infrared film to photograph churches but I find digital infrared much more satisfying in that, using Elements and Nik software, it enables me to produce the images that I want. many country churches are in villages but some stand apart from their associated villages, surrounded by countryside - hence "Churches in the Landscape".
Visiting the Isle of Arran last year on a lone photo trip, I enjoyed the sea and the hills but found my highlight at dawn two miles down the coast from my hotel at Corrie. Horizontal slabs of grey and red sandstone were washed by the retreating tide, leaving a miniature landscape of ridges and pools, ambiguous in shape and scale.
These are photographs taken over twelve hours during a brief visit to the Moroccan end of the Saharan Great Sand Sea. There were ideas and inspiration everywhere and show both the cool and warmth of late and early sun. We were just far enough into the dunes to forget that the hotel and my lovely bathroom were only a half hour camel ride away!
It’s interesting how circumstances can combine such that even if you have what others might consider to be iconic landscapes on your doorstep, your photographic curiosity takes you away from the obvious through a choice of composition, photographic technique, and/or print processes. Stuart Clook’s work mixes places beloved by 21st century filmmakers, audiences and adventurers with 19th century photographic and printing processes, exploring the way that colour can influence perception and deliberately making room for error and discovery. We had a taste of Stuart’s ‘Precious Landscapes’ for our subscriber’s 4x4 portfolio feature back in 2017 and as he prepares for his first solo exhibition of the work, we thought it would be good to find out more.
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 grew up and went to school in Llangollen, North Wales and from an early age, my interest and passion was fly fishing for trout and salmon in the local rivers and lakes. At 15 and 16 I represented Wales in the junior fly fishing team and had no thoughts for photography. I left school at 16 with a scholarship to go to Manchester and study Polymer Science and then continued my studies in London for a further three years before returning to North Wales to work as a material scientist in a new research facility for BICC cables. Seven years later, and a decision to go find some adventure, I decided to move to New Zealand. I have worked in various Manufacturing and Operations management roles for the past 25 years and now look after quality and regulatory affairs for a medical device company that designs and manufactures mobility equipment for adults and children with physical and mental disabilities.
How did you first become interested in photography and what kind of images did you initially set out to make?
I didn’t pick up a camera until moving to NZ, and then only as a way to record my fishing and tramping adventures using a disposable waterproof camera that took 24 pictures. Very much a point, shoot and wind on. I would drop it off at the local camera store and pick up my negatives and prints a week later. My photographs of smiling faces and big fish were just that and were great for keeping memories and for bragging at the local fishing club but I was never really satisfied with my other photographs of the rivers, valleys and incredible scenery that I was fishing and camping in. Coming from a similar size country with some 55 million people to one with 3.6 million and with only a third of those living on the South Island the landscape is huge in comparison.
Largely untracked and with remote and wilderness areas it was breathtaking, and it wasn't long before I bought my first proper camera, a Nikon F60.
Largely untracked and with remote and wilderness areas it was breathtaking, and it wasn't long before I bought my first proper camera, a Nikon F60. That's how it all began and over the next several years the fishing trips turned into photography trips, the photography improved and the landscape images I was printing onto canvas and fine art inkjet papers were starting to sell through a local gallery which helped fill the petrol tank and kept the ink and paper flowing through my printer.
What’s your local area like and which places are you drawn back to, time and again?
I live about 20 minutes out of Christchurch over the Port Hills at the top of Lyttelton Harbour on Banks Peninsula. Banks Peninsula is the remains of two long extinct volcanoes that have been claimed by the sea resulting in two large harbours with numerous bays and coves. I enjoy photographing along the coastal tracks and on the tops between the bays where there are what remains of native bush and totora forests that had not been totally cleared by the early European settlers. An hour’s drive away is the Southern Alps, a mountain chain that runs the length of the South Island. Here there are beech forests and alpine meadows in the valleys and rivers and lakes that drain the year round snow covered mountains. I make many day trips into the mountains exploring new ground and revisiting familiar places at different times of the year. I especially enjoy making longer trips in the autumn and winter when the light is not as harsh as in summer and when there is a good chance of a gathering or clearing storm.
What changes have you observed – for good or bad – as film and social media have popularised the landscapes of New Zealand?
I have been in NZ for 25 years and yes the numbers of visitors has increased significantly in that time. I don’t see it as a bad thing; the dollars the visitors bring with them are a big part of our economy and our walking tracks and back country huts are being renovated and improved as a result for the enjoyment of all us, locals and visitors alike. NZ’s South Island is still largely unpopulated and with the extremes of our geography there are not many roads to get around on, hence it can be quite crowded and busy and is why you see a large number of images on social media that are of the same scenes and locations. Recent films like the Lord of the Rings and The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe have only further raised the number of visitors coming and as a result there are visitors and tour groups jumping from one film location to the next and it is not uncommon to have dozens of tripods and cameras clicking during peak times in the iconic locations and roadside rest areas. This does of course make it difficult if not impossible to make a unique photograph of the scene without being influenced by those you see on social media or in magazines and is actually one of reasons I started to look at other ways to make my photographs and particularly in the printing of them.
One of the images you have chosen for this interview is of the Wanaka tree and is a good example of this. This tree has been photographed thousands if not millions of times and I can hear my kiwi friends groaning at ‘not another Wanaka tree’ image. This photograph was taken several years ago when I first started to explore alternative printing techniques and it really helped to open my eyes to what is possible.
This is a cyanotype print that has been bleached and then re-toned using several exposures of watercolour pigment using the gum bichromate process. A work of labour, yes, but tremendously satisfying when it comes off.
This is a cyanotype print that has been bleached and then re-toned using several exposures of watercolour pigment using the gum bichromate process. A work of labour, yes, but tremendously satisfying when it comes off. To get to the final print that you see here took many failures over several weeks before I had a print I was happy with and it was this process of making prints that I started to fall in love with as much as working with the camera in the field.
Who (photographers, artists or individuals) or what has most inspired you, or driven you forward in your own development as a photographer?
The artist and writer Austin Kleon writing on how to be more creative published a book titled ‘Steal Like an Artist’ and - along with a quote I have written up on a ‘post it’ note above my desk from the film director Jean Luc Goddard, who in a response to criticism he received for a new film said “it’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to” - it is very much my philosophy when looking for inspiration and new ideas. I will dive down all sorts of rabbit holes, be it in camera techniques and gadgets, to variations in the printing processes I am using, to completely new printing processes.
When I first started making ‘serious’ pictures I would find ideas and inspiration in the photography and art books and magazines in the local library. A couple of photographers that were a great inspiration at the time were Peter Eastway, Andris Apse and Craig Potton who set a very high standard to aim for in terms of composition and technical excellence.
My appetite though to take my photography to a new place led me to explore the historical and alternative printing processes. The change from chasing so-called technical perfection and the precise nature of digital processing and printing, to a hands’ on and often long process of nurturing a print through successive printing exposures and development, to finally holding something that has a unique beauty is extremely satisfying.
I’m learning about and making full use of what’s called the photographic syntax. This is not just the choices made with the camera as to the subject, composition, lighting, contrast, colour, etc., but how the physical print materials and tools influence the final result. For example, how the choice of paper and texture affect the way the light reflects off the print surface and the type of brush used to coat the paper. I am discovering a whole new way to help me express what I see and feel.
I’m also very much in awe of the photographers from the early years of photography when much was unknown, and how experimentation and mistakes led to new discoveries.
I’m also very much in awe of the photographers from the early years of photography when much was unknown, and how experimentation and mistakes led to new discoveries. My influences include the style of the Pictorialist photographers of the late 19th and early 20th century and the many artists today using these same processes. Photographers such Robert Demachy, Imogen Cunningham and today Peter Liepke with his ‘Above and Beyond’ series of gum bichromate prints, Diane Bloomfield’s gum over cyanotype prints and Beth Moon’s sublime platinum prints also come to mind. I study how they use their cameras and how they make prints that are full of atmosphere and mood. I have to mention Edward Steichen as well, and his use of combination printing of gum bichromate with cyanotype and platinum is something I work with quite a lot in my current work. One of my all-time favourites is his 1904 print of the Flatiron building in New York.
Have there been any especially decisive moments for you or has anything changed your relationship with the camera, or your approach to photography, over time?
A key decisive moment in my printing has been to let go of perfection which was a hangover from my digital processing and printing days. I spent far too long when I began using these Alternative processes in making step wedges trying to achieve a ‘perfect’ calibration between my digital negative and the final print. Making my first prints with a ‘good enough’ calibration and feeling my skin tingle as the image appeared through the developer was all I needed to give up on step wedges and start making real prints.
Another ‘ah-ha’ moment has come recently with the move to using a medium format and a large format film camera. The isolation from the world when using a dark cloth or waist level viewfinder has made an enormous difference to my composition. You become completely absorbed in the process, much more so than when viewing a scene through a DSLR viewfinder. These are also fully manual cameras and I really enjoy the problem solving and mental gymnastics that I go through, working back and forth between how I think I will print the image and working out the exposure I need using an old Minolta spot meter. It doesn’t always work out as intended but that again is all part of the enjoyment of it to me.
Would you like to choose 2-3 favourite photographs from your own portfolio and tell us a little about why they are special to you?
Well this is really hard, but if I look back over the last several years then these prints are very much like mile markers in my understanding of how to use them in finding my “voice”
Marching trees
My first really satisfying print using the style of the Tonalist painters and selecting a colour to help create a mood in a print.
I was exploring the bottom of the South Island in my small camper van in late winter. The photography had been good and I was pleased with several images I had been able to capture. On my last full day, the weather had turned pretty foul with a full on southern storm and knowing it would be another day at least before it started to clear I decide to head for home. A few hours later I could see on the distant horizon a series of pine trees along a ridgeline and they looked very much like they were following each other. As I drove closer, I knew I had to find somewhere to stop and see if could make something of them. I ended going up and down a 400m stretch of road several times before finding a farmer’s gate that provided just enough room to get off the highway. As it was raining heavily I decided to set up the tripod in the back of the camper van and open the sliding door on the side of the van. With my longest lens at 200mm and timing my exposures in between gaps in the traffic to minimise vibration, I made three or four exposures. On returning home and processing them through Lightroom and Photoshop as normal I then used a new technique that I had come across for making duotones for the gum bichromate process. This is similar to split toning where you can add a different colour hue to the warm and cool tones in the image. This is done by using the channels function in PS to split the RGB image into it's component Red, Green and Blue greyscale separations. The Red separation is used to make a digital negative for the cooler tones for printing with platinum and the warmer tones are printed using yellow pigments and the gum bichromate process with a digital negative made from combining the Green and Blue separations.
The final print is a platinum print with several layers of gum printed in registration over the platinum to build up the colour and depth in the image. I also used a yellow pigment that contains mica in the last couple of gum layers so that as you view the print the specular highlights from the mica bring the print to ‘life’.
Icy grasp
I have lots of failures in what I do and this series of prints and this one, in particular, is a reminder to me that persistence can pay off in the end.
This is a platinum print on vellum with silver leaf gilded onto the back of the vellum. The image is of a small stream in mid-winter that makes its way down a scree slope towards the main river a km away in Canterbury’s High Country. The stream is no more than 5 or 6ft across and at its deepest maybe only 12 inches, and I could see that it was freezing at night and thawing during the day depending on how warm it got. This cycle must have been going on for several days or longer and the resulting ice patterns were like windows into the depths of the icy world below. I had my Bronica with me and with its square frame I had a ball and used up a whole roll of film making 12 exposures in all.
Printing onto vellum (which by the way is made from plant materials, not the traditional animal skins) is technically challenging and even now I never quite know if it’s going to work. As soon as you apply the liquid platinum salts to the vellum it starts to buckle and roll up like a scroll. I have made many experiments and explored dozens of different vellums in trying to learn how to control and tame the vellum to make a print that I was happy with. After developing and drying the platinum print and once I have it somewhat flat again I then using guilder’s size to apply the silver or gold leaf to the back of the print. When this is then varnished the vellum becomes translucent allowing the silver leaf to shine through the lighter tones in the print and combined with the unevenness in the vellum surface it creates a three dimensional feel to the print.
Andalusia
The image is from our holiday though Spain in 2017 with my wife Louise. The small barn was seen from a long way off across the valley in the evening and by the time I got back to the location the following day it was already well over 40degC and with a 200mm lens I made a couple of exposures. Several weeks later after getting back home I was ready to print and knew that I should use palladium only in the print and that with the right paper humidly during exposure I should get a warm toned print, perfect for how I remembered the day. The straight palladium print was very nice but by adding a gum print over the top and adjusting the ratio of pigment, gum, dichromate and exposure I could add additional depth and texture to the darker tones of the trees on the ridgeline and the shadows in the ploughed fields. This was perhaps one of my first successful uses of the gum process to target specific tones in the print to add depth and ‘richness’. I find the gum process to be one of the most creative processes I can use in my printing.
Which cameras and lenses do you like to use? Do you have a favourite format or film?
Up to around 2 to 3 years ago, I was using a Nikon D800e and my go to lenses were a 24mm and a 45mm tilt-shift and an 80-200mm f2.8 zoom lens. Today I am using film almost exclusively and I find the whole experience totally consuming and although frustrating at times it is highly rewarding and satisfying.
The two cameras I use today are a Bronica S2 from the early 1960s for which I have 3 lenses; a wide, normal and long lens equivalent to 28, 50 and 110mm on a full frame sensor. It produces a square format 6x6cm negative and I love it. If I want to, I can put the main subject of the scene in the centre and use the symmetry of frame to help with my composition to focus the viewers’ attention and not worry about thirds or golden circles etc. I have earlier this year bought a 4x5 Chamonix large format camera. A gorgeous camera made of teak, aluminium alloy and carbon fibre and also the lightest camera I have ever owned. It has asymmetrical movements on the rear standard which along with its reasonable price was the main reason I chose it. These movements make it a lot easier and quicker to control depth of field in the image, particularly if I’m in a hurry when the light is changing, and although I have only been out with it half a dozen times so far I am really enjoying getting to know it.
Film wise I only use black and white film and mostly Ilford’s Delta 100 due to its low reciprocity which helps keep my exposure times to a minimum.
How popular are analogue and alternate processes in New Zealand?
Film photography like most everywhere is having a resurgence, particularly among the younger generation. We have a couple of new film labs popping up in our two largest cities and we even have a small group of dedicated enthusiasts raising funds to set up a community darkroom in Queenstown. As far the alternative or historical processes go, I would say they are still very much off the beaten track and perhaps seen as a little eccentric.
There are a handful of photographers using wet plate processes for portraiture and I know of a couple of artists through social media working with cyanotype, lumigrams and gum bichromate.
There are a handful of photographers using wet plate processes for portraiture and I know of a couple of artists through social media working with cyanotype, lumigrams and gum bichromate.
I provide a platinum printing service to other photographers and artists and I have also started delivering workshops in the last nine months in using digital negatives with the cyanotype and platinum process so there are a small but growing group of fellow kiwi practitioners.
For readers who are not familiar with alternate processes, can you give them an idea of what they offer and what is involved?
The majority of the alternative processes are contact printing processes that use a negative of the image that is the same size as the final print. Most people use Photoshop to make the ‘digital negative’ and print it onto an inkjet transparency or photo paper using an Epson or Canon printer. Depending on your chosen process the light sensitive chemicals are measured out and mixed following a recipe. This is then brushed onto your chosen paper or substrate and allowed to dry in the dark. The digital negative is then placed on top of the dried sensitised paper and held tightly together using a sheet of glass and clamps and exposed to UV light, either by placing it outside on a sunny day or inside using UV lamps. Once the paper has been exposed it is then developed, washed and allowed to dry.
What would you suggest to those who would like to try some of these processes but are put off by their perceived complexity or cost?
These processes are not necessarily expensive; yes if you go straight to Platinum and Palladium then these are at the expensive end of the spectrum but there are many processes like Gum bichromate, Cyanotype, Kallitype and Salt printing that use very inexpensive materials.
To really get a good understanding of what is involved and to see if it is for you with a minimum of the cost I would strongly recommend a workshop. This will not only save you money, but considerable time and you will come away with a good understanding of what is involved and several finished prints to review and hopefully enjoy when you return home. If you are handy with some basic tools you can make a lot of the equipment yourself. For the UV exposure unit, you can find DIY plans on the internet or like me find a second hand sun tanning bed in an online auction for no more than the cost of a Sunday lunch.
You refer to the fact that with the techniques that you use, results are never guaranteed. Is the margin for error from something that you can’t wholly control and the chance of serendipity part of their appeal to you?
I love the fact that it doesn’t always go to plan. It’s a big part of the creative process for me and makes each print unique. I’m also working with chemistry that is affected by many variables, for example, our water at home comes from a volcanic spring about 1km up the valley and it can change in the level of iron and calcium impurities which interfere with some of the processes I use. If it’s really bad, particularly if I am making cyanotype prints, I will collect water in several 25 litre tanks from the nearest petrol garage in Christchurch for processing my prints. Finding solutions to problems can often take me in different directions.
I love the fact that it doesn’t always go to plan. It’s a big part of the creative process for me and makes each print unique.
You have a couple of forthcoming exhibitions, including a solo exhibition. What work will you be showing for these and where can people see your prints?
Yes, I’m very excited and yet full of dread and self-doubt at the same time. These are my first shows on my own and I will be exhibiting prints from the last couple of years. The first one is in July at Chambers Art Gallery in Christchurch and then in September and October at Gold Street Studios which is about an hour north of Melbourne, Australia. These will all be New Zealand landscapes printed in platinum/palladium, cyanotype and gum bichromate. I also have an exhibition planned for July next year at Photospace Gallery in Wellington where I am also planning to run a couple of print workshops to accompany the exhibition.
Do you have any particular projects or ambitions for the future or themes that you would like to explore further?
My vellum prints are a larger body of work that is slowly coming together. Finding the right image and conditions means it will be one of those projects that will likely keep running in the background.
My vellum prints are a larger body of work that is slowly coming together. Finding the right image and conditions means it will be one of those projects that will likely keep running in the background.
With my new 4x5 camera and a 10-inch enlarger that I was very kindly given last year, I’m starting to explore silver gelatin printing and after taking a Mordancage workshop late last year with Elizabeth Opalenik I’m currently experimenting with the process for my landscape images. Mordancage is a bleach and etching process that lifts the silver emulsion from the shadow areas in a traditional darkroom silver gelatin print to create veils which can be removed or rearranged before redeveloping to create a print that is quite unique and one of a kind.
If you had to take a break from all things photographic for a week, what would you end up doing?
I haven’t been fishing for probably three years and have recently promised an old friend that this season coming he needs to come and rescue me from my garage darkroom and go bush.
And finally, is there someone whose photography you enjoy – perhaps someone that we may not have come across - and whose work you think we should feature in a future issue? They can be amateur or professional.
Well, this is really a hard one as there many great landscape photographers. Looking at my bookcase I see several Joe Cornish and David Ward’s but I also see New Zealand’s Andris Apse and Craig Potton, two great traditional NZ landscape photographers. Andris goes to enormous lengths and planning to photograph the NZ wilderness and will have many stories to tell you. For someone a little more contemporary I’m sure you will also enjoy viewing and reading Tony Bridge’s insights and landscape photography.
Thank you, Stuart, and good luck with the exhibitions.
Stuart will be showing ‘Precious Landscapes’ at the Chambers Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand from 9 – 27 July 2019, and at the Gold Street Studios in Victoria, Australia, between 28 August and 27 October 2019.
If you’d like to see more of Stuart’s work, his website can be found at http://www.labrettophotography.com/
In the start of a hopefully regular series, we are taking advantage of the many passing photographers by bribing them into the house with tea and biscuits in return for a quick chat about photography. In the first edition, we're talking to Paula Pell-Johnson of Linhof Studio and our own Joe Cornish where we cover ground from megapixels to film and some of the new products that Paula is excited about in the coming months. One of these 'interesting' new products is the Hasselblad CFV II 50C.
As a drop-in back for old Hasselblad medium format cameras, it's a little bit interesting but once you introduce the tiny 907x body adapter which will take X1D lenses and with converters for Hasselblad mount (and via other converters to Mamiya, Bronica, LF lenses, large image circle 35mm lenses, etc) we have a system that is incredibly flexible. The final inclusion of an electronic shutter means you could mount it to a coconut and use it as an organic pinhole camera if you really wanted! It's the first really flexible MF back which should appear at a top-end DSLR price. We hope to get our hands on one in the coming months.
We should apologise for the slightly less than perfect sound. The recording was made last-minute via our Macbook microphone. Future instalments of "Passing Through" will hopefully sound a little better.
Are you passing through Glencoe in the coming weeks or months? Why not pop in for a cuppa tea and a catch up? We're looking for other stories from our community, whether it's talking about a trip, a project, some of your favourite images. Drop us a line and we will get in touch!
I remember the feeling of proud excitement as I walked past the headmaster’s office and first spotted a picture of mine stuck to the wall with 4 drawing pins. It was an 8”x 8” picture in a rather tatty mount, the type that used to get sent with an enlargement from Trueprint at the time. I had won the school photo competition and it was the first time I had seen my work exhibited in public.
The picture was of a sunset taken on a school trip to Blackgang Chine in the Isle of Wight. It was shot on a Kodak Instamatic that my sister’s boyfriend had given me, having felt sorry for me after I’d spent a year shooting 120mm film on a plastic camera that I had won in an amusement arcade crane machine. My dad had always made an effort to capture moments from our family holidays on his camera, so I was excited to follow in his footsteps. A real camera took me that much closer to doing this, and I started using it to take photos of my mates, family days out and sunsets (which always seemed to be good in my little corner of Leicester). The camera produced square format images which I diligently stuck into a scrapbook that I still have to this day. That camera and the sunset picture in the Isle of Wight started me on my road to becoming a photographer.
In my teenage years, I loved wandering around the countryside, getting up at dawn and walking across to the fields near my family home to capture whatever I could with my new camera. The landscape wasn’t particularly inspiring; it was fairly flat with a few small clumps of trees and hedgerows around the farmer’s fields. I could always find something interesting to shoot though, whether it was a single tree stood alone in an open space or the dew on the young wheatgrass with the sunrise backlighting the droplets of water.
Forty years later I am working as a photographer still, having managed to persuade a few art colleges I was good enough to give a place to. My work these days is mostly lifestyle photography and video shot for advertising and corporate clients. My paid work is a long way from the landscapes I used to take as a kid but luckily I get to work on my own projects between commissions and landscape photography still fascinate me.
The Triptych
The word ‘Triptych’ originates from the Greek adjective meaning ‘three-fold’ and was adopted by Christians in the early modern period to display altar art on three relief-carved panels. In this period, and as the technique was adopted into Gothic architecture, the centre image was often larger, clearly the intended focus of the work. More recently, however, artists have begun to place equal emphasis on each panel by making them all the same size. I was attracted to the triptych in this form and sought to further the balanced outcome by having each piece focus on the same landscape. In this way, each image is of equal importance but provides new information by showing the subject from a new angle. With each changing frame, I hope that a sense of movement is created that more accurately portrays the changeable scenic reality.
The first time I had the opportunity to use the triptych form was when I was photographing a beach on the Northern coast of Fraser Island, Australia. A very remote area, the beach was deserted, meaning I was able to shoot the environment stripped bare of people. I was shooting on a Hasselblad (the love of the square format hasn’t left me) but wanted to simultaneously capture the detail in the sand and water, along with the distant breaking waves and the remoteness of the scene. Working on a wider lens meant sacrificing at least one of these elements, so I ended up shooting closer segments. Having shot a few polaroids and looked at those in unison, I had the idea to put them together with the skyline acting as a constant. This made the group more of a recognisable set, and my first triptych was created.
Planning Shots
Narratively speaking, the main aim of the triptych form is to show change. This comes with a number of factors to consider in the planning process, as there is a lot to play with when deciding how to present such a constantly changing environment in only a few moments. An important factor to be planned then is the time element. I am amazed by how a landscape can change so strikingly over just a few hours, and this can be accentuated by putting multiple images next to each other. This is particularly powerful in landscape photography, as the slow movement of the weather is emphasised when placed in comparison with a scene from only a few hours before. There is something very powerful about seeing three versions of the same landscape next to each other that could never be witnessed at the same time in reality. Emphasis is placed on the extremity of a change that would usually seem minor.
The change of time can, of course, be just as noticeable when confining the shoot to a few short minutes. Waves crashing on a beach, for example, change through the lens constantly and the transitioning sand and water can be brought to life if seen in triplicate. It gives you more options for getting your message across. Even when a landscape is seemingly static, time is considered in planning the consistency of the pieces. In open areas such as large vistas, triptychs can act almost like a panoramic view, providing more information on the landscape with the only change in pieces being the perspective. Still, though, time is important. If you wait too long to take all three pieces the landscape with inevitably change. If you happen to take one shot when a cloud has gone overhead, that shot will have different lighting to the others. This must all be considered when planning a triptych.
Symmetry is another factor that must be considered more significantly when planning a triptych. Sometimes you can achieve this simply by making the central image more distant, with the side images being more detailed. However, even when they are the same size, three images together will often feel like the central image is the most important with the two images to its side being supporting players. It is important to me that each image could stand up for itself if it were viewed individually. If you have two good images but a third that isn’t quite up to scratch the finished result won’t be as powerful. It's important to make sure all three are strong in their own right. Sometimes triptychs don’t work out as planned and I end up using just a single image on its own. “If in doubt leave it out” is something I repeat to myself often when editing!
Locations
I’ve been very lucky over the years to have worked for many travel companies which have taken me all around the world. I’ve seen some amazing locations and often shot them with a lifestyle element. The jobs are commissions of course so I can’t go off taking up client time on personal projects, however, I have managed to sneak a few shots here and there while travelling around. The images of clouds were mostly taken while travelling between jobs, as were some images I have of the sea taken from a cruise ship job. Many shoots come while on a holiday, wandering around my garden or local countryside locations. I find that gardens and garden wildlife can be great for photographic studies and can work just the same as large landscapes. My project tends to make me look closer at what’s around me, to look for opportunities wherever I might be. My image of the clouds at sunset was taken in Australia too, but could really have been taken anywhere with the right weather and time of day.
I think the most important thing about any sort of photography is simply being out there trying things out. I have never been too technical- the best camera to have is the one in your hand as they say. I tend to be a photographer that will watch the light and how it interacts with the landscape. I love shooting water and clouds for this reason. Shooting any body of water twenty minutes after the sun has gone down always works well when the failing light in the sky is reflected in the water rather than direct harsh sunlight hitting it earlier in the day. The soft muted colours come through to the fore, creating a much nicer atmosphere. I find there is a particular headspace you can inhabit when out watching the changing weather on a landscape. Its incredibly relaxing to put some time aside to be immersed in your natural surroundings.
Social Media
Having been shooting triptychs for many years, I have been newly inspired by imagery-based social media and how this offers up a whole new range of artistic opportunities. In my professional life, I have taken on Instagram and Twitter as an important element of marketing and have looked closely at what constitutes a successful post. The immediacy of taking a photo one second and having it viewed by the world the next is in many ways challenging for a professional photographer, as content becomes diluted by the sheer number of images being posted every second. However, I am not one to turn down a challenge and I have found that triptychs can be used incredibly effectively in this new social media environment. When posted over a short period of time, each ‘panel’ is first viewed respectively and can generate interest as the overall image slowly comes together. The fact that your Instagram page presents posts in a three-across formation provides the perfect opportunity to exhibit multiple triptychs, allowing the viewer to see them as a whole, and then to further inspect them individually if they choose.
Smartphone images posted on social media are often taken closer to the subject, with less consideration of overall composition, due to the fact that they can focus a lot more closely than many consumer cameras. Again, this creates new opportunities, as it results in images that often have a different point of view, lower angles, twisted horizon lines and movement that previously would have constituted a failed image. I try to use these alternative photographic principles in my photography, to keep imagery fresh and avoid too much of the obvious. This is not so simple to do with landscapes of course, but it might mean taking a different viewpoint or just getting in there on the ground and amongst the daisies.
If you ever see me on my hands and knees, drenched in early morning dew and with a phone in my hand, I'm probably trying to find that unusual angle for the final shot of another triptych!
I am not often known for including manmade structures in my photographs and I could be considered guilty for the determined exclusion of them most of the time. The reason for this is, to me, I find them distracting in what I am trying to say with a photograph, which is often my appreciation of the landscape. The inclusion of manmade structures such as buildings seems to draw attention away from this and, in part, the hand of man commands recognition once again.
This however changed when I made my first trip to the High Plains of Montana and the Dakotas in the USA recently. Strangely, I have been somewhat fascinated by the open, flat vastness nestling beneath huge skies for many years. For a photographer that is dizzy with inspiration beneath mountain spires, lakes and at the coast, this place could not be further from the norm for me. Along with the landscape, the remains of times long ago also had me returning to the pages of many books again and again to gain an appreciation of why this was. Where and why did everybody go, or more importantly, why did they come in the first place?
Prior to 1900, the High Plains of the USA were generally regarded as a bleak wilderness, not suitable for settling families or communities. This was all about to change when the powerful railroad companies wanted to extend their tracks across these vast plains and the trains needed to be serviced regularly for this to succeed.
Prior to 1900, the High Plains of the USA were generally regarded as a bleak wilderness, not suitable for settling families or communities.
The federal and state governments of the time gave the railroad companies millions of acres of land and they wanted to get on with the job. A massive campaign was launched by the railroads to attract incomers and promised virtually free land in the vicinity of the railway lines where they could farm and become prosperous, and come they did!
A chance perusal of Lizzie Shepherd’s website in 2018 had me quickly booked for a return visit to one of the most beautiful places on earth. I am not usually one for hyperbole but there are few places that stir up the emotions more than a visit to the Outer Hebrides (also known as the Western Isles), a 200km chain of islands lying a mere 20 miles off the north west tip of Skye in Scotland. When Mother Nature is at her worst, the Outer Hebrides have that “edge of the world” feel, where a dramatic but unprotected coastline meets the full force of the Atlantic.
The chances of a rewarding photographic sortie north of the border looked excellent. With the workshop booked, I recalled the withdrawal of Bonnie Prince Charlie from the islands in the mid-1700s and that infamous tune had me tapping my fingers with drum beat anticipation:
Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar,
Thunderclaps rend the air; ~ extract, The Skye Boat Song
With the workshop booked, I recalled the withdrawal of Bonnie Prince Charlie from the islands in the mid-1700s and that infamous tune had me tapping my fingers with drum beat anticipation.
And so, late March had me travelling with Lizzie Shepherd and Alex Hare to a place I love and a chance, perhaps, for photographic redemption; my images from a 2015 visit were OK but I knew I could do better, much better. With white sandy beaches, turquoise-blue seas, rocky foreshores, abandoned crofts and one of the best-preserved standing stone circles in Europe, I relished the opportunity of a return visit, especially with the possibility of changeable weather and potential for storm light.
Arriving at the CalMac ferry terminal at Uig on the north west tip of Skye, I was rewarded with a punctual ferry and calm seas. Once boarded, the 100-minute traverse of the Minch (that narrow stretch of sea between Skye and the islands) passed quickly as I flicked through Iain McGowan’s excellent “Hebridean Images” (1993), a superb, mood-setting collection of 35mm black and white photographs evoking island life and the landscape beyond. On disembarkation, I was greeted on the dockside by the Isle of Harris Distillery - a good start! A few hundred metres up the road had me nestled snugly within the arms of our very comfortable and conveniently-located hotel - the Harris Hotel - which I can heartily recommend without grace, favour or recompense. March into April is statistically one of the drier periods in the Outer Hebrides (and mostly midge-less) but the forecast was for mixed weather - ideal! - and possibly snow flurries at the end of the week. With the thoughts of snow-capped mountains at the back of my mind, I was in high spirits as the group convened.
Such a great challenge and honour for me to write an end frame article for On Landscape magazine. Thank you for the opportunity.
Recently, I have started to wonder less about how an image is taken and more about its power of striking a chord. This way of approaching an image, from an enthusiast photographer’s point of view, can be very useful to improve as a photographer and to understand photography more as a creative art.
I am pretty sure that everyone can list several favourite images for the most various reasons. Sometimes it is because of the light, sometimes it is thanks to the gorgeous subject or sometimes it is an original composition. However, we are not always able to explain why an image means so much to us. This happens (at least to me) when every part of the image spreads emotions and feelings towards the viewer. Well, despite the different tastes and preferences I think that the majority of us aims at making this kind of images. Of course not an easy task…
The image I choose has exactly the power of summarizing most of the feelings and emotions I feel when I am in the mountains and in nature in general. Above all, it is “responsible” for my transition from grand landscapes to more intimate landscape photography (together with other much appreciated artists such as Guy Tal, Hans Strand and Theo Bosboom among others).
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!
These images form part of a body of work that will focus on the river Dart in Devon.
Using Alice Oswald’s award winning, long form, poem “Dart” as a guide I am hoping to interpret the river as it flows from its source on the high, floating bogs of Dartmoor, through south Devon to the sea.
These four images are taken around the Dart’s source, high up on the mires and peat bogs of central Dartmoor. Oswald herself refers to this area of Dartmoor as having an “amphibious vagueness, neither pool nor land”. It is an area devoid of feature, where a thin layer of grasses cover a sodden earth. It is a primordial landscape, an Ur-landscape, whose power lies in Blake’s sublime or Nietzsche’s void rather than the picturesque.
It is an unforgiving space. The lack of physical features, the constant wind, the wet everywhere make it both physically and emotionally exhausting. In Oswald’s poem one of the “voices” deliberately imagines a figure on the horizon so as to quell the sense of isolation and vulnerability. In three visits to the area I’ve yet to see another soul.
Walking on a little mountain pathway, in a cold spring morning in Abruzzo, even a slab of ice can hide fancy shapes and profiles. Just for a moment, it is worth stopping and admiring this wonder.
Perfect squaring is repeated like fractals, making nature more and more fascinating. A thousand bubbles enclosed and hidden in the cold, motionless, seem to want to escape and free themselves.
Like a sun, ice shows its perfect, linear, sharp rays too, forming incredible geometries that are sharp and perfect in their symmetry. Even a face hidden behind the tiny ice seems to look at me and whisper to keep its secret.
Like many in artistic pursuits, I am plagued by the question of validity. In the last few years, I have found something approaching quiet confidence thanks to a way of working (rather than through choice of subject or its presentation). I was spurred on by my rediscovery of the technique of reversal processing, which in short, consists in the creation of positive images from standard silver gelatin emulsions layered on paper or film. I put a sheet of photographic paper in the back of the camera and expose it; after some relatively quick chemical processing, it is good to go into my album. The prints are definitive and final because the only parameter I can control is exposure; the rest is tied to the chemistry. There is no post-processing possible.
The prints are physically connected to the place and time of their creation. This is one of the great attractions of slide film, especially in any of the sheet film formats. I used to shoot 5x4 a lot. Their disadvantage is that you can't just put them in an album to enjoy as prints. Sheet film is also, most commonly, enlarged to create the print. Creating prints in camera means the end size of the print is known, which in turn means that the aperture can be set to create a definite depth of field. I am an artist in control of my output.
I have used the reversal process to create a visual autobiography, a diary in pictures. This has freed me from more commercial constraints and, I feel, has brought me closer to the Truth. Much of this work follows a quest for the typical and the topical. I am also constrained by practical reality. Thus it is, that I take a lot of pictures in my home town. This series is taken in woodland just a few minutes from my front door.
I have recently come to the conclusion that my past obsession with truth and reality in my photography was causing me headaches. The notion that a photograph doesn’t lie is such unfortunate fallacy. Even the notion of documenting I have had to throw out. Now, instead, I reframed my thinking and approach to photography as one of creative expressionism. I am an artist. For me, my photography is one of abstraction, something to be celebrated and not be condemned. There are so many layers to this notion of ‘Truth’ that I will explore in this article.
I think the first time this really came into my head, that I need to let go of truth was when I first started to wrestle with accurate colours. I learnt to print my colour work in the darkroom with negative films with RA4 process type C prints. Getting what I thought was accurate colour was helped along with viewing filters. I didn’t really stop to think about the colour palette I was using, nor about how accurate my colours were. You tried as hard as I could to get each photograph resolved. I was just so excited to be printing in colour. If I got them anywhere near nice I was happy. Next, I started printing my transparencies onto Cibachrome. There wasn’t many transparency films to choose from at that time particularly for those of us who loved greens. I don’t think at the time I even had an understanding of the different exposure latitudes of the different films I was using. For me choosing a film has always revolved around what I perceived as the film having truthful colours in the green spectrum. Transparency film seemed to win every time. This eventually led me to settling on Provia transparency film as my preferred medium for colour photography.
Later, I do remember the angst I experienced in getting satisfactory prints when it comes to colour. This has extended over the years into my digital photography. It is one of the reasons I have avoided colour photography for the last few years. A few years ago I decided to let go of the notion that I had to have truthful colours in my work.
Perfect colour accuracy as a truth is very difficult, neigh impossible for me. Therefore I should pursue the abstraction of colour as part of my photography as just part of the course.
I was at Kiama on the south coast of NSW. I started to intentionally abstract the colours in my work. So once I started playing with them, I soon had satisfactory work. Later that year in a workshop I was running with Mark Littlejohn and Tim Parkin in the Lake District, I was educated in Mark’s approach of actively abstracting his colours with split toning. Hmmmm, someone else, whom I admire, who actively abstracts their colours.
One of the things that prompted me to approach Adam about an interview at this particular point in time was the campaign that sought to prevent the planned hydro schemes in Glen Etive. Adam has for some time been considering in photographic terms the structures that we tend to avoid or overlook, including the many hydro-electric dams built in the Scottish Highlands in the 1950s and 1960s. The massive scale of these prompts me to wonder whether our views (in both senses) of such interventions in the landscape change over time, as nature does her best to try to mellow them. We live with a legacy of constructions, sometimes happily, sometimes less so. What will our successors’ and descendants’ views of today’s proposals be in 50 years’ time? It wouldn’t be fair to expect Adam to answer this, but perhaps through his eyes we can re-evaluate – and perhaps in some cases where the hand of man is now less obvious – fully realise what we have already done to the Highlands.
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 Birmingham. I didn’t stick around though, my family left within three months to live in Lincoln. At five years old after another move, I ended up in Edinburgh. My whole childhood from then on was spent living on the outskirts of Edinburgh. While I lived in the city I had access to the countryside and I spent much time exploring it on my bike. Well that was until the early 1980s when home computing became a reality. From then on I spent most of my teen years in a darkened room playing computer games and then writing my own. When I left school I went onto Leeds University to do a Maths degree, followed by an MSc in the then trendy subject of Chaos (Non-linear mathematical systems) at Heriot-Watt University back in Edinburgh. My first job and in fact my only job was at the video games company DMA Design as a programmer. I spent 23 years there. During that time it morphed into Rockstar North and I slowly made my way up the ladder, eventually becoming the Technical Director. Much of my time at Rockstar was spent working on a little known game called Grand Theft Auto. In 2015 I left. Working at Rockstar was all consuming; I had very little time for anything else and I had this other thing I wanted to do, called Photography.
How did you first become interested in photography and what kind of images did you initially set out to make? How much time are you now able to devote to photography?
In my childhood, my father was a keen photographer. But being a contrary kind of kid I showed no interest at all. My sister was the one to take on that mantle. She was the one messing about with darkroom chemicals in our bathroom.
It wasn’t until 2009 that I took up a camera with the intention of taking more than snapshots. I had a year’s sabbatical from work and we spent it living in the Pyrenees. While there I purchased an iPhone 3GS. Suddenly I had a camera in my pocket all the time. I started taking pictures around the ski resort we were living in. This was a bit of a revelation. The joy I got from trying to get the right composition was something new to me. The iPhone camera had many limitations and I started to hit them more and more. So when some friends visited and one of them had a DSLR I realised that was what I needed. After that, I was lost. All I could think of was Photography. If I wasn’t out taking photos, I was processing them on the laptop, reading up about technique or perusing websites for the latest equipment.
I have come to realise photography can be so much more than pretty pictures or pleasing compositions. It can inform, tell a story, evoke an emotion.
Initially, I took photos of everything. But given at the time I lived in the mountains the obvious thing to take photos of was the surrounding landscape. This would become my concentration. The majority of my photos were of either mountains or the local woodland.
Nowadays I am lucky enough to be financially independent so I could spend all my time devoted to photography but I probably split it evenly with various programming projects I have running at the same time.
Who (photographers, artists or individuals) or what has most inspired you, or driven you forward in your own development as a photographer?
Given I have had no formal education in photography my first inspirations were various photographers I found on social media. Initially, my inspiration came from a number of photographers who were doing black and white long exposure work. This included people like Joel Tjintjelaar, Julia Anna Gospodarou and Russ Barnes. This would lead me to the work of Michael Kenna.
Since then though I have come to realise photography can be so much more than pretty pictures or pleasing compositions. It can inform, tell a story, evoke an emotion. This came through following people like Rob Hudson, and the work of the collective Inside the Outside, of which he is a founding member, and Iain Sarjeant whose imprint Another Place Press is releasing some of the more interesting photobooks within the landscape genre. My own work now comes from a mixture of influences including the New Topographics (Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams) and some of the more recent landscape work from the likes of Mark Power and Toshio Shibata.
What is it that draws you to document our interventions in the landscape rather than adopt the more prevailing romantic view? Looking through your Journal entries, visual form and structure are recurring themes, whether you’re looking exclusively at man-made forms, or comparing and contrasting these with natural features.
I want to tell stories. The stories the landscape tells on its own I am not so interested in. Rocks move, seasons change and repeat, plants grow and die. These can become interesting when used as metaphors for the human condition, but on their own do not provoke anything strong in me.
The stories the landscape tells on its own I am not so interested in. Rocks move, seasons change and repeat, plants grow and die. These can become interesting when used as metaphors for the human condition, but on their own do not provoke anything strong in me.
I’m no good at metaphor so stick to documenting humans interacting with the landscape. Much of my work tends to centre around environmental subject matter. I try to find a space within the conflict between conservation of our environment and the development of it for our needs. This leads me to make images of landscapes formed by man.
Outside of my long term projects, repeating forms and geometric structures are something I like to play with. These don’t necessarily have to come from the man made. If nature is ready to present these to me I’m happy to point my camera at it. But in general, the geometry of buildings provides a source for this more frequently.
What reaction, interpretation or value do you hope to provoke in viewers in response to the man-made and the monumental?
Life is complex. My images represent complex situations where difficult decisions are being made between the value of a landscape in itself and the value of developing it. When I am documenting these, I’m not setting out some doctrine. I don’t generally have a solution to the issues I am highlighting. I hope I can encourage people to investigate further and also not respond in such a dogmatic way which can so often be the case when it comes to conservation issues.
When standing in front of some of the large infrastructure man has placed on the landscape it is hard not to be in awe. The fact that we can build at this scale and push nature around to this level is quite something to behold. Unfortunately, we are also very good at destroying at the same time and what we lose is sometimes of more value than what we gain.
Would you like to choose 2-3 favourite photographs from your own portfolio and tell us a little about why they are special to you?
Demolition Sequence #1
The sequence is from the destruction of the chimneys of the Cockenzie power station in East Lothian. The project was about nostalgia, looking at a structure that many people had some attachment to. They were part of the horizon line when viewed from Edinburgh. Driving north up the A1, when you saw the chimneys you knew you were nearly home. At the same time though Cockenzie, when running, was the dirtiest power station in the UK. Not something to be so nostalgic about. The project was also about our industrial heritage. The power station represented a point in our history when we were dependent on coal. It was also considered an important modernist building. None of this was thought to be important enough to conserve and the power station was demolished in 2015.
Trotternish ridge in Skye
This is a landscape shot and it is of rather a well-known spot. It could be a landscape photography trope. I hope not. This is late April snow looking down the Trotternish Ridge in Skye. I like the detail the snow brings out in the mountains. The flat light and fog have turned them into cutout cards placed on top of each other. They seem to exist outside of the real world. For the rest of that visit to Skye, the only thing I made photos of were snow covered mountains, trying to repeat what I had here.
Lawers dam
The image is part of a much larger project. I have spent the last few years documenting the hydroelectric infrastructure built in Scotland post world war 2. This also shows off a format I have been using quite frequently. I call them broken panoramas. I initially used them because of limitations of my equipment. The Hasselblad camera I use has a 6x6 square negative. Dams don’t tend to be square. They are long and thin, much more suited to a panorama image. I started to take two images to generate a panorama. But because I had been taking the images on film it felt wrong to try and stitch them together in Photoshop so I just present them as separate images. Later I did buy a panorama camera but liked the aesthetic so much I continued to present the panoramas in this way.
Most of my project work is done on a Hasselblad 503CW film camera. Many people talk about how film slows them down and that makes them think more about what they are doing.
Can you talk a little about the cameras and lenses – and film – that you like to use, and whether this has changed over time?
While I started out using digital exclusively, for the last four years I have been using a mixture of film and digital cameras. Most of my project work is done on a Hasselblad 503CW film camera. Many people talk about how film slows them down and that makes them think more about what they are doing. Even though I know I take approx. 10 times the number of photos if I’m using a digital camera and still come away with the same number of keepers as when I’m using film I actually think one of the main advantages with film is the enforced gap between taking the photo and seeing the results. When I come to review the negatives may be a few days later or even up to a month later I come to them with fewer preconceptions. I’m less likely to choose a shot because I wanted it to be good.
Black and white negatives are developed by myself and printed in my home darkroom. Darkroom printing is such a magical process. Everyone should have a go at it. Colour negatives are sent off to the lab to be developed and I scan the results when they return. I do really like the colours you get from a colour negative and have found it difficult to replicate these with a digital camera. It adds another parameter to your decision making as well, as different colour films have quite different looks. Colour negative film is incredibly forgiving and can handle high contrast scenes much better than digital.
At the time of writing, the future of the Stills Gallery in Edinburgh seems uncertain. How valuable a resource has it been to you in developing your practice, and what can photographers do to support such facilities?
The City of Edinburgh Council is currently proposing to triple the rent Stills Gallery pays for its premises. This would damage its ability to deliver its programme of exhibitions and events. Stills is one of the longest established photography galleries in the UK and has brought groundbreaking photography to Scotland for many years. While this in itself is enough of a reason to ensure its survival it is also a great resource for local photographers. Stills has a large darkroom facility and an extensive digital suite. It gives photographers access to top of the range equipment that most would probably never see outside of college or university.
Personally, I have been on a number of courses that Stills run. I have learnt both B&W and Colour developing and printing at Stills. I have also made extensive use of their darkrooms to practice and improve my printing skills. It has given me skills I use every day in my photography practice.
The first thing photographers can do to support such facilities is use them. Many people just never find the time but if you want them to be available you need to use them. Go to their exhibitions, use their resources, take one of the courses. If the facilities aren’t used then that gives councils, arts bodies, reasons to not support them. If you are interested in helping Stills you can sign their petition.
What role does digital play for you in making, processing, or printing/presenting images? You’ve developed a modern-day digital alternative to the viewing frame that allows a preview of a specific camera and lens combination without the need to remove the camera from your bag?
I work with a lot of bulky old film cameras, but this doesn’t mean I have left technology behind completely. I am finding frequently my photographic eye is a lot more optimistic than it should be. Many times I find a composition I like, but after spending 5 minutes of getting my camera out of the rucksack, setting up the tripod and framing the shot, I find it wasn’t worth the effort. To short circuit this process I wrote an iPhone app that did the pre-visualisation for me. You set what camera and what focal length you are using in the app and just point the phone at what you want to photograph. You will then get a preview of what you would see through your camera viewfinder on the iPhone screen. If you like it, then get your big camera out. Otherwise, move on. The app is called Viewfinder Preview and is available on the iPhone App Store.
We met back in 2016 on a bookmaking and sequencing workshop co-hosted by John Blakemore and Joseph Wright. How much difference has seeing their creations, and learning to make your own, made to your photography?
My favourite part of that workshop was when John opened up his box of treasures and produced all these photobooks he had made. They came in all sorts of formats and sizes. Photography can be so much more than just making an image. John showed that how you present it and how you sequence it within a group of other images opens up many paths for creativity. Not always, but there are many times now when working on a project I am already thinking about how I would present it in a book form right from the start. This will define what images I take and what format they are in.
My favourite part of that workshop was when John opened up his box of treasures and produced all these photobooks he had made. They came in all sorts of formats and sizes. Photography can be so much more than just making an image. John showed that how you present it and how you sequence it within a group of other images opens up many paths for creativity.
How important a part of the process for you is printing an image, by whatever means, and the trials and tribulations that we encounter in getting it wrong, before we get it right?
Printing is a very important part of the process. The physical object, the photo, holds so much more than the ephemeral digital image. A printed image is part of this world, you can hold it in your hands, have a much closer relationship with it. And it can add another layer of creativity in how you present your imagery.
I print a lot of my B&W film using traditional darkroom methods. Most of these are on small 10x8 papers and are for personal consumption. I am still learning when it comes to darkroom printing. It’s a much slower way to process and print film than scanning and moving some sliders in Photoshop but the resultant silver gelatine prints are really rather nice. The tonal quality and depth of black from a darkroom print is so much better than an inkjet print.
When I am printing inkjet prints, it is generally for a book. I don’t tend to print single images as I find the process quite frustrating. I never seem to get the result I’m looking for. If I need prints for sale or exhibition I tend to use professional printers as they do a better job than me.
Transient is newly formed; we are still trying to work out what we are. We formed because we felt there weren’t enough opportunities for Scottish photographers and we were looking to make them for ourselves.
You’ve recently exhibited as part of the Transient Collective. What role does the group hope to play, and how important is it for photographers to work together and interact beyond the online community?
Transient is newly formed; we are still trying to work out what we are. We formed because we felt there weren’t enough opportunities for Scottish photographers and we were looking to make them for ourselves. This initially formulated itself in our inaugural exhibition ‘Landmarks’. Six of us presented bodies of work under the theme of landmarks. These could be physical, personal or temporal. The exhibition featured quite a disparate subject matter including epilepsy, childhood trauma and my own hydroelectricity work. The advantage of being in the group was the responsibility, pressure and stress of setting up an exhibition was spread across six of us. At the same time, we still had enough space each to present a good body of work.
The collective has also provided us with a forum to present work in progress, and receive more honest feedback. This is something I think all photographers/artists need. Sometimes you need to be told what you are doing isn’t working, but then also having someone you know critically look at your work and give positive feedback is equally helpful. Feedback can also include new possible directions for what you are doing. Social media has pretty much proved it is incapable of any of this.
You’ve spent a lot of time visiting and photographing - and presumably researching - the structures associated with the 50+ hydro-electric dams built over the 20 year period following the Hydro Electric Development (Scotland) Act of 1943. What was it that drew you to this?
For the last few years, I have spent the majority of my time on a project documenting the hydroelectric schemes built in Scotland post World War Two. The initial reason for starting this project was an aesthetic one. I like the contrast between these large masses of concrete and the Scottish glens they are strung across. Especially in the remoter areas of Scotland, they have quite some presence. This evidence of so much human endeavour while there isn’t a soul in sight.
After doing a bit of research I found the story behind their construction was as interesting. The government body created to do this was set up in such a way that its priorities were the people of Scotland, instead of profit. Much modernisation and investment were needed in the Highlands. Any profits made supplying electricity to the Central Belt of Scotland were used to construct smaller hydro schemes in the remoter areas of the Highlands. They also had a duty to encourage socio-economic development through investment in the region. The politic will that created this body would go on to build the NHS a few years later.
I don’t think the romantic view of Scotland’s wild landscape has really changed much over the last 150 years. It is still the main argument for conserving our landscape.
What have you learnt from it that is relevant to both our present-day relationships with the physical legacy and our reactions to current infrastructure development?At the time fears were voiced about the ruination of the landscape and detriment to tourism, but publicly these were perhaps tempered by the social vision to bring power and improvements to the Highlands, and the employment that it created? It probably helped too that it was delivered at no cost to the tax-payer.
There was much opposition to the hydro schemes initially. This came from the landowners, salmon fishing interests, the coal board, the tourism industry and conservation bodies like the National Trust and the Association for the Preservation of Rural Scotland. In the end, either alterations were made to appease, or the social vision overrode those concerns. Many of the concerns over the ruination of the landscape were overplayed and nowadays one of the biggest tourist attractions in Pitlochry is the dam.
I don’t think the romantic view of Scotland’s wild landscape has really changed much over the last 150 years. It is still the main argument for conserving our landscape. The likelihood of someone coming down on the side of a development versus conservation is generally related to how much direct benefit they would receive from that development. The photographer who spends two weeks’ holiday in Scotland is probably more likely to be interested in the conservation side of the argument than the individual who sees investment in his local community. The modern day equivalent of the hydro-scheme development would be the many wind farms that are being constructed in Scotland. For many communities that direct benefit is not so obvious anymore. In general, the electricity being generated is sent down to the Central belt of Scotland or even onto England and the profits go to a public company and mainly benefit shareholders. Of course, now this is all tempered by the fact we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. So many people, regardless of locality, see a direct benefit of developments like wind farms because they can relate them to a reduction in greenhouse gases.
Do you have any particular projects or ambitions for the future or themes that you would like to explore further?
I would like to release my hydroelectricity project ‘Neart nan Gleann’ in book form at some point. I have been building book dummies recently looking to get the right form and testing out various sequences of images.
Regarding projects and themes I have one more idea to investigate related to electricity production in Scotland. I would also like to look into the Forestry industry. When travelling around Scotland it is hard not to notice the industrial woodland installed to generate timber. The scars of the recently felled, that interrupt this spruce monoculture, could never be considered beautiful. I am still attracted to them and want to investigate further. Of course as well as excluding much biodiversity these woodlands are also a carbon sink and we should be looking to increase our forestry coverage, but maybe with a little more variety.
If you had to take a break from all things photographic for a week, what would you end up doing? What other hobbies or interests do you have?
If I suddenly managed to lose all my cameras, I would probably spend more time coding on one of my many little programming projects. Most of the apps I make are small tools I use during my photography, so if that counts as photographic, I would get on my bike. I love cycling. I have cycled all my life. It is one of the best ways to leave the world and your worries behind. Being able to get out of town and sail down small country lanes is a wonderful thing. It is also the best way to investigate your local countryside. A bike is fast enough to get you somewhere, but not so fast you miss everything on the way.
And finally, is there someone whose photography you enjoy – perhaps someone that we may not have come across – and whose work you think we should feature in a future issue? They can be amateur or professional.
I’ve recently come across the work of Frances Scott. She is currently exhibiting as part of a group exhibition at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh. She is presenting three images from her project of walking the coastline of all the islands in Orkney. Her imagery is a mixture of the manmade and coastal details. Along with this, she has a series of images which are the GPS tracks of various walks she made along the Orkney coastline. Each one includes a couple of comments from her notebooks about the walk. These images are really intriguing. They give away very little, but enough such that you want to know more about these walks.
Thank you, Adam. It’s been great to find out more about what you get up to when you disappear, and we look forward to seeing ‘Neart nan Gleann’ in book form – keep us posted!
To clearly express my feeling for life with photographic beauty, present objectively the texture, rhythm, form in nature without subterfuge or evasion in technique or spirit, to record the quintessence of the object or element before my lens, rather than an interpretation, a superficial phase, or passing mood – this is my way in photography. It is not an easy way. ~ Edward Weston, 1927
There are a number of highly photogenic dune systems in the United States. The best known include Mesquite Flat Dunes in Death Valley National Park in California, the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico and the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado; but there are also others that are somewhat less well known and less often visited such as the Oregon Sand Dunes National Recreation Area; the Algodones Dunes in the far south east of California; the Dumont Dunes in the Mojave Desert in east California; and (perhaps) the Oceano Dunes on the coast of California, situated between Santa Barbara and Monterey.
The Oceano Dunes are but one section of the Guadaloupe – Nipomo sequence that stretches for some 29 km along the coast from southern San Luis Opisbo County to the northern part of Santa Barbara County. It includes the highest coastal dune in on the west coast of the U.S., Mussel Rock Dune at 150m, just south of Oceano. The sequence includes the Pismo Dunes to the north and the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes National Wildlife Refuge and Rancho Guadalupe Dunes Preserve to the south. There are also areas where sand buggies and other All Terrain Vehicles can make a lot of noise, including the Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreational Area. The size of this permitted area has been reduced over the years but if you Google the Oceano Dunes you will find much more about riding the dunes than about photography.
The Oceano Dunes are but one section of the Guadaloupe – Nipomo sequence that stretches for some 29 km along the coast from southern San Luis Opisbo County to the northern part of Santa Barbara County
However, I qualified the Oceano Dunes with perhaps less well-known because while they may not attract so many photographers today 1, the area has an interesting history and has been the subject of some classic photographs, most notably by Edward Weston, his son Brett Weston and Ansel Adams. Nancy Newhall in The Photographs of Edward Weston2 published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1946 wrote:
Considered by many to be Weston’s most accomplished series of images, the twenty-nine Dune photographs that resulted from his time at Oceano certainly show the artist at the peak of his creative powers. Weston first visited the area briefly in 1934 but returned two years later with his lover and muse, Charis Wilson, for an extended period of photography.
He found the undulating landscape perfectly suited to his interest in form and pattern and produced work that encapsulated many of the ideas he had been developing about the photographic image.
Much later, in 1948, Edward Weston was filmed at Oceano by Willard van Dyke as part of a film about him called The Photographer produced for the US Information Agency3. Van Dyke had studied as an assistant with Weston and was a founder member (with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak and Henry Swift) of the f64 group. He later gave up still photography in favour of film making. In a 1982 documentary, he said that this was so as not to compete with his good friend and past mentor Weston.
I’ve been hearing a LOT about filters lately. It seems half the photographers on my social feeds are brand ambassadors for one filter company or another and boy do they make sure I know! Recently our own Tim Parkin has unwittingly made On Landscape part of the hype train. Kase Filters are the MOST COLOUR NEUTRAL FILTERS! Shout it from the rooftops! Or don’t use filters at all.
For those of you, like me, who are ‘in deep’ in the landscape photography world it sometimes feels like you are living in the Twilight Zone. Gear discussions about almost totally irrelevant specs “an extra 0.5 stops of dynamic range” soon turn heated and we forget about the photography itself. But nothing has confused me more than the modern obsession with Graduated Neutral Density Filters, or grads.
An admission
Before I really lay into the use of grad filters I thought I would undermine myself by explaining my bias. When I started photography 12 years ago I did washing up through my university holidays to finance my first SLR. All my gear was second hand, and there was no way I was going to buy a filter set when I could exposure blend for free on my pirated copy of Photoshop CS2. Back then blending exposures was time consuming and complex. I made many mistakes along the way, but I quickly reached a level that matched the effects of grads and later exceeded them from a technical perspective. When I became a backpacker the reasons for the digital process multiplied - I didn’t fancy carrying that extra half kilo or looking after a load of delicate bit of resin in challenging environments. That is to say, I have never used filters and, barring a foray into film, I never will.
Setting aside my own experiences there are many reasons to make the case for a “gradless” capture process.
1. Getting It Right in Camera
If you ask photographers why they use grads you’ll get a mix of answers, but chief among the explanations is ‘Getting it Right in Camera’.
On the surface, this is the reason I understand most of all. As someone who greatly values realistic photography I completely understand the satisfaction that comes from capturing a scene as it is.
That warm fuzzy feeling you get when you press the shutter button and you know you have The Shot™. On the surface, this is the reason I understand most of all. As someone who greatly values realistic photography I completely understand the satisfaction that comes from capturing a scene as it is. You also get the instant feedback in the image itself, you can see then and there on the back of the LCD that you have succeeded. Unfortunately using filters can be problematic. There are better digital methods.
Selecting and placing grads is almost an art in itself. The photographer can look at a scene and judge the luminance balance between the sky and ground (commonly) as well as how quickly that light transition occurs and then select a grad that roughly does the right thing. The grad must then be positioned correctly in accordance with the scene (usually now using live view because it is the most precise method). Ideally, the lens should be stopped down to the selected aperture in order to see most precisely what the final effect will be. Select the grad incorrectly or position it poorly and you’ve just done the opposite of what you intended. You are “Getting it Wrong in Camera” (do you see what I did there?). “Getting it Right in Camera” is, of course, shooting an exposure bracket.
A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.” ~ Wynn Bullock
While looking through Paul Caponigro’s book “Seasons” I was surprised and delighted to discover it contained an autobiographical text to accompany the portfolio. As an admirer of his work, I was interested in learning about his journey and philosophy regarding photography. In reading his autobiography I became particularly interested in his experience studying under Minor White. He mentions White’s method of reading photographs, and how students were often put alone in a room to look at his work until they could get past the obvious subject and discover what deeper implications might be conveyed by the images. Over time Caponigro became disillusioned with White’s approach. Beyond recognising that a photographer should impart some of her or his self on their work, he questioned if every image “needed to be so excessively burdened with ‘meaning’”. He came to find Minor’s adherence to Zen too intellectualised and formulaic. After a time he yearned to free himself of rigid dogma and simply open himself up to experience and to make expressive images that were “the results of quiet action and discovery”. He advocated less thinking and more doing.
I happened upon this autobiography at a time when I was questioning the idea of meaning in my own work. As photographers, we talk often of meaning and making photographs that are personally expressive. But, what does this really mean? I know the common definition is that expressive images are those that are not of things, but about things. As White himself said, “One should photograph objects, not only for what they are, but what else they are.” Of course, the operative and somewhat ambiguous word here is the “else”.
I happened upon this autobiography at a time when I was questioning the idea of meaning in my own work. As photographers, we talk often of meaning and making photographs that are personally expressive.
But, does this mean that every photo must be a metaphor? With regards to my own work, was I truly making meaningful images? And if so, what was I trying to say in those images? Are my images metaphors or simply pretty or interesting photos bereft of any deeper meaning or message? I feared being guilty of fraud, of talking the talk but not walking the walk. Troubling questions indeed.
We have already covered a previous project of Theo’s with “Autumn Leaves” and we were very pleased to hear that he was taking on a more substantial project that covered multiple countries including the coast of Scotland. The project can be summarised as covering the tidal zone of Europe’s Western coastline. Theo humbly says “It was never my intention to cover Europe’s entire Atlantic coast” as if this was perhaps a passing thought, discarded at the last minute. What he did do was to find a judicious sampling of fifty beaches across nine countries including the Faroe Islands, Scotland, Norway, Iceland, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Portugal, Spain and France. The goal was to show the diversity of this transition zone and portray some of the dynamism everyone can experience when visiting the Atlantic coastline.
Theo gave a fantastic talk about the project during our Meeting of Minds conference in 2018 and it was sometime later that I realised I hadn’t bought a copy of the associated book (I must have had something else distracting me!). I have since bought one and have been enjoying sampling from it from time to time over the last few months.
I’ll skip to the chase on the recommendation as I can heartily recommend purchasing it and the book itself is very well printed and hardbound (which I’ll come to in a moment). The book needs little written narrative to explain itself and is a great case study in how to create a body of work that walks the line between a documentary approach and an interpretation. Each photograph is an aesthetic work by itself but the accumulation of many visual fragments adds up to a very personal take by Theo.
And it is the closer details that make the book special to me. Many people would make the main part of the project about the bigger views and include smaller details as asides. Theo’s work makes these smaller fragments the main story and uses larger views to place them in context.
Distilling a project like this into a final ‘product’ sometimes benefits from using an external editor and designer and Theo was very lucky to have a very talented colleague to help with this, Sandra Bartocha. As a photographer herself (and a very good one) and with her own experience of book and magazine publishing, Sandra was able to create an eye catching, professional design and I’m presuming she also helped with the sequencing which is excellent (some inspired facing images and a good sense of cohesion across the chapters).
If you want to support Theo, you can buy "Shaped by the Sea" directly from his website (click here) or if that's not possible you can get it from 'all good book shops' (or horrible ones if you really want to)
I’ve picked a few of my favourite photos to demonstrate these different aspects.
Every photographer has an image that means a lot to them, even if it's not the most successful on social media or one that friends and family don't 'get'. Images that stretch the edges of compositional norms, that show well-known places in different ways or that reflect a moment that means so much personally in your progress as a photographer or just in life.
If you have a personal favourite photograph of yours and a story behind it and why it means so much, then why not share that with our community. Submit your favourite image here.
It's interesting that this series is all about my favourite photo, rather than my best photo. To some extent, the two are interchangeable but by no means always. I'm sure that we all have pictures that we really like, even though secretly we admit that there are technical flaws such as the picture is less than tack sharp, or the composition is a bit imbalanced etc. Some time ago I read in a response to "What do you consider to be your best photo" the photographer replied "it's the one I have yet to take" or words to that effect. Fair enough, we all strive to do better...
For this piece, I have chosen an image that I made in September 2015 and it remains both my favourite photo as a successful outcome from what was a difficult location for me, but also as probably my best in technical terms. It is sharp, well exposed, has a decent composition (well, to my eye at least!) and I think it shows what I felt that morning.
The location is Veidivotn, arguably the "Lake District" of Iceland and a truly stunning alien landscape, far removed from what I would expect to see on this planet. We arrived just as it was getting light and as I got out of our vehicle, an eerie silence enveloped us: although we were a sizeable group of nine we were all very quiet. I felt overwhelmed by the magical, mystical and incredibly rich scene in front of me. In fact, to be honest, I was so overwhelmed that I couldn't see a single subject to take, there was so much choice that I suppose I just froze, I literally didn't know where to turn. The group dispersed in different directions and I too wandered off along a ridge, but with little idea what I might shoot.
A good 45 mins or so later, having shot two mediocre frames, I started wandering back to the minibus. I noticed that the sun was soon going to pop-up over a ridge and I saw 3 or 4 of my companions lined up ready for their shot. I felt somewhat despondent at my lack of success, especially as I knew that there were subjects all around me - if only I could see them amongst all this beauty! Having no better ideas, I decided to join the group.
Lovely curves leading deep into the scene, great contrasting light and dark shapes, wonderful colours against the black lava ash and, to cap it all, intense pre-sunrise colours in the sky.
As I walked up, the shapes in the landscape changed relative to each other and began to come together; the light was beginning to intensify and I hurried further on to find a spot of my own, looking for a slightly different view. Suddenly the hills of lava and ash, the lakes and the distant valleys all snapped into place. At last I felt that I might get a half-decent shot!
Lovely curves leading deep into the scene, great contrasting light and dark shapes, wonderful colours against the black lava ash and, to cap it all, intense pre-sunrise colours in the sky. I had to work fast to expose my shot before harsh sunlight flooded the scene; to add to the pressure, I could already feel tiny drops of drizzle floating around as a rain storm approached. I lined up and adjusted my composition, set the focus and attached the grad filter. First click, check the histogram, make a small adjustment to the exposure and re-set the focus. Click again, the histogram looked OK. Check the filter - just a few small drops of drizzle, quickly wipe and shoot again. And then it rained, hard. I had shot three frames in the space of about 2 minutes; I wanted one more to capture the light filtering through the rain, but the filter was covered with raindrops. Game over.
When I got home and processed the files, that third image had just two tiny drops which were easily dealt with. A few weeks later I had the photo printed in a lab at 24" across and it is on my wall to this day. I have several other pictures taken subsequently that I really like, but none have usurped its place. For over 3½ years it has remained my favourite - and I still think it’s my best.
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!
As a young child, the superstitions and folklore I experienced staying at my grandparents in the mountains of County Sligo left a lasting impression on me. Living in a thatched cottage beneath a 2000 foot tall mountain with no electricity and running water set the scene for a magical setting, particularly when sitting around an evening turf fire listening to my grandmother’s stories of fairies and ghosts. All the time the oil lamps flicker straining for its golden light to reach into the darker recesses of the kitchen. The mountain range that dominated this region is steeped in ancient history and Mythology. I felt when I was breathing in the air with a soft mist on my face I felt connected to an older time, sharing this space with the seen and the unseen.
The Red man
Sculpted in cement I created this fairy character that is known as the Red Man. The Red Man is another similar version of the leprechaun, in that he is a small creature about half the size of a man. His name is Irish for ‘red man’, given to him because – you guessed it- he dressed from head to toe in red, including a scarlet hat and cloak. He is also usually depicted with long grey hair and a wrinkled face. Like the leprechaun and Clurichaun, he is a fan of practical jokes, usually leaning towards the more gruesome kind. His appearance is also a sign of impending bad luck.
Banshee Tower
The Banshee Tower, Ducketts Grove Castle, County Carlow, Ireland. It is believed that the voices of the past and the ghosts of their owners haunt the high tower and the grounds of the roofless shell of Duckett’s Grove. The eerie atmosphere and spooky stories that shroud the skeletal ruins of this once magnificent Gothic mansion, built in the first half of the 19th century, are probably the main reason for the mystery and fantasy that arise from these beautiful remains.
Celtic Merrow
Celtic Merrow is another of my sculpted cement figures. It should not be assumed that merrows are kindly and well-disposed towards mortals. As members of the sidhe, or Irish fairy world, the inhabitants of the Land beneath the Waves have a natural antipathy towards humans. In some parts of Ireland, they are regarded as messengers of doom and death.
The tower at Kildavnet
The tower at Kildavnet on Achill Island is thought to have been constructed by the Clan O’Malley in about 1429, but is associated locally with a descendant of the original builders, Grace O’Malley or Granuaile. This legendary pirate queen is thought to have been born around 1530 and died in about 1603. The Tower at Kildavnet is one of a series of such strongholds that Granuaile established along the western seaboard (she is said to be buried in a similar tower on Clare Island) as she dominated the waters during the 16th century.
These 4 images form part of a larger series of images and probably my favourites so far. The project initially started without any intent, and after venturing out in similar conditions, a collection of images started to come together.
To me, they represent a quiet moment of mood, all the images were taken at times when there is no sound, perfect silence, a time to reflect and recharge. Having this thought process has allowed me to just go out, no plan, no pressure, a rewarding mindset.
Having been to Iceland several times over the last 10 years I was aware that my collection of images tended towards the big vista. I decided that my 2018 visit would feature more detailed images. The reality was that the big vista was hard to resist but I did come away with some detailed images. This 4x4 collection, all from 2018, features different textures of rock found in the Western Fjords of Iceland.
Lofoten is the place where mountains and ocean meet together. A small archipelago where every day several villages preserve history and tradition. Hamnøy is the oldest and most iconic of all Lofoten Islands, favourite place for photographs from all over the world. Sunrise is probably the best moment to capture its quietness and the magical colours surrounding the "rorbu", the traditional fisherman's cabins.
As I write this, the buds are visible fattening on the trees, and the landscape in the northwest Peak District is greening up. It’s a good time of year to head for the woods, but then any time of year is a good time to do so. Even the most unpromising scrap of woodland offers an escape from everyday life and an opportunity to reconnect with the sights, scents and sounds of nature. Paul Mitchell has become well known for his complex and beautifully lit woodland scenes, though this is by no means his only strength as a look at his website will reveal. Hopefully, our Revisited feature will allow you to catch up with his work, and may even give you an insight or two if the complex patterns of branches and stems leave you lost for a place to start. Even if you venture into the woods, find a place and simply sit, it will be time well spent at any time of year. You can read the original featured photographer interview from 2011 here.
What has changed for you, photographically speaking, since Tim spoke to you way back in 2011, or given you the most enjoyment?
What I perceive to have been the biggest change for me over the last eight years is my gradual, but inevitable, slide towards digital capture. I’ve certainly not abandoned film completely as I do still enjoy venturing out with my pinhole camera on a fairly regular basis. Indeed I still have all my large and medium format cameras and intend holding on to them as long as possible. Why the change though? In a nutshell… convenience. My increasing appreciation of the countryside and woodland has made me realise that you have to react quickly to the ever changing seasons and weather conditions which is why I keep my camera bag handy next to the front door. I very often just pop out for an hour or so at dawn and can still be sitting at my desk by 9am. I can then download, review and process my images on an ad hoc basis without waiting to finish off a roll of film. It is also fair to say that digital has ‘come of age’ and has now equalled, if not surpassed, the results I was obtaining with film.
Have your tastes in photography changed at all, or what you find inspiration in? (Either in terms of your own work, or what you enjoy looking at.)
As with my taste in music I’ve always considered my interest in photography to be quite eclectic in nature. I appreciate a well-crafted Joe Cornish landscape image as much as I do an Alex Soth or Andreas Gursky. I often feel that those who confine their interest to a small number of genres are missing out somewhat in their total appreciation of photography. Indeed my own interest in woodland compositions has led me to seek out inspiration from some of our traditional landscape painters such as John Constable, Paul Sandby and John Sell Cotman. The more contemporary work of Christopher Burkett and Shinzo Maeda always continue to inspire.
If you're reading this then you're probably a disciple of the quest to explore nature in all its forms; hiking, discovering, conquering and escaping into mindfulness. We would argue there's a human need for photographing in these places. We want to sometimes tame them and idealise them, set ourselves a compositional challenge and bend the location to our will. It's about unearthing something unseen, to create surprises, offering a wider acknowledgement that our own way of seeing is unique to us, that we are different. Though perhaps that's not quite enough.
Last autumn I visited Spain, once again in search of wooded scenes making use of the autumnal colours. It was on my list of photographic things to do; always looking for a less well-known location and places that challenge me as a photographer. I found the experience enjoyable and intense at times, which is an ideal state. The subsequent set of photographs produced was also satisfying. However, once the images were in a set, I felt something was missing. Whilst interesting and perhaps pretty, they did not convey to me anything other than the natural forms I had recorded, however skilfully. There was no narrative. There were no layers of meaning.
Mystery in photography is often seen as a sign of artistic endeavour. The more we can ask the viewer to seek an understanding of the image, the longer the image is in their presence, the more successful the photograph. With this in mind, some photographers seek to obfuscate their photographs through processing hoping that this will give them artistic credibility (harking back to Pictorialism perhaps). They imbue mystery, believing it will offer meaning. It's the wrong road and one which I suggest you shouldn't take. Look at the work of the masters such as H.Callahan and E.Weston for guidance on this issue.
Fotospeed has announced that they will be hosting Foto Fest 2019 as the festival heads into its fourth year. Once again, the festival brings together 4 talented photographers to deliver talks about the inspirations, techniques, and stories behind their images. You will also have access to the market place featuring industry leading brands and take advantage of some very special offers. The market place is open and free to anyone who wishes to visit with or without a ticket for the talks.
Read on to discover everything you need to know about Foto Fest 2019, including details of the talks. If you have any additional questions, you can contact the Fotospeed team at sales@fotospeed.com or 01249 714 555.
Event details
Where is it?: University of Bath, Bath
When is it?: 8th September 2019
What time?: 9.30am – 5.00pm
How much are tickets to Fotospeed talks?: £40 day pass
How much is the Market Place? FREE with or without a ticket to Fotospeed Talks
Speakers
Martin Parr
Arguably one of the most legendary documentary photographers of his generation, Martin Parr will be headlining Foto Fest 2019. With over 100 of his own books published – and another 30 edited by him – Parr is most noted for his humorous and anthropological observations of human habits through the lens of social class structures.
At Foto Fest, Parr looks at his long career in photography and finishes with work from his recent National Portrait Gallery exhibition earlier this year.
Rachael Talibart
Award-winning photographer Rachael Talibart is most known for her Sirens portfolio, critically acclaimed photographs of stormy seas, named after creatures of myth and legend. Her work has been exhibited around the world, and she delivers photography workshops and tours as the owner of f11 workshops.
For Rachael, the coast isn’t the end of the land; it is the beginning of imagination and possibility. In her Foto Fest talk, Rachael will explain some of the techniques – from the conventional to the experimental – that she uses in her own work, why she makes the images that she does, and how she generates the ideas behind her work. In an age when it sometimes seems as though everyone is a photographer, Rachael will encourage you to create coastal images that stand out from the crowd.
Tom Way
Tom Way is an award winning professional fine art wildlife photographer who has been awarded in various international competitions including the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year. Spending the majority of his time overseas, Tom’s main passion is Africa where assignments have seen him focus on Elephants and Lions in Kenya, and Leopards in Zambia.
In his talk, Tom will discuss what it takes to be a Wildlife Photographer, tackling the issues of light, angles, and how to compose a sellable image. You’ll hear stories of Tom’s adventures abroad and how he went from working in a gym to taking and exhibiting wildlife images around the world.
Nigel Danson
Nigel Danson became a full-time landscape photographer after a life-changing accident at Yosemite Park, which caused him to leave his job as CEO of a software company he founded – something he describes as the best decision he ever made.
In his talk, Nigel will look at the tips, tricks, rules, and processes that he has learnt through making over 100 landscape photography videos that will help you improve your images and create prints that you’ll want to hang on your wall.
What's Included with the ticket
4 incredible talks from 4 world-renowned photographers
FREE all-day parking
FREE entry to Fotospeed Market Place - access exclusive show deals for one day only
Live demonstrations, technical advice and all the latest equipment
Marketplace
There will also be an opportunity to get help and advice from our experts and enjoy some amazing event only deals. We will be featuring these top brands and more:
Fotospeed, Kaiser Fototechnik, Clifton Cameras, Sony, Lee Filters, Rotolight, Canon, The RPS, and more
When people find out that I am a photographer, inevitably, they ask how I got started. In response, I tell the story of my journey from novice to now, making sure to highlight the time I spent shooting and developing black and white film. I reminisce fondly on time spent in a darkroom because to me, it is a peaceful space. When I explain it to people, I talk about how developing film is a meditative process, where the rest of life’s worries and stresses fall away for the time that I am in the darkroom. If I am thinking about dodging and burning, or chemical baths and film reels, I cannot help but to be fully invested in that moment. In hindsight, it has occurred to me that all aspects of landscape photography have been restorative for me, not just my time in the darkroom. That is part of why I have made it a centrepiece in my life. It encourages me to travel, explore in nature, practice mindfulness, develop connections with the world around me and create something of beauty.
Although I have always thought about the positive impact landscape photography has on my own life, I only recently realised that photography has therapeutic value for others. The realisation came while I listened to a photography podcast featuring William Patino, a landscape photographer out of New Zealand1. William said that several years ago he’d been diagnosed with depression and photography helped him manage it. In his own words, “photography was this tool that allowed me to kind of see colour and hope and beauty in the world again. Depression just really made me very numb to everything and photography was a tool that helped me feel alive.” That is a powerful sentiment that resonated strongly with me. Among other things, photography has been a way for me to celebrate the beauty of the world and to hear someone else verbalise my feelings were strange. Of course, I’ve always known that I use photography to celebrate nature, and of course, I’ve always known that I found happiness in the act of creating art. However, until hearing that interview, it never occurred to me that those two things were two sides of the same coin.
Time spent in nature has long been known to have health benefits. Gregory Bratman, a graduate student at Stanford University, conducted a study to measure brain function before and after a person was immersed in nature. Participants were asked to describe their baseline level of brooding, worrying over the same issues repetitively or fretting, and they were scanned to measure blood flow in the brain.
Two years ago, shortly after our second Meeting of Minds conference, we said goodbye to David Ward as he set off to run an eco lodge in Botswana. We weren't sure when he'd be back (if ever!) but we're very happy to say that he's returned after two years and not only started photographing again but agreed to write about it for us. Welcome back David!
If somebody had said to me when I turned 50 that shovelling elephant poo off paths would ever be part of my daily duties I would have laughed in their face. Yet, at the tender age of 57, this was exactly what I found myself doing – sometimes once or twice a day.
Elephants in camp
Obviously, this was not “normal” for a landscape photographer/workshop leader. But I was no longer a photographer: I was now a safari camp manager. Since I was eighteen years old I have defined myself as a photographer, in the same way, that someone with medical qualifications defines themselves as a doctor. Such labels tend to overshadow other aspects of one’s life. Of course, I was also a father, a lover of music, a bus driver, someone with a keen interest in science, a walker, a writer, a onetime carpenter, a teller of bad jokes, an aspiring philosopher and a thousand other things.
Such labels tend to overshadow other aspects of one’s life. Of course, I was also a father, a lover of music, a bus driver, someone with a keen interest in science, a walker, a writer, a onetime carpenter, a teller of bad jokes, an aspiring philosopher and a thousand other things.
But “photographer” was probably - most of the time - top of any personal list of my activities, attributes and skills. Consequently, I found that picking up elephant ordure was nowhere near as upsetting as having cast aside photography; something that I felt, and still feel, is a fundamental part of my life. So what led to this wild and somewhat painful change in direction?
It’s tempting to blame my partner, Saskia. After all it was she who suggested that running a safari camp in Botswana would be exciting, challenging, rewarding and also help the conservation of endangered species. But she wasn’t twisting my arm (at least not so hard that I couldn’t bear the pain).
Ultimately, two factors influenced my decision to make the move.
Firstly, I have felt for a long time that I should do something concrete to help with conservation efforts. Making contributions to charities and supporting campaigns are obviously worthwhile but, as someone whose whole life has been spent trying to reach a deep communion with the natural world, I felt I needed to do more than give money. Helping to save some of Africa’s megafauna seemed like the most worthwhile thing I could do. Nick Brandt’s (https://www.nickbrandt.com) elegiac photographs of East African wildlife had really moved me. Elephant populations in Africa have declined by over 30% since 2007. They suffer horrifying deaths to satisfy the illegal ivory trade. The carnage wrought by poachers who trade rhino horn as a drug to ignorant people who believe it will cure their cancer or fix their wilting libido is equally senseless.
I was browsing the BBC News Magazine back in January 2019 when I came across this article 'The concrete blocks that once protected Britain'. I was drawn into the fascination of these structures: How were they built, where are they located, how did he find them all, were they all documented? The list of questions went on and I eventually got in touch with Joe to find out about his family connection to the sound mirrors and how he went about documenting part Britain's history.
What sparked your passion for photography?
The darkroom at my old college. It was 2010, I was at Exeter School of Art, which coincidentally had both black and white and colour darkrooms. It was the first time that breaking the rules and not just doing as you were told was encouraged. Being able to experiment and see the results appear under the red light was the most amazing thing. I would skip other classes and just spend hours in there.
You studied photography at Brighton University. How did this experience shape your photography?
Brighton was where I found my voice as a photographer. It was a safe environment where I could get things wrong and teach myself to be the photographer I always aspired to be. It also helped that one of my favourite photographers, Mark Power, was the professor at the time. I only had a few classes with him but it was enough to get me on the right path.
Why did you choose landscape photography as opposed to other genres?
Photography has always been my way of making sense of the world and my relation to it. Photographing the landscape came naturally to me. I have always enjoyed the solitude and adventure it brings. It took me some time to get the confidence to explore other genres. I was quite awkward and a bit shy when I first started out, apparently as a kid my mum had to essentially train me to look people in the eye when I spoke to them. Truth be told portraiture was not something that came naturally, I had to work at it. Now I love both.
Photography has always been my way of making sense of the world and my relation to it. Photographing the landscape came naturally to me. I have always enjoyed the solitude and adventure it brings.
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Tell me about the photographers or artists that inspire you most. What books stimulated your interest in photography and who drove you forward, directly or indirectly, as you developed?
That does change from project to project but overall my main influences starting out were Alec Soth, Mark Power, Jem Southam, Simon Roberts, Nadav Kander and Broomberg and Chanarin. However, you don’t see any of their influences In Defence of Lost Causes.
In terms of books, Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph as Contemporary Art was like the bible to me early on, it eased me into the inescapable and necessary theoretical side of photography.
Simon Roberts has a studio in Brighton, I met him within a few weeks of being here and he has been my mentor ever since.
Tell us a bit about the project 'In Defence of Lost Causes’. Where did it all start? What's your personal interest in this subject?
It started with a conversation I had with my dad the night before I moved to Brighton a few years ago. After the rest of the family had left the dinner table he shared a story he hadn't told before. He began to describe large concrete structures dotted along the coastline between Brighton and Dover, a precursor to radar that used sound to detect enemy aircraft that in turn, his dad had described to him. When I was a child he told me stories about my grandfather and his involvement in radar. One of his recurring jokes has always gone along the lines of, “It’s not rocket science, I should know, my dad was a rocket scientist.”
Initially, I was drawn to the family connection, but later after researching early aircraft defence experiments I became fascinated by the story of the sound mirrors.
How did the project evolve? Did you have to refine the vision of what you wanted to achieve?
Initially, I planned to walk the 90 odd miles along the coast from Brighton to Dover photographing anything that fit my dad’s original description of concrete concave structures dotted along the coastline. The resulting photographs would have played around with scale, representation and interpretation. To start with I didn’t want to see what the structures looked like but I couldn’t help myself, and then as soon as I saw a few examples of them online and learnt there were more around the country I knew I wanted to take a more topographical approach.
Initially, I planned to walk the 90 odd miles along the coast from Brighton to Dover photographing anything that fit my dad’s original description of concrete concave structures dotted along the coastline. The resulting photographs would have played around with scale, representation and interpretation
How did you go about researching where they were and the locations? Were they all documented or did you have to do a lot of in-depth analysis to get the information? Did you include all the sound mirrors? If not, how did you decide which ones to include?
There are whole books dedicated to them and they are well documented online with numerous blogs and forums that mention where they are located. The National Archives was also a valuable source of information which has maps, original documents and archival pictures of the sound mirrors in use.
Yes, I photographed every remaining sound mirror in the country.
Tell us about the project and how you planned it, how long it took, how did you decide in which sequence you chose to visit the locations.
I researched each of the locations and cross-referenced the information between different online sources. Once I had the coordinates I used Satellite view on Google Maps to confirm the locations before plotting each of them on a custom Google Map.
I photographed the Brighton to Dover leg in Spring of 2016, then was commissioned by FT Weekend to photograph the remaining structures on the Northern coast in November 2017.
Were there any of the sound mirrors that you found particularly challenging to photograph or were in interesting locations?
Each had their own challenges but the Warden Point sound mirror was particularly tricky. The structure was originally built on the cliff but due to erosion fell off into the sea some years ago. The majority of the time it is submerged but when the tide is fully out it is still accessible. Only half of the mirror still remains so I had to shoot it at an angle that would accentuate the concave. In my picture, black seaweed drapes over the bottom section of the structure and the cliffs behind purposefully align with the tideline markings.
Photography is more than just a tool for observation, it can peel away the original context and function of a thing and transform it into something entirely different.
The images tell a story of the sound mirrors and their significance in history and their failure. What visual (and non-visual) narrative did you want to leave the reader with when you were working on this project?
That any advancement, technologically, creatively or otherwise, takes years of experimentation and failure. That cutting edge technology of the day will eventually fall into ruin.
Photography is more than just a tool for observation, it can peel away the original context and function of a thing and transform it into something entirely different. Here we have a primitive military technology - that through amplification made the speed of sound faster than the speed of light - being presented as monuments of experimentation.
Tell me what your favourite two or three photographs from the series are and a little bit about them.
Visually my two favourites are Abbot’s Cliff and the 200ft wall at Dungeness. On an aesthetic level, they both do it for me, the feeling of awe is there and they both incite the sense of intrigue that I hoped for. This is more important to me than how I made the photographs but conveniently they both do have anecdotes.
Abbot’s Cliff
When I arrived at Abbot’s Cliff the light was still peak midday sun - perhaps the worst lighting for the sort of pictures that I make. The light was creating a distractingly unappealing orb shape in the centre of the structure. I took my time working out which angle I wanted to shoot the picture from, set up the camera and sat in the grass reading a book waiting for the sun to change position. It took several hours of waiting but the sun did eventually pass over creating an eclipse effect. For me, this slither of highlight makes the picture what it is.
200ft wall at Dungeness
I took the three pictures at Dungeness on the second trip I made to the site. They were originally built on marshland but now a line of housing separates them from the sea. Over the years they have been subjected to kids vandalising them and idiots on BMXs using them as half-pipes so the council built a moat around them to stop all access. The first time I went to make the pictures I underestimated how deep the surrounding flooded trench was - it’s practically a lake in places - so went home empty handed.
The second time I went back with an inflatable to put all my gear on, stripped down to swim shorts and swam across. I put my clothes back on and spent the afternoon working out which were the best angles to shoot the structures from. The 200ft wall at Dungeness is just that, a massive concrete wall some 30ft high and 200ft across. I photographed the back corner at a diagonal so it would fit in with the other pictures in the series but I love how strange it looks.
You used a large format camera for this project. Could you tell us a little about the camera and lenses you typically take on a trip and how their choice affects your photography?
To confess, I am a bit of a camera nerd. As much as ideas drive my work, the tools that I use are always highly considered. I don’t always use the same camera for every project, I tend to experiment with different set-ups before I find something that works. For In Defence of Lost Causes, I used an Ebony 45SU which is a non-foldable wooden 5x4 field camera that allows for fairly extreme camera movements for its class and bellows that can take wide lenses without any issues. I wanted the structures, which range from 15ft to 30ft high, to fit the same area of the frame, I ended up using a Schneider 90mm f/8 which has a large enough image circle for extreme movements. In terms of camera movements, all of the images in the series used front-rise but occasionally swing as well (Selsely) to help with diagonal perspective and on occasions tilt (Dover 15ft) to change the focal plane to keep my shutter speed high enough to avoid slow-mo plants in the foreground.
In most photographers lives there are 'epiphanic’ moments where things become clear, or new directions are formed. What were your two main moments and how did they change your photography?
Yes definitely, these eureka moments where things just start to make sense. I remember the moment that I decided I wanted to be a photographer. I was maybe 17 years old, on a foundation photography course, trying to find quarries to photograph. It was before I was educated in the history of photography. I had this raw, untainted by the burden of research, idea that I would photograph quarries as if they were beautiful rolling landscapes. No one told me landscapes didn’t have to be idyllic views, that landscapes could also be of scenes tainted by man. Now, of course, this idea is unoriginal but at the time I had no idea. After hours of driving around, I eventually found a claypit quarry in St. Austell, Cornwall, UK. I remember scrambling up this slope, looking up and just dropping to the floor in total awe. I just sat there looking at the landscape in front of me for what felt like hours. The water at the bottom was a bright turquoise, the white sweeping cliff edge on the opposing side was marked with streaks of pink. A miniature forest had grown in the basin of the void and ducks swam carelessly in the bright pool. I tumbled down the steep slope and all of a sudden I was in another world.
Chase subject matter that you can really get your teeth into, with research that excites you so much it keeps you awake at night and technical considerations you have to really work for.
I had this feeling there was almost too much to photograph but just totally in love with making landscape pictures. Later, when all the films came out totally blank, I realised I had knocked the camera heavily when I clambered my way down. But it didn’t matter, I was totally hooked on photography after that.
The second hasn’t really happened yet.
If one of our readers was thinking about embarking upon a large project similar to yours, what insights and learnings would you give them?
Chase subject matter that you can really get your teeth into, with research that excites you so much it keeps you awake at night and technical considerations you have to really work for. For the work that I do, if a project doesn’t do all of these things then it is not worth pursuing.
What is next for you? Where do you see your photography going in terms of subject and style?
After Charlotte asked me to write an article for End Frame I spent some time searching through my collection of photography books trying to select a favourite image to write about. Then I asked myself why I was searching for a favourite image when it has been hanging on the wall for the past 10 or 15 years — and I’m still not tired of it! It’s “The Labyrinth” by Tasmanian wilderness photographer Peter Dombrovskis.
This is of course not the first time an image of Peter’s has featured in End Frame, which shows what a gifted photographer he was. His work gained prominence in the early 1980s when his photograph “Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend” was used as part of the successful campaign to stop the damming of the Franklin River in southwest Tasmania. He was a passionate environmentalist with a deep love for the Tasmanian wilderness and was widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost wilderness photographers. Tragically, he died of a heart attack while photographing in the Western Arthur Range in southwest Tasmania in 1996 at the age of 51. He was posthumously inducted into the International Photographic Hall of Fame in 2003, becoming the first Australian photographer to be accorded this honour.
I’ve been a great admirer of Peter’s work ever since seeing his collection of postcards, diaries and calendars on my first trip to Tasmania in the 1980s. He was able to bring out the essence of whatever he photographed, be it the wider view or the smaller, more intimate details in the landscape. In all of his images, his deep love and reverence for the natural world is apparent. Through his work, the general public glimpsed the wild beauty of the Tasmanian wilderness and, more importantly, what would be lost if it wasn’t protected.
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!
Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains are a small cluster of rugged granite peaks and crystal clear lakes, linked together by forests of pine. They are a favourite of outdoor enthusiasts of many kinds; day hikers, backpackers, paddle boarders and kayakers. mountain bikers, horseback riders, fishermen, photographers, etc. The mountains’ snowmelt feeds the rivers of central Idaho; the area’s main and only town, Stanley, is a mecca for rafters and kayakers. And for those seeking serene mountain panoramas, and the ambience of a small mountain town, there is that too.
Location
The Sawtooths are located in south central Idaho, in the Sawtooth National Forest. They are about the junction of Hwy 21 and Hwy 75. near the town of Stanley. ( population 68 in 2017 ) Twin Falls, Idaho lies 143 miles south of the Sawtooths, and Boise is located 132 miles to the southwest.
Weather
As you would expect from a high mountain locale, the temperatures are cooler than average. Summer highs average 79 degrees with a nighttime low of 36 degrees on average. During the winter months, Stanley is consistently one of the coldest places in Idaho. Keep your light coat or sweater handy, and you should be comfortable from May to October. It is a dry climate, the average rainfall is only 12.2 inches per year and snowfall averages 76 inches.
Photo Experiences
There are abundant photo ops in a relatively small area. The views begin about 5 miles west of Stanley, at Stanley Lake. This large ( for the area ) mountain lake is overlooked by McGown Peak, a large pointed buttress of granite rock. Several miles closer to town is a pull off that gives access a tremendous panorama of pole fence and sagebrush stretching out to a wide expanse of granite peaks topped much of the year with snow. Just across the road is a wide view looking down on a small tree-lined creek meandering thru a grassy valley. This creek is lined with the pole fencing characteristic of the area to keep the cattle out of the stream. About a mile west of Stanley is another paved pull off. A large open meadow area with a pole fence meandering back and forth leads your eye to another beautiful group of peaks. At dusk, the light on these mountains makes for a striking photo.
In town, a short drive up a small hill to the school and airport leads to another great panorama. Here is the Sawtooth Valley Meditation Chapel, a log cabin with large windows facing a scene that is fittingly peaceful and serene.
From the highway junction south, it is just a continuum of photo worthy views. My favourite is at Little Redfish Lake. An early morning stop yielded a still lake view with an impressive line of mountain peaks reflected in the water. Further down this same well marked side road, you can walk down to the waterline and photograph Redfish Lake with an impressive pine covered rock ridge on the other side of the water.
Back out on Hwy 75 headed south, it is difficult to drive because your eyes are drawn to the views you are driving by. By carefully pulling over to the side of the road or using access roads, I took picture after picture in the first 20 or so miles. My Canon 24-105L was set from 24mm to 70mm for most of these moderate distance photos. When you have travelled 25 miles, a road heads west to Alturas Lake. Alturas is another photogenic mountain lake with a large granite ridge backdrop. Out on the highway again, just a few miles further south is another lake, Pettit Lake. It sits in a similar setting as Alturas Lake. Past Pettit Lake, the road climbs and winds up a hill to Galena Summit. You’ll find a large overlook there, named for Frank and Bethine Church. (Frank Church was a well liked Senator from Idaho; the Frank Church Wilderness area is also named after him ) Here you can take in the quintessential view of the Sawtooths. You see them extend west into unroaded areas, and north all the way to Stanley. This view shows you clearly how rugged these bare granite peaks are, and the limited area they cover. It is 32 miles from Stanley to this panoramic opportunity.
Best Time To Visit
Summer can be quite busy in the Stanley area, with trucks and trailers stacked tall with river rafts parked along the roads; the parking lot of the gas station/convenience store can get quite congested. I was visiting during the 3rd week of June. I would suggest a little earlier or wait till after Labor Day if crowds turn you off. ( the area starts shutting down in mid-September when the temperatures drop ) For more information about the area, I would suggest the Chamber of Commerce’s website. It is very well done and full of the knowledge you will need to plan a visit.
This set of images, from my current researches, were taken on a trip to Shetland, in March this year. They are examples of where my motivation for taking the image is that I have perceived pathos, isolation, a feeling of being left behind in such human constructions. In doing so, I am endowing these buildings and objects with personalities and emotions of their own, as if they can feel pathos as we do. In my mind, these are not dereliction photographs, where evidence of former human presence and activity is the key motivation. Instead, these are buildings and constructions themselves demonstrating a stoicism, despite being abandoned, overlooked and apparently, no longer of value.
This concept of banal human constructions having anthropomorphic qualities shows up in many of my images. Other such qualities I have so far identified include Confrontation, Survival and Exclusion. Hopefully, by the end of the researches, I will understand what draws me to take photographs of such scenes and in the desaturated, flat lit ways that I do so.
In August 2018, I was travelling in middle France, searching for inspirational places, as there are many highlands there. I eventually came across these ones, they were one of the most isolated areas I've ever seen in this country, apart from the high mountains like the Pyrenees or the Alps. I always was really attracted by this kind of barren, windswept and uninhabited landscapes.
There is something really cinematographic in them, and this was exactly what I was looking for. So a few months later, at the end of the winter, in March 2019, I decided to go back there. There was still snow patches across the moors, a glacial north wind was blowing strong, and swarms of birds were waving under a darkened sky, only pierced by rare rays of light. The scene was reminding me of Andrei Tarkovsky's movies, Andrew Wyeth's paintings or the atmosphere of some series like Fargo or True Detective. So I kept these influences in mind and started a series to transcribe the ambience of these forgotten lands where almost no one lives, which I call the High Moors.
I went into photography pretty early, as a kid, with disposable cameras. Year after year, this art took a more and more important place in my life. Quite quickly, it became primordial, passing from a simple tool of testimony to a real medium of artistic expression. My work is now mainly focused on wild landscapes, but also strongly influenced by cinema or painting, and increasingly including a bit more human elements.
The danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience. Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. ~Rollo May
Inner experience is the subjective significance, or meaning, we each associate—intuitively and/or consciously—with certain circumstances and perceptions, and the emotions inspired by this significance. While some predictable commonalities exist in the significance most may associate with some known circumstances, generally speaking, we don’t all experience the same (objective) circumstances in the same way—what one person may find beautiful, heroic, tasty, or interesting, may impart altogether different perceptions in another. For example, a person raised in a religious tradition may feel intuitive reverence for the divine in circumstances where another, raised in a different tradition, may just as intuitively experience wonder and mystery without supernatural associations; a person accustomed to a certain cuisine may delight in dishes that another person of a different culinary background may find distasteful, and so on. While it may seem obvious that such things as tradition, education, personal sensibilities, or social norms, may influence one’s intuitive perceptions, what is less obvious is that we each also possess a considerable degree of conscious control in shaping our intuitive perceptions. Indeed, in some cases, a degree of conscious thinking and cognitive training may transform our experiences—in a greater sense, our perceptions of the world, of ourselves, and the courses of our lives—in pervasive and important ways.
Indeed, in some cases, a degree of conscious thinking and cognitive training may transform our experiences—in a greater sense, our perceptions of the world, of ourselves, and the courses of our lives—in pervasive and important ways.
In past writings, I touched on the personal value of favouring qualities of experience to qualities of photographs. This attitude has been so transformative for me, that I am no longer interested in making photographs unless they ensue out of some personally-meaningful experience (even if just a moment of peace and inspiration). But experience is not a singular quantity and has dimensions and varieties that warrant discussing more specifically.
In April, Tim and I went to the Isle of Skye for two days to see if we could get away from the madding crowds (even on a busy Bank holiday). I think we did OK but we wanted to ask our subscribers to send in their images from less travelled Skye locations. Although we're sure a fair few people would rather keep some locations quiet, a few people were willing to share there own favourite spots. A big thanks to all who appear below! There's still a couple of days left if you want to add yours!
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Toby Deveson
July 2015 using a Nikkormat and a 24mm lens. Taken on Kodak T-Max 400 and printed uncropped by me in my darkroom
Paul Marsch
Raasay Squall
Glen Brittle
Along the Sound of Raasay
Leslie Ashe
Trumpan, Waternish Peninsula Approaching storm
Loch Harport - a sudden shaft of light
John Liggins
Kylerhea to Breakish road through Glen Arroch looking back to the Knoydart Peninsula on the mainland.
Kylerhea to Breakish road through Glen Arroch looking to Knoydart Peninsula. Looking toward Broadford and The Cuillins in the distance
8083 near Torrin looking over Loch Slapin towards Bla Bheinn
Jo’s images have been punctuating my social media feeds for a while now, soft and personal expressions of her relationship with nature and the seasons, a perfect escape for the urban and the world weary. Her ‘A Year in Nature’ little squares are a good reminder of our country’s biodiversity where man has had a lighter touch. Hers was among several names that I know who graced the latest International Garden Photographer of the Year awards and for me it was a pleasure to see these individual interpretations doing well in the Abstract Views category. In 2018 Jo was awarded a bronze medal for a Portfolio of Photography at the RHS London Plant and Art Fair. We featured some of her images earlier this year in our 4x4 Portfolio and in this issue we’ll find out a little more about Jo and her passions.
Would you like to start by telling the readers a little bit 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 London but grew up in the West Country, Alexandria in Virginia and New Delhi in India, so I guess I’m what’s known as third culture. I went to so many different schools, but my favourite was multi-cultural. I love everything about exploring different cultures and my childhood was peppered with exotic foods, words and sensations.
I’ve always been happiest alone and in nature. Not that you are ever alone in nature. I built a den in the garden hidden in the hedge and dreamt of living in it, away from the people world.
I took my O levels (that shows my age) in India and am still in touch with most of the class of 1985, despite us being spread across nearly every continent. For kids that led transient lives travelling we have managed to find a point in our life to put down some roots and stay connected. These connections reinforce my belief that we are all the same and seek the same things: love, security and purpose.
Year on year, digital sensors seem to improve, and with that, dynamic range expands. The figures look good with 11-12 stops being commonplace and the very best sensors capable of capturing 15 stops of dynamic range. This challenges or exceeds the previous benchmark, colour negative film.
Landscape images are often made in challenging, high contrast conditions, yet on the face of it most sensors – if exposed correctly – can handle that range. From the bright highlights to the deep shadows. It’s true the raw files need some work to reveal those details; fortunately, raw converters are up to the task with excellent recovery tools that can be used globally or locally.
The project, or series of photographs, is from the local area where I live, West Lothian. West Lothian itself is geographically quite a small county, situated in the central belt of Scotland. It's not my home county, that is County Antrim in Northern Ireland; However, it's somewhere I know well, that I have met a lot of wonderful people in and where I have chosen to raise my family.
Scotland itself is well known for the drama it conveys through its stunningly beautiful landscape and the diverse and intricate weather. However, the terrain of West Lothian is less 'eye-catching' and one has to look more carefully for images. This certainly didn't come easy to me at the start.
So why did I start this project?
Well, to be honest, it was almost forced upon me. Before its creation, I very much enjoyed chasing the larger scenes in the Northern territories of the Scottish Trossachs and Highlands.
Before its creation, I very much enjoyed chasing the larger scenes in the northern territories of the Scottish Trossachs and Highlands. The escapism and hugely obvious drama that greeted you every time you entered these areas created an excitement in me that was almost infectious.
The escapism and hugely obvious drama that greeted me every time I entered these areas created an excitement in me that was almost infectious. In fact, it was infectious - massively so.
However with an increased workload, family and young children and the ever-increasing fuel costs, I was driven to find photographic possibilities closer to home. I'll be honest, I resented this greatly at the beginning. I didn't want to drive or walk a mile from the house to see what I pass 10 times a day in the car. I wanted to chase the light in areas I'm so lucky to live near to, but I had to stick to the new plan.
Although the immediate visual 'grab' wasn't there from the low key terrain, I began to notice that West Lothian had a number of little woodland areas, owned largely by the Woodland Trust and other conservation agencies. I also began to notice that they offered their own possibilities for exploration and their habitats changed as the seasons developed. And within myself, I felt at ease and increasingly absorbed with the subtle views that were so close to my front door. So, since 2013 my whole mindset changed towards my natural landscape photography.
And now here we are, six years down the line. I have a real body of work created, consisting of approximately 50 images I am truly happy with. All the images have been taken within approximately 10 miles of the house and have been taken in short outings to the woodland, often before or after work. The support I have had for the work has been so wonderful, especially from others that specialise in the field of woodland photography. Without this continual support, would the series still be ongoing? Doubtful, as external 'drive' was greatly needed in the early days. Nearly all of the images have been taken on colour negative film, and whilst medium or process is not important, it has helped slow down my own approach to the project and has provided consistent tonal properties to the body of work.
Will the project ever be finished?
Maybe if I move house! However, I very much doubt it. Even when I visit a familiar scene, it is never truly the same as the previous time I set foot in the area. Over the next 12 months, I hope to print more and release a few limited edition box sets of images, however, the real enjoyment is just immersing myself in the familiar, knowing that I'm potentially adding to something I'm already proud of.
Tim Parkin: Having revisited these locations many times, what are the biggest changes you've seen?
John Irvine: The levels of deforestation at some of the locations have been a bit upsetting if I'm honest. There are a number of scenes that are no longer there. Whilst is it nice to have a negative of the scene, it is a bit of an awakening to the realisation of the long term existence of woodland areas.
In terms of intricate differences or changes, it is probably the lack of consistency in the seasons - especially with the mild winter we have had this year. I've pretty much given up on returning to scenes that have attracted me previously due to certain characteristics due to the fact that they'll never be recreated. The core form of the trees will often be fairly consistent, however foliage, leaf cover and the ever presence of mankind certainly do not remain the same.
The levels of deforestation at some of the locations have been a bit upsetting if I'm honest. There are a number of scenes that are no longer there. Whilst is it nice to have a negative of the scene, it is a bit of an awakening to the realisation of the long term existence of woodland areas.
TP: Do you have a favourite season or conditions to visit in?
JI: Not really if I'm honest. Due to logistical constraints, I rarely take pictures in Winter as I'm either at work or with family. Autumn is naturally a draw however I just shoot when I'm able to. This has been refreshing and doesn't pigeon hole the time of day I shoot in. I believe that this, in turn, makes me more creative and I feel that I don't go through the motions like I would if I always shot my images later Autumn/early November.
TP: Conversely, have you been surprised at some work created during 'lesser' conditions/seasons (mid-summer, harsh light, etc)?
JI: I feel that some of my stronger compositions have been in less obvious conditions as I don't have flamboyant colours, for instance, being the main draw to the image. I probably work harder during these occasions, and whilst I wouldn't say I'm overly successful, the reward when it does work out is often better.
TP: People are often worried about working in urban areas during anti-social hours - have you had any bad encounters?
JI: This hasn't been something I've ever really had to encounter. When I completed my Peace Walls project back home I was pretty careful regarding the logistics. I would often shoot during the long days of summer and would frequently be set up on locations at 5am, whilst people were asleep. The more natural based locations that were intertwined with an urban scene were often met with questions of interest and intrigue with some really lovely responses from people that you wouldn't expect. I did have to leave out a couple of locations that I would have loved to have photographed, however, this was a calculated risk due to employment/personal reasons.
TP: Did you bump into any other peculiar creatures (other than landscape photographers)?
JI: Ha ha, not really. In fact, on your point on landscape photographers, I have never met a single other person photographing a scene near to me during the woodland project. On reflection, that's hugely appealing and something I suppose I haven't thought a great deal about. The notion of me being the only person to have taken a picture of a particular scene brings a smile. This is not an elitist thing - as I still enjoy landscape photography of all forms, popular or otherwise, but more a quiet pleasure.
TP: Do you think your urban work in Northern Ireland has rubbed off on your local work at all?
JI: I would definitely say it has. Certainly, my images have been quieter than they were previously, in terms of tonal properties and the core forms within the compositions. My approach to thinks now has certainly got a more documentary feel, and I feel most satisfied, creatively speaking when I can combine nature and a documentary landscape.
It was pointed out by a couple of readers that I’d missed a couple of tests that they would have liked to have seen. These were a ‘scratch resistance’ test and a vignetting test. Whilst I didn’t foresee these changing the results really, I was keen to include them. I also promised a short video on each filter to demonstrate some of the usability issues I’d talked about in the last issue. Skip this section if you just want to see some more test results and videos.
As for many contributors to end frame, choosing my favourite landscape photo is an impossible task. Often the answer would be the photo that I have seen most recently. Instead, like some other contributors, I have chosen a photo with a message, perhaps even a prescient message as the photo was in a book published in 1986 and must have been taken well over thirty years ago before concerns with impact people were having on nature had reached its current level.
Choosing this photo is about Fay Godwin’s book, The Secret Forest of Dean (Redcliffe Press and Arnolfini Gallery in collaboration with the Forestry Commission, 1986), in which it is printed, as much as about the picture itself.
The book is one that has been on my shelves for at least thirty years, having been given to me because I was interested in photography because it was about somewhere local and possibly because it was favourably reviewed in The Guardian newspaper. I have looked at it periodically over the years but it was only very recently that I took a more serious interest in it, because I had started thinking about undertaking a similar project.
Individually, the photographs in the book might be thought unremarkable. They are all black and white and although they all have an excellent range of tones—the mark of good traditional darkroom work—many of them don’t stand out as particularly dramatic (though that may be because I have never seen the originals, only reproductions in a small paperback book). The first four images include two of sunlight streaming through trees and two of trees in mist but the rest appear to have comparatively flat lighting. A few have some clouds, though nothing particularly dramatic and several other skies are plain white. However, none of this stops the images from having an impact.
The theme linking these images is that Godwin focused on the marks that have left on the landscape, not avoiding in order to show a more beautiful natural landscape.
There are photographs of the industrial archaeology, of houses, smallholdings, a wrecked barge, a harbour pier, the decayed iron foundations of a bridge, a fence, and even some motor tyres dumped in a hollow by a tree. Not the usual subjects of landscape photography.
There are photographs of the industrial archaeology, of houses, smallholdings, a wrecked barge, a harbour pier, the decayed iron foundations of a bridge, a fence, and even some motor tyres dumped in a hollow by a tree. Not the usual subjects of landscape photography. In addition to showing the landscape as it actually was, she also documented the people of the area—the Foresters—and their way of life.
There are many images I could have chosen but the one I have opted for is a very simple image of a brick-built bridge spanning a former railway track bounded by a wall on one side and a low bank on the other (The Secret Forest of Dean, p. 59.) It is not the most dramatic image in the book—that prize would probably go to “Fence” or “Gossamers” with the wonderful sunlight streaming through the trees—but I find it a fascinating image.
The foreground is covered in leaves and the textures of the leaves and the wall, rendered in mid-tones, are clear even in the small reproduction in the printed book. The Romanesque arch of the bridge is framed on one side by a sapling leaning over with the wall leading into it on the other side. The whole picture is covered in fine detail. It is a beautifully balanced image. And then what makes the image for me is that the darkness under the bridge frames an image that is complete in itself—another view of the railway line overshadowed by another slender tree.
A seemingly simple scene, in which man-made objects and nature combine. The book tells us that the brickwork was deemed unsafe and had to be demolished, meaning that the view is no longer there.
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!
