Walking into a woodland, or even a copse of trees has always brought a sense of peace and calm. More often than not, I am also overcome by an overwhelming desire to place a palm on bare bark and just breathe for a few moments. It is primal and sensory. Words do not begin to describe it. Life on earth is complex, species are transient, and for us humans it is difficult to fully comprehend geological and astronomical time-scales when we have only been around for but a proverbial ‘blink of an eye’. But if there are two things that are essential to life on this planet, and most certainly essential to human life, it is water and trees. Take these two things away, and we are left with sheer desolation. No atmosphere as we know it, and definitely no atmosphere - that thing landscape photographers crave!
So when it came to a subject for my first (proper) project, I had little hesitation. Some people may say that images of trees are becoming cliché. I say that shows an unfortunate lack of insight. Would anyone say that portraits of people have become cliché? Undoubtedly you can capture a bad portrait, an unflattering portrait, an uninteresting portrait, a poorly exposed, oversaturated, shoddily cropped, ill-considered portrait. But to call portraits cliché? Absurd. To me, images of trees, like portraits, defy cliché-ism. And like portraits, to capture a good one you must take the time to know your subject. A good tree image carries some essence of the subject and something of yourself too. I find it is often easier to establish this connection with trees than with the wider landscape because trees are the quintessential givers of nature. Open your mind, and your heart, and be assured they will give you something. Or if your mind is in a mess and your heart too unsettled, just stand around them and breathe, for that is their gift too.
These images are the beginnings of a project entitled “In trees I trust”. I look forward to adding to it in the coming months.
In November 2015, I moved to Marquette, Michigan, on the south shore of Lake Superior. I did this with the intention of creating a body of photographs as a response to my sustained presence in the Northern Great Lakes. This work is the result.
Writing about the intention behind this work is difficult for me. The exact meaning behind it has always been elusive. Although, my understanding of this work as lending shape and colour to an emotional state has been consistent. To give a parallel, before I moved, I spent a notable amount of time looking at Helen Frankenthaler’s The Bay, at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Looking at it feels synonymous with dwelling in it. It evokes qualities of place that are vivid, yet intangible. Such an immaterial conception of place is what I set out to describe in these photographs.
It evokes qualities of place that are vivid, yet intangible. Such an immaterial conception of place is what I set out to describe in these photographs.
Being raised in the Detroit suburbs, the homogeneity of my surroundings put me at odds with them. A week spent each year upstate with my family on the shore of Lake Huron felt different than this. The Northern Great Lakes are where I first consciously felt unopposed to my surroundings. Since childhood I have maintained an emotionally vivid relationship with this region. Beyond this, I have never traveled much, adding to the mental stature this region occupies for me.
From the beginning of this work’s development I was fixated upon portraying the psychological timbre of my experience of this place. Describing the quality of this experience of place is difficult with words. I have found photography to be most effective in evoking such qualities. Its ability to make tangible the content of vision, and impose stillness upon it, allows it to recontextualize experience in a way idiosyncratic to the medium.
Photographing in this region throughout my life has had a pronounced effect upon my practice. Much of the landscape here reveals itself gradually. The most dramatic features are the surrounding Great Lakes horizon-lines and the near-constant presence of water. In this work, water’s amorphousness appeals symbolically to the subconscious, to something palpably present, but ungraspable. In water’s visual elasticity I have found a way to address intangibility. .
Much of the landscape here reveals itself gradually. The most dramatic features are the surrounding Great Lakes horizon-lines and the near-constant presence of water.
Trees make open spaces a rarity and dominate the mostly flat topography. With consistently short line of sight, looking near, often at small things has become essential to my way of seeing. From this I have developed a penchant for photographing the minutiae and ephemera of my surroundings. If not for photographically seeking them out, I would likely be only peripherally conscious of such things. This series is built upon taking such content, normally resigned to the corners of experience, and elevating it to the central point of focus. In experience, such content is least likely to be singled out, objectified; it is likely to remain elusive.
Idealism toward the natural environment of this region is very much present in my understanding of it. After moving to the shore of Lake Superior, prolonged exposure to the reality of human encroachment upon this environment more thoroughly settled into my consciousness. The creation of this work has served as catharsis for this tension between idealism and undesirable reality. This understanding has manifested itself in these photographs as dream-like ominousness and an obscuring of the line between the natural and the man-made.
Over the course of creating this work, a dialogue has developed between the landscape and myself. The patterns that run throughout these photographs have become engrained in the way I visually process my surroundings. As a result, the landscape depicted has a through-flowing rhythm all its own. It feels to me like a self-contained place.
Over the course of creating this work, a dialogue has developed between the landscape and myself. The patterns that run throughout these photographs have become engrained in the way I visually process my surroundings.
We often talk about the ability to see in photography. To the general public, that word implies the physiologic act of directional focusing of photons, the conversion to electrical signals on the retina and the subsequent propagation to the visual cortex. In photography though that word implies the ability for artistic vision. The ability to isolate and focus on those visual elements that will be key to self expression. I often struggled with this abstract concept. My training in radiology was structured around visual analysis. As I studied the internal imagery of the human body I gradually developed a visual database and that led to an improved sense of pattern recognition, appreciating nuances in tonality and subtle changes to texture and form. I was taught how to catch anomalies, steer clear of irrelevant visual data and zone in on what looked different from the expected norm. That which should not be there was the clue to pathology. The more I practised this form of visual analysis the easier it became.
The first thing I realised about photography was that unlike learned standard pattern recognition and efficient analysis, photography involved quiet observation. My mind was trained to race through an extensive visual database trying to map out abnormalities with various permutations and combinations as I devoured the visual data laid out before me in radiology. In contrast, the mind quieted down when pursuing photography. There were no extensive lists to cross check through. Only quiet contemplation as the light danced around on the landscape before me. There was no one specific thing that I had to find but instead, appreciate so many things. There was no standard pattern, yet there were patterns galore. It was a confusing process. It was almost as if I was not searching for something but instead waiting for something to move me.
From the moment I started using digital cameras with my Canon 20D I had difficulty in getting ‘pleasing’ colour. I was regularly told that digital cameras were accurate and yet what I saw on the LCD and computer was rarely as I remembered the scene. My disconnect with colour was furthered when I started buying landscape photography books, such as Colin Prior’s Scotland books, Joe Cornish’s “First Light” and Jack Dykinga’s “Large Format Nature Photography”.
About a year later I bought a large format camera and started photographing the same scene with film and digital (I’d upgraded to a Canon 5D mk2 by then). This really brought home to me how much film was creating a more visceral result and that Velvia wasn’t just about saturation but about how the film manipulated colour in a way that was satisfying to the eye (at least my eye!).
Here’s an early comparison between my film result and my digital result where I used Camera Raw to process the raw files.
As you can see the differences are quite obvious and it’s the ‘muddy’ result from the digital files that I wasn’t happy with. Since then I’ve upgraded from the 5D2 to a Sony A7R and then an A7RII. The camera system got better over time and also the Camera Raw processor got better as well. However, the colours were still not quite as I wanted them.
It was shortly after I bought the A7RII that I tried out a few film emulation plugins for Lightroom. I’ve never been a great fan of these plugins when I’ve just considered them as film emulators but what struck me when I was trying them out is that some of the results ‘twisted’ the colours in ways that reminded me of what I was looking for. In particular, most of them made the shadows cooler and the highlights a little warmer. They also changed the lightness of some colours, in particularly the yellows and greens.
I thought it would be good to go back to basics and try to work out a preset that took my Sony files and produced results that didn’t necessarily look like Velvia 50 but gave a better starting point, adopting some of the common techniques in various film emulation plugins.
Because I’ve been using curves for much of my scanning colour adjustments, I first started by playing with the R, G and B curves in Photoshop to create this warm highlight, cool shadow result. On top of this, I played with the hue, saturation and lightness controls to tweak certain colours, for instance, making yellows slightly warmer and greens slightly cooler and darker. The result of my first tests were quite satisfying and so I moved them over to Lightroom to create a preset I could use when importing images.
Now the results I got with my own tweaks were pretty good but it was only when playing around with the VSCO film emulation plugin that I hit on what for me is the ideal preset. The "Classic Film" pack from VSCO includes a range of Fuji films like Velvia 50 and Provia 100 but it was the Provia 400X preset that did the trick for me. I was basically pulling apart these various film presets to see what different aspects do. For instance, looking how the curves panel on its own works or just the camera calibration for instance. When I tried out the curves and camera calibration from VSCO’s Provia 400X pack I immediately got that rich look I’m familiar with, but it took quite a bit of playing with until it stopped looking like an overblown Instagram filter. I made a range of presets which were based on this settings.
These presets made a world of difference to the appreciation of the results from my digital camera. Here’s a couple of samples of before and after images when using my Sony A7RII on some late winter forest at the back of our house.
On the left is the conversion with a standard preset and on the right with my modified VSCO preset
During a recent business trip to Utah I had a free weekend between meetings, so I decided I’d take my camera gear and see what there was to photograph.
Never having been outside the environs of Salt Lake City and Park City, I didn’t know where to go, so I started with Google Maps. Obviously, there are lots of mountains and suchlike, but then I saw these things called National Parks. Two of them specifically seemed within reach – Arches and Canyonlands. A bit more googling and…oh…ah…I see. That’s where THOSE ICONIC IMAGES are taken.
A mission was born – go “Trophy Hunting”. I’m referring to what are called “Trophy Shots” – those images that are taken by millions of people and are so overdone that they are simply everywhere. It’s not my usual modus operandi. I usually target “the other shot”, and look to simplify shapes and textures from otherwise complex landscapes. As a fan of David Ward’s approach of reducing and refining compositions, having a scrum with hordes of others all looking for the same image is too much like my old game of sports photography. But why not for a change? No harm in it and it could well be excellent fun. And anyway, who doesn’t want a shot of Mesa Arch at sunrise, glowing in all its finery? Just because it’s shot to death doesn’t mean it is a bad image. I put together a plan – Mesa Arch, Delicate Arch, and Balanced Rock. Plus anything else I could find, and a few “other shots” if possible.
Photographing Mesa Arch in the “correct” trophy shot manner is a bit of a science. According to the expert trophy hunters, it must be done at dawn, with the sun hitting the rock face below the arch and the reflected light casting a fiery orange/red glow onto the underside of the arch. A small aperture must be used to create a “sun star” which must intersect with the rock to be more obvious. Some cloud cover is useful. Also, it gets VERY BUSY there, so arriving early to set up and “bag” a spot is essential. Plus it was a Saturday. Plus it was a holiday weekend. Thus I set my alarm for 3:30am the following day, and arrived at the arch at 4:15am, the first one there. Hooray! Note that there was nobody at the park entrance that early, so entrance was free. Bonus. Plus the twisty road up there is rather good fun.
It’s not my usual modus operandi. I usually target “the other shot”, and look to simplify shapes and textures from otherwise complex landscapes.
I bagged my spot by placing my tripod in the location I’d recce’d the previous evening, and after checking the position of sunrise with the excellent Sky Guide app. This would ensure I got the “correct” window into the view beyond, and the sun star, and the arch. It was a bit like bagging a pitchside spot at a football match actually.
Think of an image depicting the Swiss Alps. Chances are, you’re visualising a gorgeous scene of the Matterhorn, perhaps rising above a meadow of wildflowers, maybe reflected in the still waters of a pool at dawn. The Matterhorn is a dominant visual motif in popular Alpine imagery. But how accurate is that depiction of an unspoiled natural mountain environment? And as photographers, is it our duty to tell the full, uncensored truth?
I first visited the Swiss Alps in 2007. I wasn’t a photographer then – I came to the mountains as a climber, a passion that slowly morphed into a love of landscape and mountain photography. But I remember feeling puzzled at the disconnect between reality and my expectations. Almost every image I’d seen published of the Swiss Alps portrayed pristine, beautiful desolation – or, at most, a minimal human footprint on the land. A quaint wooden chalet or cobbled street leading the eye over the rooftops and back into the mountains.
But I remember feeling puzzled at the disconnect between reality and my expectations.
The reality I saw was quite different, and yet perhaps no different to any other mountain landscape. Switzerland is a developed country, not a wilderness. Humanity’s presence is everywhere – even if landscape photography rarely embraces that presence to its full extent. The same can be said of the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands, or even Iceland.
But it was only when I returned to the same spot a decade later, in 2017, that I comprehended the true scale of this reality gap in the Alps.
On an intellectual level, I knew that climate change was affecting the Alps, that glaciers were in retreat, but there’s nothing like seeing it for yourself to drive the point home. When I returned to Zermatt in September 2017 and revisited some of the climbs I’d done ten years before, I was shocked at what I found.
Landscape photography tends to be a solitary pursuit for many of us, myself included. We enjoy being out on the hills or down in the woodland valleys, maybe at the coast with just the whistle of the wind, the sound of the tide lapping the shore or maybe the dawn chorus to keep us company, but when we do meet up with like-minded souls, occasionally something in the ensuing conversation sparks an idea, one that makes you examine not only your photography but that of others too.
This happened to me at the beginning of the year when I happened to call in on On Landscape’s proprietors, Tim and Charlotte. Initially, I called in to talk to Tim about Large Format photography, lens choice, film stocks and metering, amongst other things. As we drank coffee in the kitchen I could not take my eyes off of a beautiful large framed print Tim had on the wall. Entitled "Red Leaves" it was to me about as perfect an image as I've seen anywhere. When I stood up and approached the picture Tim pointed out one or two little imperfections caused by the various difficulties with large format, small depth of field requiring a large amount of swing amongst others. Now I had been studying the picture for quite some time and had not noticed these little imperfections, they had to be pointed out to me. I just continued to enjoy the picture and thought no more about it.
It is a commonplace of photographic analysis to point out that the camera does not see like the eyes see. The mono viewpoint (vs human binocular vision), the limitations of the frame, the ability to freeze movement or conversely to capture expanses of time, black and white – these are all structural/formal elements that belong to the machine of the camera rather than the mind’s eye. But in one sense they do come together. That is when the photographic image is made to reflect the emotional feeling and sensibility of the photographer. A ‘neo-Pictorialist’ approach to image making. Steve Gosling’s images do just that. They play with the camera’s technical facilities, not to record ‘reality’ but to convey emotion. John Szarkowski put it thus: “A photographer must define his relationship to the medium: Does he wish his hand to show, or will he try to make the picture look as though it were made by a machine? It is not a technical, but an aesthetic issue […] The question concerns intent and effect, not rule of procedure” (Szarkowski – Looking At Photographs, MoMa, 1973).
When people first try out large format photography and they come to the choice of lens for their first kit, they typically make a few common mistakes. Hopefully, this article will address some of these and also expand on what makes the large format lens such a unique object.
Lens Equivalents
The first problem most people encounter is choosing a focal length. Received wisdom has it that the conversion factor from 35mm to large format (5x4) is 3x. Sadly this received wisdom causes no end of people to buy lenses that are far too wide for day to day use and is a real barrier in certain conditions. The actual answer is a little more complicated because the aspect ratio of the two formats are different. To this end, I’m going to give two sets of tables and which table to use depends on how you plan on photographing with large format camera.
If You Take Panoramic Pictures...
If you typically use your 35mm camera to take horizontally oriented photographs or crop to create panoramic photographs then the difference between the two formats is the ratio of the film/sensor sizes longest edges. 35mm film/sensor is 36mm across the long edge and 5x4 film is 120mm across the long edge. Hence the conversion ratio is 120/36 = 3.333x
Here’s the conversion table for common LF focal lengths
5x4 Focal Length
35mm Focal Length
72mm
22mm
90mm
27mm
110mm
33mm
150mm
45mm
180mm
54mm
210mm
63mm
240mm
72mm
300mm
90mm
360mm
108mm
If You Usually Crop Your 35mm Photos to 5x4 or Square...
If you commonly crop your 35mm images to 5x4 or even square then the difference between the two formats is dictated by the short edges of the film/sensor. 35mm film/sensor is 24mm and 5x4 film is 96mm. This gives a ratio of 96/24 = 4x
Here’s the conversion table
5x4 Focal Length
35mm Focal Length
72mm
18mm
90mm
23mm
110mm
28mm
150mm
38mm
180mm
45mm
210mm
53mm
240mm
60mm
300mm
75mm
360mm
90mm
If we had used the 3x conversion and were typically using a 24-70 zoom lens, our LF equivalent lens range would be from 72mm to 210mm. A 72mm lens is actually a bit of a monster and quite hard to see in the corners in darker conditions and if you typically crop to 5x4 or square then this is actually equivalent to an 18mm lens, not 24mm. Quite a difference!
Given the ‘I crop to 5x4 ratio’ condition, a 24-70 lens is actually from 100mm to 300mm. If you talk to a lot of large format photographers you’ll find that there is a very common lens ‘set’ of 90,150,210 plus sometimes a 300mm and this matches quite closely with the 24-70 zoom lens.
Which Focal Lengths Should I Buy?
Now you’ve got an idea of what the equivalents are between LF and 35mm focal lengths, you can look at choosing a range of lenses. It’s often hard to work out what focal lengths to buy if you’ve mostly used zoom lenses in the past, but people who work primarily with prime lenses tend to stick the the same focal lengths. It’s very common for someone to carry the 24, 35, 50 and 80mm lenses and these are close to the 90, 150, 210 and 300 common focal lengths mentioned above. Some people do prefer to ‘shift’ this range a little by starting off with some a little less wide and so you could have a 135, 180, 240, 300 (the 135 being a very nice 33mm equivalent).
[ My own choice was based around a bit of a classic lens at 110mm (28mm equivalent) and then I worked up from their with a 150, 240, 300 ]
It’s a rare photographer these days that doesn’t have a long lens and an ultra wide in their collection and it’s very tempting to try to get an equivalent lens for their LF collection. Unfortunately, lenses start to become more demanding once you get beyond a certain range and for LF this range is anything wider than 90mm and anything longer than about 300-400mm. Hence if you wanted something to replace your 70-200mm you’d be looking at a 300 to 720mm and you’d need to buy telephoto lenses and also buy a camera that allows you to extend the camera bed a lot further than normal (most cameras that can focus a 720mm at infinity are quite bulky).
At the wide end, people may have a 16-35mm lens and if you want to shoot panoramas at the wide end of this you would need a 54mm lens. The nearest equivalent would either be the 47mm or 58mm Schneider Super Angulon which can be a nightmare to use because in most cases you won’t be able to see all of the image at once (you have to move your head around to see the diverging light rays, even with a good fresnel) and the image can be so dark that it’s difficult to focus, especially in twilight.
For now, this article will restrict itself to the ‘normal’ lens range from 90mm to 300mm and we’ll cover the more extreme focal lengths in the next instalment.
A Look at What Makes a Large Format Lens
If we step back a little and compare our typical 35mm lens with a typical large format lens, we quickly see an obvious difference. Firstly, nearly all modern (post 1950s) large format lenses include a shutter unlike 35mm cameras which have the shutter built into the camera. The most common shutter you will encounter is a Copal which comes in three different sizes, a 0, 1 and 3 (the Copal 2 was never made but there was a very old Compur 2 for which no modern equivalent is available, hence the missing 2!). The size used on a particular lens is usually dependent on focal length and maximum aperture. Long fast lenses tend to use a larger shutter and short, slow lenses tend to use a smaller shutter (if a lens covers a big image circle it might also use a larger shutter). i.e. It all depends on how the light rays pass through the middle of the lens.
One of the benefits of a shutter built into the lens (or a ‘leaf’ shutter) is that they generate almost no vibration in use, unlike the mirror and focal plane shutter on smaller format cameras (if you’ve ever heard and felt a Pentax 67 shutter firing you can image what sort of noise you’d get from a larger format focal plane shutter). The downside of the leaf shutter is that you tend to be limited in shutter speed, for instance the Copal 3 can only manage 1/125 of a second. (although an added bonus is that you can flash sync at 1/500th of a second on a Copal 0 shutter! Not so much use in the landscape though).
The shutter also has the aperture built in and if you want a nice round aperture, most older Copal or Compur shutters have more shutter blades (modern Copal have 5,7 or 7 for 0,1 or 2 shutter size whereas older Compur or Compound shutters can have 9 or more blades but can be unreliable).
Most shutters also have a lever to open the shutter to allow you to view and focus the image on the ground glass (on older shutters you might need a locking cable release to use on the B setting). Remember to close this before you pull your dark slide (you will make this mistake at some point! A good checklist is useful when you’re beginning LF).
The front and rear element set of your lens screw into the front and back of your shutter. The screw threads are brass and can be easily damaged by impact or cross threading (try turning the element in reverse until it ‘clicks’ into the thread position and then thread forward).
Finally, the lens will have a mounting ring at the back which allows you to mount it to a lens board. Some lens boards have a hole that matches a little grub screw in the back of the lens. This is rare and if you buy a new lens, don’t forget to remove the grub screw as you lens won’t mount properly in a lens board that has no hole.
The way the lens is oriented is a personal choice. I try to go for consistency in the position of the shutter open/close lever so that it’s at the top. Other people like to have the shutter cable attachment pointing up or the aperture control lever and shutter speed control easily accessible.
The cable release attaches to the shutter via a small mounted metal block. This is quite strongly attached to the shutter frame but if it does break it’s an expensive fix!
Lens Design from 35mm to Large Format
There are a quite a few quality bonuses of working with large format and one of the biggest for me is that nearly all LF lenses are way better than your average 35mm lens. This is due to a range of things but the key feature is that as the film/sensor surface gets bigger (by 4x when moving from 35mm to 4x5) the same manufacturing standards deliver 4x the quality of lens. In actual fact most landscape photographs are taken at f/22 to f/32 and hence are diffraction limited and not lens limited anyway.
You can add to this advantage the fact that large format lenses also tend to be a lot ‘simpler’. Older large format lenses used a ‘Tessar’ design which just had four lens elements in three groups. The ‘Plasmat’, which took over in the 50’s/60’s, had six lens elements in four groups. The plasmat in particular is a very efficient lens design and is sometimes used for macro lenses in 35mm cameras.
The reason this great lens design wasn’t used for other lenses on 35mm cameras is because the mirror box got in the way for wider lenses and in addtion it could only be designed with an f/5.6 aperture. Of course, for large format work f/5.6 has the same depth of field as an f/1.4 lens for a 35mm camera so is more than enough for creative work but most 35mm photographers demand something a bit faster.
Here’s a diagram showing some high end lens equivalents for 35mm, medium format and large format.
The final difference between large format lens design and 35mm lens design is that large format cameras make a great deal of use of lens movements and hence the lenses need to have a bigger image circle to allow these movements. The image circle is the size of the circle of light that the lens projects. The diagram below from Scheider shows the size of the lens’s image circles in comparison with the 5x4 film area. As you can see, many lenses allow you to shift enough to take two 5x4 photographs side by side (the equivalent to covering 10x8) and some allow you even more movement (probably more than your camera will allow).
In reality, the most image circle you will ever use is half a frame (if you want to keep the horizon in the picture and still correct verticals or you want a full side to side panorama) and typically for landscape photography, you can get away with about a quarter of a frame extra. You need 154mm image circle to cover 5x4, 231mm for a quarter of a frame extra and 308mm for a whole frame extra (i.e. it would cover 10x8). Here's a diagram of typical image circles for Schneider lenses from their PDF catalogue. The 5x4 area is shaded in red and you can see that some lenses have massive image circles but these have been designed for use on giant cameras that take up to 20"x24" film!
Choosing Your Large Format Lenses
The choice of a large format lens can be a difficult one for the beginner. Lens review websites don’t exist for these lenses and wading through old forums to separate truth from fiction is time-consuming and unreliable. The good news is that large format lenses are very rarely bad enough to be able to see even in large prints. If you buy a lens mounted in a Copal shutter, it is almost certainly a modern lens and will give results that far exceed those from any but the most expensive 35mm system. If you limit yourself to certain families of lenses then you will far exceed any 35mm lens and will rarely pay more than £300.
Given that all of these lenses are so good, why do people pay more money for some lenses then? Well, the main reason is to get more ‘image circle’ to allow capacity for more shift. For instance, the Rodenstock Sironar-N often goes for £150-£300 on ebay whereas the Sironar-S can be seen changing hands for £600-£1200. All this extra money for a meagre 15mm extra image circle (from 215 to 230mm) and some very minor improvements in flare control and sharpness in the corners! If you’re making extreme enlargements and using full movements then the S might make sense but that’s a huge amount to pay for this. Read my personal comments section at the bottom of this article to give you some perspective on this.
Just as in most things there are some ‘standard’ manufacturers and product lines. Large format is no different and the big manufacturers (Fuji, Nikon, Schneider and Rodenstock) all created stunning lenses in the latter half of the 20th Century. Here’s the product codes to look out for. You won’t go far wrong with any of these.
65mm to 90mm
Fuji SW & SWD
Nikkor SW
Schneider Super Angulon (and XL)
Rodenstock Grandagon N
100mm to 450mm
Fuji CM-W, A, C
Nikkor W, SW, M
Schneider APO-Symmar
Rodenstock Sironar N and S
I could make a longer list including some more lenses but these are the most common lenses but these are probably the most common lenses in collections I have seen and most likely to still be in good condition (e.g. I’m missing out Ektars, Doctor Optics, APO-Germinars, APO-Ronars etc but I figure as you get more into large format photography and feel a need for different lenses you’ll be talking to more people, browsing forums more often, etc and will have identified a special ‘need’ perhaps).
Kerry Thalmann wrote a fantastic set of articles and tests about large format lenses but the two pages most relevant to the landscape photographer are probably “Future Classics”, part of his “Lightweight Lenses” series.
The problem with Kerry’s fantastic article “Future Classics” is that it probably single-handedly doubled the price of every lens listed (see the aforementioned Sironar S/N comparison). These lenses are all very, very good but do they deserve the price premium they have inevitably gained? I’m not so sure… Would I sell mine? No… :-) The website is worth a look and if you happen to get any of the lenses included at a reasonable price, they’re sure to be a good investment.
Will Your Lens Fit Your Camera?
Now unlike SLR systems where every lens will fit every camera (given a particular lens mount like Nikon or Canon) large format cameras have certain constraints that can limit what lenses you might want to mount.
The first constraint is your bellows and the mechanical structure of your camera. If your bellows will only extend to a certain length then you can only fit a certain focal length of lens (and you might not be able to achieve infinity focus on some lenses). e.g. A 450mm normal lens will need 450mm of bellows extension to focus at infinity. Telephoto lens in large format don’t refer to just a long focal length, they refer to the fact that a lens can be focussed at infinity at a shorter bellows length. E.g. The 500mm Nikkor Telephoto lens can be focussed at infinity with 350mm of bellows. Quite useful!! If you want to know how much bellows extension you need then you should look up the ‘flange focal distance’.
At the other end, if your bellows doesn’t compress enough then you won’t be able to achieve infinity focus (if your bellows length is greater than the flange focal length then you’re focussing closer than infinity). Most cameras manage to focus a 90mm lens but some struggle with wider lenses. It’s worth checking whether your camera can manage before investing.
There are a couple of ‘tricks’ you can use to mitigate this problem. Some lens boards are either recessed or have extensions at the front called ‘top hat lenboards’. These can cause a few issues as the nodal point of the lens moves around when you tilt the camera - nothing that can’t be handled if you need to solve a problem.
If you want to find out more about large format lenses, I spent a while compiling information from various sources online and put them into a Google spreadsheet.
How Many Lenses?
There are no rules! You can work with a closely spaced set of lenses 72, 90, 120, 150, 180,210, 240, 300, 360, 500 & 720 or you can manage with a classic spread of 90, 150 and 210. In fact many photographers work with just a single lens, quite often a 120mm to 135mm gives a very natural field of view and a consistency to your work that can be very effective (look at Jem Southam’s work).
If you have any questions, please add a comment at the bottom of the article and we’ll try to get answer. In the meantime, don’t worry too much! You can’t really go too far wrong and if you buy the wrong thing, as long as you didn’t overpay you should get your money back on resale!
Tim Parkin
When I started large format photography, I was fortunate to exchange a few skills in website development for a few lenses. I remember giving a range of lenses, chosen from the aforementioned “Future Classics” website to my colleague and saying “Get me one or two from this list if you’re happy with the website”. He must have been very happy as he got me everything on the list, all brand new. So here I was with an 80mm and 110mm Schneider Super Symmar XL, a 150mm Rodenstock Sironar S and a 240mm Fujinon A. I couldn’t have been happier with the range of lenses but I quickly found out that the 80mm was difficult to use. Even at f/4.5 wide open it was still darker than I thought it would be. I soon sold it and bought a Nikkor 360/500 instead.
I now owned the main lenses I would use for the next few years. Having not used any ‘cheaper’ lenses (or ones not on the Future Classic list) I had no idea whether what I had was amazing or not. However, a few experiences made me realise that if they were amazing, the differences are subtle.
The first was when I began my scanning business and was looking at many peoples large format photographs. The thing that stood out was that they were all very good. It was rare to see a 5x4 photograph that didn’t wow in terms of sharpness and detail and when I asked about one that was softer, it was usually taken at f/45 or even smaller.
The second was when I started taking photographs of military battalions and thought it would be best to have a duplicate camera and lens setup (belt and braces!). To this end I used my Chamonix camera and bought the cheapest 150mm Schneider APO Symmar I could find, a £45 beaten up sample from ebay. To my surprise, when I came to look at the drum scans of these two photographs, I couldn’t tell the difference! Now I’m sure at the extremes of movement and in certain conditions, there will be differences but in most cases they will be marginal.
Since then I have invested in, and inherited a few extra lenses. A Nikkor 300M (for my 10x8 camera but works really well on 5x4 as well as a Nikkor 200M and I also bought a 75mm Rodenstock Grandagon N which although it has an f/6.8 aperture is beautiful.
Like Richard Childs, I tend to use a different lens setup depending on what I am doing. If I’m doing some mountaineering, I might take a 90mm f/6.8 Angulon (a tiny lens I got for a Travelwide Kickstarter camera with not much coverage but sharp enough to make big prints), the Nikkor and a Nikkor 200 M. if I’m just walking around for a few miles, I might take a 110, 150, 240 and 300 lens (or include the 75mm or 360/500 if I know what I’m going to see). Finally, if I’m working next to the car I’ll take the lot (if it’s not too much hassle).
The main thing to know is that it’s more than possible to take fine pictures if you only go out with two or three lenses (or even one!).
Singing Sands, Eigg – 110mm Schneider Super Symmar XL
Barnluasgan, Knapdale – 150mm Rodenstock Sironar S
Ballachulish – 240mm Fujinon A
White Moss – Nikkor 360mm T-ED
Richard Childs
I didn’t really need to think about lenses when I first took up Large Format Photography. My first camera came bundled with one, a nice, chunky Schneider 90mm Super Angulon Classic. Once I had worked out that I needed a lens panel and had it attached to my RSW45 I was delighted. With hindsight, however, the 90mm was definitely the wrong ‘only’ lens to start out with as it offered very little flexibility and choice with subject matter. A 150mm lens would have been far better proving me the option to shoot both views and details in equal measure.
I still own my original 90mm lens which, even when I’d added to my stable on lenses, was my go-to lens for probably the first five or six years. These days it sees very little action as I opt for a more natural feel/look in my wider shots. I have never owned a 150mm but only because I bought a Rodenstock 135mm and then a Schneider 180mm both of which get me very close to the classic 150 view. There has always been much discussion around what is the best spread of lenses to own. Should you go 90, 150, 210, 300? Or 72, 110, 180, 240 etc. Should you have lots of lenses or maybe just one or two? The answer is, of course, whatever suits you and your photography and this can only be achieved through trial and error and as your photography evolves. I have carried as many as six lenses out on the hill but at the moment tend to go with just one ( and the security of a digital camera covering other options-earning my living from photography I do often have to return with something and Shropshire’s hills have proven to be particularly exposed to Westerly winds).
My typical spread included 72, 90, 135, 180 and 300mm lenses. A 210 or 240mm lens would have perfectly finished the range but never owning one has only had the effect of changing slightly what and how I photographed on a particular day.its absence didn’t mean any missed images because the lenses I did carry would define what I shot. This year I’ve been heading out with only one lens, a Rodenstock 120mm Sironar-N. A Schneider 110 would have been my first choice but at more than five times the price I couldn’t justify the expense. I’ve been enjoying both the discipline, and freedom, that this has brought to my photography not to mention the huge drop in the weight of my bag.
I no longer own the 72mm lens as I immediately found that I didn’t like the overstretched, super wide look. I kept it for about two years before selling it on having only used it a handful of times. It did however enable me to photograph the fissured shoreline in Norway where I simply couldn’t move myself and the camera any further back as we were right up against a four-foot high rock wall. My 90mm lens meant for too tight a foreground and the 72mm solved the problem but was one that I have only experienced a couple of times in nearly fifteen years. Little need then to carry this heavy lens along with special push fit filter holders. I no longer own my Fujinon 300T lens either which I do strongly regret as it would be perfect for some of the woodlands I have visited. However, in open countryside, I’m afraid I do reach for my digital camera with its 70-280mm range as this provides me with a far more stable platform in exposed locations.
I’m sure that Tim will be discussing some of the more technical points ( advantages/disadvantages) of certain types of lenses. Sharpness is not something I’ve ever really been obsessive about. I feel I’ve been quite fortunate in my career in that it hasn’t been a critical consideration in my workflow. That’s not to say that I don’t try my hardest to gain sharp focus when I’m making an image or that I would accept a poor performing lens. However, it has meant that I haven’t had to go looking for the most expensive glass. In my experience it’s only we photographers who press our noses right up to the glass when looking at a print. All of my lenses help me create a wonderful, natural looking sharpness that, combined with film produce prints that make me happy which is what matters.
I was thrilled and honoured to be asked to contribute to the On Landscape ‘End Frame’ feature. I’ve not been active in photography for many months, largely due to work commitments. My full-time job (working for a US software firm) takes me all around the globe. I get to visit many wonderful places, but I rarely have enough downtime to warrant packing my DSLR. I also usually travel hand-baggage only, so that limits what I can take with me. In fact, my last ‘proper’ outing with my DSLR camera was was back in February, up in the Lake District.
I was lucky enough to take part in a workshop with the highly talented Stewart Smith and the very well-known Mark Littlejohn (who's a regular contributor to On Landscape). I’d been a fan of Mark’s for a while, initially inspired by his ‘A Beginning and an End’ shot that won LPOTY in 2014. So, for me to get the chance to spend a few days with him, in his ‘native’ Lake District was a wonderfully rewarding experience (and I learned a hell of a lot, too). I also came away from that trip with a few keepers too, a bonus for sure.
For the magazine feature itself, where I was asked to choose one of my favourite images by another photographer and write an article about said image, there was really only once standout choice for me. Despite having networked with so many excellent photographers through social media, over the last few years, this particular image stands out as a firm favourite.
Confessing to having a favourite type of rock opens oneself to a certain amount of derision and the inevitable quip, “Is it Blackpool?” However, I would guess that a large portion of landscape photographers have at least a passing interest in geology; after all, geology is frequently the essence of what is being photographed. Rock helps to define a place, whether that is the gritstone sculptures of the Peaks, the Torridonian sandstone of Assynt or the exquisite, ancient swirls of Lewisian gneiss in the Outer Hebrides. As wonderful as these rocks are, one rock stands out, to me, as just that little bit different, that little bit special – limestone. Limestone has a story to tell like no other, a story that spans the vastness of geological time and yet one that continues on a scale more comprehensible to humans.
Drifting Light, Newbiggin Crags
For a start, limestone is made out of life. The Carboniferous limestone found in the north-west of England was created 350 million years ago by layer upon layer of dead sea creatures and corals settling on the bottom of a warm, shallow tropical sea. Mind-blowing geological processes turned the calcite of the creatures into rock and transported it to what is currently Yorkshire. So the next time you are standing at the top of Malham Cove or wandering over Twistleton Scar take a moment to reflect on the fact that you are standing on a former sea bed that used to be somewhere akin to the Bahamas! After arriving in its current location the limestone then underwent the rigours of the ice age, the bedrock scoured and gouged before finally being revealed 10,000 years ago as the last of the ice retreated. Exposed to the weather, the rock then succumbed to the slow, subtle effects of rainwater dissolving and eroding to form the karst landscape of caverns, potholes and the clints & grikes of limestone pavement; a process which continues today.
it fascinates me how political boundaries such as county lines or national park boundaries, influence the value placed on particular landscapes – limestone landscapes in the Dales are well known but those in Lancashire and Cumbria are rather forgotten about.
Our 4x4 feature is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios from our subscribers, each consisting of four images related in some way. You can view previous 4x4 portfolios here.
We're always on the lookout for new portfolios, so please do get in touch! If you would like to submit your 4x4 portfolio, please visit this page for submission information.
*Shout out* as we are looking for contributions for the next few issues, so please do get in touch if you're interested!
Please click the images to see the portfolios in full.
I was brought up by the sea in a village protected from the ravages of the ocean by an extensive groyne structure. Consequently, I have always been fascinated by the interaction of the sea and man-made structure. These images are part of series which aim to explore the interplay of the sea and man-made structure and the ultimate destruction of man’s creations.
This series is titled "Somiglianze" (similarities): I have approached different images, linked by visual analogies. Natural elements are replicated by non-natural elements. Shapes and colours are repeated in nature and in the world of things.
I have always been passionate about photography, I am particularly interested in the world of nature. Details, light, shapes and colours reveal their beauty even in the territory where I live near Milan. Photography is a continuous search for discovering the hidden beauty of things.
These images are of the residual marks left by water receding from the shoreline – an area of the conjunction of a river with the sea. These images have a deep personal resonance. They are influenced by Alfred Stieglitz’s “Equivalents”.
The influential psychologist, Carl Jung, was deeply concerned with our present disconnection from the environment. In his essay “Mind and Earth”, Jung offers a vision of earth that claims that earth must be transcended for consciousness. He implies that earth is in a deep way connected to mind.
In essence, my landscape images have great emotional resonance with me and related to my fairly isolated upbringing in a very small farming town. My images are in general of spaces that should be very ‘visible’ to any viewer, but some-how, in the way I compose the image, gives the viewer the impression that they did not see that context. I feel that my inner psychological terrain results in me unconsciously composing these images in a way that evokes emotions in me, and often within viewers too, and therefore consider these images to be influenced and similar to Alfred Stieglitz’s “Equivalents”.
Asturias, wild land, a thousand faces between the high-carved cliffs that look at the ocean and play with it. A walk in early June, when the spring gives way to summer timidly bursting.
Blue skies changing face leaving the clouds drawn whatever they want.
So the lighthouse lights, the fishermen's work, the scent of grilled fish, the acidic flavour of Sidra poured from above get mixed ... all in a single feeling of cheerfulness and desire to celebrate.
This is Asturias. In these photos, I wanted to trap the deafening noise of the sea, which, with its waves, tide and colours, is for me the absolute protagonist.
It’s always interesting to look at what images others favourite, and it was through this route that I came to Geoff Woods’ images on Flickr. Unusually for these times, I could find out very little about him online, though I remembered him coming into the conversation about a recent End Frame, and having been mentioned by a couple of our previous interviewees. There was clearly only one solution – to ask Geoff to be our Featured Photographer.
Can you tell readers a little about yourself – your education, early interests and career?
I grew up on a wheat and sheep farm for the first 12 years of my life, which my parents then sold and we moved to Sydney where I finished my education. Leaving school I became a Carpenter (and have been doing this for nearly 50 years now). At the same time I took up surfing and was an A Grade surfer by the time I was 25; I kept surfing until I was in my mid 40s.
How and when did you first become interested in photography? What kind of images did you initially set out to make and has this changed over time?
I became interested in photography at the age of 30 years; I thought I needed something of interest besides surfing. So I bought my first camera, which was a Canon T50, and quickly found out that it was a fully automatic camera which restricted what I could do with it so I upgraded to a Canon AE1 Program. In those days I took pictures of anything I laid my eyes on, I had no real direction.
Ian Cameron and I have joined forces for our second shared exhibition, the previous one being held about two years ago. There is no ‘theme’ as such to the exhibition as it is a selection of the work we have produced individually over the last two years. In combination, we will be exhibiting approximately 40 examples of our work.
Content wise my selections lean more towards the ‘inner landscape’ as personally, I find intimate landscape photography a real challenge and therefore for me more satisfying. This also allows me to concentrate on locations close to home in Moray although I have also chosen a few examples made in the North West Highlands of Scotland.
Covesea Beach - Jim Robertson
I’ve included a four print mini project of four trees which I regularly re-visit and photograph as well. One ‘old friend’ located at Badachro near Gairloch I’ve been visiting regularly for the last four years and I plan to go back again in the beginning of December. Apart from the ‘old friends’ mini project most of my framed and matted prints are in a square format and all are shot digitally and composed with cropping in mind.
Ian tells me that a great many of his photographs will centre around Moray but that undoubtedly there will be other familiar and not so familiar locations displayed in all shapes, sizes and finishes. Ian hopes to be around at the gallery on a number of occasions particularly at weekends if he is not running a workshop or master-class and I’ll be in the gallery during some of the exhibition. Both of us will be delighted to meet you, answer any questions we can and of course, offer advice on any photographs. Ian also intends to have cards and his book on sale.
Applecross Strollers - Ian Cameron
The Gallery at Elgin Library offers the most prestigious hanging space in Moray and we are both grateful to Libraries and Information Services - The Moray Council for allowing us the use of the exhibition facilities. A special thank you to Sheila Campbell (Principal Librarian Central Services), Linda Geddes (Lending Services Co-ordinator) and Carol Grant (Business Support Team Leader).
The exhibition runs from 10th October – 13th November 2017 at The Gallery, Elgin Library, Cooper Park, Elgin, Moray, IV30 1HS. Admission free, on site parking and Cafe.
Please contact the library on 01343 562600 to check on opening times and accessibility to the gallery and please do sign and comment in our visitor's book.
A surprise to find the words when photographing the White Horses and Hill figures in Southern England. Leucipotomy, noun, the art of carving white horses on chalk upland areas, from the Greek, Leuci- white, hippo- horse, tomy- the cutting or excising of. And Gigantotomy, noun, the carving of large hill figures. But the craft in Britain is far more ancient than the Greek culture that gave these words.
Alton Priors stone sculpture, Wiltshire
The White Horses and Hill figures are never quite on their own. Whatever the season, someone in our landscape will be aware of one in the corner of their eye, perhaps in the far distance through a cottage window, above or below them when walking uplands or downlands, or looming over them from the other side of their valley.
Climbing up and leaning into their sharp slopes each week, their orientation showed they were clearly chosen for their drama, the focus in the bowl of a hill range, the steepest convex curve of the hillside, or on a crown facing skywards across open Downs.
Like many, they first came into my conscious when young, in Dorset, intermittently glimpsing The Cerne Giant or The Fovant Badges framed through the glass of the family car as we skimmed past flickering hedgerows and trees, or suddenly ahead, after the curve in the road in stark view.
On Landscape are no strangers to the Fotovue series of location guidebooks. We’ve previously looked at the Cornwall and Devon book (plus a brief mention of the Snowdonia and Lake District) and were very impressed with the layout, authority and production values of them. The latest instalment in the series is about the Peak District and weighs in at nearly 500 pages of densely packed information about where, why, when, what with, etc.
My first encounter with Jack Dykinga’s work was with the publication “The World’s Top Landscape Photographers”. Despite the ‘Top Trump’esque moniker, the book is actually a pretty good cross-section of some of the best talent of that era and three double-page spreads were dedicated to Jack’s work.
Shortly thereafter, a colleague of mine bought me Jack’s “Large Format Nature Photography” as a bit of a joke (Ha ha! You’d have to be mad to use those ridiculous cameras!) but regardless of the intended goal of the book in educating the budding large format photographer, it was the images that really stood out for me. Carefully crafted slides of American mid-west with exquisite composition.
We’ve recently featured Michel Lucas in our ‘Featured Photographer’ section and along with his answers, he also sent us a copy of his book “Hoge Venen” or “High Moors”, a self-published portfolio of work from the highest area of the low country in Belgium. The book is a season by season visual narrative of the changing landscape, from deep snowbound forests through misty moors in spring and a quick zip through summer before a wonderful section on forest brooks and fallen leaves. The print quality is good throughout and the design a simple and clean canvas for the images and ideas with just enough layout variety to draw the reader through. The book is the culmination of a project studying a location that Michel obviously has a great personal connection with and it shows in the images.
Michel has a dedicated website for the book at www.hogevenenboek.com and you can see more of Michel's work on our Featured Photographer article and at his own website. Although the book is in Dutch, a PDF of the English translation is available.
After following the "End Frame" article for the last few years I was delighted when Charlotte Britton asked me whether or not I would like to make a contribution. Of course, most of the authors say how much they struggle to make a choice - I had no such struggle. However, all of them then manage to write coherently about their chosen image - this is where I have struggled, but there may be reasons for this.
My chosen image is one from Chris Friel (read our featured photographer interview with Chris)- the 5th photograph in the “Morning” section of his "After" book (JW Editions, 2017). I feel like a bit of a cheat choosing this photograph as a couple a years ago I would not have looked at this sort of thing, never mind bought the book. However we all change and for me, this image brings together the North West Highlands of Scotland, a quality hard copy book and an exquisite, dramatic but unclear view – what could be better?
In summarising some of her key photographic influences, Valda Bailey’s words about the images of Chris Friel seem to hit the nail on the head;-
"I love his lightness of hand and the ease with which his images seem to come together. His work is never laboured and he always appears fresh and innovative." ~ Land | Sea One (Triplekite / On Landscape, 2014)
I couldn’t agree more. The background to the 48 black and white images in the “After” book could scarcely be more poignant – the series was taken in a single day shortly after Chris lost his son, Joe, when he took his own life after a long struggle with mental illness. The photographs are from the Outer Hebrides in memory of happy times Joe had spent there. Chris recounts the images being made while thinking of Joe and “weeping in the rain”. This context makes many of the words one might normally use to describe a photograph very difficult and often trite.
The book is split into three sections dealing with “Morning”, “Afternoon” and “Evening” – my chosen image is the fifth of the “Morning” section, is shot in landscape and covers one and a half pages of the book. It looks like everything has been shot through a blurry lens particularly at the left and top of the frame where it could be a curtain or eyelid coming down and in so doing frames other parts of the image.
The ultimate focus of the picture to me is the sky. There seems to be a juxtaposition of scales going on here with a wide mountain view overlain by a sky made up of close-up raindrops exploding onto the ground.
We see a mountainside falling in from the left hand side of the frame before leading to an undulating curved ridge rising slowly and away into the distance in a sloping line. All this is seen across a short expanse of water – the hillside doesn’t look too far off with the water looking fairly choppy. In the foreground, we see a hint of reeds – and of a slanting rain coming in from right to left. At the bottom right of the image, the water is itself in shadow and blends in with the hillside in the background. The ultimate focus of the picture to me is the sky. There seems to be a juxtaposition of scales going on here with a wide mountain view overlain by a sky made up of close-up raindrops exploding onto the ground. What really attracts me to the image is that it looks like the hills are being so drenched that the soil and stones are being kicked up into the air under the deluge. The overlaid motif, often in a vertical form is repeated several times in other photographs in the series.
I am always asking myself the question of would I like the image so much if the circumstances leading to the book had been different? More fundamentally, is the personal life of an artist in any way related to what their art means to the viewer? In the end, this is only for the viewer to decide and shouldn’t I simply recognise that this image is one of many in the book which resonates really strongly in me and I am forced to return to it time after time – isn’t that enough? Perhaps I should cut down on the analysis and just continue to be moved by the image.
All the images from the book will be on show as part of this exhibition which runs until 4th November at An Lanntair is a hub for creativity and the arts in the Outer Hebrides lanntair.com/events/event/hyperborea/
Do you have a favourite image that you'd like to write about? We're looking out for new end frame submissions for forthcoming issues, so please get in touch.
Our 4x4 feature is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios from our subscribers, each consisting of four images related in some way. You can view previous 4x4 portfolios here.
We're always on the lookout for new portfolios, so please do get in touch! If you would like to submit your 4x4 portfolio, please visit this page for submission information.
*Shout out* as we are looking for contributions for the next few issues, so please do get in touch if you're interested!
Please click the images to see the portfolios in full.
These 4 images were taken within the space of 3 days in July at Camus An Lighe, somewhere on the road past Glen Uig and in Glen Etive.
Anyone who has spent a good amount of time outdoors in Lochaber will attest that it has the wettest rain in the world. The wettest! Bar none! We had camped on Camus Lighe and the weather was fine for a day but then it came in. It really came in. Waterproofs were no match and ticks made a beeline for the tent to shelter from the deluge, it was like being in a wet nylon prison with blood sucking inmates. The river swelled, from 1 river with a small offshoot. To two rivers, to three, then just one big river. We packed up and marched out. Lochaber had beaten us. Despite all this, I love the weather in Lochaber. It stands against all notions of how wet, we can be. It is defiant and sobering like a slap from your Granny. No matter how hard Lochaber hits me I will always come back. I love the place. My Dad grew up in Glen Nevis and my Mother in Caol. Though I live in Glasgow, Lochaber is home and its rain is in my blood.
These four images to me represent how the autumnal landscape can differ according to the light. From the soft, muted shades of green, yellow and orange of a misty October morning at Rydal Water to the high contrast of an almost spotlit landscape as in "Elterwater Highlights". In between we have "Tarn Hows Gold" & "Illuminated" which is probably how we all think of autumn for the majority of the time, it's all about "in your face" punchy, saturated colour.
'HeadSpace' is a very personal project for me. At a time in life where life seems to be speeding up, I'm trying very hard to slow it down.
I've turned to landscape photography as a means of attaining mental well-being. Based on the principles of mindfulness, I use long exposures to create images that show the passing of time in a beautiful and peaceful place.
The coast is my favourite place to be, as a result, the majority of my landscapes are perhaps more accurately seascapes! I take a lot of trips to the sea with my family, and so whilst these may just be pretty pictures of the seaside to some of you, to me they're very fond memories of times spent on the beaches with my wife and children.
I spend a good amount of time exploring the North Yorkshire Coast with my family. We go to Scarborough quite regularly, and from there, Whitby, Robin Hood's Bay, Sandsend, and many of the other towns that pepper the coastline. Each time I go back, I try to do something different and see the places I've seen many times before with new eyes.
Four months in Kyrgyzstan, portraying this country on the outskirts of global headlines with a large format camera, through faces and landscapes. This work highlights the generational disparities between those nostalgic of an abolished USSR order and modern westernised youths born after the fall. It covers the trials of a young, woebegone country struggling to simultaneously form a national identity and keep apace with a global economy. Relics of a past era mingle with the faces of a population frozen in transition.
At the conference in 2016, we ran two series of Community Talks over the lunch period.
A lightning talk is a very short presentation lasting only a few minutes. Over the lunchtime, on the Saturday and Sunday, we invited our community of photographers to talk about a project they are working on or an idea.
Our host for the talks David Ward, introduces each of the speakers and if they run over the 10 minutes.....watch out for the nerf gun!
Karen Thurman
Despite (or maybe because of) spending her formative years in the concrete jungles of the Far East, large format black & white landscape photographer Karen Thurman fell profoundly in love with Mother Nature and now uses photography to encourage people towards reverence for her.
Inveterate nomad and camper, Karen is most likely to be found in one of two places: in her tent or in her beloved darkroom developing and printing images of the forests and woodlands that are so magical to her. Read our interview with Karen or visit her website.
From Seed to Show
Karen talked about getting a photographic project from a germ of an idea to an exhibition.
Thomas Peck
Tom Peck is an amateur photographer who’s getting more and more serious about his passion. He writes about photography for magazines (onlandscape.co.uk, Black & White Photography, AP, Shoot) and leads workshops in Yorkshire and the US with aspect2i. Visit his websites www.thomaspeck.wordpress.com and www.thomaspeckphotography.com
Utah Rocks!
The American West is a photographer’s mecca, especially Utah and Arizona with their canyons both Grand and Intimate. A land of iconic vistas, but a risk of photographic cliché. So how do you search for your own point of view? Is it possible to develop a vision as well as technique while on a landscape workshop? Here’s what I learned when I swapped being a landscape workshop attendee for leading the workshop myself.
Alastair Ross
Alastair is a non-award winning photographer based in Sheffield on the edge of the Peak District in England. I tend towards landscape, environmental and nature photography in what I do, but have been known from time to time to dabble in street photography. Visit Alastair's website. Alastair is also a contributor to On Landscape.
Ties to the Land
Using pinhole cameras and film I explore humanity's relationship with the land and how it has used the land. Humanity has always used the land to his own ends and he has left evidence of that across the millennia from the subtle to wholesale reforming of the land.
Colin Bell
Colin is first and foremost a lover of the landscape and in particular, the Lake District, being a regular visitor over 30 years.
The inspiration for Colin’s photography derives from his connection with the landscape itself, a photographer of the ‘place’ more than the ‘location’. His work at Thirlmere, Delamere Forest and Holme Fell reveals the developing narrative of the land and how nature strives to meliorate the open wounds left by our intervention.
Seeing beyond the obvious is important to Colin and so he allows repetition of visits and the passing of time to reveal both the intimate and wider scenes that are typical of his photography. Visit Colin's website.
What’s the Story?
Colin will be using his work from Holme Fell, Thirlmere and Delamere Forest to talk about how the landscape reveals the narrative of its history and regeneration. He will talk about how to create photographs that embrace imperfection and reflect the sense of place and not just a location.
It’s not about snapping or shooting a picture. It’s about the capture of a moment, just a split of a second, which is unique, and will not appear again.“
This is a quote I once wrote down during a hiking session. In the last few decades, a lot has changed around us - the way to communicate, the way to buy things or order a taxi and the way of travelling. What we considered a decade ago as a most isolated place in Europe is today quite easy to reach. But, still, there are places which are not yet to touristy and still a new experience, like a rough diamond. One place I consider like this is the eastern European country, Georgia. This country has untouched landscapes and unbelievable facets, from half deserts to tropical areas and glaciers. I just visited it for my Birthday in January and greatly enjoyed the hospitality they give.
Traces to Azerbaijan
David Gareja desert
Alaverdi Monastery
This year I sought a new destination, something in the north which is still not photographed that much and as previously mentioned not yet too well known, and at the same time an exciting experience. Taking these aspects into account, the Faroe Islands came to my mind, far out in the Atlantic, an island of volcanic origin with breathtaking and unforgettable Landscapes and scenery. Located halfway between Norway and Iceland at 62°00’N, it rises majestically from the sea and with the highest sea cliffs in Europe and where you are never more than 5 kilometres from the sea.
When thinking about this, it was clear that the weather may not be the best, it could be a lot of rain and fog or maybe not the best light. I selected a date bit before the main season in the hope that I will have the great weather like I had during my last journeys. While I was planning which route I will flight I saw that I could choose between Edinburgh and Copenhagen. In this case, I thought I will do a stop in Copenhagen and say hello to my friends, Capture One who also managed to organise a project for me which included another photographer, Anja Wurm, with fashion photography from local Designers.
I've written about my journey and why it was maybe even harder than I thought, so let the images take you to one of the last secret corners of Europe.
In addition to my normal Equipment, which is a Sony SLT-A58 with a Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 Lens or a Sony SLT-A99 with a Sony 50mm f/1.4, some Hoya Filters and a Cullmann Tripod, I got supported by some partners for this project. Capture One provided me with a Phase One XF IQ3 100MP XF System a Schneider-Kreuznach 35mm LS f/3.5 and Schneider-Kreuznach 80mm LS f/2.8 Lens; The Swiss distributor GMC Trading with various Hoya Filters and GraphicArt Zurich with an Induro Tripod Carbon Series 2 CLT203 and the BHD1 Ball Head. And Microsoft Switzerland with a Microsoft Surface Pro 4. In addition, a big thanks to Visit Faroe Islands and Atlantic Airways for the support and the helicopter flight. Moreover, it has paid off; the Faroe Islands offers breathtaking and unforgettable landscapes, from majestic mountains, mighty waterfalls to beautiful coastline and fjords. I've written about my journey and why it was maybe even harder than I thought, so let the images take you to one of the last secret corners of Europe.
When we reached the Faroe Islands from Copenhagen on Tuesday 16th May, we first did some extra rounds with the plane because of the fog. After landing on the Island of Vágar where the Airport is located we picked up our car and took the undersea tunnel to the Island of Streymoy where one of the smallest capitals, Tórshavn, is located. There we had a first contact with the Designers and preselect some clothes for Anja’s Fashion Shooting on the weekend. On the Way to Strendur, where we had our house for the next few days, we took the old road and wanted to visit the wind farm above Tórshavn. Some days later we saw that we were standing just 75 meters from them but couldn't see them because of the fog. After reaching the Island of Esturoy the clouds began to open and next on to Strendur for a warm welcome to the Faroe Islands in form of a rainbow. But that did not last long and in the evening the fog came back.
ælabogi
On our first full day in the Faroe Islands, the morning started with some clouds over Strendur and we decided to discover the Island of Esturoy. After a stop in a village called Fuglafjørður we drove in direction of Gjógv and it started to rain and we drove to the harbour and I checked out the spot and the frame. I went back to the car and picked up the 80mm and a ND100 Filter. I finished the first image and went back for a 35mm and a circular polariser. Unfortunately, it still rained and we sat inside the car but luckily, we had some tea with us. Another half hour was around and I spotted a small hole between the clouds and saw my chance, I decided to take it. I went down to the harbour, set up the camera and the polarisation filter, did a zoom in at 100% and so I could manage the complete depth of field. Exactly at the moment, I shoot the Image I felt some drops and went back to the car. We decided to drove around Esturoy but quite often it was very cloudy or even rainy, also the weather radar showed no good spots and we had not such a luck with the Landscape on this day.
Road trip
Gjógv
The second day we had a sunny start in Strendur but on the Road to the Island of Streymoy, some clouds come over us. Then, on the way to Tórshavn, we decided again to take the old road and had a stop again at the wind farm which was this time clearly visible. After a short meeting in Tórshavn and some dinner the sun came back again and we drove around the east part of the Island of Streymoy and because of this excellent weather we decided to drive again through the undersea tunnel to Vágar and going to the largest lake of the Faroe Islands the Sørvágsvatn or Leitisvatn (depends on which side). We walked up the whole lake and I captured some great Images of the free standing rock Geituskoradrangur and the waterfall Bøsdalafossur and we saw this great sun and thought of the sunset. Before we arrived in the Faroe Islands, I saw some pictures of the waterfall near the small Village Gásadalur in the western part of Vágar and hope to capture this with a nice sunset. In this moment I had a watch at the clock and calculate we need 45 minutes back to the car and around 20 minutes to drive and the sunset will be in around 1 hour and 15 minutes, what means if I want to realise this Image I have now only this one chance as I saw the weather from yesterday. And as you can see we managed to capture it as planned.
Vindur
Geituskoradrangur and Bøsdalafossur
Sunset behind Gásadalur and Árnafjall
On Friday, the day started with fog (again) and I was curious about the planned aerial shoot with such a weather. Again, on this day we went to Tórshavn to take the Atlantic Airways Helicopter via Skúvoy and Dímun to Froðba. The Helicopter on the Faroe is something like public transport, especially for the two families living on Dímun the smallest Island of Faroe, because by boat it's quite hard to climb up the cliffs. We had a short stop in Froðba and after we went back the same way. To shoot Aerial by this weather was quite a challenge but with the Phase One IQ3 100MP XF System it was good to master. Back on the Heliport in Tórshavn it was still foggy, we had a look at a spot for Anjas Fashion shooting on the next day and picked up some clothes. By using the weather App Meteo Blue with the Where2Go function we found a small spot with some sun exactly near the village of Tjørnuvík with a great view to Risin og Kellingin. In a legend, it is said that the giant and his wife are trying to haul the Faroe Islands to Iceland, but in the first rays of the morning sun became stone.
In a legend, it is said that the giant and his wife are trying to haul the Faroe Islands to Iceland, but in the first rays of the morning sun became stone.
Stóra Dímun
Endless sea
Risin og Kellingin
Saturday was the Day of Anja’s Fashion Shooting, so on this day, I was just the assistant until the shoot was finished. We woke up quite early, picked up the model, then sorted out the make-up, the hairdresser, chose the dresses and went to the shoot. Luckily the morning had some sun between, after bringing back the model to Vestmanna a village on the east of Streymoy the sun disappeared and some clouds came up but with some pretty structures. I had a short stop at Kvívík which is one of the oldest settlements on the Faroe Islands to capture these fascinating clouds. Later we planned to reach a cave but the tide crossed the plans and it began to get super foggy later this evening.
Kvívík
Rough sea
Our fifth Day, Sunday started again with a bright sunshine, which was good for Anja’s second Fashion shooting. And again, after bringing back the model to Tórshavn we had some hours quite nice weather and during a hike, the weather changed again to cloudy and later it rained again the whole evening.
Skeiðsskarð
On the fifth day, we were lucky to start with sunshine. We drove to the Airport for the second Helicopter flight, this time to Mykines a small Island which lay in front of the bay of Vágar and its full of birds, especially the cliffs in the west near the lighthouse. On our hike back the clouds came back again and turned to rain. We had to turn back, rain becoming our cursed adversary.
The Bridge
Mykines Lighthouse
Imperial Cliffs
On our last Day, Tuesday, we went back again to Vágar, this time for a story about Fisher which was captured by Anja. Unfortunately, this day started as it ended the day before, with rain. We packed the Phase One System into a plastic bag and protected the lens with a Hoya UV Filter. This rain changed later in some fog which was ideal for an Image of the farm Dúvugarður which I captured already on the first day, but with this fog the farm from the 17th century gets a special mystical atmosphere. After reaching our house in Strendur we decided to visit the last small point of Esturoy which we didn’t visit so far, the small village Hellurnar, not mention in the Tourism Guide but has a very nice harbour and fjord which it is worth.
Dúvugarður farm with fog
Hellurnar
Thanks to Benjamin for this photographer's diary story - the Faroes is definitely getting a little more popular now and we hope it doesn't end up like Iceland. Fancy submitting an article? We'd like to hear from anyone who has found their own special locations for landscape photography and don't forget, if you need any help or feedback writing an article, just get in touch. Our community contributions are really important to us.
Imagine incredible northern lights, dancing over a "Tolkeniesque" landscape of sharp granite towers, glaciers pouring down towards the ocean, the Moon shining through moody clouds and a polar bear standing on a rocky outcrop. Well, that has been photographed already.
What about massive UFO-like lenticular clouds set ablaze by the light of sunrise, hovering over an otherworldly landscape filled of frosted trees and frozen waterfalls? Done, too.
Massive icebergs with milky ways? Done. Towering dunes at sunset in a sandstorm? Ticked too. Tropical islands framed by impressive waves with white sharks in the foreground? Done...
What is left then to landscape photographers? Vision and introspection.
What is extraordinary?
Most photographers want to make images that are "better" and "different" than the rest. In other words, "extraordinary". But what does "extraordinary" mean? According to the dictionary, extraordinary is something "unusual and surprising". That is, something is extraordinary when it takes us out of what we are used to seeing, experiencing or feeling in our everyday life. We could conclude this quality is way more related to the concept of "scarcity" than "quality".
It could be thought that whenever a landscape photograph is made, a certain conversation takes place between a certain place and a human being, who stands behind the camera.
An extraordinary photograph, therefore, would per se have little to do with the level of its quality, if we define quality by the depth of vision from the photographer who made it, and would be more related to the degree of novelty and the surprise effect it raises in the observer. It is only when we investigate about the origin of that novelty, that is, the place where that surprise effect comes from, that we can start making connections and assessments of quality value.
It could be thought that whenever a landscape photograph is made, a certain conversation takes place between a certain place and a human being, who stands behind the camera. However, the degree of participation of each of the speakers in this conversation can vary strongly. On some occasions, the photographer becomes a recorder of what the landscape has to say. On other occasions, the landscape becomes the microphone through which the photographer speaks up. When a photograph, the result of that dialogue, is extraordinary, it tells us something we did not know, or something we never saw or heard about, something new, unusual, surprising. This surprising message can come from the landscape itself, from the way the photographer sees the world, or as a collaboration of both.
At one extreme of the situation, we can choose to delegate the job and create "extraordinary" images by looking for "extraordinary" places and let them talk alone. This is the easy route, being nowadays easier than ever for a number of factors.
As human beings, we have evolved in a growingly urban environment, away from nature and its wonders. Most of the world population lives today confined to an ecosystem of concrete, asphalt and carpet. Our habits have changed and so also what we see and experience every day of our lives. Today, things that our ancestors lived and considered "ordinary" for millions of years, like contemplating a sunrise or gazing a star filled night sky, have become something rare and unusual. In a way, progress has brought with it a strong homogeneity and limitation in terms of life experiences, making most human beings grow used to a very similar and reduced reality which pushes them to find "extraordinary" what before was not.
Paradoxically, traveling to faraway places has become increasingly easy these days. Expeditions that took weeks and great lengths of logistical effort in the old days are nowadays easy commutes for most people with a minimum of skills, financial resources and physical fitness. In less than 48 hours, we can virtually be in any place of this planet, any ecosystem, any environmental situation.
To end with, photographic cameras have grown more and more portable, allowing us to record the world that stands in front of a lens at ease. We do not need to haul hundreds of kilograms of large format cameras, glass plates and chemicals anymore like it was needed a century ago.
Today, we can very well leave our home with our camera conveniently fit into a small bag, catch a flight, travel to an "unusual and surprising" location, record a few images and bring them back to the urban reality where most people live. With a minimum of technical and compositional skills, we will be able to record the monologue of the landscape and bring back its extraordinary quality to our peers. The likely result will be an extraordinary image, possibly awakening an extraordinary reaction from the audience and eventually making us extraordinary photographers.
The problem with this approach is that it only leads to a dead end: becoming the universal photographer.
The likely result will be an extraordinary image, possibly awakening an extraordinary reaction from the audience and eventually making us extraordinary photographers.
The problem with this approach is that it only leads to a dead end: becoming the universal photographer.
Angela Chalmers is a visual artist based in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, who uses painting, printmaking and photography to explore the themes that interest her. I spotted her beautiful “Botanicals” - created using the cyanotype method - in this year’s North Yorkshire Open Studios guide; she has also recently exhibited with husband David Chalmers at the Joe Cornish Galleries and led two workshops there.
Can you tell readers a little about yourself – your education, early interests and career – and the places in which you grew up and now live?
My journey begins in the pottery district of Stoke-on-Trent. When I was born my mother was employed as a fine china lithographic artist. As a young girl, I remember her explaining how floral patterns were created on the side of teacups. My father served in the RAF during the 1950s and was a keen amateur photographer.
His work brought the family to the Yorkshire coast when I was four years old. This is where I attended school and college and also where I first experienced a photographic darkroom. I studied Fashion and Textiles and one of our photography assignments was to shoot clothing using studio lighting. One of my fellow students arrived with a black Victorian dress, cape and bonnet. I jumped at the chance to model the outfit. Little did I know that this would be the start of my love affair with ‘Victoriana’.
Wake up early, everyone is asleep. You prepare yourself with the things that might be needed, I would say essential: warm jumper, raincoats and knife. Many images that go through your mind driving up the numerous hairpin bends, 12 km from Cittanova to Zomaro (from the Greek Ozómenos - waterlogged), the gate of the Aspromonte, a land of bandits, hidden paths, rugged mountains and landscapes sung and praised by Norman Douglas and Corrado Alvaro.
The name Aspromonte has two potential etymologies. In addition to the obvious meaning of "rugged mountain" that describe the morphology, another possibility is the meaning of "Mont Blanc", the Greek word “aspro”, which means white.
The name Aspromonte has two potential etymologies. In addition to the obvious meaning of "rugged mountain" that describe the morphology, another possibility is the meaning of "Mont Blanc", the Greek word “aspro”, which means white.
It is a places of history, as it is said that Spartacus has taken refuge and there, at Marco's plans, defeated the Roman legions of Marco Licinio Crasso. Past by many brigands including Nino Martino, Giuseppe Musolino, the band Mittica, Bizarro And Giuseppe Pronestì, the brigand Sonnino all engaged in the fight against the 'mercenaries' of Garibaldi, he himself wounded in Gambarie, sent to conquer the south around the 1850s.
At 1,000 meters high, 20 miles from the Tyrrhenian Sea, 30 miles from the Ionian Sea, someone would now call it paradise.
You get to the top, it is still dark, it starts to rain which is frequent in these mountains. Clouds come from the sea as black walls burst with rain that collides with the mountains and where they then stop.The sun among the trees gives the first timid lights.
While driving you just think about the places you want to reach, the panoramas you want to shoot, but what about the roads that take you to these places? This is the story I want to tell…
I have always been fascinated by the multitude of shapes that a mountain road or backroad can have, the colours, the colour of the pavement, the surroundings… You don’t really need to go and find them, they are everywhere.
The Aspromonte National Park, in Calabria, South of Italy, is part of the southern Appennine mountain range. It sits right in the middle of this narrow land which is Calabria. In many places, you have the rare opportunity to stand right on top of a mountain seeing in front of you the western coast and behind you the eastern one. Amazing views. And to get to these places, of course, you have to take the path to.
I have always been fascinated by the multitude of shapes that a mountain road or backroad can have, the colours, the colour of the pavement, the surroundings… You don’t really need to go and find them, they are everywhere. Most of the people just drive on them, they are just the way to reach places. Nobody wonders how they have been built, why they have been built, what was the original pavement or if they always been like that.
Most of the roads are now just used by shepherds, forest guards and in some cases by woodsmen and wild boars hunters, but a century ago they were the main arteries for trade of wood, coal, where everybody walked them on foot to take their own goods to be sold in markets on the other coast. Much of them have been paved due to the fact that until the 1980s they were the only access to the mountains. But don’t expect to find a smooth way up, as it has been a rugged mountain as the own name says, roads are often blocked by landslides of mud or rocks, fallen trees, sometimes flooded by the rivers that come down from the top.
Once you leave the car and begin to walk through pine or beech forests there are the backroads, mainly now used by shepherds and mushroom pickers. They once were part of the network that linked the myriad of villages perched in the mountains.
There are thousands of these paths, spread out all over the mountain, all different. Most of these paths can be easily found on the National park map, where all are well highlighted depending on the size, the length and the importance. In fact, the park, put a lot of efforts, thanks to the park’s guides, to keep them as clean as possible where possible, to revive the signs that indicate the way from the beginning to the end. This is very important actually, first for people who need to learn to move around on these mountains, second for tourism as these tracks are seen as an important chance to let everybody get to know the beauty of this place.
Is not really much of a challenge taking a good shot, you need just patience. The same road can look very different from a season to another. You will have just to make up your mind on what you want to represent. Some tracks are in the shades, where the light hardly get through, some right under the light of the sun. During fall or winter, these backroads get quite magical with fog all over the place, the smell of mushrooms and underwood; this is where I get connected with nature, a sort of inspiring path that leads to the “wow” place.
Visit Calabria, this is my suggestion The majority of landscape photographers concentrate their efforts on finding the beautiful place where to take the “wow” picture, the one that would give you the appreciation of the public. Now I do not really think this is the way to tell the stories of your own land or the places you visit.
At first, years ago, this was also my way of thinking, I used to take pictures with wide lenses, just because I thought that this was the right way. In time everything has changed, the way of seeing things around me. I started seeing instead of just looking.
I have also changed the main tools, using now tele lenses like 70-200 and also 150-600. It may sounds a bit weird using a 150-600 for landscape pictures, but I can assure that the views sometimes can be breathtaking.
I use Photoshop to post process my images, nothing special though.
Roads and Back Roads, Rocco Calogero, read article
Sometimes you start a story without realising you have done so. The narrative follows its own path, finds its own pace and carries you along unaware of its existence. You have no control of the direction, nor the pace nor the destination. My story, the one that led to this Distinction, started years ago and for a long time, I had no idea that it had begun nor where it was taking me. As the story branched and grew it took me further north, chasing the light that is unique to that part of the world. I found myself drawn to the emptiness and silence that swells and covers the land as the sun sinks nearer to the horizon, the temperatures plunge below zero and the first snows start to fall.
Following on from my previous article on pinhole photography I decided to create my own film pinhole photographs using a large format camera and a converted Copal 1 shutter (I removed the lens elements and inserted my pinhole, mounted on a suitably sized circular plastic sheet, into the back of the shutter). This conversion allowed me to try some full frame 5x4 pinholes and also some 6x12 pinhole photographs using a Horseman back.
At the end of this instalment, I am also going to give a few links to books, photographers and resources that will help you along.
To begin with, my experience of pinhole photography was quite intriguing. There wasn’t much ‘accurate’ framing going on. On most pinhole cameras you get ‘lines’ that show you the field of view for your camera. On my large format conversion, I had a couple of choices. Firstly, I could use an equivalent focal length lens to check my composition if this didn't match the focal length I could just stop it down to get an idea of the framing. This won’t be 100% accurate for the frame edges (because many modern lenses don’t have the exit pupil at the same plane as the lens board) but could help get the balance of a picture right.
Secondly, I could take the pinhole out of the back of the copal shutter and check the position of my corners using the 'chopped' corners on my ground glass. In the end, neither of these techniques were 100% satisfactory and I came to the conclusion that a camera with diverging line markings to show the field of view is a pretty good compromise and fits with the philosophy of pinhole photography e.g. see the Reality So Subtle camera below.
With my 5x4 camera I was unable to take exceptionally wide photographs, the widest I could manage was approximately 60mm (equivalent to about 16mm on full frame 35mm cameras). The light fall-off on these photographs should be about two stops, which looks about right based on the results I got.
The Results
What surprised me most was just how sharp some of the results were. If you are one of those people who characterise pinholes as generally blurry or having an out of focus look, think again. In this particular photograph of Achnambeithach at the bottom of the three sisters, the detail in the house is quite incredible considering there is no lens involved.
In fact, the detail is probably too much and a few people commented that if you want sharp photographs shouldn’t you be using a lens? Well, that’s a pretty good argument but the pictures do have a certain aesthetic that I haven’t seen from a straightforward optical photograph. I surmise that there is probably a sweet spot in terms of film size and this is probably in the medium format territory. I'll probably make or buy a 6x12 camera with masks.
Here’s another photograph look directly at the Three Sisters in Glencoe and displaying the flare that is characteristic of pinhole photography. These ‘rays’ are presumably tiny reflections from the imperfections in the pinhole (which goes to show you that even a £55 hole isn’t aberration free). Also, with flare in mind, you are still best to shade the pinhole if the sun is outside of the field of view of the photograph as light rays can still be bounced onto the film via these imperfections.
Here’s a photograph that is about as wide as I could get with the large format setup, taken from the bridge over the river Coe at the bottom of the three sisters.
Another surprising thing that I discovered whilst developing and scanning these photographs is the amazing latitude of Ilford HP5! I overexposed most of the photographs by at least two stops (in order to ensure no blocking up in the corners) and yet the highlights were clearly captured on film without excessive grain, witness the Three Sisters photograph looking directly into the sun with the shaded hills.
Here are a couple of results using the Horseman 6x12 back on the Ebony.
I have to say I'm very pleased with the results from the pinhole photographs I have taken so far and will be looking at making or purchasing a simple box camera pinhole when I get a chance.
Resources for the Pinhole Photographer
Whilst I was putting together the article on pinhole photography, I invested in a few books to research the genre. Here are a few favourites.
Pinhole Photography by Eric Renner (2008)
An excellent treatise on the history, techniques and application of pinhole photography. A must buy for those interested in pinhole photography.
ISBN: 978-0240810478
The Pinhole Camera by Brian J Krummel(2009)
Covers a lot of ground including things like how to develop film and also includes some very nice pinhole work in a gallery in the back
ISBN: 978-1442187665
The f/D Book of Pinhole by Kier and Libby Selinsky (2016)
A global survey of pinhole photography. A digital print book with an eclectic collection of practitioners represented.
ISBN: 978-0692837337
Poetics of Light by Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer (2014)
A very well put together and varied portfolio covering a wide range of practitioners and techniques.
ISBN: 978-0890135884
I also looked around at various websites and here is a selection of ones I found useful.
F/d. Exploring the art of pinhole photography - fslashd.com
I love autumn. The smell of the moisty forest, the cold nights, the fog in the morning and of course the wonderful colours. It is the season for contemplation, for emotions and for long walks. For nature and landscape photographers autumn is obviously also a great season, offering all kind of possibilities for moody and colourful pictures. But it is not so easy to make something new out it. Trees will be trees and leaves will be leaves. Or?
A fresh perspective
Since 2006 I have spent a couple of days at La Hoegne in the Belgian Ardennes every autumn. It is a beautiful mountain stream that meanders through a nice beech and birch forest, with many small waterfalls, rapids and vortices. Very picturesque, with new treasures around every corner.
After a couple of years, I got the feeling I had photographed the Hoegne from every possible angle. And even worse: the little river became more and more popular among other photographers and I saw the same kind of photographs popping up everywhere. Although it was still great to visit the area, it was time for something new from a photographic point of view. At that time I started wondering how autumn would look if seen from underwater, through the eyes of a fish or another creature living under water. I saw the autumn leaves flowing by, saw them dancing in the water under small waterfalls, getting into vortices and getting struck behind branches in the water. And I started wondering if this all could be photographed.
Getting started
I didn’t have any experience with underwater photography, nor did I have any gear for it. When I checked out the prices of professional underwater housings for my Canon DSLR, I was about to leave the whole idea and find another project with less financial implications. But then I found out that an official underwater housing for my Canon G10 was not expensive at all, costing only around 150 GBP. So I bought one and decided to give it a try in La Hoegne. I looked for a good place in the river, not too deep and with nice trees in autumn colours in the surroundings.
When asked to choose my End Frame, Gateway to the Moors II rose to the forefront of my mind. Even though the exposure of great landscape pictures on social media and in the recent surge of photography books can be almost overwhelming to digest on a daily basis, I can still somehow remember the moment of engaging with this one in a quiet yet glowing contentment a few years ago. I don't really remember when and where precisely just the conscious engagement.
The reasoning for my selection brought to my attention of how we see and process all this visual stimulation before us. I don't often translate visual processes and emotions into words but it's certainly a practice I like to spend more time on. I remember Charlie Waite quoting once, the mind and eye are a great double act and perform a rapid scanning process before concluding, yes I quite like that.
We take in ingredients such as composition, light, tones, mood, depth, hue, juxtaposing, balance etc. But is there anything else in the process that makes a picture so engaging, what about the other end, the viewer. Each viewer has their own individual way of processing visual input with influences from experiences, memories and the people around us. Together the picture and the viewer are like a silent visual conversation.
Our 4x4 feature is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios from our subscribers, each consisting of four images related in some way. You can view previous 4x4 portfolios here.
We're always on the lookout for new portfolios, so please do get in touch! If you would like to submit your 4x4 portfolio, please visit this page for submission information.
*Shout out* as we are looking for contributions for the next few issues, so please do get in touch if you're interested!
Please click the images to see the portfolios in full.
I started photography as a hobby around 6 years ago now. I have had many hobbies in my time but this has been the one that has lasted the longest! There is always something new to discover, different light or different weather conditions to be had that can completely transform the landscape. I am most at home by the sea or by water, its where I find peace. The coast is so unpredictable but this just means you never know what you're going to get on any given day and that’s part of the fun!
The images I have chosen are a mix from across the UK. When I first started out I predominantly shot black and white images and gained my LRPS in that format. Although I do use a lot of colour in my images today I still find I often revert back to processing in monochrome and the impact of those images can be striking.
In November 2016 I hired a camper van in Salt Lake City and spent 3 weeks visiting some of the National Parks in Utah. Bryce Canyon was my 4th National Park after Arches, Monument Valley and Canyonlands. It's surprisingly small and even at the end of November is still very busy. Sunrise Point, Sunset Point and Inspiration Point are all beguiling and yes, there my tripod was placed, but I did try to find something that was a little distinctive and gave some idea of the unique beauty of this wonderful place and my feelings for it.
My 4x4 is of a particularly spectacular cloud Inversion that occurred on a summer summit camp on Slieve Binnian in the Mournes this July. It is a record of one the most beautiful occurrences I have ever witnessed in nature. Inversion which is more common in spring and autumn although July seems to have its own has its own monsoon season lasted for nearly two hours I spent some time taking shots before finally standing open mouthed at the wonder of it all.There was another couple camping on the summit (not togs..) I had attempted to awaken them several times but it was silly o'clock did finally get up just as the clouds arose to summit height time for me to return to bed...
A collection of Images from in and around Glencoe and Rannoch Moor taken over a few days in December 2016.
A Location that has become engrained in my photographic journey over the last 5 years. It is a location full of popular honey pot locations but looking a bit deeper and spending more time in the area I have been working on creating unique shots from popular locations and new ones alike.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
~Wendell Berry
I set up my camp at a favourite spot on the edge of a grove of old aspens, where the trees give way to a large expanse of rolling hills covered in fragrant sagebrush and bordered on the horizon by red sandstone cliffs and lofty volcanic plateaus. I am only about twenty miles from my house, but no evidence of human presence is detectable. The only sounds are the wind in the trees, the calls of birds and squirrels, and the rattle of flying grasshoppers. I watch my dog playfully rolling on her back in a sunny patch in the grasses as the afternoon clouds gather for the almost-daily spate of monsoon rains. A beautiful orange flicker feather rests by a cluster of mushrooms sprouting from below a fallen log. As the day progresses, I watch storm cells moving about the landscape, culminating in veils of rain. Filled with a sense of peace, I photograph, working slowly and quietly as to not disrupt the natural rhythm, within and without.
The sense of energy at Canary Wharf is palpable; it’s not a place that is often associated with quiet contemplation. Yet pausing for a moment reveals real beauty and softness alongside the corporate architecture; the patterns and colours can be mesmerising like a kaleidoscope as they change with the light and weather.
With so much activity all around, capturing these colourful images requires a focus that isn’t immediately obvious to passers by; I can spend hours at a time examining one body of water, waiting for something out of the ordinary – I sometimes think I might be the only person who is still among the crowd.
Attending the first On Landscape Conference was a bit of a revelation for me creatively - I had made many trips to locations like the Lakes and Scotland that are usually regarded as highly productive for photographers yet came away with nothing that I felt was remarkable. Jem Southam's talk about his concentrated and detailed studies of his local area helped me realise why my previous approach wasn't working for me.
If anyone asks about what my photography influences are, I think of what fascinated me as a child, playing for hours with a kaleidoscope, spirograph and etch-a-sketch and being captivated by the endless variation of colours and shapes you could create. Later on I connected with artists such as Rothko, Klimt and the photography of David Hockney; those themes still inspire me. I realised the sort of photographs I was producing before the OL conference had no roots in what enthused me. So I decided to be more focused and, on being given a creative commission for the Canary Wharf Group plc, and a 24/7 access all areas pass for their site, some ideas began to germinate.
Having to return to the same location time and time again over several months, I began to notice shapes and patterns that motivated me to try to capture in photographic form the images that I was I visualising in my mind. It was precisely because I returned repeatedly that I began to realise the potential for them as a project, a project that would take the next four years to develop into something fruitful. It was probably no coincidence that connecting with something that really interested me meant I was more productive and happier with the results. Winning the 'Your View' section of LPOTY in 2015 with an image from the series made me feel I was on the right track somehow.
It was very much a trial and error process getting the technique right to create what I was imagining I could record but when I did I barely noticed at the time taking them, it was pretty common to take over 600 images over 4 or 5 hours and get only one or two I was happy with. The type of weather I preferred and my availability to coincide with it slowed the process down greatly as only certain conditions seemed to create what I was looking for. But it's no bad thing to have to wait sometimes to make progress; it sort of makes it more exciting.
The whole process became like a form of meditation for me and felt very rewarding, which only fuelled more photography. I doubt that I will find an end to the project as I enjoy it too much but, then again, why would I want to end it if I am still enjoying it?
Fleeting Reflections Exhibition
This is an exhibition of abstract building reflection photographs taken over the last four years at Canary Wharf in London by Mike Curry.
Exhibition runs from 14th – 28th September 2017 at the Greenwich Gallery, Linear House, Peyton Place, London SE10 8RS. Admission free.
Accompanying book ‘Fleeting Reflections’ published by Triplekite Publishing and available to pre-order now. Click here.
Michel Lucas, a biologist by training, is inspired by landscapes that are largely free of human influence. Most of his images are made in two areas: his local patch ‘Hatertse Vennen’ (the Netherlands) and the ‘High Moors’ (Belgium). He published his first book ‘Hoge Venen’ (High Moors, wide and intimate landscapes) in 2016.
Can you tell readers a little about yourself – your education, early interests and career?
From early childhood on I have always been interested in nature. So there was never any doubt about the choice of study: biology it would be. I had romantic ideas about a job in wildlife research, but as job perspectives were uncertain I turned towards a job in environmental monitoring. I picked up cameras at several stages of my life, but I was never really serious about it. This changed when I joined my local nature photography club in 2004 after a trip to the Galapagos Islands and the rainforests of Ecuador. At this club I became aware there was much more to photography than filling the frame with rare birds or animals. Here I also met and became friends with Theo Bosboom, whom I think of as one of the great nature photographers of our time. So this club and friendship got me on the track of being a passionate nature photographer.
At this moment, I have a regular job to pay the bills and photography is for leisure and fun. As I am always ambitious to develop myself, I try to further my photography by publishing (a book and articles), participating in competitions, and giving lectures and workshops. I am undecided about turning pro. Of course, I find the idea appealing at times but I value my freedom and I am not looking for increased stress in having to make money from photography. Right now, my strategy is one of gradual development, building up, learning, gaining confidence, etc. Who knows where this may lead in a few years?
Like all art, our photography develops as we change and progress in our lives.
I have come to realise over the last two or three years, that there is more to photography than beautiful landscapes taken in the morning or evening golden hours. Much as I still love those times, and the wonderful light that illuminates our magical world, still I feel there is 'more.'
“Practitioners such as John Austin, who have worked so consistently to develop their practice and their creative voice play a unique role in the cultural ecosystem of our state,” says BRAG director Julian Bowron. “The retrospective is a chance for us to celebrate and recognise this sustained effort, and share the resulting cultural contribution with diverse audiences.” In the interests of documenting this extraordinary contribution, the exhibition is accompanied by a full catalogue, featuring essays by Dr. Diana McGirr and Sarah Drummond.
The timeframe for Austin’s retrospective begins with the photographer’s move to Quinninup, a small forest town in the South West of WA, and also marks the start of his engagement with anti-logging protests in this area. Documentation of these protests – and the destruction of the South West forests are an integral part of the photographer’s oeuvre.
These images – many of which are deeply jarring, sit alongside other, more restful bodies of work, such as the Littoral and Limnal series of intertidal zones, sites which are described by the artist as “owned by both the sea and the land.”
This exhibition is part of an ongoing series of major retrospective exhibitions at BRAG by some of the most respected senior artists of the South West. Survey II is the second major exhibition of Austin’s work following on from John Austin: Photography 1970-1993 which was exhibited at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in 1993.
Survey II also features a collection of the artists snapshots, together described as Eclection where the photographer speaks of waiting for the story to emerge. As Sarah Drummond suggests in her essay, these snapshots document a part of the artist’s life.
Together, the works in this exhibition present a sense of documentation on a greater scale. As artistic objects, their balance and beauty draw the viewer in and present a unique take on the familiar iconography of the South West. The value of these work also extend beyond the artistic to the cultural. Presented together their stylistic cohesion present a clear and personal cultural record of the environment and cultural milleau in which they exist, from the perspective of a photographer who has carefully tuned his work and sensibilities.
All of the images are shot on film, and processed in Austin’s Quinninup darkroom studio, Austin is known for working exclusively with fine silver-gelatine black and white prints, normally from large format cameras, and this sustained engagement and ongoing refinement of the technical processes of his craft results in a cohesive oeuvre, which, although spanning a broad range of subjects, present a clear vision through the eye of the photographer.
We’ve all heard of pinhole photography and many of us have no doubt had a go at it in some form or other, either by building a basic pinhole camera, sometimes by ‘pretending’ to demonstrate to a hand child, or through buying a very expensive “hole enclosure system” (commonly known as ‘a pinhole camera’).
And what could be simpler than a hole that lets the light through and forms an upside down image on a sensor or film surface? Well, it turns out that there is quite a bit of science going on that means getting the ‘right’ hole is more complicated than just poking a pin in some tin foil! As I’m a geeky sort, I figured it would be interesting to buy, and also make, some holes and test the results.
Firstly, a little bit of an explanation about the way that an image is formed when using a pinhole. If you take a look at the following diagram, you can see that light passes in direct lines from the letter G in front of the camera, through the pinhole and lands on the rear of the camera, inverted top to bottom and left to right.
However, this presumes that we have a hole with no width or height. If we introduce a ‘real’ hole, we can see that each ‘point’ in our letter gets ‘blurred’ because light from a single point projects to a circle.
If we make the circle smaller, the amount of blurring gets less and hence the image looks sharper.
This suggests that if we have a really small hole we get the sharpest image. However, sadly, science gets in the way. When light passes close to an edge, it is ‘bent’ by that edge*. This is called diffraction and is minimal for a large hole where the area of the hole away from an edge is a lot more than the area of the hole near the edge which is subject to diffraction. This means there is a transition point as the hole gets smaller where the image starts to blur again because of this diffraction.
The blurring from diffraction is actually a little more complicated than the simple geometric blurring of a large hole and the image formed is a central blurred spot surrounded by less and less bright ‘rings’ of light. This is called an Airy Disc and I’ve shown this in the diagram above.
*actually it’s a lot more complicated than that but quantum physics and wave/particle duality is a little beyond this article
So getting the sharpest image possible means trying to find the balance between geometric blurring because the hole is too large and diffraction blurring because the hole is too small.
Various scientists and undoubted geniuses have tried to work out what size this ‘perfect pinhole’ should be, most notably Prof. Joseph Petzval, Lord Rayleigh and Prof. Lommel. What is surprising is that they all came out with different answers! This is partly because our understanding of diffraction was still developing during their era but the most complicated problem is that have the highest resolution result and having a sharp picture are two different things. There are two different solutions for optimal pinhole size, larger holes for the best resolution, smaller holes for the best contrast, which is what we need for a picture to look sharp.
Finally, just to confuse matters further, our assumption that a pinhole camera renders everything in front of the camera equally sharp is also incorrect. As you can see from the following diagram, as an object gets closer to the pinhole camera, the blurring gets larger. In order to have sharp images up close, you need to have a smaller hole (but that can mean a softer image in the distance!).
I’ll add an appendix to the end of this article with the maths involved in some of these calculations but I think we need some practical results to look at. Tests Ahoy!!
Testing Pinholes
In order to test some of the topics discussed so far, I realised that I needed to get my hands on some pinholes of various sizes. Luckily, the kindly proprietor of Pinhole Solutions is a reader of the magazine and recognised my name and it was only a couple of days later when I received a set of complementary pin holes from size 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 and 0.5 mm (0.4mm was unavailable at the time).
Also, in order to find out if the quality of pinhole makes a difference (and to get the missing 0.4mm hole), I went back to one of the laboratory suppliers I had used when I was lecturing and ordered a 0.3mm and 0.4mm mounted pinhole (these holes are typically used in collimating beams of various sorts).
Untitled 22.tif
These pinholes are not only very accurately made (using high-intensity particle beams) but they are also made using a very a very thin support material that is tapered to almost nothing near the edge hole. To see why this makes a difference, have a look at the following diagram. You can see that the thick material shows less of a hole when light arrives at more acute angles and is completely blocked well before the thin hole making the vignetting greater and the image circle smaller. These holes are also pretty expensive too at £55 each!
In order to carry out the tests, I modified a Sony E-mount body cap so that I could tape each size hole to the end of the camera. I also used a set of extension tubes, Canon fit tubes on a Metabones Sony to Canon adapter, and a Canon body cap to allow different focal lengths to be tested (25mm, 65mm and 117mm). I then printed out some USAF resolution targets and positioned them at 15cm, 30cm, 60cm, 120cm and 240cm from the pinhole position. Here’s a photograph of the equipment used (I also had three other different size USAF res targets printed).
Here is a comparison of the different pinhole results at the 25mm focal length and 120cm distance.
As you can see, for this focal length the 0.2mm hole is obviously the sharpest. The 0.1 is soft and low contrast and the 0.3 and 0.4 are showing spurious resolution (in some cases it’s showing two lines when there are actually three).
The 65mm focal length shows similar results but this time with 0.3mm being the sharpest result.
Finally, the 117mm focal length shows the most interesting results. For this example, we can see that the 0.4mm focal length looks the sharpest but if you look closely at the 0.5mm hole, you can see that it is actually resolving smaller sets of lines but generally the whole thing looks very soft.
One thing to be aware of is that if there is a star next to the image hole size in these diagrams, the pinhole used is the Thor Labs one. Looking at the results from our Pinhole Solutions hole, our homemade hole (using a pin and sanding down the edges) and the Thor Labs hole, you can see that the biggest variation is in the contrast of the results. It looks like the Thor Labs hole has such as smooth edge to the whole that it avoids spurious diffraction. (I also made some intentionally 'bad' holes by just poking through tin foil and they also showed odd double edges and different resolution in different axes).
The other experiment was to assess how the sharpness and contrast varied with distance from the pinhole. In the next diagram, you can see the difference between a 1:1 image (distance = focal length) and a 1:8 image (distance = 8x focal length) for different pinhole sizes. You can just about see that although the sharpest 0.4mm hole focusses well at a distance, it is blurry at 1:1. The 0.3mm hole focusses better up close but sacrifices detail at a distance.
You can see this effect a lot more clearly in the following real photograph.
On the left, you can see the ‘optimum’ sharpness pinhole which shows a ‘sharp’ background. On the right, you can see that with a slightly smaller pinhole (25% smaller) the foreground has snapped into focus with only a slight sacrifice in the sharpness of the background. It turns out that the optimum pinhole is worked out for infinity focus which is roughly defined by any distance beyond about 20x the focal length. For our example with a 117mm focal length, this is anywhere from roughly 2m onwards. Anywhere closer than 2m will get a bit softer. In our tests, we noticed the softening for items closer than one meter (or about 10x focal length).
The problem is, most of us don’t have a second pinhole we can substitute into the camera. However, some of us have cameras that can be focussed by changing the distance from film to ‘lens’ e.g. a large format camera.
So we have an alternative trick for closer focus. If we extend the focal length a bit, we should really increase the size of the pinhole. If we don’t increase it, then we have an undersized pinhole which is just what we want in order to be able to focus closer! The book “Way Beyond Monochrome” (highly recommended!!) has a chapter that goes into a few issues we’ve discussed here and they suggest extending the focal length by 50% which will make a position 3x the focal length the sharpest region. Hence for a 25mm focal length (typical for medium format) we would extend the focal length to 37.5mm and the sharpest area would be at 75mm distance.
Conclusions
Well, what have we learned from all of this? Firstly it’s pretty obvious that there isn’t really a definitive ‘best’ pinhole size. There are various sizes that are useful for different results. We thought it would be good to show the photographic variations with pinhole size so we took a few photographs. The first shows the variation when using a 25mm focal length where the 0.2mm is the clearest.
And a 65mm scene (note that we’ve used the Thor Labs pinhole in most examples but here we’ve included the Pinhole Solutions example at the far right which shows a little less contrast). Here the 0.3 is the most contrasty. The 0.4 has a little more fine detail but at a big sacrifice in contrast.
And finally, a 117mm scene where it is very clear that the 0.4mm pinhole is the clearest.
Using the criteria above, it is recommended that you use a pinhole size which is approximately 1.56 x Sqrt( F * wavelength) so for daylight, it simplifies to 0.036 x Sqrt(Focal Length). This 1.56 figure is fairly widely accepted as the best trade off between resolution and contrast.
For our 25, 65 and 117mm focal lengths this gives 0.18mm, 0.3mm and 0.4mm (which we confirmed with our visual results).
Appendix A
People have been making sharp pinhole images for well over a hundred years. A great example is George Davison’s “An Old Farmstead (The Onion Field)”.
The photograph won the Photographic Society of Great Britain’s annual exhibition and caused a schism between the straight photographers and the pictorial photographers, so much so that George led a group of photographers to form the Linked Ring society. Read more about it here.
Gallery
Here is a gallery of 25mm and 15mm photographs taken with the A7Rii and body cap pinhole lens (0.2mm and 0.1mm pinholes) taking during testing.
Back in 2004, I had the opportunity to visit Australia. Together, my girlfriend and I travelled from Sydney to the Blue Mountains, and the coastal track from Brisbane to Cairns.
It was a truly wonderful trip and we had numerous awe-inspiring moments. In photographic terms, it was the film age and I had a simple Nikon F50 with a cheap zoom kit lens on it. I bought some regular Kodak (negative) films which I used during the trip. My level of photography in those days, to be honest, wasn’t high and I didn’t have much knowledge about the different type of films that were on the market.
But during the trip, heavily inspired by the beautiful surroundings, I started to develop a more critical photography style.
At the end of our trip, we stayed for a couple of days in Cairns. From there we made a day trip to the small village of Kuranda, which lies some 30 km North of Cairns.
Kuranda is a beautiful picturesque village and located at the terminus of the world famous Skyrail and the Kuranda train. When we walked through the streets we saw a gallery. Because of my growing enthusiasm for landscape photography and nature, we took the opportunity to visit it.
Once inside a friendly staff-member welcomed us. She took the time to explain the work of the photographer. To be honest, I had never seen such beautiful work before! There were some photographs which reminded me of the Australian landscape I had just observed.
Our 4x4 feature is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios from our subscribers, each consisting of four images related in some way. You can view previous 4x4 portfolios here.
We're always on the lookout for new portfolios, so please do get in touch! If you would like to submit your 4x4 portfolio, please visit this page for submission information.
*Shout out* as we are looking for contributions for the next few issues, so please do get in touch if you're interested!
Please click the images to see the portfolios in full.
Photographs of European passenger ferries arriving at the UK coastline. I wanted to respond to the recent decision Britain has made to come out of the European Union. Physically the images depict historical links connecting the UK to its current continent but that is subject to change. Metaphorically the photographs consider horizons and our divisive cultural attitude towards them.
All these photographs were taken in the vicinity of Mont Blanc and Glacier du Geant on the same day of September 2016. There are many mountaineers trying to reach the highest summit in Europe, most of them succeed but some do not. Power of dreams drives people to achieve goals despite their insignificance next to the forces of nature. This mini series being part of an ongoing project is dedicated to their courage.
These four buildings are just some of the many disused dwellings and industrial buildings that are scattered all across the North Pennines. These four in Weardale are a testament to a time not long since passed when these northern dales were alive with industry and endeavour; lead and fluorite mining, limestone and marble quarrying, and of course, farming.
The "Giele Botter" (Yellow Butter) is at the centre of an abandoned open mining area for iron ore, which I still remember being active when I was a kid. It's now mostly a nature reserve used by walkers, joggers and mountain bikers (though, officially they are not allowed there). Our dogs get their daily 16-20km walks there. Many paths criss-cross the whole area and you can widely vary your walks, between open air and more wooded parts, ideal when the summer heat gets too much.
The red rocks (from the iron ore) and the birches give a nice contrast and there's a lot of moss on the rocks in certain parts. And then there are the flowers. Lots of them in many colours, changing through the months. Including over 20 varieties of wild orchids. So far we have only identified half a dozen! Not far away, at the "Tëtelbierg", there are excavations of Roman settlements.
Exhibition at the Joe Cornish Galleries 12th August to 5th September
It seems as though I have been working on Moorsview 2017 for ever, so it was great to finally get one of the planned events underway at the Joe Cornish Gallery last weekend. This first exhibition is the curtain raiser for the main seminar and includes work by all the speakers: Joe Cornish, Peter Leeming, Lucy Saggers, Robert Fuller, Steve Race, Karl Holtby, and myself.
I knew from the range of photographers included that the exhibition would be varied in style and content, but seeing the work hung together in print form really brought this home. When people think of the North York Moors they tend to get a vision of a high, but empty landscape characterised by a monoculture of heather. But looking at this collection of work shows that the region offers so much more than that to the outdoor photographer.
From the colourful coastal rock panorama from Peter Leeming, to Karl Holtby’s moody black and white of Port Mulgrave. From the action of Steve Race’s Northern Gannets fighting for fish to the delicate seasonal portraits of weasels by Robert Fuller. From Joe Cornish’s softly lit Roseberry Winter Twilight, to my own vivid image of burned heather in blue winter light. These contrasts illustrate the huge range of landscape and wildlife photography possibilities offered by the North York Moors and Coast throughout the seasons.
Here are a few images from the exhibition launch, and an example from each of the exhibitors. The exhibition runs until the 5th September, when it moves to ‘The Wonky Pitcher Cellar’, in Pickering for the weekend of the Moorsview Seminar itself. It then takes a break before opening again at the Moors Centre Danby’s ‘Inspired by..Gallery’ from 19th October. This last exhibition will also feature work by many of the speakers from the first Moorsview Seminar in 2015.
Book your ticket for the Moorsview 2017 Seminar now by following this link. There is a £10 discount for all subscribers to On Landscape.
A number of Kate’s dreamlike images from her series Elutriate featured in a 4x4 Portfolio back in September 2015; they and their companion images from her website lodged in my mind and remain there. Judging by the reaction to the series when featured by Inside the Outside earlier this year, others feel the same. So what is it that attracts her to the New Jersey Meadowlands, an area known as much for its abuse as for its ecosystem, and why does she choose to work with pinhole cameras and the use alternate processes that include making her own black walnut ink and using rice paper as a print medium?
Can you tell readers a little about yourself – your education, early interests and career – and the environments that have shaped you?
I was born in NYC and lived in South Carolina and rural New Jersey until I was out of high school. I worked on a thoroughbred and a Standardbred horse farm and had several other jobs from the time I was 12. Upon high school graduation, I spent the summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, driving a horse carriage, working on a whale watching boat, and volunteering for a marine science organisation in their dark room. That fall I attended Outward Bound in Maine for a semester on island ecology that brought me to the Chesapeake Bay and also Florida. From there I attended College of the Atlantic in Maine for two years, volunteered at a traditional wooden boat school, hitch hiked across the country, and worked in the US Virgin Islands. The second year at College of the Atlantic, I was hired as a teacher's assistant for a trimester in Greece and Turkey. From there I went to the Isle of Skye in Scotland for a while, moved home, and saved money for school. I transferred to Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where I remained until graduating, with two trips to Africa thrown in. I've done boat deliveries that have brought me 400 miles offshore, and travelled to quite a few other countries as well, so I guess that many environments have shaped me. I had a camera with me for most of my travels.
Charles Cramer has been photographing the landscape for 35 years. His prints are available through many fine galleries, including the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite. Cramer was selected by the National Park Service to be an artist-in-residence in Yosemite in 1987 and again in 2009.
He has taught digital imaging for the Ansel Adams Gallery Workshops, Anderson Ranch, John Sexton Workshops, and others. He has been profiled in PhotoTechniques, Outdoor Photographer, Outdoor Photography (UK), Camera Natura (Sweden), and Popular Photography (China), PhotoVision, and View Camera Magazines.
He is also included in the books “Landscape: The World’s Top Photographers,” published in 2005, and “First Light: Five Photographers Explore Yosemite’s Wilderness,” published in 2009. He also had a solo exhibition at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel in 2010. His work can be seen at www.charlescramer.com.
A black burned landscape with small dead animals. At first sight this probably does not sound like an attractive subject for a photo project. Nevertheless, when he heard from the wild fire in a national park close by, Theo Bosboom was curious enough to take a look. And he was glad he had taken his photo gear because what he found was dreary and gaunt, but at the same time very photogenic.
The devastation
On April 20, 2014, I saw the news on television that in the Hoge Veluwe National Park, close to my home in Arnhem, the Netherlands, there had been an out of control wild fire. The fire was even in the World news for a short moment because the top artworks of, among others, Van Gogh and Monet of the Kröller Möller museum in the park were threatened by the fire. The paintings were brought to safety just in time and luckily there no people at risk, but the fire had destroyed about 350 hectares of nature. This is maybe relatively small compared to wild fires in some other countries, but by our standards, it was a very substantial fire.
When the area was reopened to the public two days later, I decided to go there and take a look. I didn’t have any plans of making a photo series at that moment, I just wanted to see how the landscape looked like after the fire. You could say I was acting like a disaster tourist. Large wild fires are a relatively normal phenomenon in nature, but I had never seen and experienced the effects of a wild fire before. And it was more or less in my backyard, less than a fifteen minutes drive from where I live.
It was Garry Winogrand who said that he took photographs to find out what something looked like photographed. By selecting a slice of space and time and freezing the moment we can later examine it at leisure. Understand it, give it meaning, enjoy it – for it cannot be repeated. I think I was unconsciously doing that here in this project. I had the idea but did not know where it would take me and only by taking the photographs has it become clearer.
I can't quite remember why and when I decided to explore the watershed. Perhaps I was thinking, when walking nearby, about Mount Tronador along the great divide between Chile and Argentina, the border between nations that is also the watershed along the Andes.
There are in fact lots of watersheds everywhere as every stream has a boundary between the next one. What I was interested in though was the main watershed, the one which defines where waters flow in different directions.
I thought there may be a watershed in Wiltshire, my home county – there are after all rivers that flow in different directions. Luckily there is a very useful website from the Environment Agency which details all the water courses and the river catchments areas from which the streams and rivers then flow into the seas.
There are in fact lots of watersheds everywhere as every stream has a boundary between the next one. What I was interested in though was the main watershed, the one which defines where waters flow in different directions. I found that Wiltshire is unique in England and Wales in having one point where the rains divide into river catchments that flow in three different cardinal directions. That point is just north of Devizes and those rivers are the Kennet/Thames (east to the North Sea), the Bristol Avon (west to the Severn) and the Hampshire Avon and River Test (south to the English Channel via Christchurch and Southampton respectively). Avon is the Celtic word for river. The watershed cuts across the county from the Gloucestershire border near Malmesbury, around Royal Wootton Bassett, south near Calne and almost to Devizes, then along the north of the Pewsey Vale, through Burbage and then out into Hampshire near Ham.
About a year ago I started exploring this invisible line. I didn't know what I was going to find or what I would find of interest to photograph. Or why I was photographing it, except that I thought this natural feature would be a useful thematic device. By definition the watershed is along the highest spots in the landscape, which although not very high compared to elsewhere (just 295m at the highest spot), would at least give good views and a perspective on the landscape. I quickly decided that I would produce work in black and white and, using the 2¼ inch square format of my old Bronica, would make the images square. And so, inspired by Fay Godwin among others, I started work. My digital SLR camera allows the live view mode to be set to square so it was easy to frame the images as square at the time of shooting, even though the raw files are recorded as full frame.
Some research with the OS maps showed that there was a number of man made features along this watershed. In fact, the whole watershed has been touched by humankind in one way or another. This has become the underlying theme to the work. Many of these man made features are linked to the fact that these are the high spots in the landscape. From Iron Age days there are several hill forts still carved into the land from 2000-3000 years ago – Oldbury, Martinsell, Knap Hill, Oliver’s Castle and Bincknoll. There is the Wansdyke, the pre-Anglo Saxon ditch which marks an unknown border. There was the 1643 civil war battle of Roundway Down in which the Royalists defeated the Parliamentarians. There are 4 white horses carved into the chalk hills, the latest at Devizes carved for the recent Millennium – the only one in Wiltshire to face right. We have 9 trig points (out of 250 in Wiltshire) along the way – those now redundant OS mapping points. One of them had been moved by a farmer to the corner of his field and another was completely smothered with undergrowth, and a challenge to find. The Kennet and Avon canal has its high stretch through the 450 yard Bruce tunnel, constructed in 1809. There's the derelict Wilts and Berks canal near Swindon, and other Victorian infrastructure which has been ripped up, like the two Savernake railway stations and the Midland and South Western Junction railway line. There are a couple of monuments (Cherhill and Ailesbury) erected by landowners in honour of their forbears.
Modern transport bisects the watershed In a few places – the Great Western railway near Swindon, the Taunton line at Burbage and various main roads such as the M4 near Swindon and the A346 in the Savernake Forest. Farming is ubiquitous and has probably had most impact on the landscape, both arable and livestock. Numerous water reservoirs dot the watershed, including those maintained by the water utility companies. There are many long distance footpaths such as the White Horse Trail and the Mid Wilts Way.
By exploring this line I have been aware of connections with hundreds of previous generations who have lived on this land, fought for it, defended it, decorated it, developed it and passed through it.
By exploring this line I have been aware of connections with hundreds of previous generations who have lived on this land, fought for it, defended it, decorated it, developed it and passed through it. Standing upon the high spot in the landscape has practical reasons for surveying incoming armies and literally surveying the land (those trig points), but a good view is also good for the soul. I think of much of this landscape as classic Wiltshire in the way that we know it now – rolling hills of chalk downland with clumps of beech trees along the ridges. It may not have the grandeur of other parts of the country but it has its own particular beauty.
The underlying tension in these photographs is between beauty and utility. In nearly all the images, the hand of Man is visible, even if people rarely appear themselves. There really is no part of this landscape untouched. Our mark is seen in domesticated animals grazing in their fields, tractor lines in crops, Industrial Revolution architecture for canals and railways, benches to take in the view, footpaths across the land, relics from war, farm buildings and litter carelessly discarded. Modern society uses land for its roads, railways, electricity pylons, water towers and so on, as well as using land to produce food. Farming and leisure are the main activities today. Not all of this activity creates or even sustains beauty – but this is the challenge: to preserve beauty while providing utility. I hope that these images reflect that dichotomy.
What next? I have been exploring this part of the landscape for over a year now, having made many trips to all parts of the watershed in different seasons and exposed many photographs. With a project like this there is no obvious stopping point as the landscape is in continual change. However, the work is being exhibited in July and August and this has provided a clear deadline and moved the focus from producing work to editing, developing and presenting. It’s been a tremendous challenge to select images that stand up on their own in exhibition format but also fit into the narrative theme of the whole show. It’s in a book that the narrative can be developed further and I am currently working on a prototype using Blurb.
Humankind has shaped this landscape in all sorts of ways and in so doing has left marks from ancient history to the present day. Although this part of Wiltshire is a very worn landscape it retains its natural beauty, a testament to the fact that in spite of shaping the land for our use and survival, it has a permanence beyond the span of human lives. We can ponder the track that a raindrop takes if it (hypothetically) falls an inch this way or that and works its way down to a different sea. That has not changed and is as old as the hills themselves.
The work is showing in August as follows
White Horse Bookshop Gallery, Marlborough, Wiltshire SN8 1HW
August 4th to September 1st
Open 9 to 5.30 Mondays to Saturdays, 11 to 4 Sundays
We’ve all been there before; you’re chatting with your friends about the next big foreign trip that you hope to squeeze in between family commitments. It seems that in this age of foreign travel every corner of the globe has been explored and the world suddenly feels like a much smaller place. Many of us are beginning to realise that if we go to Iceland or Norway we’re going to be bumping tripod legs with other photographers, sometimes quite literally. It can, of course, be nice to mingle with like-minded people. Eventually, we will want to discover somewhere new and give ourselves the opportunity to capture unique images.
In recent years Patagonia has risen high on the bucket list for landscape photographers. Whilst nowhere near as busy as Iceland or Norway the region has long been recognized for its outstanding natural beauty and rugged mountain scenery. Patagonia encompasses both Chile and Argentina. The region is comprised of a vast expanse of desert, mountains, and remote glaciers.
Patagonia has captured my heart and my imagination. Despite spending over two years photographing there I’m still eager to return. I spend the majority of my time on the Argentine side of the Andes, in Los Glaciers National Park although I do from time to time venture over to Chile to photograph in Torres del Paine.
I remember first seeing the mountains of Patagonia in old coffee table books. The grainy and quite frankly poor quality images were enough to feed my imagination long before I owned a passport. It wasn’t until my late thirties that I made my first of many trips. As a landscape photographer, I make a lot of sacrifices so that I can follow my passion. Each time I go abroad for foreign travels I try to stay away as long as possible, Patagonia is, after all, a long way from my home in England.
Spring through to Autumn
The changing seasons in Patagonia are very noticeable. Towards the end of September, the warmer spring days allow the shrubs to blossom with pretty flowers. The most visible of these is the Mata Guanaco; it’s a strange name that translates as ‘dead guanaco’ don’t be put off though, the flower can be extremely photogenic. The summer months between November and January can be busy with groups of tourists. Hotels and guesthouses are often full and can sometimes be booked up over a year in advance.
Photographers arriving in autumn now extend the tourist season for businesses of El Chalten and particularly the lodges in Torres del Paine.
There’s no denying that during peak fall the mix of colour is spectacular. The leaves of the Lenga and Ñire tree offer a mind-blowing spectacle of colour; this usually peaks in late April. The months of March and April also seem to provide the best lenticular clouds. Lenticular clouds can be best described as ‘flying saucers’ due to their disk-like shape. When conditions are just right, they build during the day and can stack up in groups by late afternoon. These remarkable clouds are formed when large features, such as the mountains of the Andes disrupt the flow of air.
When conditions are just right, they build during the day and can stack up in groups by late afternoon. These remarkable clouds are formed when large features, such as the mountains of the Andes disrupt the flow of air.
Winter
Of all the season’s winter is my favourite, by the end of April; you can already feel a chill in the air. Many of the hotels and guesthouses begin to shut down and seasonal workers migrate north in search of work. Once the leaves have fallen from the trees at the end of May the parks can suddenly become quite lonely places. Other than the footsteps of a park ranger it’s not uncommon that I’ll be the only other person on the trails.
Photographing the mountains during the winter is extremely rewarding. Nothing changes a landscape quite the same as a dusting of snow. During the winter solstice, the sun rises 30 degrees further to the north compared to early April. For the photographer hoping to capture a beautiful photograph, this can make the difference between direct sunlight and beautiful dramatic sidelight. The low winter sun also gives the opportunity to shoot much later into the morning. During mid-June, the sun rises a little after 9.30am, and it’s not uncommon to still get good light as late as 11.00am.
Torres del Paine and the Argentine town El Chalten are both below 500 m. This means they don’t experience the harsh winters one might expect. Daytime temperatures often hover just above freezing, although at night it can be significant. Fortunately, if you’re photographing in Los Glaciers National Park you can leave early in the morning under headlamp and arrive in time to shoot before sunrise.
During the winter from June until September, the Milky Way is ideally positioned over the mountains. There may be as few as eight hours of daylight.
During the winter from June until September, the Milky Way is ideally positioned over the mountains. There may be as few as eight hours of daylight. With so much time to spare between sunset and sunrise, there is ample opportunity to try night photography and enjoy pollution free skies.
For those looking for a new and challenging place to shoot I can highly recommend Patagonia, you won’t be disappointed.
Once you’ve bought your large format camera, it’s time to look at the ‘extras’ that you’ll need in order to take pictures. We’ll be covering lenses and lens panels in the next chapter so for now here is a run down of what else you’ll need for your bag. It’s worth remembering that most of what you know about choosing equipment is not the same for large format. Even a poor camera with a cheap lens can make stunning images and so what you tend to pay for with large format is to do with ease of use, flexibility of control and enhanced pleasure in operation.
First of all, we’ll look at the ground glass, loupe and dark cloth. These are the components that give you your view of the world and the better quality you get, the better your experience of using the camera will be.
Ground Glass & Fresnel
The ground glass is your window to the world, your live view and your auto focus. Having a ‘bad’ ground glass can make using the camera considerably less enjoyable. However, the good news is that a good quality, basic ground glass can be had very cheaply and most modern cameras come with a good quality example as standard.
The ground glass is just what the name implies, a piece of plain float glass which has been ground on one side until it becomes diffuse. The amount of grind is a personal taste and why some people like to grind their own (a long process, only for the patient). Less grind and you will have a brighter screen but potentially have double images and a ‘hotspot’. A coarse grind can be brighter but the texture will be visible. A very fine grind will be darker but will be clear and easy to focus. People have done the research before you though so I would trust a decent commercial screen.
For most lenses, a standard ground glass will do the job nicely but you need to know that the light coming from a wide angle lens will hit the corners of the ground glass at an acute angle. Most of the light hitting a ground glass carries on in the same direction and so in order to see the corners, you have to move your head in line with the light rays. In practice, this means that on a wide angle lens it looks like you get a ‘hot spot’ in the centre of the ground glass and dark in the corners. As you move your head around, this hot spot moves around the screen of the ground glass. This can make focusing hard in the corners and also makes composing quite difficult. To solve this problem you can introduce a fresnel lens behind the ground glass (some manufacturers say in front but that can cause focus registration issues). The fresnel is effectively a flat lens which redirects these acute light rays hitting the corner of the ground glass back towards your eye. This means that the hot spot is a lot less.
Looking straight onto the ground glass you can see the bright centre and darker edges. This is with a 75mm f/6.8 Rodenstock Grandagon
You have to move your head to one side in order to move the 'bright' area around the screen and see different parts of the composition. This effect is very noticeable during twilight or other darker conditions. This is with a Maxwell fresnel and ground glass.
With longer lenses the whole of the image area is illuminated well. This is with a 150mm f/5.6 Rodenstock Sironar S
Just like lenses, fresnels can range in quality. At the very top end, the Maxwell fresnel is particularly good but also particularly expensive. Just like a normal lens, the fresnel can have different focal lengths and Maxwell screens are available in focal lengths to accommodate ultra wide angle lenses. The Maxwell screen (and some others) combine the ground glass and the fresnel into a single moulded unit. Being in control of the ground glass as well means that you can buy brighter versions. Have a chat with Mr Maxwell on the phone (but don’t expect the phone call to last less than an hour!).
Chamonix cameras come with a very good fresnel/ground glass combination which can be bought separately. Yanke screens (also a Chinese manufacturer) sell very good budget fresnel/ground glass units.
The downside of a fresnel is that it can make focussing a little more difficult because you don’t get the ‘snap’ into focus that you can with just a plain ground glass (this is worse on cheaper fresnels and is to do with the quality of moulding for the fresnel). Also, when you use a longer fresnel where the light rays are almost parallel, the fresnel can over bend the light rays and you can end up with a peculiar version of a hot spot (in practice it isn’t that hard to deal with).
Viewfinders
When starting large format, it is very tempting to get hold of a ‘reflex’ viewing hood. This allows the view on the ground glass to be seen ‘the right way up’ via a mirror. The problem with most viewing hoods is that they only really work well when you don’t have any rise or fall and you still have to remove them to do any critical focusing with a loupe. Personally, I would only recommend them if you plan on not using movements on your camera and are looking to find a way to take ‘quick’ pictures. Even then, I’m not sure if they save you enough time to warrant the trouble and it will only delay the moment when your brain ‘flips’ and you learn to see the inverted image as if it were the correct way around (it never really looks the right way around but your brain adapts to understanding the inverted image as reality, rather than being confused by it).
Loupe
In order to see what you are focussing on clearly, some sort of magnification is usually needed. If you’ve got good eyesight and are stopping down then you can just about get away without one but we wouldn’t recommend it.
Magnification
The range of magnifications usually available with a loupe start from 3x and go up to 10x. For most purposes, we would highly recommend you stick to 4x as more powerful loupes show less of the image and reveal too much of the ground glass or fresnel texture. A 3x loupe could be used but you’d have to have good eyesight and a loupe with very good coverage to warrant one.
Using a loupe stronger than 4x can make the lines on a fresnel (shown her) or the ground glass texture overpowering.
Better Quality Loupes
Just like any other lens, a better quality loupe will be sharper and clearer, especially in the corners, and usually, have a wider field of view. The problem with a ‘blurry’ loupe is knowing when the blur is your fault or the loupe’s fault, usually with a poor loupe you have to rely on just the very centre of the view to be most accurate. The more expensive loupes are multi-coated for reflection control, use multiple lens elements and sometimes use aspheric components.
Jewellers Loupes
The problem with jewellers loupes is that they don’t have a reference base and are usually too powerful. The lack of a base means that you can’t be sure if your view is blurry because your camera is out of focus or because the loupe isn’t held at the right distance from the ground glass.
Tilting Loupes
One of the problems of wide angle lenses is that the rays of light hit the ground glass at an acute angle. This means that to get the brightest view of the ground glass, your eye has to be inline with the ray of light and so you end up looking at the ground glass at an angle. However, your loupe has a flat base and so you can only place it on the ground glass at 90 degrees. Silvestri have a solution for this and sell a 6x loupe with a base that allows the loupe to tilt over. I have used one of these loupes and it is effective, however, it only allows you to focus on a small section of the view (the tilt of the ground glass means that, viewed at an angle, only a ‘slice’ of it is in focus at once). In reality, a good fresnel lens redirects the light enough that a normal loupe works satisfactorily (and 6x is considered too much magnification by many and on 4x5 you can’t really fit the base of the loupe into a corner anyway). A cheap version of the tilting loupe can be made by cutting away a section of a normal loupe’s skirt as shown (the light grey shows the area to be removed).
Hood Loupes
You can buy loupes that are purposefully made long enough to be used inside the folding hood of many 5x4 cameras. The Toyo 3.6x is a good example of this - be wary of the more powerful loupes (many hood loupes are 8x).
Recommended Loupes
The highest quality loupes are made by Schneider and Rodenstock. Cabin, Peak, Nikon, Agfa, Horseman and Toyo are also decent makes. Keep your eye out for the Calumet badged version of the Rodenstock 4x loupe which sometimes sells for very low prices.
Make Do with an Old Lens
At a push, you can use an old 50mm lens reversed as a loupe. I’ve tried this and it’s better than nothing but not very satisfying.
Dark Cloth
On a bright summer’s day, it’s quite easy to see the image on a ground glass, particularly with a nice fast normal lens like a 150 f/5.6. As light levels fade and you’re using wider lenses or ones with smaller apertures, it becomes harder and harder to see the ground glass. The answer is to use something to create shade. Photographers of old used to use simple squares of thick black material draped over themselves. A modern version of this simple tool creates a tube of cloth and adds an elasticated ‘waist’ to go around the camera. To help keep things cool, these are often light on the outside and dark on the inside.
BlackJacket Dark Cloth
More advanced versions can have arm holes (Black Jacket - highly recommended) and can even be made out of breathable materials (Paramo). In my mind, the cheapest and best dark cloth is the BTZS Hood, available from View Camera Store in the US. It’s light, reflective and holds well on the camera.
BTZS Dark Cloth from View Camera Store
Cable Release
Cable releases serve two purposes. The first is to allow you to trigger the shutter without contorting your finger around the edge of the lens and the second is to do so without vibrating the camera. Most cable releases will serve this basic purpose so why should you buy one over another?
1) Should have optimum breaking strength. Too weak and it will break to easily; too strong and the shutter connection will break instead of the cable release. As to longevity, the cable release must not become less flexible over time and should be resistant to corrosion.
2) The cable itself should not be too stiff. If it is, it will transmit any movements of your hand to the camera.
3) The action should be smooth
4) It should be lockable
The best cable releases we’ve found are the Nikon AR-3s which, although short, are quite flexible.
The problem with cable releases is that they can be quite fiddly to attach to the lens. One option that many people use is to keep a cable release attached to each lens. This can end up expensive, can take up more room in your bag and can end up damaging the cable releases or the lens. An alternative is to use short cable release extensions attached to each lens. Although these aren’t cheap, they make attaching a cable release a lot easier and don’t take up too much room. The ones we have tried are made by Gepe and can be bought in the UK through Walker Cameras.
Gepe Cable Release Extension
Double Dark Slides
Without something to hold the film you’d be pretty stuck and so the typical large format photographer has a few ‘double dark slides’. Why double, you may ask? Well originally dark slides on had one slide, i.e. they could only be used one way around. When the ‘innovation’ came with a piece of film and slide at each end, they become ‘double’ dark slides.
Anyway, there are a range of manufacturers of dark slides around but we’d highly recommend getting either Fidelity Elite (or Lisco and Regal who rebadged them) or Toyo and if you have the budget the Chamonix dark slides are beautiful and light.
One of the tricks we invented when we started large format is a way of identifying whether a dark slide has film in or not. Each dark slide has a marker at the top which shows either black or white. When it’s white, it means it’s unexposed; when it’s black it means exposed. Unfortunately, there is no ‘code’ for empty and you don’t want to leave the dark slide out because dust will get in. The method we use is to wrap an elastic band around the dark slide. When the elastic band is sideways and the darkslide shows white, the film is unexposed; when the elastic band is lengthways and the darkslide shows black, the film is exposed. When the elastic band is sideways but the darkslide shows black, it is empty.
We extended this method to use two rubber bands. This can then show you whether the darkslide has zero, one or two sheets left unexposed. See the photos below and the captions to see what we mean.
Two Provia (blue), two E100G (yellow) and one Velvia 50 (red) plus one completely exposed dark slide
Finally, we bought a range of coloured elastic bands and so we can also tell what film type is in the dark slide (in my case I use red for Velvia, blue for Pprovia, white for Portra 160, purple for Portra 400, orange for other negative film, usually Ektar, and yellow for other transparency film). Now I can have a glance at the darkslides sitting in my bag and quickly tell how much of each film type I have left.
Two unexposed
One side expose and the other unexposed
Both sides exposed
Empty (black showing on dark slide)
Dark Tent
In order to load and unload your dark slides, you need somewhere dark. Using a bathroom or bedroom at night can do the job, but you need to check for leds and mobile phones switching on when you’re in the middle your task. Most people buy a dark tent of some sort. We would recommend a tent which has supports inside it so you don’t have to constantly fight with the material while loading. The Calumet dark tent is a good example which can be bought for around £60. The Harrison tent is the Rolls Royce of changing tents and used in the movie industry for loading rolls of motion picture film. The tents retail at £282 can be bought for around £120 if you look around. Larger tents can be bought for 5x7, 10x8 etc and sometimes a larger tent makes it easier to load film.
A Spare Film Box
This the one that everyone misses. It is only once you’ve bought your first box of film, loaded them and then decide to send them off for developing that you realise you have nowhere to put them! Your only choice now is to try to separate the box you have into two, exposed and unexposed, by putting the exposed outside the envelope but inside the box, a recipe for disaster, or you find someone willing to donate an old box. It’s better to ask in advance for a box - most people are willing to help! Don’t forget to mark the box as ‘exposed’ plus the film types you’ve got in and wrap some elastic bands around them so they don’t accidentally open.
Viewfinder
One of the most desirable accessories in days of old was the Linhof zoom viewfinder. This was a calibrated zoom viewer that used to be mounted on the top of Linhof Technicas (if you got the Rolls Royce version) and we used to ‘compose’ your images. The downside was that they were rare as hen’s teeth and exchanged hands for multiple hundreds of pounds. The view wasn’t that clear through them either. Cheaper versions were available, the Zorki for example, but they view through these was even worse
Linhof Zoom Finder
Most people who couldn’t afford these just cut a square hole in a piece of card or plastic sheet and these days many just carry a compact camera around with them. I still like to use a simple ‘hole in a card’ viewfinder as it forces you to close one eye and gives a more visceral rendition of the landscape but I also carry my Sony A7RII around with a 24-70 zoom on which I use to sketch images and find photos.
Tim’s Experiences
Once you’ve bought your large format camera, the next step is to make a series of mistakes buying all of the accessories and then going back to the start and buying everything again - or so the saying goes. I suppose I lucked out a little by having a very good group of friends to recommend gear, not having too many budget constraints (I’d sold most of my digital gear) and by spending far too long on the largeformatphotography.info forums. So the Schneider 4x loupe, Blackjacket dark cloth, Harrison 5x7 dark tent, Maxwell fresnel and ground glass and Linhof cable releases all did the job very well (but cost way too much) and I still have them. Not being one to stop when I’m winning though, I have since also bought a Schneider 3x and 8x loupe, a set of cable release extensions and a couple of Nikon cable releases (you will lose them!), a BTZS dark cloth and another film changing tent for 10x8 film. Obviously, you can never have too much of a good thing.
I only realised some of the pain I avoided when I began teaching large format and realised how bad poor or too powerful loupes were, the problems with ultra short cable releases, the joy of using an ultra wide angle lens on a plain ground glass at dawn and fighting with a square dark cloth with lead weights on the corners in the wind (I only lost the vision in one eye for an hour or so).
You shouldn't worry too much about these accessories though, even a simple magnifying glass for a loupe, a plain ground glass, a couple of nested t-shirts for a dark cloth, a battered cable release using the bathroom for a dark tent won’t affect your images. You’ll still have all the visual advantages of large format but the process of taking the photographs won’t be as easy or enjoyable. But if it was was easy everyone would be doing it!
240mm f/9 Fujinon A – Ballachulish
110mm f/5.6 Schneider SSXL – Glencoe
150mm f/5.6 Rodenstock Sironar S – Glen Etive
150mm f/5.6 Rodenstock Sironar S – Seil Beach
240mm f/9 Fujinon A – Lochan Na h’Achlase
Richard Childs' Experiences
My hands were shaking with excitement as I opened the parcel covered in Robert White packaging tape. Inside was my very first large format camera and lens and I couldn't wait to get it on a tripod in my back garden and have a go at taking my first 5x4 image.
I had been pursuing photography as a hobby for just four years and had upgraded during that time from a Pentax P30T through a Nikon F65 and F100 to a Pentax 6x7 camera. Each upgrade required very little extra investment as I already had a suitable filter system and a decent tripod. Why I thought moving on to large format would be just as simple is beyond me but on opening the box I knew there was much to learn and more equipment to buy.
I already had two new Fidelity double darkslides and twenty sheets of Velvia ( nowhere sensible to change the film out though=more on that later) but was quick to realise that five double darkslides would make perfect sense as film comes in foil sleeves of ten sheets. Most equipment buying decisions are about working towards an optimum efficient workflow which with large format extends way beyond operating the camera into film handling\management etc. Having to split packs of film and return to them to get a couple more sheets out simply doesn't make sense to me. Anyway, back to my unboxing...
First the camera itself, all very simple, a beautiful Ebony RSW45. I fitted a base plate and put it on my tripod, the bellows extending smoothly as I turned one of the titanium thumb wheels. Then the Schneider 90mm lens... There appeared to be two lenses in the box and neither of them fitted the felt lined hole on the front standard of my camera! After much head scratching, I decided to call Robert Whites to see what I was doing wrong. 'Ah yes' came the reply 'you will need a lens panel and a copal shutter for that lens'. 'While I'm on the phone then is there anything else I will need to get up and running' I asked. The next day another box arrived containing an Ebony lens panel, shutter, lens spanner wrench, cable shutter release, Harrison dark cloth and a Horseman 8x Loupe.
Those of you who are experienced LF users will already know that some of the gear listed above will have served me pretty poorly. The loupe was way too strong and showed too much of the detail in the ground glass rather than the image. This was switched out for a Rodenstock 4x loupe just two weeks later. The dark cloth, a huge lightweight silver square sheet proved to be far to temperamental in a breeze and was quickly replaced by the Gnassgear dark cloth ( sadly no longer available) I still use today. As I've mentioned before there is a wealth of information available now that wasn't as easy to access back in 2003. Two weeks after getting my first Ebony I was away on the Gower Peninsula where I not only learned how to operate the camera with guidance from Messrs Ward and Cornish but also picked up a wealth of tips from other attendees regarding equipment choices. Having struggled to change film without a tent I opted to invest in a Quickload holder and used this until I began processing my own film in 2007 when I purchased a further fifteen secondhand double dark slides and a Calumet film changing tent which still serves me well. For the first six months of use, I metered my scenes using my Pentax 6x7 but eventually opted for the much lighter, convenient and incredibly accurate Pentax Digital spot meter which has for me has been the perfect partner for a large format lens. For many years I also carried a Linhof zoom viewfinder which was sadly lost on the Island of Luing. Looking at the replacement cost I opted to buy an alternative in the form of a Lumix GF1 which could also take photographs and has now been replaced in my bag by my Sony A7r.
Despite the enormous amount of information available online I continue to find that clients coming to me for help with LF and metering have all sorts of unusual pieces of equipment that can act as a real block to the creative workflow. Arriving at a perfect set up takes lots of trial and error but can be an enjoyable part of the process and certainly helps to gain a better understanding of working completely manually. The equipment I carry continues to evolve but once I find an accessory that works it will remain with me as long as it's fit for purpose and fortunately, much of the gear associated with LF has proven to be incredibly robust.
I thought it might be useful to list below what accessories I take with me when I go away for a few days of large format photography to ensure that everything goes to plan. Just one missing item can make the difference between success and failure.
Film management
Film changing tent
Fifteen DDS ( 5 each for Velvia, Provia, Colour neg)
Spare film
Empty film box for storing exposed sheets ( box covered in 'exposed' stickers and four rubber bands).
Separate box for any colour neg.
Accessories
Spot meter and a spare battery
Cable release and a spare.
Dark cloth
Screwdriver and allen keys
Lens spanner wrench
Filters
Filter holders
Two plus sheets of kitchen roll to clean filters and lenses in the rain without smearing
Umbrella
Small hiking flannel/towel ( sits on top of the camera if it's raining)
Trying to identify a piece for an Endframe article has been a bit of a challenge for me, and I know I'm not the only one to find this - I mean where do you start? It sounds fairly straight forward when you're initially asked, but there is a dawning realisation when you start trawling through the depths of your memory looking for long forgotten images, or even trying to identify a photographer in one case, that the journey isn't quite as straight forward as you imagined!
The obvious place to start would be with the photographers who influenced you most to start your landscape photography journey. In my case, it was a great of the landscape genre whose images truly capture not only the rugged beauty but also the sheer vastness of the Scottish landscape. However in looking back as research for this article, I've realised that, as my tastes have evolved and my knowledge and experience of the landscape photography genre has expanded, as influential as these images have been, looking at them now just don't seem to speak to me in the same way they did then.
By speak to me, I think I mean grab me by the throat and drag me completely, physically and emotionally into the image.
Only rarely does an image truly conjure up that sort of physical and emotional reaction in me. It's not a reaction you expect when you look at an image, which makes it all the more powerful when it does happen, and is clearly a result of some kind of subconscious process beyond a simple appreciation of a fantastic capture.
I first came across Nigel's work several years ago when I first considered submitting work to Landscape Photographer of the Year and was looking for examples of previous submissions and successes to give me some kind of sense of the challenge (hah, I had no chance!) Nigel's images just blew me away, across the board. It wasn't just one single image, it was his entire Flickr portfolio that led to this visceral reaction, but in particular, Sleepy Hollow that really sucked me in.
I also love the panoramic format, which really lends itself to what is an intimate woodlandscape, adding breadth to properly explore the scene and allowing you to trace the line of the brook as it winds behind the hill and into the mist
Ever since studying Keats at school, I've become a bit of a sucker for misty autumn scenes and for me, one of the images generated in my head by "To Autumn" is captured in this panorama - mist; subdued light; soft warm and rich colour tinged with a chill of blue and grey. It perfectly captures a season, so much so that it triggers your other sense - you can feel the frost and the moisture of the mist on your face; You can smell the leaf litter and woodsmoke in the air; You can feel and hear the leaves crunching underfoot, and sound is muffled by the mists - It's July, yet you can feel the cold bite!
I also love the panoramic format, which really lends itself to what is an intimate woodlandscape, adding breadth to properly explore the scene and allowing you to trace the line of the brook as it winds behind the hill and into the mist - both of those elements providing the sense of depth. Being meteorologically minded, I also find the way the weather interacts with the landscape and how it creates and affects light fascinating, with the mist cooling and flattening the light to give the perfect, even tone which makes the leaves in the foreground almost glow.
Nigel's work has most certainly left a deep impression on me, as much as my original influences 20 years ago. It's important to me to explore and discover new work and keep being enthused and moved by the art of photography and the landscape, which refreshes my personal motivation and love for the land.
Our 4x4 feature is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios from our subscribers, each consisting of four images related in some way. You can view previous 4x4 portfolios here.
We're always on the lookout for new portfolios, so please do get in touch! If you would like to submit your 4x4 portfolio, please visit this page for submission information.
*Shout out* as we are looking for contributions for the next few issues, so please do get in touch if you're interested!
Please click the images to see the portfolios in full.
Through studying photography, I found myself veering towards a more traditional representation of the landscape while using modern technology. I am combining a personal journey, through experiencing the landscape in its pure form and represent it as I see it. I focus on rivers, especially from source to sea, and how this journey has become a portal for me to engage with Nature, finding a meditative state through walking along and listening to the water, while recording the passage of time and personal identity.
This body of work started at a place close to me, but it has now expanded beyond borders. It visits the landscape with respect to folk tales, which connect with the element of water, in particular that of rivers. In this context, similarities were found within folk tales from Scotland and those of other countries, and whilst the perception of nature seems unique to different peoples, it may actually be very similar. During my exploration along different rivers in Aberdeenshire, I wondered whether I was ‘seeing’ the rivers in the same way, as people from a distant past were. So, I went on picking up new narratives, new experiences and challenges; just like the river does on its journey to the sea. Here, I create my own narratives, not particularly from folk tales, but from thoughts and feelings, that bring about the connection to the rivers, to the landscape, to nature. In many ways, I’m constructing my own, if disparate, folk tale.
River Tales Project will be presented as a handmade book for my final degree submission, a dummy can be viewed in PDF format on my website. By clicking on each image, you’ll be redirected to its web page for viewing large.
The Alarm sounds at 03:30, kettle on, the thermos filled and a bacon butty in hand, I get in the car and drive a couple of hours to my sunrise destination, filled with excitement and anticipation of what wonderful sights the sunrise will allow me to capture in camera... Well that's the romantic version!
Sometimes our best made plans don't always work out, so when things go awry, the weather doesn't turn out quite like the reports suggested, persevere and keep pushing for an image, after all, you've made all that effort to get to your location.
My shoot at Clevedon pier is one such example, I arrived shortly before sunrise in the hope of catching side lighting on the pier it's self, however, the bank of fog that greeted me on arrival; I have never seen anything quite like it before or since. Although the pier wasn't visible at all, I wasn't going to let that stop me and began to look for images that were interesting to me, concentrating on the rock along the sea front, eventually, the fog lifted just enough to see the pier.
My Hove and Durdle Door images follow a similar storey of the shoot's not quite going to plan and through determination end up with images I enjoy.
A buzzard soars overhead, exploiting the thermals. Yesterday a red kite flew down the valley. Perhaps we will be lucky again tomorrow. This was the haunt of curlews and pewits, but without extensive hay meadows, they left. Above all, there is quiet – a peace and stillness that comes from being away from towns and main roads – but essentially created by the rhythms of the countryside.
This rhythm suits my style of photography. To observe, to absorb, to make, and to share with others. I spend my time in fields and woods – I spend ages deliberating the concept of ‘field’. The patterns that they create in the countryside tell us so much about what has gone before, what is happening now.
That parcel of land ‘a field’, increasingly has less to offer. The bareness of a brown, newly cultivated field, the gaudy yellow of oilseed rape, the dull green of a large tract of wheat. My eyes wander – perhaps they are drawn – to the features that make up the boundary. Perhaps they form some manner of contextualisation. A hedge, a fence, a wall, maybe even a brook. For wildlife, this is a rich haven. For the photographer, countless opportunities.
I have always been drawn to lily ponds since a child and the fascination has never left me. These pictures were taken at several different ponds during last summer. As I spent time photographing the lily pads I was struck by the intricate details of colour and form to be found in them. When I began to process the images, I experimented with laying them one on top of the other to bring out and add to the complexity of the shapes and colours.
Usually, I try to avoid talking about too much about technique in these articles. It’s the aesthetics of the image that really interests me - the impact a picture has on the viewer. And it is the emotional reaction that is most fascinating about Chris McCaw’s beautiful and mysterious Sunburn pictures, but his method of capture is so different that it warrants a departure from the norm, and a quick explanation, before returning to the customary critique.
Sunburned GSP ♯676 (San Francisco Bay), 2013
All photography is, of course, a means of writing with light, usually in a fraction of a second. But McCaw doesn’t so much write on a photographic medium, as scorch photographic paper over an extended period of time – an hour, day or weeks.
It was the middle of December, temperatures were close to zero, what better time than to go to the beach, right?
It was my first time visiting this location, I was hit simultaneously with the usual anxiety and excitement. I had done a some fairly extensive research on the location online, but the usual questions crop up. How would this place look to my own eyes? Will I be able to find an original composition I liked? Will the weather hold up? I can’t wait to see what the light does!
I head down to my local train station and started the trip towards the East coast. My destination was Whitby, a small, quaint and popular seaside town on the edge of the North York Moors. As the journey progressed, I enjoyed the scenery gradually progress from a concrete jungle to a pristine moor side and then the view of the ominous, yet calming sea.
I arrived a little later than I’d hoped to and the sun was setting upon my arrival, leaving me a very short window to get to the location for a decent scout around before the light faded. I oriented myself using my smart phone and took a determined stroll through Whitby town centre, towards the abbey.
While I was walking, I was also shooting b-roll and other clips for my vlog, this in combination with my quick pace ended up with me missing my turning, the light was quickly fading so at this point I did a U turn and started jogging.
Now back on the right track, walking along the top of the sheer cliffs on the East coast - which formed part of the Cumberland Way - I noticed a sign outside of a farm stating “trespassers will be shot”, I hoped to myself they would not mistake me as a trespasser in the ever fading light. The only thing separating me from my path and the farm was a low wire fence!
I kept the pace on right up until I came to my location, there were only a few minutes of light at this point. The North-East facing bay is surrounded by imposing cliffs and thus got dark very quickly. This was just enough time for me to get a feel for the location and the relationship between the main features - the Saltwick Nab and Black Nab - along with a few points of interest on the shoreline. I took a few reference images and walked back to check in at my accommodation.
After a fairly brief sleep, I jolted awake to the sound of my alarm at 7am. Immediately the anticipation and excitement of seeing the conditions I was to work with that morning kicked in. I made myself a quick bite to eat while unnecessarily but excitedly glancing out of the window every minute or two. It looked windy, cold and clear, but it wasn’t raining.
I arrived at the location and having briefly scouted the night before, I knew exactly where my first composition was to be from. It was by a shale shelf at the Southern most end of the beach.
Energetically, I burst out of the front door and marched on back down to the bay. It was indeed clear for the most part, which the forecast predicted, but to my delight, there were a small number of lingering clouds. These could add some much desired interest to the clear sky in my compositions. This encouraged me to march on even quicker.I arrived at the location and having briefly scouted the night before, I knew exactly where my first composition was to be from. It was by a shale shelf at the Southern most end of the beach. This would only be visible at low tide and, as the tide was on its way in, this had to be my first port of call. This also happened to be in the direction the sun was rising and the cloud cover was the greatest - I couldn’t have asked for more! I had my favourite lens with me, the Canon 24mm tilt shift, and this was the perfect place to use it. I used the shift function which made it easy for me to capture more of the scene by shooting 2 horizontal images, making a vertical panorama. Whilst the tilt function aided in getting the very closest of
I arrived at the location and having briefly scouted the night before, I knew exactly where my first composition was to be from. It was by a shale shelf at the Southern most end of the beach. This would only be visible at low tide and, as the tide was on its way in, this had to be my first port of call. This also happened to be in the direction the sun was rising and the cloud cover was the greatest - I couldn’t have asked for more! I had my favourite lens with me, the Canon 24mm tilt shift, and this was the perfect place to use it. I used the shift function which made it easy for me to capture more of the scene by shooting 2 horizontal images, making a vertical panorama. Whilst the tilt function aided in getting the very closest of area of the rocky shelf in focus. I set up my composition and I waited for the light. The tide lapped around my feet with increasing depth and power as the tide rose. I waited.
With the tide rising and my feet getting wet, I knew I had to be quick. As if just in time, the sun lit the clouds from below, revealing texture in the clouds with a beautiful orange and magenta wash of colour. I took a few sets of bracketed exposures to capture all the detail in the scene, paying attention to the waves to ensure the shelf wasn’t obscured by water. My ISO was set to 50, which gave me a slow enough shutter speed to capture movement as the waves receded. The final image was a composite of 3 exposures - one for the sky and 2 for the foreground, blending different waves to more accurately portray the scene I witnessed.
By this point, the tide was consistently coming into my knees so I took a few steps back to review my images and look for another composition. Some of the colour had disappeared, however, a lovely orange glow persisted. I immediately noticed the now-higher tide washing around a prominent rock to the side of where I was stood. It created an almost whirlpool effect so, using more or less the same settings and approach as the last image I waited for the right wave to create the pattern that caught my eye in the first place and took the image.
I eagerly continued to look for compositions further down the beach and a foam forming around another pleasing looking rock.
I
I eagerly continued to look for compositions further down the beach and a foam forming around another pleasing looking rock. I saw the potential for a fairly minimal image shot ‘straight down the middle’ so I set up my camera, focussed in and fired off another few brackets, again, paying attention to the movement of the tide around the rock.
As the colour in the sky subsided, along with the clouds, I decided to call it a morning. I head back to my base, dried off, warmed up and had some well deserved breakfast.
I took the day to relax and refresh intending to return to the same bay for sunset. I double checked the tide times and found low tide was due at sunset, so this would be my opportunity to get out on to the headland and check out what I’d previously been unable to access.
As I head back out, it was a nice crisp winters evening, however, there was very little cloud cover and thus colour in the sky. I arrived at the bay about half an hour before sunset and started to make my way out onto the rocky shelf to the North side of the bay. The shale was extremely slippery so I had to move slowly and with care. The main feature here, was the Saltwick Nab, a large outcrop that almost takes on the shape of a whale when viewed from the bay. I really liked the lines that scarred the shale shelf I was walking on and would have made for fantastic foreground interest. I say would have, because the conditions really didn’t favour me here. The sky was pretty uninspiring and bland so rather than waiting here I took a reference shot and head back to the main beach. At this point, I’d written off this sunset as it did not look like I was going to get the image I was after. So I took this opportunity to head back along the beach and take a look at the other end of the bay, at which the Black Nab stood proudly.
As I made my way over there, I was periodically turning my head, looking back towards the Saltwick Nab. The sun had just gone down behind me and I was curious as to whether any other colours would appear in the sky. I walked along the shoreline, clambering over the huge, wet rocks, keeping my distance from the imposing cliffs above.
I continued for about 10 minutes and I turned to notice a purple hue being cast on to the last remaining cloud in the sky above the Saltwick Nab. I knew this was the only opportunity I’d have for some interest in the sky so I took it. I immediately started hunting for some foreground interest. Luckily for me there was a large flat rock with bags of texture, an interesting shape and distinctive lines almost right next to me. I reached into my bag for my camera and hastily set up my tripod not to miss this moment. Once again using my 24mm tilt shift, I set up the composition using both tilt and shift to ensure correct perspective and front to back sharpness. The colour intensified and faded in a matter of a couple of minutes. Thankfully I was ready for this and got the image. Satisfied with this result, I headed to the main beach, leaving the Black Nab for another day. And this once again proved to me that whilst on location, working with the elements and changing light - ‘it’s not over until it’s over’.
Have you been to Saltwick Bay? What were your experiences? Why not share your thoughts in the comments on this article.
Chris Gilbert has been making his living from photography since 2006. His workshops are perennially popular and he is also one of five landscape photographers behind the Peak Photography Gallery in Bakewell. And as if all of that isn’t enough he is photographer and co-author of the forthcoming fotoVUE Guidebook to Photographing the Peak District.
Can you tell readers a little about yourself – your education, early interests and career – and the environments that have shaped you?
Originally from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, third of four kids. No history of art in the family, although interestingly both my sisters were also pretty good at it. Disinterested parents. Moved around a lot but ended up in the Peak District. MSc in Computer Studies and a varied career including software engineering and teaching. Always loved art and the countryside. Spent a lot of time growing up in the fens. Harboured aspirations to be a painter but abandoned them when I realised that actually, I wasn't that good at it. That's where the photography took over.
How and when did you first become interested in photography? What styles of photography and subjects were you attracted to initially?
Fotospeed are delighted to bring together
4 world-renowned photographers for a day of talks
Sunday 10th September 2017 at the EDGE, University of Bath
Following on from the success of 2016 Fotospeed are thrilled to host FotoFest 2017 at a new state of the art location. Not only will you have the opportunity to hear talks from 4 amazingly talented photographers. 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.
This year we will be holding FotoFest in The Edge building at Bath University. As the event is on a Sunday, parking is free and there is plenty of it. We are also including complimentary tea and coffee for all those who attend the talks.
Below Fotospeed have tried to cover all the information you may need to know but if you have any additional questions please feel free to contact one of the team. sales@fotospeed.com| 01249 714 555.
Martin Hartley
One of the world's leading expedition and adventure travel photographers, Martin Hartley specialises in documenting the most inaccessible places on earth. He has documented 20 unique polar assignments and is one of the only professional photographers to have crossed the Arctic Ocean on foot and with dogs (Adventure Ecology Top of the world Trans-Arctic Expedition 2006, Caitlin Arctic Survey 2009 and 2010)
Paul Sanders
Paul’s journey from news photographer to landscape photography began as a form of therapy to help him deal with the stress, depression, insomnia and anxiety that resulted from the pressure he was under at The Times.
Many of the images he creates are long exposures, leaving the shutter open for 5 - 45 minutes to allow the light and elements to move, this develops an ethereal quality that has a painterly feel to the photographs.
Ben Hall
With a lifelong passion for the natural world, Ben has used his skill in photography to capture many stunning images. He is driven by the need to protect and preserve Britain's last fragile ecosystems, as testified by his work for the RSPB, various wildlife trusts and other conservation organisations.
Colin Prior
Colin Prior is of one of the world’s most respected landscape photographers. Born in Glasgow, his proximity to the Scottish Highlands shaped his passion for the outdoors and fostered an interest in photography. His photographs capture sublime moments of light and land, which are the result of meticulous planning and preparation and often take years to achieve.
What's Included with the ticket
4 incredible talks from 4 world-renowned photographers
FREE tea and coffee on arrival
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:
There’s no denying that it’s a lot easier to describe and analyse ideas like “Rule of Thirds, “Leading Lines” and “Negative Space” than the challenge set for this article. But it would be irresponsible not to address these two ideas, Depth, and Flow in any series that aspires to illuminate photographic composition. These are certainly not Rules of Composition in the conventional sense. But are they Considerations? You bet.
Quite simply, most of the time Depth is a non-negotiable essential characteristic of landscape photography. To make pictures that engage us (as photographers…never mind any imaginary audience) we strive to evoke the physical space and depth that we experience in the landscape, whether deliberately or subconsciously. Many of the tactics and devices of composition are there to serve this underlying purpose.
Especially for landscape photographers – whose images cannot rely on the theatre of human activity or wildlife behaviour and form – evoking space, depth, and the physicality of the landscape inevitably becomes a primary objective.
Depth is often thought to be the inevitable by-product of using a wide angle lens. While wide angle images may indeed exaggerate space and make the superficial appearance of depth of field greater, none of these characteristics matter nearly as much as the perspective created by camera position and the relationships established by framing, whatever the lens.
Depth may be understood as recession, the depiction of space, the modelling of three-dimensional form. Depth may be measured in millimetres in the macro world or many miles in the mountains. Depth may be enhanced by atmosphere, whether fog, mist or haze (so-called aerial perspective).
There is a curious and perhaps unexpected side effect of the successful evocation of depth and that is the promise of emotional depth as well.
It can be evoked dramatically shooting into the light. It can even by suggested by ‘drop-focus’, a by-product of optical physics. Counter-intuitively, it can also be reinforced by full-focus, the deliberate acquisition of deep focus front to back either through the technical camera’s tilt mechanism, focus-stacking or plain old stopping the lens down. Colour relationships also play their part, with well-balanced colour usually much better able to evoke depth than images which are ‘masked’ by colour casts. But whatever conditions prevail and technical solutions utilised, it is still camera position, perspective and the relationship framework that are decisive.
There is a curious and perhaps unexpected side effect of the successful evocation of depth and that is the promise of emotional depth as well. This is an immeasurable quality, but anecdotally it can be argued that spatial and physical depth is alluring, involving and ultimately more inclined to engage the emotions.
While depth may be more or less understandable, the notion of flow is more elusive. But flow significantly contributes to depth, hence presenting the two themes together. Flow could also be thought of as ‘energy’, the life force of the image. Because it is often associated with three-dimensional features it makes sense to consider it in relation to depth. Flow may be evoked by line, by space, by light. As we (the viewer) interact with an image, we explore it in the obvious two dimensions within the frame, but the illusory depiction of space – depth – makes flow a three-dimensional consideration too. In landscape, the way elements ‘face’ in relation to the frame edges and to other elements can also have a decisive effect on flow.
Flow might be smooth and fluid, calm and relatively static, or staccato and unsettled. Flow is not an absolute, just as river water is influenced by gradient, stream-bed conditions, volume and atmospheric effects. It is formed from the complex web of visual relationships which artists inevitably understand on some conscious or subliminal level.
With all this preamble, perhaps it’s time to investigate a few pictures and see how depth and flow are depicted, more or less successfully…
Estrahorn, Iceland
You can read the previous five articles in the series by Joe:
Recent years has seen an uptick in interest in lo-fi photography where the pixel sharpness of an image has been de-emphasised in deference to a “look” or “feel” of an image that, in my view, would otherwise be difficult for high-end digital cameras to replicate but this, in truth, is what kindled my initial interest.
Film pinhole photography has been prominent in this recent resurgence; the lensless “look”, when recorded on film, has attracted many to this relatively cheap form of photography - beautiful, handcrafted, oil-waxed, maple or teak wooden pinhole cameras can be purchased new for as little at £70. With no expensive lenses to purchase or detailed menus to scroll through, the relative analogue simplicity of pinhole photography has drawn many new followers over the years, myself included!
With the ability to experiment and use the essential characteristics of a film pinhole camera to produce surprisingly creative, almost unconventional, imagery, pinhole photography has now obtained a core following around the world and, dare I say it, heading for the mainstream.
With the ability to experiment and use the essential characteristics of a film pinhole camera to produce surprisingly creative, almost unconventional, imagery, pinhole photography has now obtained a core following around the world and, dare I say it, heading for the mainstream; there is even an annual celebration of pinhole imagery - Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day (usually the last day in April) which the pinhole community has embraced. For those pursuing the traditional pixel sharpness as their photographic nirvana, then look away now as, let’s be clear, a pinhole camera will not generate a traditional “sharp” image; for many, it is this dreamlike, almost impressionistic analogue “look” that draws them into this particular branch of film photography. You can tell I’m hooked!
It is Summer here in New York, but I can feel the frost radiating cold from Andrew L. Moore’s photograph "Sandhills Blizzard" Cherry County, Nebraska 2013. You see, I, myself, am a child of the desert. And this empty landscape brings about early memories from my childhood roaming the low hills that roll down towards the Judean Desert. But there, and then, snow was almost impossible, and a blizzard, never heard of. I had never been to Nebraska or the Great Plains of North America, but Andrew Moore takes me there, and it is as cold as the desert is hot.
The striking beauty of this snow coated frosty landscape, doesn’t tell right away how harsh, hostile and unforgiving it is on its inhabitants. First, you are in awe of the sheer size of the open landscape in comparison to our proof of existence, a windmill. The imagination takes you there, towards that windmill, the signifier. The snow had frozen, and it is not soft nor fluffy. The wind is blowing hard because nothing around will rise against it, the sound is maddening and the ears turn red pumping with sharp pain. It seemed so close, a hundred yards or so, but it is actually a long mile walk. You get to the windmill, but now what?
The freedom to roam is a nice illusion. You are actually lost, and you are a prisoner of food and water supply, connected by an invisible extension cord, only as far from base camp as it may last. You are free to choose to travel in any direction but not will make any sense. You might think of reaching for the windmill like conquering a mountain peak, but upon your arrival, its magic will fade. That is exactly the genius of this photograph. The windmill only makes sense from a far, against all odds, enduring the merciless landscape surrounding it. The windmill gives scale to the landscape rather than the other way around.
The aerial perspective of this picture is a perfected visual fingerprint by an artist who has mastered the medium. This specific type of a vantage point is an answer to a landscape that is actually hard to photograph, or perhaps it is better to say - capture.
First, you are in awe of the sheer size of the open landscape in comparison to our proof of existence, a windmill. The imagination takes you there, towards that windmill, the signifier.
In Andrew Moore’s book, Dirt Meridian, other similar masterpieces accompany our frosty windmill. Many are captured with a similar strategy. From reading the texts in the book itself, and listening to artist talks and recorded interviews, you learn from the photographer that his unique fingerprint is the conclusion of a few years journey to the Great Plains. Moore realised that from the ground level the land is too flat, too empty, too vast and turns compressed by the camera into thin horizon and big skies.
At this point, Andrew Moore arrives at a similar conclusion of other great photographers who mastered the landscape with their cameras - elevation opens up the ground field of view. In many of the photographs documenting old masters at work, they are found situated atop of a ladder. The most memorable of them all is no other than, Ansel Adams, shooting his famous masterpieces standing with his camera on top of a special platform installed on the roof of his van. But the Great Plains initially appear so flat that a ladder or a platform on a roof of a car was not enough. After a great deal of travelling around He realised that he had to get some wings.
Now, this is where the magic happens. Andrew took it to the air but remained low, dangerously low in fact. To achieve the perfect vantage point he joined forces with Doug Dean, a crop duster pilot, and photography enthusiast, whom Moore dedicated Dirt Meridian book too. Using Doug’s piloting skills, flying low over crops, Moore had managed to find the sweet spot for shooting this impossible landscape; at times flying as low as 30ft above ground. At these low altitudes, and with the speed of an aeroplane, he discovered a way to roam the vast land and to capture its essence. High enough for the land to open up, but not too high where human presence is visible and the landscape is not a collection of abstracted shapes.
What I love so much about this photograph, and other photographs from Andrew Moore’s book, Dirt Meridian, is their ability to tell the story of this landscape, and us, in significantly in it.
The image is taken from the book called "Dirt Meridian", published in 2015 by Damiani Editore.
Watch the short film with Andrew to find out more of the Dirt Merdian project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DURfYCi3Dao
Do you want to write about one of your favourite images? Has it inspired your photography or taken you off in another direction? We'd love to hear from you, so get in touch on our submission form.
One of the most important and difficult skills in good post-processing is subtlety. As we start processing our images, we frequently over cook them. Frequently spurred by impact, we think all post-processing should be led by a dramatic and epic intent. The result is frequently over contrasty, over saturated and over textured images. Too much contrast, too saturated colours, too much clarity in the mid tones, too much sharpness... are frequently the proof of a lack of sensitivity, subtlety and respect for the genuine intent which led us to make the photograph in the first place.
As processing adjustments get too intense, post-processing starts to be seen, not felt, and it stops enhancing a mood or intent. Instead, it becomes a barrier to it, and it blocks the observer at the superficial level, not allowing her to go through it into the deeper levels of signification that the photograph could have provided. When we go too far with post-processing, post-processing becomes the real subject of the photograph, and we have failed as artists wanting to use photography in an expressive way.
Post-processing is quite like cooking. When we start, we frequently drown the tastes with an abundance of spices and condiments, using way too many ingredients whose tastes blend and hide each other, leaving in the mouth a unique strong taste with no nuances.
Post-processing is quite like cooking. When we start, we frequently drown the tastes with an abundance of spices and condiments, using way too many ingredients whose tastes blend and hide each other, leaving in the mouth a unique strong taste with no nuances.
As our experience grows, we make simpler dishes, with less but better suited ingredients, and become subtle in the amount and diversity of spices we use. A good chef will prepare a meal that delivers a subtle but intense range of tastes, coming in waves, deployed in different levels, none of them overpowering the others, none of them taking over the dish.
Our 4x4 feature is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios from our subscribers, each consisting of four images related in some way. You can view previous 4x4 portfolios here.
We're always on the lookout for new portfolios, so please do get in touch! If you would like to submit your 4x4 portfolio, please visit this page for submission information.
*Shout out* as we are looking for contributions for the next few issues, so please do get in touch if you're interested!
Please click the images to see the portfolios in full.
The Cornish coast is somewhere that I’ve spent the majority of my life so far and I feel I have quite a connection with it. I’ve spent time playing in the sea as a child, watched it for hours to help calm my mind in my teens, competed in rowing events on it as an adult, even sadly known people lose their lives both in or on it. It’s like an old familiar friend and, due to its unpredictability, a stranger at the same time. Cornwall has a spectacular coastline with a lot to offer photographers, and the four images that I’ve chosen are all from here each showing a slightly different sea state and motion, ranging from the very calm to the slightly more moody. Photographing it in my adult years has definitely brought our relationship even closer.
I have been a photographer in some shape or form for 20 years. Ten years ago I decided that the genre "Wildlife" would be my focus. Living in Africa and a love of "wildlife" that seemed an obvious choice. I spent a considerable time alone in the African wilderness honing my craft. I have enjoyed this journey and achieved the goals I had set myself.
Becoming a father for the first time I have now found myself in a quandary. Leaving my son and wife for long periods of time to photograph 'wildlife' has become somewhat heart rending.
Two months ago I decided to change my focus to landscape. Living in one of the most beautiful parts of South Africa, the "Garden route" famed for its beautiful beaches, lakes, forests and mountains. I am spoiled for choice. However a month into my new genre I found myself overwhelmed and underachieved in my work. My focus was too wide. One day I was photographing mountains the next lakes, ocean etc.
I decided I needed to micro manage my focus. I divided my landscapes into categories, I chose the Coastal, I then divided that category and chose "Rocks''. This approach really worked for me as it gave me order and goals.
I was quite hesitant and fearful of learning a new genre. It is a steep learning curve and I have a long way to go. But I am really enjoying myself and pleasantly surprised with my results.
The project titled, Ebb &Flow: Rocks, is based on local/well-known landmarks on our coastline. The garden route is a popular destination for local and overseas visitors and I hope that when my project is finished. To be able to sell my work to this market.
The series “Hyperborea” is a wandering through the strange forests of the Far North. It was realised from June to September 2015 in the Yukon Territories, Canada. The title is inspired by an ancient Greek myth.
The windswept spaces of the Fenlands are bleak and sparsely populated but the harsh geometry of the landscape betrays man's presence. It has been a difficult terrain to embrace as it does not offer up grand vistas in the classical style. I have been working to capture the essence of the fens and to appreciate the photographic opportunities provided by this stark landscape that has been shaped by the farming industry. This selection of images are from Great Fen, Burnt Fen and White Fen.
In particular, I was drawn to the shelterbelts of tall poplars that provide embellishment to the field edges, the lodes and drains and the patterns of planting in the farmed fields. The use of a longer lens predominates in these images and has the advantage that it isolates the subjects and imparts simplicity. I think the monochrome interpretation also helps in this regard and produces the best realisation of the landscape. Most of all I think seeing the prints on a matt art paper (I’m a bit of a Museum Heritage fan at the moment) brings out the subtle detail and tones. This is very much a project in progress and I hope to be adding a greater variety of subjects to my portfolio of the Fens next winter. May the challenge continue!
QT Luong’s mammoth project to photograph all 59 US National Parks couldn’t come at a more opportune moment. The current government of the United States has proposed many reductions in the scale and protection of the National Parks and any material that can make people consider what a monumental folly this would be is to be gratefully accepted. And this should really make people consider what a gift the American people have in those national parks. The history of the United States of America is recorded by hardy pioneers wrestling with oversize wooden cameras to capture that elusive light on silver gelatin and it is quite apt that QT’s camera of choice while creating this book has been a 5” by 7” large format camera. (So dedicated to his tool of choice that he created and still runs the Large Format Photography information website, the authority on all things 20 square inches or more).
Unlike Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan, QT had quicker and more comfortable methods of getting around and his final images are recorded in “Glorious Technicolor” (OK - Fuji Velvia mostly then).
It was always QT’s idea to produce a book at the very end of this 20-year long process but I don’t think many people expected something of quite this scale. The book is about the same weight as QTs large format camera but once you open it up you’ll realise just why it needed this scale. The photographs within the book are quite beautiful and QT manages to (mostly) avoid the most cliched views of each park so many of the images reveal something new to the viewer.
Erin Babnik is known for her ambitious and expressive style of photography and for her adventurous approach in the field. Her dedication to the medium of photography evolved out of her years working as an art historian and archaeologist, photographing in museums and in archaeological sites throughout Europe and the Middle East for the purposes of teaching and research.
She subsequently spent years producing photographs on assignment and for licensing, all the while expanding her personal photographic excursions to increasingly remote outdoor locations. She now works as a full-time landscape photographer, travelling extensively from home bases in both California and Slovenia and teaching photography workshops on both continents. Erin also draws upon her background in art history in her writing about photography, which appears in a variety of publications.
Multiple exposure images have increased in popularity over the past few years. You may have come across a technique called ‘in the round’ where a large number of images taken at intervals around a central focus are combined in layers to produce an image that is more akin to a drawing than a photograph. For this issue, we’re delighted to talk to Pep Ventosa, whose photographic compilations of trees, among other subjects, have inspired many others to try this technique.
Can you tell readers a little about yourself – your education, early interests and career – and the environments that have shaped you?
I grew up in a farmhouse in the Penedès wine country, south of Barcelona, attended school in the city of Barcelona and studied Tourism as a career. Franco ruled Spain under a fascist regime until I was 18 years old. They were scary times, with limited freedoms and a lot of repression. My reaction and shelter to that environment were through music and photography. I played drums in several bands, I guess as a form of personal resistance, and viewing photographs from the free world became like windows for me, something to aspire to and dream about. Through magazines and books, I discovered images of the hippie and social movements of the late 60s, amazing portraiture, beautiful pictures of remote exotic places and historic and archaeological sites, and photos of live concerts of bands which were impossible to attend in Spain at the time. Magazines like Life and National Geographic also served as an education for my eye, a great source of photojournalism and landscape photography. At the time, it was all a light in the darkness, an anchor to the world.
How and when did you first become interested in photography? You went to art school but didn’t take to the darkroom. Yet you retained an ambition to work as a photographer?
I’ve been fascinated with photographs as long as I can remember. I think every photograph is interesting. They hold some illusionistic quality. In 1967, my family received a camera as a present from friends in France. It was an Olympus Pen, a half-frame fixed-lens viewfinder camera. I was 10 and that object was like a magic tool. I took pictures of our farm, the family, my dog; all black and white. Although I wasn’t especially excited with the results as they didn’t look quite like the magazine shots. As a young teen, I became a drummer and spent many years thereafter consumed with music, but my interest in photography remained. I bought my first SLR in my 20’s and went to art school to learn more about it. There I discovered that the click of the camera might start a photograph, but it didn’t end there. You could adjust and perfect it in the darkroom. Two steps that can make a world of difference. Now, when I take a photograph I feel it is the beginning of something rather than the end, as it was in my early days. And in the digital darkroom, I feel I have infinitely more possibilities at play.
What styles of photography and subjects interested you initially? From where (or whom) do you draw inspiration?
From a very young age, I was attracted to archaeology and old architecture. I loved seeing ancient ruins, castles and cathedrals. It was a way to experience history. I once aspired to be an archaeologist. Also growing up in the countryside, not far from the coast, I learn to appreciate nature and the landscape.
I’m fascinated with photographic images in general and the many ways they can show us the world.
Being a musician, I found great interest in the popular culture and urban life. I guess this mix of influences, and others formed my vision and taste in photography. I loved to shoot all those subjects, and still do. But more than a style or a subject in particular, I’m fascinated with photographic images in general and the many ways they can show us the world. Picasso once said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working”. I think inspiration comes especially with work but also through curiosity and observation.
How important was your move from Barcelona to San Francisco Bay, and the time at which you moved? The digital revolution in a sense set you free to become the photographer you wanted to be, and you were in the right place at the right time.
Moving from BCN to SF in 1999 was the best move in my life. First, because I married an extraordinary person, my wife Jackie. Second, because SF is a highly inspiring city, as beautiful as few places I’ve been, with a pulsating art scene where my love for photography was reinvigorated. And third, because the digital revolution was taking off and with it, I found the tools to achieve my photographic vision, the photographic image as a mean to create new visual experiences rather than to reproduce the world.
Beyond developing an individual approach, what do you consider has particularly helped you to establish yourself? (e.g. reviews, exhibitions, social media, competition success).
I was intrigued by the potential of the digital darkroom and learned my way exploring new approaches to represent my subjects. At the same time, the Internet was growing new ways to interact, share and learn photography.
I was intrigued by the potential of the digital darkroom and learned my way exploring new approaches to represent my subjects. At the same time, the Internet was growing new ways to interact, share and learn photography. I was active sharing work and getting feedback, applying to competitions, learning different work methods within Photoshop, building websites. All of that was extremely helpful to establish my work as a style and to get the opportunity to show it in galleries and art shows.
Do you think that the popularity of “In the Round – Trees” is in part as a result of society’s increasing disconnect from nature? Trees are there but most of the time we are looking past them?
Trees have always had a profound symbolism: rooted in the earth, projecting to the sky. They nurture life giving us food, shelter and the air we breathe. They are symbols of strength, wisdom, and protection, and they are simply beautiful. Maybe our urban and stressful life, detached from the long history of humans surrounded by forests and trees, produces nostalgia for them. Hanging a picture of a tree in a wall may bring some sort of comfort, some feeling of shelter and security; a connection to our past. With the Trees in the Round series, I’m also trying to show trees in a new way. By blending a group of shots taken while walking around one tree, I like to give the tree a starring role, showing it from all sides at once, with the background falling away into abstraction.
How important is the habitat, the background to your images? As more people are absorbed in their technology, their perception of the environment around them lessons.
As with the Trees In the Round, I have other series such as the Carousels in the Round and the Street Lamps where by overlaying multiple images the main subject is highlighted and the background is transformed into abstract shapes and colour fields. I see your point about this becoming also true of the way we see. But I believe that even though people are spending less time looking around and more time on their screens, it’s also true that we are all taking more pictures than ever before, with cameras, phones and drones. And while much of it is driven by the human necessity to capture the things we like and to say “I was there, I saw that, I did that,” along the way we’re also seeing things in that imagery in ways unseen before. So at the same time, our understanding of the world and the environments in which we live is expanding.
I believe that even though people are spending less time looking around and more time on their screens, it’s also true that we are all taking more pictures than ever before, with cameras, phones and drones.
How do you feel about the others adopting – aping even – “in the round”? Is imitation flattery or do you wish they’d go find their own way of looking at the world?
When I see close imitations of my Trees in the Round without a mention of the source of inspiration, it doesn’t feel good, not unlike when a musician recognises her melody in other’s music. (Although it may be a coincidence, right? Ideas are not necessarily exclusive.) On the other hand, when it is used as experimentation by other photographers who are trying to ultimately achieve something different, I am flattered to have inspired them and influenced their creative processes. Certainly, I’m not working with something that is completely new and exclusive; the question is to make things your own way, finding the originality. My wish is that my photographic explorations inspire others to find their own voice, their own style.
You’ve previously defined ‘originality’ as ‘repetition with judgement’ but there will always be some who see repetition as their shortcut to success?
Repetition does not necessarily mean to copy; it means imitation, inspiration. It is a concept rather than an actual action. Finding new significance to an existing thing is to find something original. Nothing comes from nothing. It was Voltaire who said: “Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.” We are all part of the very old tradition of creating images: drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs…and that surely has a profound influence on us. Through repetition and imitation, as concepts, we may find our unique voice, ergo be originals. Something especially difficult in photography, I think.
How important is it to differentiate between photography as a technique and as a medium? It’s all too easy to stumble at the first and not appreciate or explore the possibilities of the latter.
Photography is one of the broadest mediums we know. It has immense potential to reveal information, to show us and to help us understand the world. Photography is technology, science, art, memory…and with computer-mediated technologies, like the ubiquitous smartphones, it is a universal language, a substitute for words. It’s a gigantic playground and we, the players, can arrange the game with our own rules, either for the pleasure of technical fascination, for the search of beauty, or for the unavoidable urge to tell a story. We cannot embrace the whole universe of photography, so our unique chance is to focus on the functions of the medium that speaks to us. I think it’s important to know about the medium and its history, as a way to find your place in it.
Digital has freed us up to explore, to play even, perhaps in the same way that photography allowed painters to move away from photo-realism?
Good point. I’m positive that the impact of the digital revolution in photography has exponentially expanded its language, in the same way, that, on another level, it is now reclaiming old analogical, almost obsolete, techniques.
I’m positive that the impact of the digital revolution in photography has exponentially expanded its language, in the same way, that, on another level, it is now reclaiming old analogical, almost obsolete, techniques.
Since the invention of photography, the arrival of digital cameras, scanners and editing software is the biggest change ever experienced by the medium. It’s a paradigm shift. Photography retains its soul but has become something new. The term Post-Photography is already out there. Nowadays people can produce photographs at no cost and it is relatively easy to make technically good ones that not long ago required specialised equipment and expertise.
The advent of the pixel and the ease of its manipulation is also changing the credibility that once was associated with photography. It’s not crazy to relate all of that to a photographic departure from realism and the documentary properties to explore new territories like some painters did almost two centuries ago when they felt that realism was perfectly done by photography.
The internet has increasingly become a resource for you? For compiling and creating the new interpretations of well-known views and for series such as Street Rhythms?
Since the inception of the Internet we kind of live in two worlds: the real one and a virtual one. I find them both supplementary and inspiring. The virtual world has an added value that is its novelty, is a new place to explore with lots of creative possibilities. On top of the more than one billion photos uploaded to the web every day, mapping software is robotically capturing 360-degree views and a near seamless mirror-like image of the world. I like the idea of repurposing this data-driven imagery and giving it artistic composition. The Street Rhythms and other series are an example of that.
To what extent are you reflected in your photographs? Your musicianship and sense of rhythm, and what you described to another interviewer as a chaotic, spontaneous, personality?
We project ourselves in our actions. What we do, somehow define who we are, right? In that sense, I guess my photographs, as well as my work methods, reflect who I am. I usually work with several projects at once, jumping from one to another. Most of my series are ongoing. I’m always exploring new ideas and making experiments to see if I hit something of interest. There’s a lot of spontaneity involved rather than a plan.
My musical background and my love for music must have an impact in my work too. I see rhythm, harmony and dynamics in my images. Time, indispensable in music, is somehow also in my work: the images are intriguing to the eye and there’s a need of time to inspect them. As for sound, the other essential characteristic of music, I sense it through the feel of vibration of the multiple images at play.
Yet what you do requires a degree of patience and persistence – layering and compositing are not for the faint-hearted.
People who know me would describe me mostly as quiet and patient. That serves me well in my work. My images are constructions made of multiple photographs and a lot of trial and error. It requires some persistence to make them work. I feel more like the painter that sees his painting progressing little by little. It is a process that I enjoy.
Do you see your work – your technique and the resulting images – as being in part a response to the immediacy of much photography? An antidote even: the time you spend creating the images but also in making the viewer work harder too?
One thing I miss from the film days is the idea of the latent image; the image that floats in the film once it has been captured and before it is processed and printed.
One thing I miss from the film days is the idea of the latent image; the image that floats in the film once it has been captured and before it is processed and printed.
During that time period, between the shot and the printed image, our imagination is in suspense and wondering. It was a time for dreams and hopes that vanished with digital photography: now the image is instantaneous. The way I work brings a little of that tempo back. The final image is in latency, I don’t know how it will look until it’s done. I love when a surprise emerges from that process, and then again when I learn how to tame it. My hope is that the viewers have a nice visual experience after a close observation of the photographs.
You’ve said too that you’re trying to mimic the way that our sight works, and you’ve also mentioned collective memories?
The notion of a collective memory arises from my Collective Snapshot series. It’s an homage to the most enduring form of photography: the snapshot. Everyone who goes to Paris takes a shot of the Eiffel Tower. I adapt, overlay, and rework those found shots to combine them into new representations of the places we’ve collectively been and seen.
As for mimicking the way we see, my Reconstructed Works series is a deconstruction and reconstruction of various scenes. I first capture something in smaller puzzle pieces—sometimes 20, sometimes 200—and then rebuilt it in my digital darkroom. I don’t use stitching software; rather I do it by hand, or mouse if you will, positioning and processing every single piece at my will. That process mimics how we actually see: the eyes are constantly focusing on the specific details and elements of what’s in front of them and the brain then processes that visual information making the reconstruction so we perceive the world around us.
What else interests you photographically? Are there subjects or themes that you are keen to explore further in future?
I’m intrigued by anything photographic. I love looking at photographs, reading about them, seeing them at exhibits and in books. I like the idea of taking familiar objects and finding ways to present them in a new light. I’m interested in the interrelationships between photography and painting. I like old cameras and have a ridiculously large collection of them that I imagine will one day inspire new works. In short, I have my head and hands in a bunch of new ideas and experiments and no idea which if any might be realised—we’ll see—but I look forward to the exploration.
Who do you admire? Is there anyone (a photographer, amateur or professional) that you’d like to suggest we interview in future?
I love Richard Misrach’s work. The landscapes of his ongoing series for 40 years, Desert Cantos, are mesmerising, not only beautiful but with a profound narrative about the relationship of man and landscape.
Thank you for the opportunity to answer your insightful questions and share my story with your readers.
Thank you too, Pep, I’m sure our readers will enjoy your words and images.
Until recently the last time I had set out to shoot seascapes was on West Wittering beach in 2003. I was armed with my dented Nikon FM2 and rolls of Kodachrome 64. This was the final set of pictures I took while working full time as a landscape and fine art photographer. I moved on shortly after to other areas of the industry and eventually into editorial photography.
The majority of my work since has been as a freelance contractor for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph. Shortly after joining the paper I began a series of trips to document the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last year I was asked to review my war photography for a tenth anniversary article. Looking back through the thousands of pictures I had taken and the hundreds that I had filed left me with a sense of disenchantment. What was the purpose of pictures that few people wanted to look at? The pictures brought no pleasure to anyone. Could they even be considered as a historical document or record if they are largely hidden from view? The miserable human experiences I had captured inspired me to return to taking pictures of pleasure, not pain.
Here, then, is the beginning of a vicious circle. Because “beautiful” poems make the poet beloved, a great quantity of poems come into the world that attempt nothing except to be beautiful, that pay no heed to the original primitive, holy, innocent function of poetry. These poems from the very start are made for others, for hearers, for readers. They are no longer dreams or dance steps or outcries of the soul, reactions to experience, stammered wish-images or magic formulas, gestures of a wise man or grimaces of a madman—they are simply planned productions, fabrications, pralines for the public. They have been made for distribution and sale and they serve to amuse or inspire or distract their buyers. So just this sort of poem finds approval. One does not have to project oneself seriously and lovingly into such poems, one is not tormented or shaken by them, rather one sways comfortably and pleasurably in time to their pretty, regular rhythms. ~Hermann Hesse
I was surprised by the number of favourable responses I received to a recent post in which I stated that not one of the images I consider as my most meaningful resulted from planning. Continuing this line of thinking, it also implies that if I was in the habit of planning my photographs, I may have succeeded in following my plan and rewarded with images that are pleasing and popular—things that can be planned for—but I would never have made any of these images that I consider meaningful and revelatory—things that cannot be planned for. In this sense, planning can be considered a great impediment to making the kind of work I value most. With the danger being, ironically, succeeding in accomplishing the planned outcome.
Among the changes observed in the brain during flow states and in times of heightened creative performance is a phenomenon known as transient hypofrontality, involving the temporary deactivation of parts of the prefrontal cortex known to be associated with decision making, a sense of self, inhibition, self-censorship, and planning.
Worse yet, if beholden to plans, I would not have had the experiences that led to the making of those images—experiences marked by such things as exploration, discovery, creative epiphanies, novelty, and what psychologists refer to as flow states, defined as optimal experiences that are so enjoyable that people will pursue them for their own sake, independent of outcome, and which involve changes in consciousness and brain functions that are profoundly rewarding and known to be strongly correlated with creativity.
Saturday 9th September, Kirk Theatre, Pickering, North Yorkshire
Following the success of our first event in 2015, PC Photographic and Trailblazer Outdoors are delighted to announce MOORSVIEW 2017. Once again renowned local photographers will come together to celebrate the beauty of the North York Moors and Coast, highlighting the opportunities they offer for outdoor photographers. But this time the inspirational sessions will cover both landscape and wildlife photography.
Less frequented than the Northern meccas of The Peak District, Lakes, and Yorkshire Dales, the North York Moors offer a rich variety of landscape and wildlife opportunities. From the expansive open views on the high moors to the intimate patchworks of a succession of verdant dales, this is a landscape of contrasts shaped by a long history of human habitation. Field sports, hill farming and forestry are the most obvious influences today, but the environment has also been shaped by industries such as mining, quarrying and glass manufacture.
The coast ranges from high chalk cliffs in the south to fossil rich shales in the North, featuring a succession of sweeping bays and coves, peppered with precipitous fishing villages and shipwrecks. Host to internationally important breeding populations of seabirds and Grey Seals, the area also offers a growing range of wildlife watching and photographic opportunities - including whale watching and diving gannet trips.
The Moorsview sessions will focus on the practical aspects of photography in the region, whilst touching on the broader themes of man’s historic use of the moorland and coastal landscapes, their conservation, and the impact of human activity on the wildlife of the area. Inspiring presentations on capturing this wealth of photographic opportunities will come from a stellar line up of speakers.
Joe Cornish - Joe Cornish Photographer and Joe Cornish Galleries
Needing no introduction to the readers of On Landscape (click here to read Joe's articles), Joe lives on the western edge of the North York Moors - close to the local landmark of Roseberry Topping. For Joe, this landscape is no pristine wilderness or manicured park. Rather, it is a working upland -covered by great carpets of heather that can be a forbidding, bristling black, or an opulent purple haze - depending on the conditions and time of year.
Joe says: “The years of walking, of standing in the teeth of a gale, or clambering through snowdrifts, of marvelling at spring wildflowers in the gritty, peaty soils, of watching the sun sinking over the blanket of August heather, or of climbing up through mist onto high ridges on an autumn morning … these years have helped me understand the moods and beauty of the moors.
The camera has helped me understand this is a truly living landscape of variety, character, history, humanity … a place that has retained its traditions and remains untainted by industrialised tourism. And the art in photography has helped me to cultivate the love which I feel for the North York Moors.”
We have asked Joe to look back over the years, and assess how his photography of the region has changed and developed - as a result of changes in his own photographic vision, the equipment he uses, and the landscape itself.
Peter Leeming - Peter Leeming Landscape Photography
I first came across Peter Leeming’s work when I found that some of my pictures were hanging next to his at the Inspired by gallery, in Danby. The exhibition was to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the North York Moors National Park, and I remember thinking his pictures had greater maturity than mine. Next to Peter’s calm, assured, natural evocation of his subjects, mine looked like they were ‘trying too hard’, and shouting for attention.
As Peter says himself: "I think my photography is most satisfying, and possibly most authentic, when I have found and explored a good location, re-visited it many times throughout the seasons, kept exploring, stepped back for the wide view, zoomed in on the detail, and kept on until I have said all I wanted to say about it.... trying to work at the edges of my technical ability, kept on pushing both technically and physically... working, refining, working, refining... allowing each decision making process to help my photographic style evolve…”
Fast forward five years and Peter has amassed an impressive catalogue of images - capturing, in particular, the beauty of some of the world’s highest mountain ranges. Closer to home he has gained high praise for his ‘Haunted by Waters’ images of the River Derwent, and his epic project to record the ‘Secrets of the Dinosaur Coast’. Add in his continuing efforts to use panoramas to capture the essence of the North York Moors, and I am sure you will agree that Peter’s presentation will be a hi-light of Moorsview 2017
Lucy Saggers
Lucy Saggers is an award-winning photographer of rural life, who is currently documenting the richness of life in her home village of Ampleforth. Lucy's evocative black and white images capture the allure of the landscape, and the essence of ordinary lives - recording the small, often unseen moments, to tell a contemporary story of the fabric of the countryside. Her work blends landscape and documentary photography - exploring the interactions between the land and the people that work it. The character of one is shaped by the other, and vice versa.
Her work challenges us to consider the ‘living landscape’ - something which is used, exploited, formed by the rural economy and our other interactions with it. For me Lucy's deliberate use of stark black and white also helps to draw out these graphic interactions, lending her images a certain timeless quality that stands apart from much contemporary landscape photography.
Lucy Saggers was a finalist in the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year in 2015 and 2016, and shortlisted this year. She was also Craft Photographer of the Year in 2015 and reached the 2nd round of the National Portrait Gallery Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. Her presentation at Moorsview 2017 will add another fascinating and inspirational strand to the day.
Steve Race
Steve is an award-winning wildlife photographer and trainer based in Scarborough and has been a keen naturalist and photographer for over 30 years. Over that time he has acquired an exceptional knowledge of the wild environments of the moors and coast, and the behaviours of the animals that live there.
Steve uses this expertise to pick out the details of everyday life for the birds and animals he photographs - depicting wildlife in its context. Steve is best known for his coastal photography and workshops, but for Moorsview 2017 he will focus on the variety of wildlife and habitats offered by the inland landscape of the North York Moors.
Steve’s images have featured in national and regional newspapers and magazines, websites and other publications. He works with the RSPB, the National Trust and the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, and has recently been an adviser on the Channel 5 television series Yorkshire: A Year in the Wild. In 2013 his work was “Commended” in the ‘Wildlife Photographer of the Year’ and ‘British Wildlife Photographer of the Year’ awards. In 2014 he was “Commended” in the ‘Big Picture Natural World Photography Competition’ at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA.
Robert Fuller
Robert is best known as one of Britain’s foremost wildlife artists, but he is also an accomplished photographer - painstakingly observing and capturing the behaviours of his wild subjects as source material for subsequent paintings. In 2016 he won the British Seasons category in the British Wildlife Photography Awards for his series of shots of a family of weasels. The previous year his stunning shot of ‘Sparring Sparrowhawks’ was highly commended in the same awards.
Recently you may have seen Robert’s fantastic footage of Kingfishers - featured recently in the BBC’s Springwatch series. The images were the result of months of work in constructing a hide specifically for the purpose of observing, photographing and filming these glorious creatures. Robert’s Moorsview presentation will discuss this and other projects where he has used particular techniques to follow the lives of birds and animals around his Thixendale Gallery, and capture aspects of their everyday lives.
Karl Holtby
Karl feels an intimate connection with the landscapes of the North York Moors and Coast - having spent much of his childhood and adolescence exploring them on foot and by bike. Hailing from a family of photographers, some of his earliest memories are of developing black and white images from such trips in his Father’s dark room.
When I think of Karl’s work I tend to think of fairly 'clean' images, which tend towards the minimalist, and evoke a sense of calm reflection. He works in both colour and black and white, often using ND filters and long exposure times to soften water and emphasise the graphic qualities of a scene.
For Moorsview 2017 Karl will address his personal connection to the North York Moors National Park, before looking in detail at coastal photography. He will consider the dynamics of the coastal environment, before exploring the use of abstract imagery, and emotion to evoke mood. Throughout he will consider the practical aspects of working by the water - including the advantages of ‘travelling light’.
Karl has exhibited widely and has been featured in magazines including Lee Filters Xposure, and On Landscape. Over the past few years, he has worked with many leading manufacturers, including Phase One, Manfrotto, and LEE filters. Karl is currently an ambassador for Induro Tripods UK and Sigma Imaging UK, and in 2017 he gave his first talk at The Photography Show, on the theme of coastal photography, on behalf of Induro Tripods UK.
Moorsview Extras
The main Moorsview Seminar takes place on Saturday, but speakers and supporters are also offering a range of optional Moorsview Extras over the weekend from Friday 8th to Sunday the 10th September. These include a range of practical workshops, photo walks and open gallery events - you can find details, along with booking information at www.trailblazeroutdoors.co.uk/pages/moorsview.
Exhibition
A touring exhibition will also support Moorsview 2017 - opening first at the Joe Cornish Galleries in Northallerton on Saturday 12th August. The exhibition moves to The Pickering Gallery for the weekend of the Moorsview seminar, before opening at the Inspired by Gallery at the North York Moors National Park Visitor Centre, at Danby on 19th October.
Special Offer on Tickets for On Landscape Subscribers
Tickets for Moorsview 2017 normally cost £80 - including a buffet lunch and refreshments throughout the day.
OnLandscape subscribers can take advantage of a £10 discount on the normal cost.
Proceeds from Moorsview 2017 will be split equally between the Scarborough and Ryedale Mountain Rescue Team and local wildlife and conservation charities. The event is supported by a arrange of organisations including the North York Moors National Park and Welcome to Yorkshire.
We are also grateful to Tim and Charlotte at On Landscape for their continuing technical and editorial help, and all of the speakers at the event - who have donated their time and expertise completely free of charge.
Whilst preparing for a trip out with Joe Cornish a few weeks back, I noticed that Stephen Trainer, the brains behind The Photographer’s Ephemeris, was releasing a new application called The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D. I know this sounds like a bad film sequel and I’ve always enjoyed the 2D versions more, however in this case the app is actually something I’ve wanted someone to develop for a while.
To summarise what the application does is quite simple, it casts shadows. Now that doesn’t sound that clever, but the clever bit is it casts shadows of Mountains and takes into account the curvature of the earth as well. All the while allow you to fly around the landscape to see the effects.
Here’s an overview video that Stephen released to go with the launch (epic Tolkeinesque voiceover too).
So I thought we’d give it a go on our trip out above Kinlochleven. First I took at look at the location on the new fangled Ordnance Survey maps (subscription only I’m afraid) and here’s the view.
OS Map Aerial Overview
So in TPE3D you navigate to the area you are interested in by swiping, pinching, etc., and then place a ‘marker’. You can then double click on the marker to get a view at ground level (and if you're slightly wrong, you can "walk" your viewpoint around to get a better vantage point). Here’s the view from our marker.
You can see along the bottom of the picture there is a strip that shows the current time, the elevation of the sun and the moon and some markers to show sunrise, sunset, moonrise, etc. You can swipe this left to change the time and the sun will move around in the picture and show the landscape lit correctly including shadows. As far as I am aware, this is pretty unique stuff - even Google Earth doesn't calculate shadows correctly. We used it to calculate the point where we would lose the light on the foreground and made sure we were on location a good hour before hand. Here's our view showing the light softening in the foreground.
With so many excellent photographers making their work known to others through galleries, websites, social media, exhibitions, shows, books and magazines (including On Landscape) there is no shortage of images I might have chosen when asked to write here about a favourite photograph. So why did I find it so easy to respond almost immediately to this request with my choice of “Llanberis over Glyn Rhonwy” by Richard Childs? I can’t now recall how or when I first became aware of this work but there are several reasons why it caught my eye then and has since become a firm favourite.
One reason is that I have known and enjoyed this part of North Wales for over thirty years. I have visited Llanberis many times but until I saw Richard’s image I had always been drawn in other directions when looking for images of my own. Unless setting off for Snowden, most photographers – I think – head east from there, as I had, to capture the local viewpoints and scenes of industrial heritage around Llyn Padarn and Dinorwic Quarry (both of which are visible, but only just so, in this picture). They provide endless possibilities for distant and close landscapes most of which will be familiar to other photographers, but here was a viewpoint that I had been unaware of previously even though it is as dramatic as any in the locality and bears witness just as strongly to Snowdonia’s industrial past as do those of Dinorwic. I was excited by Richard’s portrayal of a fresh and compelling photographic viewpoint in an area easily accessible from my home on the Wirral.
This area of North Wales has long been associated with the romantic sublime aesthetic and the context in which this photograph’s main feature is set– the rugged mountains and dramatic sky – certainly evoke a sense of awe inspiring nature. (Tate: Art and the Sublime) But the main feature here is man-made rather than natural. Does that place it in another category?
For me this work still falls unequivocally within the sublime aesthetic because of the impression of violence and feeling of unease created within a natural environment by the working of the quarry, leaving as it has those jagged, angled pinnacles and a seemingly bottomless pit.
Leaving aside the argument that rigid categorisation of works of art is pointless, for me this work still falls unequivocally within the sublime aesthetic because of the impression of violence and feeling of unease created within a natural environment by the working of the quarry, leaving as it has those jagged, angled pinnacles and a seemingly bottomless pit. Added to that, nature has responded with its powerful capacity for regrowth – something which in itself is awe inspiring, albeit reassuring rather than threatening. Richard has very much added to the sense of the sublime in his photograph by choosing to make it in light that brings out the full drama of the scene. I was inspired to see if I could make a rewarding photograph of this viewpoint myself.
I had an opportunity to try in spring of last year during a trip to the area with colleagues from my local photographic society. I worked out roughly where the viewpoint is by looking at the image and studying the OS map, other maps and satellite imagery. Finding Glyn Rhonwy Quarry is relatively easy and it is possible to photograph it towards the west from the roadside. But the area is heavily fenced off there and the choice of viewpoint is very limited. I found that gaining access to Richard’s viewpoint was much more challenging: and it was more by luck than design that I eventually reached it from the opposite direction. The circuitous route that I took did have the advantage, however, of taking me past a couple of other large quarries worthy of further photographic exploration, as well as new (to me at least) views of Snowden to the south
Needless to say, perhaps, none of the images I took matched up to Richard’s, though by my own standards I believe I made one successful photograph. I chose a slightly different viewpoint which meant that I missed the tree in the bottom right and had a different perspective on the pinnacle below it. And I included less sky, perhaps because the day was overcast and the flat light made it was less interesting (I was there late morning). The light on this occasion also meant the absence of those catches of sunlight on the trees in the middle distance and distant mountains that so enhance Richard’s image.
I have subsequently learnt more about Richard’s approach to his photography through On Landscape. I was delighted to see “Llanberis over Glyn Rhonwy.” featured in the Lightning Talk that Richard gave to the On Landscape Meeting of Minds Conference in 2016. On Landscape Conference 2016 Day Two. (It is about 4 hours and 55 minutes into this video – but the whole recording, together with the video of Day One, could make for a very informative and enjoyable “box set day”) He emphasised the importance of the foreground in his work (he called the talk “Foreground First”) and described how he had noticed the flow of key elements in his images into the frame from the bottom right. Both these features are evident here (though the foreground is rather less prominent than in other images by Richard). Certainly one reason for the lesser impact of my own images is the less distinct flow from the bottom right into the picture, and I think this plays as much of a part in why they are less successful as do the weaker skyline and absence of better light.
Richard followed up this Lightning Talk with an On Landscape article Foreground First: A Style Evolving. In the article, he explains in more detail his “rule of fifths” using this image as one example of it. The rule, or any other “rule,” is not something he consciously applies but it brings together a number of compositional elements in his pictures which contribute to a recognisable (and successful) “style”. The article is well worth a read.
Richard has said that this viewpoint is becoming something of a “honey pot” though it is not easy to access, and should be approached with great care to avoid a serious fall. Although I would like to return there and improve on my earlier efforts at recording this part of Snowdonia it might become increasingly difficult to do so as planning permission has now been granted for a hydro-electric pump storage scheme that makes use of Glyn Rhonwy (£100m Llanberis pump scheme approved). When I visited there was no barrier to access along the route I took, but this may no longer be so in future. If that is the case, and the Quarry is radically altered by construction work, then Richard’s image will be important not only for its quality, but also as a record of an interesting and beautiful interim stage in our evolving interaction with the natural environment of Snowdonia.
I am sure others appreciate the beauty of “Llanberis over Glyn Rhonwy” and the skill applied in making it. For me its making and publication have meant the additional benefits of seeing and recording this viewpoint for myself, and using the experience to learn something about how to improve my own photography. I will long remember and refer back to it.
Interest in very long exposure photography isn’t new. In fact, it was originally the only way to take photographs as the materials used in early photography were so insensitive to light. It is only really in the 20th Century that ‘quick’ photography was born, and yet people still have a desire to see the effect that exposure times in the minutes (or even hours) can have. Michael Kenna’s work is a great example of how these long exposures can transform the landscape. His work on power station cooling towers immediately springs to mind, as does his long exposure images from the coast of Japan. Other photographers working around this concept include Hiroshi Sugimoto and Alexy Titarenko
More recently, photographers such as Micheal Levin, Joel Tjintjelaar and David Fokos have taken this subgenre of photography and run with it, creating portfolios full of inspiring work using screw in filters such as the classic B+W 110 or Tiffen examples.
It’s no surprise that much of this work is black and white as colour film behaves very differently for very long exposures. However, with the advent of digital cameras, the ability to make long exposures using neutral density filters and to produce reasonably colour accurate work brought a renewed interest. In the UK at least, the advent of Lee Filters “Big Stopper” 10 stop filter found many photographers starting to experiment with these very long exposures during the daytime and reproducing the results in colour as well as black and white.
However, the Big Stopper (and the old B+W 110 & Tiffen) did have a colour cast and even when corrected the cast using white balance, it did affect the final colour in the image compared to an unfiltered exposure.
In the last couple of years, metal coating technology that was previously used to create custom filters for spectroscopy or astronomy, has trickled down into the photography market. Manufacturers such as Nisi and Hi-Tech have produced filters based on this technology that are supposed to reduce the amount of colour cast to virtually nothing and to limit the affects of vignetting that occur using resin based filters (even some of the glass neutral density filters are actually two thin sheets sandwiching a resin sheet of neutral density material).
Being as we now have many manufacturers producing these filters and all of them saying they have no colour cast, I thought it would be good to help enlighten a few readers into what exactly this means. In doing so I was initially only going to test four or five filters but after talking to our readers and discussing the topic on social media, the final filter list ended up at 14 (although one of these is a piece of welding glass - the poor mans ND!).
The Manufacturers
Here is a list of the manufacturers we included in our tests. If you think something is missing, please let us know and we’ll try to contact the manufacturer to see if we can borrow a filter to add to our tests. Also it’s worth noting that we paid for many of the filters either because we couldn’t get in touch with the manufacturer, we felt we should or they couldn’t send product out in time - These include Lee, Hoya, XC Source and SRB.
The main test for this review will be photographic. I wanted to capture a scene that included close detail of rocky shadows (a source of infra red pollution) and far distance haze (a source of UV). I also wanted to include an X-Rite Colorchecker card in the scene so I could do some basic colour analysis.
Following this I intended to use an X-Rite I1 Pro 2 Photo spectrophotometer to analyse the spectral transmission of the filters.
Next would be a simple analysis of the anti-reflection control and finally a basic look to see if any of the filters caused a loss in sharpness.
First Test - The Scene
For this first test I went to the head of the Glencoe to a very handy layby and captured the view including some running water, rocks and the distant sky and mountains. The colour checker is large enough in the sample to be able to perform a simple colour analysis. In the samples below, I only show one reference ‘unfiltered’ photograph but in reality I retook this ‘unfiltered’ photograph between every three or four filters to ensure that the light wasn’t changing dramatically between the first and the last filter tested. The answer was that there wasn’t a significant different in the overall light quality in terms of colour temperature and distribution and so I’m happy to just reproduce one image here.
A couple of first impressions from these photographs. The first is that the solid colour filters (i.e. not metal coated) have significant vignetting. The rest of the filters exhibited no vignetting that I could detect in photographs.
Click on the filter names on the left or right to change that half of the preview window. Slide the green bar to the left or right or click on the image somewhere to see more or less of each side.
Comparing Unfiltered with Haida
Choose Which Filters to Compare
Before side
Unfiltered
Haida Nano Pro MC
Kase KW100 Wolverine
ProGrey USA Genesis IR
Lee ProGlass IRND
Nisi
Hoya ProND 1000
X4 Breakthrough
Formatt/Hi-Tech Firecrest
SRB ND 1000
VF Foto ND 1000
B+W 110
Lee Big Stopper
XC Source ND1000
Tiffen
Welding Glass
After side
Unfiltered
Haida Nano Pro MC
Kase KW100 Wolverine
ProGrey USA Genesis IR
Lee ProGlass IRND
Nisi
Hoya ProND 1000
X4 Breakthrough
Formatt/Hi-Tech Firecrest
SRB ND 1000
VF Foto ND 1000
B+W 110
Lee Big Stopper
XC Source ND1000
Tiffen
Welding Glass
These results are shown in order of quality in comparison with the unfiltered version. Some are fairly close to each other, the Kase and Haida are virtually undistinguishable and both very good indeed.
What I did find surprising is that they are all slightly different. I had in my head an assumption that there was a chinese manufacturer of ND filters that was retailing at a low cost for third parties to white label. In fact it does seem like each filter set is to a custom specification. It may be that each company is using the same manufacturer but different recipes but the final treatment of the filters- rounded corners, the way the coating stops before the corner, labelling - suggest otherwise.
I didn't want to rely on a visual test (I did a couple) for a final 'ordering' and so also photographed an X-Rite Colorchecker. You can see a color checker in the bottom left of the scene above, which I used to check the results as well.
I used Imatest to compare the color accuracies of each filter set
In most cases, such small changes in colour can be treated by a simple white balance adjustment. In the following set I have used the Colorchecker in the bottom left corner as a white balance source, using the eyedropper in Lightroom to set the WB.
Comparing Unfiltered with Haida
Choose Which Filters to Compare
Left side
Unfiltered
Haida Nano Pro MC
Kase KW100 Wolverine
ProGrey USA Genesis IR
Lee ProGlass IRND
Nisi
Hoya ProND 1000
X4 Breakthrough
Formatt/Hi-Tech Firecrest
SRB ND 1000
VF Foto ND 1000
B+W 110
Lee Big Stopper
XC Source ND1000
Tiffen
Welding Glass
Right side
Unfiltered
Haida Nano Pro MC
Kase KW100 Wolverine
ProGrey USA Genesis IR
Lee ProGlass IRND
Nisi
Hoya ProND 1000
X4 Breakthrough
Formatt/Hi-Tech Firecrest
SRB ND 1000
VF Foto ND 1000
B+W 110
Lee Big Stopper
XC Source ND1000
Tiffen
Welding Glass
The results are quite interesting as all but the more extreme colour problems have disappeared. The ones where there are still some colour problems are where there is a very strong colour cast, significant infra-red leakage (or possibly some UV) or, if we look at the next section, where the colour spectrum is 'bumpy'.
Colour Spectra
One of the tests I was interested in doing was to find a decent light source and do some spectral transmission measurements using an i1 Pro 2 spectrophotometer. With a software called "Spectrashop" I was able to extract a curve showing the transmission information for a range of different frequencies of light (i.e. for each pure colour). The curves below show a sample comparing seven different filters. The reference filter we are using is the Haida as it had one of the flattest curves, i.e. the most neutral response.
As you can see, the variation in response is quite dramatic. The worst filters show some of the interesting problems. The Tiffen has a remarkably flat curve but leaks huge amounts of red/infra red. This means that it is effectively like a very mild infra red filter and this explains some of the colour problems and why, even if you adjust the white balance, the results don't look like the unfiltered examples. The B+W is very similar although it has a slanting curve in addition, which gives it a stronger warm tone.
The Lee Big Stopper is the interesting example. It has a 'bumpy' response and some mild infra red/red 'leakage'. This probably explains why it won't completely colour correct (the infra red problem). I am also of the feeling that a 'complex' curve with the bumps shown could interact with the digital camera bayer sensor transmission curves to produce 'odd' results. This is probably camera dependent. Any way you look at it, it's not a great result.
The 'better' filters show a great deal of infra red rejection. The X4 Breakthrough filter shows an up tick in infra red transmission at the end of the curve which may cause problems but doesn't look significant (the spectrophotometer used doesn't show deeper infra red frequencies so you can only guess at the transmission based on the trend at the extreme red end of the spectrum).
You can see what is causing the colour cast in most of these filters by looking at the slant of the spectra. If it slants down to the right, it's going to be a blueish cast, down to the left and it's a warm cast (or a big lump in the middle and you're using welding glass aren't you!).
That lump at the far left of the spectrum is the one that is probably adding to the magenta tint on a filter. If you look at the spectral response of a digital camera, the red sensor actually responds to deep blue light a little bit. I think this is to represent the violet colour from the extreme end of the spectrum, the camera needs to mix some red with the blue. Hence if you have a 'bump' in the sensitivity of your filter at the far left end (like the Formatt/Hi-Tech Firecrest filter) then you'll get a bit of a cool/magenta tint.
Comparing Haida Nano Pro MC with Lee Big Stopper
Choose Which Filters to Compare
Before side
Haida Nano Pro MC
Kase KW100 Wolverine
ProGrey USA Genesis IR
Lee ProGlass IRND
Nisi
Hoya ProND 1000
X4 Breakthrough
Formatt/Hi-Tech Firecrest
SRB ND 1000
VF Foto ND 1000
B+W 110
Lee Big Stopper
XC Source ND1000
Tiffen
Welding Glass
After side
Haida Nano Pro MC
Kase KW100 Wolverine
ProGrey USA Genesis IR
Lee ProGlass IRND
Nisi
Hoya ProND 1000
X4 Breakthrough
Formatt/Hi-Tech Firecrest
SRB ND 1000
VF Foto ND 1000
B+W 110
Lee Big Stopper
XC Source ND1000
Tiffen
Welding Glass
From looking at the visual representation of these filters, I would group them into the following sets
Very Good
Haida Nano Pro MC
Kase KW100 Wolverine
ProGrey
Lee ProGlass IRND
Nisi
Good
Formatt/Hi-Tech Firecrest
X4 Breakthrough
Hoya ProND 1000
SRB ND 1000
Poor
VF Foto ND 1000
B+W 110
XC Source
Tiffen
Lee Big Stopper
ND filter performance isn't all about colour casts though, after all as long as the filter corrects (and the Very good will correct if there is any cast and for most situations the Good will also) then it's how the filter works in practise. So let's look at the reflection control and also see we lose any resolution when photographing through the filters.
Reflections
In order to assess reflections, I set up a collimated light source (basically a flat spectrum LED light at the end of a vacuum cleaner extension hose) and shone light at the filter and then used a diffuser (the top of a lightbox) to catch the reflection. I then photographed the other side of the diffuser with a camera set on manual. I tested at 45 degrees to begin with but noted that the reflections were different depending on the angle of incidence and so tested at 20 degrees (almost head on) and also at 80 degrees (just skimming the surface). I've compiled the results into a big grid. Some of the filters had different reflections on each side (the most notable of these was the Firecrest which reflected a lot more light off the back surface than the front). You can see the captions next to each grid if you click on the larger version.
I won't go into a great deal of detail analysing these results but it's generally as you would expect. The more expensive square coated filters (Lee, Nisi, Kase and Haida) did well and the plain glass round filters didn't do so well. The exceptions were the Firecrest which didn't do that great, the Hoya ND which did very well for a round glass filter, the X4 Breakthrough did a bit better than the cheaper round filters and the Lee ProGlass IRND which did exceptionally well all round.
Sharpness
Having done 'sharpness' testing at length in various guises, I know how much variability is involved and hence this analysis is really just to see if there are any general trends and any serious outliers. I used the Sigma 24mm f/1.4 lens at f/11 and placed a slanted edge in the corner of the frame and used Imatest to calculate the sharpness of that edge. I repeated these tests in different places, outside and inside, natural light and artificial, printed edge and a hard edge of a black plastic sheet. And after spending most of a day analysing the results I only saw a consistent problem with one filter, the Hoya ND. The problem was a ghosting effect in the radial direction and a few pixels. All of the other filters had no issues and I really don't know why this might be. There is a little evidence that the firecrest filters are the sharpest of the bunch but so close to the other square metal coated filters that it's difficult to tell. The round filters are generally a little softer with the X4 being the best out of them (probably because it's metal coated again).
Take these results with a pinch of salt though - it is quite possible that the differences are statistical anomalies and I shall do some more testing of the outliers to check. The conclusion here would be don't worry as long as you aren't using the Hoya ND (and even that may be a one off with my filter?).
Packaging and Protection
One of the complaints I have heard from many people about the Lee Big Stopper is it's awful packaging. The tin case may protect the filter but it looks tatty very quickly and the sponge/foam that holds the filter in place is a pain to keep in position. Looking at the different ways the manufacturers protect their filters was interesting.
Nisi use a hard container to hold their filter holder and a range of filters. This is bulky and a bit awkward and early designs had problems marking the filters (solved in later iterations).
Haida use a tin box but with a fixed harder foam insert that stays in place and which makes it easy to insert the filter.
ProGrey and Kase both use hard sleeve with a folding top held in place with a magnet. Lee ProGlass ND is in a sleeve but with an elastic strap that holds the filter in.
Firecrest supply a very large plastic tray with foam inserts (no edge foam protection though).
Although the sleeve solution doesn't complete protection against 'bending' and hence could break, it would have to be a great deal of force to do so. The best protection is probably the tin box but even then I'm not sure it would cope with being trodden on. The easiest to use is definitely the Lee sleeve with the strap but you would have to ensure storing the filter somewhere clean to stop sand/grit getting inside. Overall, it's a matter of taste I think.
Accuracy
Using a Sekonic light meter, I measured the difference between with and without the filter and charted the results. All of the filters were within 2% of the 10 stop nominal value apart from the VFFoto, SRB and X4. I measured these at between 4% and 5% off. The Tiffen was very odd as it only showed 5 stops but I think this was confusing the light meter with it's infra red leaking. Barring the Tiffen, VFFoto, SRB and X4 I'd be happy with the rest as they are all within a third of a stop.
Conclusions
Let's take a look at our overall results in a table including the retail price
Filter
Shape
Price
Cast
Reflection
Notes
Haida Nano Pro MC
100mm
£100
Very good
Very good
Can be difficult to get hold of. Beware of non-nanopro version
Kase KW100 Wolverine
100mm
£140
Very good
Very good
No foam gasket as their holder has one integrated.
ProGrey USA Genesis IR
100mm
£140
Very good
Good
US only. Price estimate plus 20% VAT
Lee ProGlass IRND
100mm
£180
Very good
Very good
Nisi
100mm
£122
Very good
Very good
Formatt/Hi-Tech Firecrest
100mm
£90
Good
Good
Hoya ProND 1000
Round 77mm
£60
Good
Fair
X4 Breakthrough
Round 77mm
£166
Good
Good
US only. Price estimate plus 20% VAT
SRB ND 1000
Round 77mm
£34
Good
Fair
VF Foto ND 1000
Round 77mm
£72
Poor
Fair
Czech only
B+W 110
Round 77mm
£84
Poor
Fair
Lee Big Stopper
100mm
£100
Poor
Fair
XC Source ND1000
Round 77mm
£11
Poor
Fair
Tiffen
Round 77mm
£130
Poor
Fair
So it looks like the Haida filter is probably the best in terms of price and performance and it was the only filter that was almost completely neutral, the other being the Kase Wolverine. They are closely followed by the Progrey and the Lee Pro Glass IRND which is an excellent performer for a bit extra pocket damage and had the best reflection control. Nisi are good and Firecrest are almost as good and also cheaper.
If I were on a budget though, I'd be happy to use the SRB filter which for £34 performs extremely well! (and many people prefer using round filters!).
The only filters to avoid are really the very cheap ones or the older resin or colour glass style filters which have a lot of infra red leakage.
If you have any questions about these results, please let us know and we'll try to address them as soon as possible.
Thank you to everyone who has helped put this together including friends who have loaned equipment and manufacturers who have helped in supplying some (and Charlotte who has approved the purchase of the remaining - I now have far too many 10 stop filters!)
UPDATE: I ended up buying a range of Hoya ProND filters, a 4 stop, a 6 stop and the 10 stop from the test. I preferred these to the SRB because they rejected more infrared.
Our 4x4 feature is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios from our subscribers, each consisting of four images related in some way. You can view previous 4x4 portfolios here.
We're always on the lookout for new portfolios, so please do get in touch! If you would like to submit your 4x4 portfolio, please visit this page for submission information.
*Shout out* as we are looking for contributions for the next few issues, so please do get in touch if you're interested!
Please click the images to see the portfolios in full.
Four Islands in The South Atlantic - all with a rugged beauty and all very remote.
Elephant Island - we met some very harsh weather which gave us brief exposure to what we can only imagine Shackleton and his crew went through.
South Georgia - After a couple of days of what just seemed like an endless expanse of rough seas, the Island of South Georgia on the horizon, no matter how daunting it looked, was a welcome sight.
Deception Island - the flooded caldera of an active volcano. Some evidence of the whaling operations
St Helena - Volcanic and tropical this is one of the most remote islands in the world.
We moved to this area 7 years ago but only last year I became aware that there are wildflowers on ancient chalk downland on Bepton Down SSSI.
The season is relatively short so I like to climb up the hill whenever I can and enjoy the views and abundance of wild flowers. It is a challenge to capture this scene, giving it justice but also trying to convey the atmosphere to others who don’t or can’t make the way up the Down.
From the side of Bepton Down you have a view across to Cocking Down and can see the South Downs Way which connects the Downs between Winchester and Eastbourne.
This year I also discovered another ancient meadow at Valewood Park near Haslemere which is covered in orchids late May/early June. The season is now over and I’m planning to learn some more techniques to create some more abstract imagery next year.
