Completely entranced and with goosebumps stippled arms, I sat staring at the large cinema style screen in front of me. I could barely take a breath. Before me was an underwater world that was filled with mystery and inexplicable beauty. The speaker’s voice faded into the background as my mind’s eye wandered around and through a watery realm. Like Alice in Wonderland, I had been shrunk and placed in an environment I had never imagined seeing. Mesmerizing light from above filtered through the veins of the translucent canopy and gently painted my surroundings. I felt the teasing tug of the river current as the stems of the giant lily pads slowly waltzed to the rhythm of nature. The fantasy was holding me captive, and I did not want it to end. I felt one with the image before me.

Such was one of my most overwhelming visual experiences with a photograph. It was one that helped me understand the profound power of an image. In fact, it may have been a pivotal moment for me, as a novice photographer, to recognize the true significance and impact of capturing and portraying the true magic of nature.

I was roused from my reverie when the next image came up on the screen and the voice of the speaker once again reached my ears. It was the voice of world-renowned photographer Frans Lanting. From that moment on I was hooked on every word.

Considered one of the greatest photographers of the natural world, Frans Lanting is best known for immersing himself, literally and figuratively, into the environment and capturing aspects of nature seldom seen. His eye-level, expressive images always excite viewers as they share his discovery of the extraordinary wonders of the world.

RPS Landscape Group Exhibition

By Howard Klein | May 29, 2022

The Landscape Group of the RPS have launched an outdoor exhibition across several cities for 2022. Having just opened in Edinburgh and running until 18th June, the event will move next to York, then south and finally moving towards London in the autumn. We chose an outdoor exhibition to show the genre to a wider audience, including passers-by, and to give a standard “look & feel” as the event moves around the UK.

This is a first time exhibition by the group to show members’ work, with images chosen on a Selection Day back in February. The 61 images have been printed onto vinyl and onto 22 high-quality, weather-resistant boards; local RPS members have very kindly volunteered to support each location. We are pleased with how the first event looks, 2 runs totalling 25 metres at opposite corners of St. Andrew Square, by the major tram stop. The York location is also central, on the riverside in front of York Museum Gardens

· 22nd May to 18th June St Andrew Square in central Edinburgh.
· 26th June to 10th July Dame Judi Dench Walk, York (*on the Riverside adjacent to Museum Gardens.)

Further locations and dates for the exhibition as we move south will be announced in due course.
More details are here: https://rps.org/Landscape-EXPO22/

Here are four images, with a few comments from the photographers.

Church in the Sea, by Rolf Kraehenbuehl ARPS

I consider myself fortunate to live near the North Wales Coast, with many stunning locations. Living near these places allows repeat visits throughout the different seasons and at various times of the day. St. Cwyfan's Church, often also called "Church in the Sea", is a small, lovely chapel off the west coast of Anglesey. Before the pandemic, it was still used three times a year for service.

The chapel is accessible by foot only, via a tidal causeway. The church is often photographed when completely surrounded by the sea, or with the causeway partially submerged and with the still visible tops of the rocks along the causeway serving as a leading line towards the chapel. Looking for a different composition and viewing angle - away from the main tripod holes - it took me many visits at different heights of the tide, and a good deal of crouching and crawling on the beach, to finally spot this small rock formation, which I've chosen as the foreground, to create an image which is hopefully a bit different.

Loch Tay Island, by Janet Lowe LRPS

I took this photograph from the shores of Loch Tay in the town of Kenmore in Perthshire. The mountain in the distance is Ben Lawers, one of Scotland’s highest mountains. I waited for the evening light to be reflected in the loch and chose an exposure that captured the lovely stillness of the scene. I am delighted to see my image included in this exhibition. The RPS Landscape Group organises many interesting projects and motivates me to continue to develop my practice as a landscape photographer. I hope the photographs inspire members of the public to see the world in new ways.

Contemplation, by Ingrid Popplewell

This is an image of an iconic lighthouse at Burnham on Sea on the north Somerset coast. But rather than being about the lighthouse it is about the mood conveyed by the little structure seemingly contemplating its vast, and on this occasion, calm and peaceful, seascape. This image is only possible at certain times of the year when there is a particularly high tide which coincides with the sunset.

Reach for the Sky, by Alastair Purcell LRPS

The photo was taken at Win Green Hill, the highest point on Cranborne Chase in Wiltshire, where there is a copse of beech trees. The copse lends itself to a fisheye lens shot, for which I had to lie on my back and shoot vertically up, producing a converging picture of tree trunks and branches, giving the impression of veins in a human body. It was shot with a high ISO giving a fast shutter speed to minimise movement due to wind on that cold January day.

Notes on RPS Landscape Group

The RPS, current patron HRH The Duchess of Cambridge, was founded in 1853 to promote the art and science of photography. Today, the RPS mission is to bring inspiration, creativity and connection through photography to people of all ages and backgrounds.

The Landscape Group is one of the biggest of the 16 special interest groups within the RPS. It exists to promote landscape photography in all forms with a very broad definition of landscape ranging from urban, though industrial to classical.

The RPS Landscape Group has over 1,000 members, producing a wide range of images across the genre. This multi-city exhibition of members’ work is the first to be held by the group. For further details, contact: Howard Klein.

Lost Forest

By Kenneth Meijer | May 28, 2022

This photo series is my attempt to convey what I experience and feel when I see a clear-cut forest. Many of us share feelings of discomfort and horror when we encounter them. This ravaging of our forests is not a new phenomenon; it has been in practice for centuries.

About 5,000 years ago, people migrated to Sweden with livestock and grains. They farmed the soil so that they could harvest grains and grind them into flour, from which they were able to bake bread. To create the plots of land they needed, they burnt down the trees in the forest. The ashes from that helped to fertilise the soil for several crops. When the yield started to decrease, they just moved on and burnt down new plots of land.

The heavy usage of the forests has continued in other ways throughout the centuries. The reason is that it has enabled other industries like mining and construction to thrive.

Protests against the harsh exploitation of forests are nothing new and have taken place for centuries. In January 1788, an official reported on the state of Swedish forestry in a speech he gave to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. During that speech, he mentioned that in a region of Sweden, during the short period 1760-1765, more than 85,000 oak trees had been felled and only about 2,300 replanted.

Why does modern forestry upset us so much today? Forests and climate change are heavily associated and, as growing forests bind large amounts of carbon, they become interesting to preserve. Also, the last remnants of old-growth forests are cut down, mainly in our mountainous forests. These old-growth forests are irreplaceable. Another serious factor is the widespread depletion of biodiversity. The harvesting also takes place at a high rate. All this suggests that we should reduce logging.

On the other hand, our desire to create a fossil-free society means we're looking for ways to replace fossil-based products with fossil-free ones. Therefore, we turn to the forest to replace plastic with forest-based materials, build with wood to avoid using concrete, and replace fossil fuels with biofuels. In addition to using the wood in various products, forests felled to make way for wind turbines; etc. All this creates an extremely high demand for forest products and more felling, which does not add up.

Doing the wrong things just because we have been doing it for many hundreds of years is not a good enough excuse. A better approach is to learn from history to solve the paradox of reducing and increasing the logging rate at the same time.

Technical Information

I have used ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) with one exposure in my camera to create this series of images. Images edited using Lightroom Classic and Photoshop.

Classical Photographers and Jazz Photographers

By Guy Tal | May 28, 2022

I’ll play it and tell you what it is later. ~Miles Davis

Ansel Adams spent much of his early years training to become a classical pianist. He often mused about the ways his musical training has influenced his photography. In one interview, Adams said, “Study in music gave me a fine basis for the discipline of photography. I’d have been a real Sloppy Joe if I hadn’t had that.” Adams also famously claimed, “The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance.” Adams’s reference to discipline and his analogy of performing a composer’s score, likely are relatable to anyone familiar with the rigours of practising and performing classical music.

Adams’s reference to discipline and his analogy of performing a composer’s score, likely are relatable to anyone familiar with the rigours of practising and performing classical music.

But such references may not apply in quite the same way to jazz musicians who rely just as much on improvisation as on performing well practised written scores.

The realisation occurred to me some years ago when preparing a set of prints for an exhibition. Although I had printed the same images numerous times before, I found myself re-editing every one of them, some in quite different ways from my original visualisation. My original exposures—film and RAW files—did not point me to any singular “right” interpretation in the same way that a composer’s score might direct a classical performer. Instead, these exposures and the memory of their making set a general mood—a visual rhythm—for me: a baseline to improvise around, in some cases to depart from, in a quite undisciplined, spontaneous, and enjoyable way.

Although I recalled my original intents and visualisations quite vividly, I also experienced new epiphanies, experimented with new interpretations, applied tools and techniques I did not have when making my initial edits, and in some cases ended up “performing” quite different “visual music” than I originally conceived. I realised then that performing a score was not a good analogy to describe my way of working. Instead, I felt more like I was jamming, riffing, improvising, and experimenting in much the same way that a jazz musician may explore new possibilities while playing.

Michela Griffith

By Michéla Griffith | May 26, 2022

This has been something I’ve been meaning to write for a while, but usually I’m busy with other things, like interviews (sometimes it feels a bit like playing keepy uppy). Now seems like the right time to take stock both before it is too late, and because it may just help inform where I go next. In late October 2021 we moved home after 14 years, returning to Scotland. As we all know, the ball never really stops rolling and it’s easy to just keep on ‘doing’. I know previously that hitting pause and reflecting on where I am, photographically speaking, has helped me immeasurably.

I was asked at the last On Landscape conference when my interview with myself might appear. And while Tim has previously been interviewed by, er, Tim it did give me an idea - to write a piece about ‘Revisited’ as a theme, a way of working. And yes, an update along the way.

I can’t believe it’s been 4 years since I wrote my last article ‘Successful Definitions’. I never expected it to prompt the reaction that it did, but I was very happy that so many people found that it resonated. In writing this I thought that I’d better re-read it. Otherwise, it’s a bit like all the strategies that are commissioned and written, filed on a bookshelf, and then rewritten again. I’m never sure that we’re very good at strategy in the UK. Slightly depressingly, much of what I wrote remains true for me and I haven’t made the inroads that I’d hoped for at the time. Including writing more! There’s no point beating myself up about it; quite a bit has happened to deflect my attention and energies. We are where we are. It’s a reminder that progress isn’t linear. “A line is a dot that went for a walk,” Paul Klee. I’m walking, slowly.

Patterns of Flow, from the series ‘A Memory of Water’
A reminder that progress isn’t linear.

At the time Tim interviewed me for the Featured Photographer series way (way) back in 2011 we had been living in the Peak District for 4 years and this had allowed me to build on my preference for exploring and going out on foot with my camera. Initially, I got a little sidetracked by the broad views and spent a couple of years working with a Hasselblad Xpan. I remember being a little disappointed that Tim didn’t choose any of my panoramics. I’d also bought a Mamiya 7II as I loved working with film. Now I hardly recognise myself in the images that are featured. They’re not as good as I hoped they were at the time, but I now see them very differently.

Little did I know it but things would change massively for me the following year, in 2012. My preference for sticking to my local patch and walking to make images was just beginning to feel like a constraint when I was told that the fatigue that had been haunting me was probably post viral fatigue. At times it was difficult to find the energy for anything but whenever I could, I forced myself to go for short walks. During these slow ambles my constraints became opportunity and opened up a new avenue to explore that I could not have previously anticipated. I’ve written about this for On Landscape before (Finding the Individual and Take Me to the River) so I won’t duplicate it. But the river - and water specifically - gave me a focus and encouraged me to experiment. I guess looking back, it had the energy that I lacked, and I borrowed of it. Due to the inherent unpredictability of photographing moving subject matter, digital finally made sense. I valued the flexibility it gave me over shutter speed and ISO, as well as the instant feedback of the LCD screen. Suddenly, there seemed to be so many possibilities. None of this would have happened without familiarity with an area - or the fatigue - and the ability to keep going back. Time after time.

From Waterfalls to Waves
The river gave me a focus, encouraged me to experiment, and finally digital made sense

I spent nine years happily returning to the same, small, place. The constraint of this and the blinkers it forged for me gave me freedom from what others were doing, the chance to follow my curiosity, and to ‘play’. I wouldn’t have it any other way. ‘Revisited’ became my way of working. I still enjoy views of the landscape, but they aren’t what I want to make. As I continued my dialogue with the river, I found that it also shaped my view of the land and the lines between the two softened. My interpretations stopped being just intimate and became increasingly abstract.

Ondine
Water has also shaped my view of the land

Water has been a good teacher; through it, I have learned:

To ‘see’ more; everything from the smallest, most ephemeral, details to the way that different shutter speeds render the movement of the water and all that it reflects (flow and sometimes breeze introduce both possibility and uncertainty) to the spots of sunlight that dance and elongate magically with time.
That we learn more by getting it wrong than by getting it right. So all that effort at emulation - the right spot, the right time, the right weather etc. - can actually be counterproductive. Experimentation is important, nay vital - ‘what if I?’
To ‘see’ more; everything from the smallest, most ephemeral, details to the way that different shutter speeds render the movement of the water and all that it reflects (flow and sometimes breeze introduce both possibility and uncertainty) to the spots of sunlight that dance and elongate magically with time
To let go (mostly) of the reins that everything needs to be sharp and in focus. I wonder how much this empathy for the soft is the product of my own myopia, my natural way of seeing.
That I don’t need to travel; there is potential in the smallest of spaces. Although mine happened to be within a National Park, my chosen spot was not conventionally pretty, and I wasn’t making a representative record but interpreting things that provoked a response in me. My self-imposed constraints made me work harder and served to liberate my imagination.
That it’s important to find something that makes you curious, and see where it goes (the Helsinki Bus Station theory again). Note that I didn’t say ‘find something that inspires you’. I’m looking for creative growth, not high impact.
That it is easier to create individual work by following this stumbling path than by looking at what others have done. Occasional overlaps happen coincidentally and it can be hard at times to come across parallels when you think you’ve embarked on something very different and personal. I’ve been looking through some pins I’d saved and came across a word - “Sillage”. I kept it for the reference to water - the wake left after the thing that caused it has gone - but in writing this its connection with perfume gains the upper hand and ‘scent trail’ seems even more apt. We’re all looking for something that we can find and follow.

Transcriptions of Light
A single, timed exposure that is naturally monochromatic

It ticks a few other boxes for me - ephemeral, unpredictable, dynamic - and shows just how much there is that we don’t ordinarily notice. It led to a handmade Japanese stab bound book and some prints, and had some success in the Px3 Prix de la Photographie Awards 2020, but it still feels like there is unfinished business for me. Other things got in the way and I wasn’t able to spend the time creating - evolving - the outputs that I’d wanted to. There’s always a temptation too to keep going back, and make more images, and doubtless that got in the way too.

In 2020’s first lockdown I guess I could have argued that taking my camera to the river could be part of my essential exercise, but I didn’t. It didn’t feel right. In theory, the situation should have given me the distance and time that I needed to progress the presentation, and it was my intention to chase down the idea of looking into what I could do to make these more individual. But it took a while to get to the point mentally where I felt able to be creative and the tentative start I’d made at the beginning of the year pre-pandemic ground to a halt. I also got sidetracked.

In theory, the situation should have given me the distance and time that I needed to progress the presentation, and it was my intention to chase down the idea of looking into what I could do to make these more individual.

I signed up for an artist friend’s online workshop on the basis that the sessions on ‘texture’ and ‘finishing’ would help me with this but my inner child got a little carried away, having not picked up a paintbrush for over 30 years. A love of drawing and painting took me to my profession (landscape architecture) but when computers took over and advancement meant less time doing the creative bits, photography became my escape. With no events to direct my output, and galleries closed, the freedom to just make in 2020 was liberating. I had no expectations of producing anything for view, or even anything much at all.

I could also go back to making books: they were a comfort zone; a natural end, EPs of images and thoughts, and I began to collect images, observations, on my daily walk with this in mind. The work that went into these and their theme was inevitably a response to our situation and the new vocabulary we learned.

In 2021 I added more to my palette of choices with courses on e-publishing and artists’ sketchbooks. Nothing like approaching it from both ends!

I started to tie myself in knots by reinstating expectation. Somehow I went from “this is interesting and enjoyable” to “I should be improving to the point of producing something”.

When the time came around to select images for display again, I found myself not enjoying the experience. It feels a bit like trying to pick out a potential hit single when I really want to share an album. In isolation I felt that the images lacked context. I like building collections - connections - and series.

With the galleries opening up ‘ought to’ again raised its head. I’m not comfortable with it, and I again went on ‘sabbatical’ from my local artists’ group before ‘live’ events returned (my notes from the time show I wrote that ‘it might become permanent’). The simple fact is I’m happiest behind the camera, or doing other ‘creative’ things.

Pellucid: From A Memory Of Water (series)

Pellucid
The title draws on the transparency of the water and the reflection of light from its surface. The images I ended up choosing for galleries were mostly blue. I wonder what that says.

I intended to resurrect my plan for 2020 - print development. And with the art courses, this meant working with other media too and trying to work out if I could integrate the different strands. And then we threw a big spanner in the works and moved 400 miles north to Scotland. It’s a big change to process, and a couple of months in I realised that after so many years it wasn’t just a case of unpacking, getting the house straight, and off you go…

Sometimes, when I’m working up questions for interviews, I find threads that are relevant to the interviewee but are also things that I realise I want to ask of myself. “Did you find that you needed to allow yourself time to absorb the landscape, to listen, and to understand what story you wanted to tell and how to do so?” I’ve learned that after the dust settles, you don’t necessarily pick up from where you were; you need to learn to breathe (in) again and decide how to exhale. And only then does what has gone before feed into it.

For many years, I couldn’t imagine photographing anything other than water and would have been very reluctant to leave that little place by the river, such was the effect that it had on me. There will be threads that continue and I do have the opportunity to tackle that unfinished business - but inevitably we react to new stimuli, and these are more plentiful here. Initially it was trees that whispered most loudly; these come a close second to water for me and at times have appeared in my images of the river. It’s been hard to ignore them ‘doing their thing’. I have much more diversity to choose from on my doorstep, a tempting outlook from the window, and last winter gave me better light than I’ve experienced for the past 10 years. It was a little like being let loose in a sweetie shop.

I found that post-move, I didn’t have the energy for social media, and took a break. And then, I found the habit broken. It took me three months and a nudge to begin again, just at the time when events again shook us out of any complacency that might we have accumulated. Photography and art felt like a frivolity, but after a while again they offered me sanctuary.

I began to see connections in the things that talk to me here: patterns, textures, layers, nature’s mark making. Movement. Differentials of focus from sharp to blur. From working almost exclusively with a 100mm macro lens I’ve been looking at things using the long end of a 24-200mm zoom lens. A new compact camera gave me a lighter, freer, way of working. So far it’s been about the response, the reaction to what I see, rather than what I might do with the images. A lot of time can be spent looking for the ‘perfect’ landscape but I learn more from the imperfect and the ephemeral; a slow burn, rather than fast love, coming to know a place and what of it prompts a response in me.

From (attempting to) exercise control of self, of work, of practice (timing of visit and technique - tripod, depth of field, shutter speed) I’ve shifted to a looser way of working (subject movement, largely hand held, experimental). It feels more comfortable, more representative of who I am now rather than anything that I may see. In the past it was easy to say whose work inspired me. Now there are photographers whose work I admire, and images that I enjoy, but inspiration is more likely to come from other sources. That doesn’t mean that I actively seek it; I’m quite happy to stumble along and see what happens. And a lot of the time, I’m simply inspired by what I experience when I’m out walking. The dullest day can bring unexpected colour; the smallest short-lived pool is a story yet to be told - and these are the words that I’m beginning to string together into phrases.

Constellation
The smallest pool is a story yet to be told. It offers me a new sky and on the edges of the moss there are stars to be found.

In art I like looser ways of making marks. Softening the line. Colouring over the edges (which I never did as a child). Surrendering full control.

On Pinterest (I was late to that too, and am still erratic, as with much of social media) I collect images that I associate with water, and sometimes land. Over time they have become more abstract. There are some photos, but it’s mostly other media. There’s a lot of mark-making and in my messy dabbles this is something that really interests me due to the inherent limits that improvised tools and techniques can place on how a line is made.

I continue to collect other things, adding to a four year old ‘Transcriptions’ board https://www.pinterest.co.uk/michela_griffith/transcriptions/ that draws on and has fed into ‘A Memory of Water’. Visual parallels, and notes to myself: calligraphy and asemic writing, maps, neural networks, and so many other things.

On Twitter I’ve found art and creativity. It’s not the most obvious platform I know, but I’ve found it a good way to broaden my outlook and find people I would not have otherwise come across. Since I’ve gone back onto Instagram, I’ve found too that the algorithm is more generous in showing me things of interest in addition to the accounts I follow.

I think that the key thing here is that the medium is not important, but the message. I’ve been trying to work out what I like. My list has:

Water
Trees
Movement (energy)
Abstraction
Intimate / personal
Mark-making
Selective focus, and defocus
Blue recurs, but I can now identify a number of palettes of colour from the landscape that inspire me
Inks and paint (water as medium)
Small pieces - things that encourage you to look more closely
Detail; pattern and texture; layers
Playing / experimenting
Sketchbooks, or even better loose sheets (no pressure about spoiling the page or producing a ‘finished’ piece)
Things I can’t fully control (tools, ways of working). The possibility of something unexpected.
Evocation, not representation
Working locally, walking to a place.
Going back, scratching away at the surface. Revisiting

Luminous
Water still tops my list, for the many ways it shows me things that I think I know – and some that I don’t. It’s about evocation, rather than representation.

This brings me back to my lines of enquiry, but also to knowing myself. I used to think of myself as a perfectionist; now I find I’m good at starting things but don’t always finish them. I think of new things to do. Sometimes I have too many ideas. I need to write these down and spend time on those that help me progress. Attention to detail matters, but over the last four years my practice has been subject to interruptions and things have at times felt chaotic. My brain is less orderly than it used to be. I’m happiest creating / making / exploring. Finding out what’s round the next ‘corner’. I like seeing interesting work on social media, but comparisons are unhelpful.

I’ve come to realise that you can’t force things. It’s been a big change, and not all of the reasons that I had for doing things previously are still applicable. I feel like I need to be kind to myself, allow time and that breathing space.

I really enjoyed playing with paint and ink but it all got tidied away when the last house had to be photographed and marketed, and I began to wonder when or even if it would come out again. Winter used to be a good time for trying things inside, but this time it’s kept calling me out to play.

I can see a future with prints, books and hopefully more writing and art. I just have to work out how I get there. The paint and ink finally came out again in February.

But at the end of the day, what’s the hurry? It’s not for ever, it’s just for now, a welcome distraction from a reality that can be hard to contemplate. I wonder if ‘normal’ will ever return. Perhaps we deluded ourselves that it was ever there, other than in our own little spheres.

It doesn’t need to lead somewhere. There doesn’t have to be a result - focussing on one strips the joy. If painters can concentrate on the process, why can’t photographers? Is it the immediacy of what we do?

One - small - step at a time. What if? What now? And repeat.

Focus on the process, not the results. If I run out of time, so be it. There’s no fame or fortune waiting, no legacy to be left. When I’m gone, no-one will care about what I’ve made.

What am I curious about? What appeals to me? Why? What do I want to say about it? What do I want my new mirror to reveal?

To be continued…

A new audience
I’ve already spent many happy hours on the edge of the moss. Someday I may get further! As my pools have dried out, I’m back to the trees which, in May, are finally leafing out. The softness of the water is travelling with me.

: Patterns of Flow, from the series ‘A Memory of Water’. A reminder that progress isn’t linear.

: From Waterfalls to Waves.
The river gave me a focus, encouraged me to experiment, and finally digital made sense

: Ondine
Water has also shaped my view of the land

: Transcriptions of Light
A single, timed exposure that is naturally monochromatic

: Pellucid
The title draws on the transparency of the water and the reflection of light from its surface. The images I ended up choosing for galleries were mostly blue. I wonder what that says.

: Constellation
The smallest pool is a story yet to be told. It offers me a new sky and on the edges of the moss there are stars to be found.

: Luminous
Water still tops my list, for the many ways it shows me things that I think I know – and some that I don’t. It’s about evocation, rather than representation.

: A new audienc.
I’ve already spent many happy hours on the edge of the moss. Someday I may get further! As my pools have dried out, I’m back to the trees which, in May, are finally leafing out. The softness of the water is travelling with me.

Past masters – Part One

By Francesco Carovillano | May 23, 2022

It is commonly said that a way to foresee the future is to study the past. I believe this is also valid when it comes to better relating our daily choices with the present time, including choices about photography.

Since I started to dive deeper into the expressive power of image composition through nature photography, I felt a strong desire to know more about the great artists from the past, especially landscape painters. Beyond getting to know their masterpieces, my main interest lies in comprehending their life decisions and how they shaped their artistic journey. From their beginnings to filling entire museum halls. I wanted to know it all, so I knew, I’ll never be done.

We knew their greatest feats but we don’t know anything about their personal life: How did they organise their days? Were they happy about their artistic output? Who taught them composition? Did they ever doubt themselves? Were they struggling with their parents' judgement? Did they have a supportive wife or partner? Were they part of a group of close minded artists or solitary outcasts in their pursuits?

Once we start to know a bit about any past master, a funny game to play is to imagine how they would act towards today’s modern life. Do you picture the introvert Vincent Van Gogh posting his painting on social media? And, can you imagine the number of vulgarities that Cézanne would have said if he didn’t appreciate the brushwork? (yes, he was quite direct).

Seriously, It can be quite illuminating and even liberating to perceive what they would care or not care about in today’s reality. Although from a technological standpoint their life would have been simpler, they had to face some of the same problems that we also face today, but on top of that, they also had problems we won’t have to face in the same way as them, precisely because they fought those battles for us.

This made me realise that the problems they faced were the right problems to challenge. As already said, some of those problems will always be challenging for us too. Such as problems about finding inspiration, tranquillity, and purposeful ambitions to convert into artistic authenticity and meaningful creative advancements.

Personally, I find this new understanding to be indeed revealing and liberating. Besides, allowing us to get to know how they made space for creativity and pursued their subjective idea of meaningful art, it frees us from the false notion that they were simply born genius.

Old dog, new tricks?

By Mark Lawrence | May 23, 2022

They say life’s a journey, don’t they? I have always enjoyed travelling, whether it is just a train ride to work or a flight to somewhere more exotic, although, with the former, I find the journey is often more rewarding than the destination! Indeed my son has recently remarked that it seems to him that the more perverse and difficult the journey, the more I like it, and I think he is probably right!

In my case, travelling, and trains, in particular, have always been something I really enjoy and my photography began as I tried to capture the trains that I saw and loved. Even as a teenager I realised I wanted to record not only the train, but its surroundings, placing it in some sort of context. In railway magazines of the time, most photographs were monochrome, with colour being reserved for the cover and occasionally a special feature. Naturally, I was therefore drawn to black and white and, with the good fortune of a darkroom at school, the journey began.

Over the subsequent 30+ years, my skills as a railway photographer improved, and when weather conditions permitted, I even dabbled with a little colour. My work was published in magazines from time to time and, after much effort, I published a book of my work in southern England.

However, it was the love of the wild landscapes of Scotland that I enjoyed most, especially the West Highland line rounding the well-known Horseshoe Curve and crossing the hauntingly desolate Rannoch Moor. Whilst the mountains, lochs and moors always factored in my images of the wonderfully scenic railways, I rarely, if ever, considered photographing the landscape without a train in it. On the few occasions that I did try, the results were disappointing and this merely confirmed that I should stick with trains. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, I realise that trying to make a successful image as an afterthought is almost always doomed to fail, in addition to which the weather conditions needed for the style of railway image I wanted to create were almost the polar opposite of those required in most landscape images.

Despite the relentless increase in the use of colour in most media, I worked primarily with black and white until 2008 when I started to dabble with digital imaging. Other than holiday snaps, railways remained the primary driver of my photography, although digital technology made experimentation much easier and so new approaches emerged that were simply impossible with film. I found this an exciting time and feel that digital cameras reinvigorated my photography which, on reflection, had become somewhat formulaic and staid. Enthused with the low light capability of digital and still in love with the landscapes through which the Scottish rail routes weave, I found I was making images that were much more about the landscape and less about the train. Even my long-suffering wife was starting to like some of my images, although her comments were usually about the wonderful landscape rather than the train!

Having long since abandoned my home darkroom set up, largely for reasons of domestic practicality, but still with a love of a print in the hand, I embarked on a somewhat fraught journey into digital printing. It was during this journey that what was to become a pivotal event took place. I was struggling to get my finished prints to match my screen so I decided to book myself onto a printing course.

Struggling to think of what to buy me for a birthday present, decided to abandon the usual bottle of whisky and pair of slippers and instead booked me on a landscape photography workshop in the far north of Scotland! Could the old dog learn some new tricks?

The outcome was that, in the short term, many of my printing issues were resolved, but in the medium term, the whole direction of my photography was to change forever. It wasn’t that resolving my printing issues made me change the direction of my photography, rather that my wife, struggling to think of what to buy me for a birthday present, decided to abandon the usual bottle of whisky and pair of slippers and instead booked me on a landscape photography workshop in the far north of Scotland! Could the old dog learn some new tricks?

Caithness and Sutherland were wonderful. The weather was fabulously mixed and certainly not conducive to my traditional railway photography, but I willingly started the journey into landscape photography. In hindsight, I was a bit like the proverbial child in a sweetshop and most of the resultant images should really be consigned to a digital dustbin, but there were a few that worked and they gave me a new perspective on the landscape. Since that first exciting workshop, I feel as though I am in transition, now able not only to look at the natural world around me but also to make images that hopefully reflect what has been there all along but which I can now see. In the subsequent years, the changes have been such that if I had to put a label on my photography (which I’m not sure I would want to do) it would be ‘landscape photographer’ rather than ‘railway photographer’. For sure I still shoot railways and hope I always will, but this is now secondary to the landscapes through which the trains travel. Today if I am standing by the lineside waiting for an iron horse to pass, I will be looking at the micro and macro aspects of the landscape around me, searching for simple patterns and compositions that will tell the story of the environment I am in and the way I see it.

However, I am more likely to be found walking through landscapes carefully observing, and seeing in a new way, all that nature provides to us. I have always loved being outdoors, especially in Scotland, where the grandeur of the mountains sculpted by nature over hundreds of thousands of years has always made me feel in awe of their sheer scale, but also at home in their comforting shadow. To be in their presence has been enough for me, but now that I am learning to capture just a small part of their beauty in my photographs, I feel that the landscape can comfort me whenever I open a box of prints at home just as it does when I am in its midst.

To be in their presence has been enough for me, but now that I am learning to capture just a small part of their beauty in my photographs, I feel that the landscape can comfort me whenever I open a box of prints at home just as it does when I am in its midst.

Of course, the wretched pandemic that has affected us all in recent times has played a part too. Restricted to local walks for much of the time, travel to ‘exotic’ locations has not been an option and I have been amazed at some of the natural beauty that is so close to home in suburban North West London. As well as local woodland and the Grand Union Canal, I have found intimate little scenes, some only 10 or 20 yards from major roads. It has been a fascinating time which has been photographically rewarding in ways that I could never have imagined 5 years ago.

Without the ‘crutch’ of wide vistas, lochs and mountains, I have also started to use new techniques to complement the traditional skills I had developed during my many years of railway photography. As a lover of monochrome images and having seen some of the inspirational work of Paul Gallagher and others, I invested in an infra-red conversion of an old Nikon DLSR. If moving to landscapes from railways was a challenge then infra-red was another step up and the old dog had to learn even more new tricks. I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience of infra-red and the wonderful range of tones that can be teased from the RAW files; indeed I will now often venture out with only the IR body and one lens for company. I have also been experimenting with ICM and multiple exposure techniques which I find can be useful in capturing certain aspects and moods of the landscape when traditional methods just won’t cut it. Is it true photography? I’m not sure I care, as for me if the results are right then the technique must have been too.

The journey from railway photographer towards landscape photographer has been thoroughly enjoyable and is certainly not complete; indeed in many ways, I hope it will never be. There is still so much to explore, so much to see and so much natural beauty all around us. I feel like I am at Crewe Station with trains going to many varied destinations and I am lucky enough to be able to hop on anyone that happens to take my fancy. Who knows where the journey will take me next? I don’t know and that is the very essence of what makes travel so exciting, after all, every journey is to be savoured and enjoyed and, based on my experience, it seems that old dogs can indeed learn new tricks!

Still Time to Wonder

By Joe Cornish | May 20, 2022

On the summer solstice last year Tim and Charlotte kindly published my article, Drawn to Rock, which describes a commission that included a small exhibition about Brimham Rocks (NT) in North Yorkshire, where it was also shown.

Brimham Rocks was a starter before the main course, a commission to photograph Fountains Abbey/Studley Royal. I am happy – and relieved – to say that this has now been fulfilled. It is hanging in various locations around the Fountains Abbey site. Except that the term “hanging” is a misnomer for reasons that will become clear later.

Without wishing to repeat the circumstances documented in Drawn to Rock, this was an artist-in-residence commission.

My early efforts through 2019 were concentrated on Brimham, and such work as I did attempt at Fountains were rather tentative. There was still time. At that point though no-one could have guessed it would be Covid-19 extended time.

After the pandemic of 2020 caused a suspension of the commission I nevertheless did continue with the work, gradually growing in familiarity and confidence at Fountains Abbey. It was actually a relief when the exhibition date was postponed by a year. This gave far more time to see different seasonal and weather conditions, as well as allowing me to develop the concepts which give structure to the exhibition. The bulk of the work was therefore done through 2020 and 2021, as well as the very beginning of this year.

As a wilderness advocate and addict, I must be honest and say that a commission to photograph a ruined medieval abbey, an 18th century water garden and a carefully controlled and managed deer park was not necessarily my dream assignment. Nevertheless, numerous previous projects have proved that such challenges can be creatively stimulating, perhaps never more so than when you are less than 100% comfortable with the subject matter. And besides, Fountains Abbey estate is always a fabulous place to visit. Not for nothing is it described by historian Mark Newman as “The Wonder of the North”.

UNESCO have granted Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal (to give its full title) World Heritage Site status specifically because of the fusion of different – created – landscapes which follow in sequence down the valley of the River Skell. They describe this as a work of human genius. That could be debated, but there’s no doubt that the longer I spent there the more I grew to appreciate the strange and unique beauty that arises from this combination of the natural and the designed.

The site also encapsulates several centuries of historic human activity, from the spiritual, architectural and early industrial activities of the Abbey, to the grand vision of ordered paradise that are the hallmarks of 18th century landscape design.

Justin Scully, the National Trust’s general manager of the estate, was very keen for me to explore all these habitats, and especially the deer park which is often overlooked because of the charismatic nature of the water garden and the abbey ruins. It was in the Deer Park that I found inspiration and early momentum. There are numerous ancient trees, lime, oak, pine, sycamore, yew, horse chestnut… and sweet chestnut, especially which make compelling subject matter.

Issue 255

By Tim Parkin | May 16, 2022

Click here to download issue 255 (high quality, 132Mb)

Click here to download issue 255 (smaller download, 80Mb)

End frame: Conception Rock by Michael Lundgren

By James Popp | May 15, 2022

In Michael Lundgren’s Conception Rock, two spherical shapes loom out of the darkness. While they appear large, the scale is not clear cut. At first glance, what they are or whether they even belong to this world or not is an open question. The lighting in the photograph only highlights the mystery. There is darkness with the light seeming to come from different directions. The light perhaps makes the spheres seem stranger in the photograph than they probably are in real life. Are they seed pods, vegetables, or something alien?

For Conception Rock, the presence of some very old graffiti both gives some scale to the object and makes one aware that the objects are from this world. The spheres are in fact structures left behind on what was once a seabed and now survive with only minimal decay in a desert environment.

The explanation that the spheres are just ancient remains does not seem to be adequate to me. I look at the photograph and feel a need for more of an explanation. It is not just the subject, but how the photographer has presented the subject. By questioning what is being seen in the photograph, I am being drawn more deeply into the scene and want to know more. What are the forces that would create such an object? Not asking strictly from a geological or biological perspective, but perhaps also from a spiritual level.

Subscribers 4×4 Portfolios

By Peter Roworth, John Dominick, Mark Burley & Karin De Winter & Jo Van Rossem | May 14, 2022

Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted by our subscribers. Each portfolio consists of four images related in some way.

Submit Your 4x4 Portfolio

Interested in submitting your work? We are always keen to get submissions from our subscribers, so please do get in touch!

Peter Roworth

Imagination

John Dominick

Ripples in Time, Harlech Beach

Mark Burley

Celebration of Spring on the River Dart

Karin De Winter and Jo Van Rossem

Crazy River

By Karin De Winter & Jo Van Rossem | May 14, 2022

These four photographs belong to a series we made about the scenery along the Rio Tinto in Spain. We were drawn to the extraordinary patterns and textures created by the continuous natural and historical pollution caused by mining upstream going back to the Roman era. Due to this the water is very acid and has an orange to red tint in the dry season, while the colourful deposits of minerals and metals in mud and on stones give the scenery an otherworldly look that resembles nothing we usually associate with landscapes that we are familiar with.

Celebration of Spring on the River Dart

By Mark Burley | May 14, 2022

This series of four images were taken on a stretch of the River Dart in Spring 2021. This particular part of the river is lined with beech trees and has a stretch of both whitewater and long deep glides. The hues of the fresh beech leaves created some tremendous reflections in a vibrant lime green, which summarised Spring for me instantly.

The whitewater rapids run through swathes of limestone and slate, and fallen trees get trapped in the flow and are pushed up onto the stone creating images (that inspire me) of both decay and wild water simultaneously.

Spring Flow is about the combination of moss covered wood and fast flowing water.

Morning Reflection was my second interpretation of stillness, reflecting on the power of nature.

Downstream is a straight study of the fresh leaves above the river, just before the start of the whitewater.

The colour of Spring is all about the sheer exuberance of that gorgeous colour, combined with water-worn stone.

Ripples in Time, Harlech Beach

By John Dominick | May 14, 2022

A gift from the sea is how I feel about sand ripples. Each tide leaves, in infinite varieties, a signature of wave energy. Some are a work of art in their own right, it almost feels like plagiarism passing them as my own work. It fascinates me to think that most will never be seen by human eyes, many carved and erased during the hours of darkness and on far flung remote shores. At times I’ve stood in awe of their complexity, as if all the mysteries of the universe are written in the sand, a mystical, algebraic formula, defying and redefining the laws of physics.

A favourite holiday haunt of mine is Harlech Beach in North Wales, its vast expanse of sand seems to be the perfect canvas for these water hewn artworks. For the photographer, the miles of sand means that many remain pristine between tides. Nothing is more jarring than a set of size 10 wellington boot prints amid geometric perfection. I have often found myself alone on the beach, especially during winter months and at the end and beginning of the day. This serves to enhance the immersive and contemplative nature of our craft, leading only to further wonder of the elements and the transience of this oceanic artistry. These images represent a small selection of my collection, one that grows with every visit. Close-up studies are favourites as well as these more expansive views, the memory of their making still vivid in my mind. All are portrait format, as is the way I seem to mostly see the world within the confines of a rectangle. Something that’s been questioned and discussed at length, along with some good-natured banter by photographic colleagues. It is always reciprocal.

Ultimately, for me, the experience comes before the image, the image must always be born from that experience after all. Although, as far as experiences go, time spent on a shoreline is never wasted, irrespective of the photographic outcome.

Tendrils

John Dominick

Pools

Ancient

Imagination

By Peter Roworth | May 14, 2022

I am now retired from a working life in nature conservation as a reserve warden in various locations across Great Britain. I always used a camera as part of my work, specialising in the photography of wildflowers, habitat management and the landscape of nature reserves.

Photographs were used to illustrate talks, for promotional literature and in articles and books Including several books for Halsgrove Publishing which I have co-authored with my wife. Recently I have self-published the following titles in Bob Books UK: Panoramic Photography, Images in a Second World War Pillbox, Old Tractors of the Outer Hebrides and Imagination.

Keith Beven’s article The Intimate Panorama, On Landscape, issue 250 inspired me to submit this folio.

Chris Byrne – Portrait of a Photographer

By Matt Payne | May 13, 2022

One of the universal truths about nature photography I’ve come to find through getting to know photographers both in these articles and on my podcast is that at the core of every photographer with superb images is a value-driven motivation. Of course, these values vary widely between every photographer, ranging from a love of natural history, the desire to express challenging emotions or process grief, etc.; however, in the case of Chris Byrne, this value is what he refers to as “the payoff.” While at first glance this choice of words may seem transactional, upon further examination of both Chris as a person and his photographs, one can begin to understand and appreciate them more fully. Chris worked in the stock market for seventeen years and found the life being sucked out of him day by day. There was one glimmer of hope though – he loved being outside with a camera as it brought him peace and joy as well as a much-needed distraction from the busy fast-paced life in the stock market. Through the lens of a stock market worker, Chris began to see his life, and later photography, as an analysis of risk versus reward, with the result being “the payoff” when that calculation was done correctly and with a little bit of luck. As someone who has also spent countless time pursuing big scenes in the mountains with a great deal of personal risk involved, I appreciate Chris’ perspective on nature photography as I believe it provides an interesting framework to operate within.

In Chris’ own words in a well-produced video on his website, the root of risk, when we boil it down, is answered by a simple question: “what are you willing to risk to get what you want?” This includes friends, jobs, family, and of course, time. As we move through life, it can be painful to make an honest assessment of this risk and make excuses as to why we can’t do the things in life that we truly want to do – in Chris’ case, become a full-time photographer instead of a stock market employee. Chris could see his very life slipping through his fingertips like grains of sand. Chris made the plunge into full-time photography in 2015 by moving his family from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Portland, Oregon to get closer to a part of the country that he knew would enrich his life from a photography perspective.

Obviously, giving up a seventeen-year career in the financial industry and moving your family involves significant risk, and I sure am glad that Chris made the decision because I have come to greatly admire his photography, and I think you will as well.

More specifically, the idea of risk and reward being a central component of Chris’ approach to the craft of photography is greatly appealing to me – as it requires one to understand and accept that not every outing will result in portfolio-quality images and that nature might not live up to the expectations that social media has driven us to expect from it. A focus on the reward, as opposed to the risk, is needed. I’m sure many readers can appreciate going to a location with expectations only to be completely skunked by the clouds. Conversely, I think we have all felt the elation when all of the hard work to reach a spot results in an incredible experience that surpasses all expectations. As such, Chris, like me, has embraced a more natural presentation of his images and goes to great lengths to keep his editing as natural as possible by forgoing sky replacements or other forms of additive editing. In his own words, Chris’ embracing of risk and reward results in much more failure than success when it comes to high-quality images; however, when everything lines up, the payoff is a huge rush of emotions and all the hard work that went into all of those “failures” pays dividends.

Like most of us, Chris is not immune to the traps that social media sets before us – scrolling through Instagram and seeing one incredible photo after another can be quite demoralising as opposed to providing inspiration.

Chris shared with me that he hears from his students quite frequently that they feel like they can’t compete with all the amazing photographs they see on social media day in and day out, but Chris feels compelled to remind them that the experience of being in nature and putting in the effort is the real reward, not the likes on social media.

Chris used to spend a lot of time as a child outside, exploring the forests with his brother all day until the sun went down. Nature photography has brought him back to those childhood roots and has allowed him to slow down and truly appreciate what life has to offer.

Chris resides in Portland, Oregon with his wife and 3-year-old daughter. He teaches workshops across the United States and in some international locations, where he enjoys instilling his ideals of getting back to nature and enjoying the process afforded by risk and reward.

If you enjoyed this article and want to listen to my conversations with other great artists, consider subscribing to my podcast, “F-Stop Collaborate and Listen,” on your favourite podcatching application.

Do you know someone you feel has yet to be discovered and should be featured here? Send me an e-mail – I look forward to hearing from you.

Helmut Pilo

By Helmut Pilo & Michéla Griffith | May 12, 2022

If you look at Helmut Pilo’s Instagram profile, you won’t immediately think of Iceland, but he credits that place and its wild nature with sparking his passion for photography. It must have been frustrating to have begun to explore the grand landscapes of the North only to have travel restricted by the pandemic, yet 2021 turns out to have had a silver lining and gave him the opportunity to spend more time on his photography, and to immerse himself in the smaller details of nature closer to home. As Helmut gets ready to launch a website, we asked him to tell us more about his photographic journey.

Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, and what your early interests were?

Despite what you might think when reading my name, I was born and grew up in Cassino, a small town situated in central Italy.

When I was a boy, I was passionate about design, music and fashion. My interest in photography started later, thanks to my first trip to Iceland in 2016.

The Parallelism of Ferdinand Hodler

By Keith Beven | May 10, 2022

To train the eye, one must observe, compare forms to each other, examine attitudes, facial characteristics, one must look at colours and compare them. Our eye develops by looking at things. Obviously, it is the brain which sees and hears. But apart from that, the eye is an instrument which can be perfected, both in accuracy and aesthetic judgment. To see is to know an object in its proportions, such as they appear to the eye. Therefore, to see is to know. ~ Ferdinand Hodler, La Mission de l'Artiste, 1897.

At the end of 2018, an exhibition opened in the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland on Parallelism in the art of Ferdinand Hodler¹. I already knew of Hodler’s landscape paintings but before visiting the exhibition I did not know of his theories about composition and the manifesto called La Mission de l’Artiste, which he had produced in a talk given in Fribourg, Switzerland on 12th March 1897². Not all artists’ manifestos have worn well with time of course, but many can be usefully read in the context of landscape photography³, including La Mission de l’Artiste⁴.

At the end of the 19^th Century Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) was a well-known artist, primarily in Germany, France and his native Switzerland⁵. Born in Bern to a poor family, after the death of his father Hodler started working at an early age for his step-father who was a painter and decorator. After the death of his mother in 1867 he was apprenticed to the painter Ferdinand Sommer in Thun where he learned to paint alpine landscapes which were sold to tourists. He set up his own studio in Geneva but also travelled to Basel and the Prado in Madrid to study the work of others. His early work was realist in nature, including landscapes, portraits, and figures. He also painted self-portraits throughout his life. In the first section of La Mission de l’Artiste, he sets out his aims for his art:

It is by our eye and our intelligence that the splendours around us affect us. I would say that is reflected in an image, more or less deeply, according to the facility for perception and the degree of impressionability of the artist. We are told that we must learn to see.

The more one enters into the spirit of nature, the more complete is the concept that can be expressed, the more one possesses the means of expression, and the better one can draw the image.

I already knew of Hodler’s landscape paintings but before visiting the exhibition I did not know of his theories about composition and the manifesto called La Mission de l’Artiste, which he had produced in a talk given in Fribourg, Switzerland on 12th March 1897

Ferdinand Hodler, Self-Portrait, 1903

In 1890 he caused a scandal in Geneva with one of his first symbolist paintings (Night) which was deemed obscene because of its several nude figures (it was better received in Paris, including by Rodin). He was commissioned to produce a number of large-scale mural works in Germany and Switzerland but It was not until 1900 that he started to have more international success. He was invited to join both the Berlin Succession and Vienna Succession groups and had successful exhibitions.

The Low Drone

By Theo Bosboom | May 8, 2022

A typical abstract top down image from a beach in the Westfjords, Iceland, taken from 80 meters high above the ground

Another top down image from a beach, this time this was taken on a snowy lava beach in the Faroe Islands, taken from more than 100 meters above the ground

It was with great interest that I read the interesting article by Joe Cornish and Tim Parkin about drones and their place in modern landscape photography (On Landscape 249). One of the tentative conclusions from this article is that especially the top down photographs from high above, which often offer a visually attractive, abstract representation of the landscape, has conquered the world of landscape photography. In fact, you could even say that this form of abstract aerial photography is already becoming so commonplace that it is getting more difficult to stand out from the crowd.

In this article, I would like to zoom in on another, in my opinion much less widespread, application of the drone for landscape photography. This does not involve flying high - on the contrary. In this technique, the drone is used to create intimate landscapes, where different perspectives can be obtained and where places can be reached that would be inaccessible to photography from the ground. I have called this the 'low drone'. The results can be both abstract and realistic. In this article, I will explain how I use this technique in my own photography.

Keep it Still

By Adam Pierzchala | May 6, 2022

Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay and it’s a legitimate form of photographic art. And what is this “it”? ICM – Intentional Camera Movement. Undoubtedly results can seem repetitive and just like with conventional photography, because it has become popular among so many photographers, getting something original is becoming really difficult.

In this article, I will look mainly at ICM i.e. deliberately moving the camera during a single exposure, but also at multi-exposure in one frame, in-camera layering of two or more separate images and combinations of all these techniques. In other words, using the camera in a way not really intended by the manufacturer, though some models do allow multi-exposures and in-camera layering.

A genuine accident of processing! The image started as a simple vertical pan (on-tripod) but in post processing I somehow slipped the mouse when adjusting the curve which produced this bizarre colour-shift result.

ICM is nothing new, even back in the days of those flexible sensors known as film, photographers were deliberately creating blurry pictures to give an impression of motion.

Issue 254

By Tim Parkin | May 2, 2022

Click here to download issue 254 (high quality, 132Mb)

Click here to download issue 254 (smaller download, 80Mb)

Endframe: East Cumberland Bay, November 13, 1914 by Frank Hurley

By John Brockliss | May 1, 2022

Since childhood I have been fascinated by the history of polar exploration, intrigued by the tales of adventure, the discovery of the unknown and the mortal dangers faced in the most hostile and remote landscapes on earth.

Among the heroic tales of polar discovery, there are none to compete with the plight of the ill-fated 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton in his bid to be the first to lead a team across the Antarctic Continent: a mission he never completed, for his ship the Endurance became ice-bound before reaching the Antarctic Continent proper. Overnight Shackleton’s priorities changed from discovery to saving the lives of his crew in the most challenging conditions on earth.

The story of how he did this and the saga of the 800 mile voyage across the Southern Ocean in the James Caird, a 22.5 foot open boat is one of the legendary achievements from the age of discovery.

In selecting his crew members Shackleton made one truly inspirational decision appointment of Australian Frank Hurley as the Expedition Photographer. In an age when reportage photography was still in its infancy the decision to appoint Hurley was to prove visionary. The harsh hand of fate dealt to Shackleton conversely was to provide Hurley with virgin locations, immense vistas, and unrivalled documentary subjects which when combined enabled Hurley to create one of the most astonishing historic collections of early reportage and landscape photographs of the early 20th century.

Szabó Zsolt András

By Szabó Zsolt András & Michéla Griffith | May 1, 2022

Our childhood interests and early exposure shape us - in Zsolt’s case it was the landscapes of J.R. R. Tolkien that captured his imagination, and with a shortage of printed matter available (something that’s hard to imagine now) pictures and photos became especially precious to him. Career and hobby began in parallel, and he credits this with influencing his decision not to turn ‘pro’ along with the realisation that such a choice would not in fact increase the time he could spend pursuing his passion projects. Not surprisingly, these are often mountains and dramatic landscapes that could come straight from the pages of a book.

Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, what your early interests were, and what that led you to study and do as a career?

I had a really beautiful Eastern European childhood; I was born and grew up in the Transylvanian part of Romania. From a very early age, I was attracted to drawing and every kind of picture. Back then, there was a shortage of local magazines and it was almost impossible to purchase magazines with pictures of any kind, so pictures and photographs became even more valuable to me, they were a real treasure. With time I become less and less satisfied with my drawing abilities; arts of any kind were not a stable option anyway, so in the end, I decided to attend medical university and became a dentist. Despite the fact that I had a camera during my childhood, and right after high school I even had a decent film SLR, photography only began to attract me later, by the end of university, so basically, right after it, I began my dental career and my photography hobby at the same time, in parallel, always making sure to have free time for photography. That worked out well for me, and probably this is why I never became a professional photographer - I knew well that for the creative part of my personal photography I would not gain even more time by becoming a pro.

What was it that prompted a particular passion for mountains? Was it this that led you to photography and does making images now come first?

I wish I could explain how my love of mountains came about :) I never gave it much thought; now that you ask, I don't think I know the answer. It started in childhood. What I know is that I grew up far from the mountains, but my parents use to bring me to the mountain areas sometimes, on summer holidays. It was a different world there: I was mesmerised by the size and beauty of it; it gripped my imagination; it was a place of adventure and wonder. Even as an adult the mountains are the place where I feel the best and where I can see (feel) everything more clearly.

Actually, the mountain trips were the reason why I started to take photography more seriously, I wanted to give it back, to show those experiences to others. My passion for mountains came first, they were some kind of main interest to me - probably that is why I was never interested to practice other genres.

My Home Landscape

By Neville Prosser | May 1, 2022

I live in one of the most popular tourist and recreational locations in eastern New South Wales, Australia, just one hour drive north of Sydney, close to hand with over seventeen sandy beaches that stretch up this coastline, I'm spoiled for choice. But this is not where I grew up, in fact, it couldn't be far more removed. Born and raised in the South Wales industrial valley of Merthyr Tydfil, where a trip to the beach was an annual holiday event only, a fortnight at Tenby or Oxwich. That was pretty much my experience of the coast. So when I arrived here in 1982 I felt as though I were on a continual holiday.

The Entrance NSW

I have always made pictures, can't remember when I started, but mum used to let me pinch dad's camera when he was at work so I could go out over the fields and point it at anything that took my fancy; I still have a couple of those shots.

When I started to take pictures here in Australia, I had difficulty in getting to grips with the vibrancy of light and colour, I didn't know how to deal with it. So photography become a now and then pastime, but there was always this niggling little thing going on in me that photography is what I wanted to do.

Now I'm not going to bore you with life's adventure, other than to say, it happened. Since then I have made pictures of Prime Ministers, Fighter pilots, world-renowned musicians and Olympic champions. Made pictures on million-dollar ocean yachts, hung out of helicopters, I was even one of the first photographers to take pictures in the newly appointed Purnululu National Park situated in the Kimberly region of Western Australia. The area was gazetted as a National Park in 1987, I went in in 1989. But this article is not about the past, but the now.

Frazer Beach NSW

Frazer Beach NSW

In all the years I have been shooting digital, a long time now, I have never fallen in love with it, digital that is, not like I used to when shooting film on my very much loved Pentax 67. Digital from a creative point just never gave me the satisfaction of making pictures, from a commercial point, it works amazingly well. But I'm a realist and times move on. So in an attempt to fall back in love with taking pictures on a personal basis, not just as a commercial venture. I purchased a new camera the Fuji GFX 50s, in all its medium format loveliness.

Now here's my dilemma. With so many people owning a camera and the vast majority of them being landscape photographers; then, for me living in a very popular over photographed area, I will have to push myself to come up with an image that will offer more to the viewer. Creative challenge accepted.

This is the camera I used to make these images. As I mentioned earlier, we have a lot of beaches, so what better than to make coastal/ocean landscape images. So these new images are in some way my attempt to fall in love with it as a form of enjoyment again.

I set myself some parameters. Light being the obvious, low light, vibrant light the list can go on. Colour, I will think and shoot in colour, why not there's plenty of it. Movement, that's a good one, the last, life. This one I decided to make about myself. The images are made along the coast that has shaped who I am in this new country I now call home. There is quite a list to this. A couple of bonus point's in this one. Not only will this keep my costs down it will also reduce my carbon footprint in the endeavour of making pictures. I figured I owe it that much, with three trips around this very big country, work-related, and five trips back and for to the UK before COVID restrictions kicked in. So, I thought this is going to be a doddle.

Putty Beach NSW

Spoon Bay NSW

This is where my problems started, thinking it was going to be easy, boy did I get that wrong. I had no idea how many people now make landscape pictures. One particular place I frequent, Norah Head, mainly because it has great a coastline with a lighthouse to boot. Well, this particular morning I get there quite early, well before sunup. First off there were a couple already set up with cameras attached to tripods and pointing at the horizon line on the hilltop.

Then there were more down on the beach, by the time I found something made a few exposures I turned around and counted well over 8 tripods all doing the same thing. I was going to have to think about my locations for this self-imposed assignment.

One of those locations I came up with is a beautiful bay called Frazer beach, situated in Munmorah State Recreation Park. It's a bit more of a drive, 35-45 minutes in the car, but enough remoteness to put off many a landscape shooter who doesn't like to walk far. This place will, no matter what time of day offers something that will take a picture. But you do have to watch the swell, I have been caught a couple of times, luckily enough only getting my trousers wet and not the gear. I go back quite a bit, even to make portraits.

One of the techniques I like to employ every now and then when shooting a moving subject like water or trees in the wind is multiple layering. This technique offers up, depending on how many exposures you want, many still or moving images on top of each other. I first tried this out when I used to use a panoramic camera called a Noblex. It didn't have a very slow shutter, the slowest I think from memory was around a 1/15th, obviously not enough for landscape work; so I used to calculate the exposure needed to layer still's on top of each other without winding on. Now, these days you let the camera work the math out, so much easier. But you still need a good tripod. I quite like this method. This is one of the lovely joys of making landscape images, it affords you the time to use the technology to create, as you are usually on your own and there's nobody you need to think about other than getting what you want.

Bateau Bay NSW

Now due to the fact I'm Welsh, I do like a bit of weather, so I tend to keep an eye on the sky and if I feel it's going to offer something then that's when my wife will let me know I need to get out, but I think that's got to do more with the fact she wants to get rid of me for a while. When the sky is empty, I call it; nobodies home sky, it just doesn't move me very much, give me a cloud any day, or Welsh mist. Ah! Welsh mist, my eyes just glazed over then.

I'm not making any artistic statement with these images, they are about my home, where I live, there's no motive in them other than this is the landscape I live with every day and I chose to photograph it this way, I could have chosen a different approach and hidden the marks of man, but what would be the point, we live in the landscape, it's unfortunate that many people don't realise it.

Frazer Beach NSW

Frazer Beach NSW

I have three or four, hold on I'll just count, four filters, but I usually end up using around one the Soft Grad 0.9. Mind you the GFX can handle a lot on its own.

All my work is shot in RAW, although I'm told the Fuji jpgs are pretty good. edited in Capture One Pro, dodged, burnt and spotted, if I missed any in Photoshop, I do add a slight grain, call me old fashioned. Simple.

: The Entrance NSW

: Frazer Beach NSW

: Frazer Beach NSW

: Putty Beach NSW

: Spoon Bay NSW

: Bateau Bay NSW

: Frazer Beach NSW

: Frazer Beach NSW

: Tuggerah Lake NSW

: Toowoon Bay NSW

: Spoon Bay NSW

: Tuggerah Lake NSW

: Terrigal NSW

: Frazer Beach NSW

: Terrigal NSW

: Bateau Bay Headland NSW

Colour as Form

By Guy Tal | April 30, 2022

Color is all. When color is right, form is right.~ Marc Chagall

Kodachrome, introduced in 1935, was the first colour film to be mass-marketed successfully. Although Kodachrome quickly became popular with hobbyists and commercial photographers, so-called “fine-art photographers” have initially shunned the use of colour, and many have expressed derisive views of colour photography. It is both common and ironic that any time a new technology or aesthetic is introduced into the photographic milieu, it is greeted with dogmatic ire. This was the case when flexible film made glass plates obsolete, when simple hand-held cameras became affordable and widely available, when colour photography was invented, when computerised processing tools expanded photographers’ creative options beyond what was possible using chemistry, and when digital capture technology began to rival the capabilities of film.

Moving Day

By Mark Littlejohn | April 27, 2022

I lived in North Cumbria for nearly forty years. During that time I fell in love with the area, married, raised a family, and took up photography. And fell in love with the area all over again. For over a decade I took photographs almost exclusively in an area encompassing the Eden Valley and Ullswater. It became the photographic equivalent of a comfort blanket. I knew every nook and cranny. I knew the best times to go to all those nooks and crannies. My photography fell into similar patterns. Out in the morning. First light. Different locations for dawn at different times of the year. Knowing where the mist would be in certain conditions. It was almost too easy.

People would ask how I got some of my shots and I would just reply – I pointed the camera in the right general direction and press the shutter release. It really was just a case of pointing and shooting.

Dune Fatigue

By Chris Murray | April 26, 2022

Yet another photographer will scarcely care where he goes; he has learnt to select, and finds pictures everywhere. He does not do this by instinct or inborn faculty; he has had to inquire his knowledge; he has learnt to know what he wants, and picks it up the moment it is before him–he has learnt to see~ Henry Peach Robinson

Several years ago on my blog, I opined on the number of Milky Way photos flooding social media and magazines at the time in a piece I titled “Milky Way Fatigue.” Fast forward to today and Milky Way fatigue has been replaced by dune fatigue. It borders on ludicrous the number of images of sand dunes I have seen over the last few years, a trend that shows no signs of abating. It would seem the Mesquite Dunes in Death Valley National Park may be the most photographed piece of natural real estate in the world, and Death Valley the most photographed national park. It's not to say many if not most of the images aren’t beautiful, they certainly are. But, it’s the worn out subject matter that has me tired and questioning. Why are so many photographers limiting themselves to such popular subject matter and places?

It's not to say many if not most of the images aren’t beautiful, they certainly are. But, it’s the worn out subject matter that has me tired and questioning. Why are so many photographers limiting themselves to such popular subject matter and places?

I realise I am wading into potentially hazardous waters here. Far be it from me to tell people what they should and should not photograph. Our choice of subject matter is clearly a very personal one. And yet, I am frustrated by the copycat feel of the images and the lack of imagination. I understand the lure of dunes, they are a photographer’s dream subject. That they are inspiring is beyond question. I also understand the desire to photograph interesting geographic features in general, the awareness of such no doubt fueled by social media in recent years. We see a great image of something interesting and unique and we wish to photograph it ourselves. The problem is when too many people act on this urge the subject matter becomes tired and cliche. As a viewer I have become completely desensitised to images of dunes and other iconic scenes in Death Valley, just as I have of Half Dome or El Capitan in Yosemite, to name a few. It’s one of the reasons I have little desire to photograph the national parks today. I love to visit them, but I have little interest in photographing them. Why? The reasons are several, but the big one is because everyone else is. The more dune photos I see the more I feel compelled to pull away from the crowd and express my vision elsewhere. It is why I have an appreciation for and admiration of those photographers who primarily photograph in ordinary places with ordinary subject matter. They are seeking something inside themselves first, the subject matter is secondary.

Finding Calm

By Alan Lait | April 20, 2022

My first introduction to landscape photography was while climbing mountains in the Lake District and at the time, it was just a hobby and my images were a record of where I’d been, rather than something I considered a creative pursuit. As I focused more time on refining my photography skills, it became more of a passion and an invaluable balance to the daily challenges of work and sometimes of life in general.

I now find photography to be an important creative outlet and on occasions, it’s helped me pull through some dark and challenging times. For some people, it might be music or painting but for me, it’s creating images that represent the environments and places I love and feel a connection to. It’s something I do for my own enjoyment and of course, it’s always a pleasant bonus if someone else appreciates an image. Maybe they see the same thing I did when I composed it, maybe they derive their own meaning from it – either way, it’s brought a sense of enjoyment to someone else, which is a pleasant side-effect but never my original intention.

I’ve often been told that my images portray a sense of calm and maybe that’s a result of what I find rewarding in an image or what my eye is naturally drawn to. That’s not to say that all my photographs are of peaceful scenes. I also enjoy finding interesting abstracts or compositions with dark, moody skies but maybe some of my own state of mind still comes through in the resulting images.

Issue 253

By Tim Parkin | April 17, 2022

Click here to download issue 253 (high quality, 164Mb)

Click here to download issue 253 (smaller download, 90Mb)

End frame: Iceberg, Fjallsarlon, Iceland by Paul Wakefield

By Judy Sharrock | April 16, 2022

I have chosen one of Paul Wakefield’s images as my End Frame. So much has been said about Paul’s wonderful work by those far more knowledgable and insightful than me, what can I possibly add that had not been said before and is worth saying.

These, therefore, are just my personal, rather random thoughts about the image, sometimes prompted by other peoples’ commentary about Paul’s work.

The image appears in Paul’s book called The Landscape. It is a fantastic book and one to which I often return. This image shot at Fjallsarlon in Iceland is one that has stayed very clearly in my head and, thinking back, I am sure it was always in the back of my mind when I visited the Arctic in 2019.

History of Art and Landscape – Part Three

By Tim Parkin | April 16, 2022

In the last instalment (Part Two) of my meandering exploration of the history of landscape art, I talked about the birth of what most people would consider landscape painting.

If you'd like to take a look at these two articles the links are here :-

Issue 215 - Part One - The Foundations
Issue 220 - Part Two - The Birth of Landscape

This period of mostly Northern European artwork stood on its own, away from the Italianate painters of the day. This independence probably derived from a weakened influence Catholic church and its sway over the artwork in Italy. Painters like Albrecht Altdorfer, Wolf Huber, Joachim Patinir, Albrecht Durer etc found an independent market for their work and were able to indulge their own passions, albeit still being influenced by Royal patronage and Italianate painting styles to some extent.

In the mid to late 16th century, painters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder brought applied his Italian training and started to produce work influenced by the Northern school and his flemish predecessors (such as the World Landscapes of Joachim Patinir and Gillis van Conninxloo). The etchings below show a few examples.

Large Landscapes (1555)

Returning to the burgeoning city of Antwerp, he took some of these skills and applied them to painting scenes of daily life, something that would be called ‘genre painting’. Scenes such as markets, drinking establishments, workers in fields, etc. found popularity with the newly wealthy population of a country that no longer felt the oppressive hand of the Catholic church and who turned to Calvinism or perhaps the later Dutch Reformed Church instead.

Interestingly, it seems likely that the success of public art during this period was a product of the very successful studio "Aux Quatre Vents" (At the Four Winds), run by Wife and Husband Volcxken Dierix and Hieronymous Cock (Hieronymous is latin for Sacred Name which, in English, would be Jerome). They would take painted works and convert them to engravings which were then printed for ‘mass’ distribution. Many of the artists would have been known by their engravings more than their painted originals.

Julien Fumard

By Julien Fumard & Michéla Griffith | April 15, 2022

If you like your mountains big and have ambitions for adventure, read on… We have a fascinating interview for you with French photographer Julien Fumard, who despite saying he’s not really into physical activity hasn’t let this stop him from undertaking a series of expeditions to the Himalayas that many only dream of. By staying with local families, he has experienced not only remote landscapes but also village life in harsh environments, and we make no apology for the fact that the images in this feature include both people and place. All too often our photography separates the two, and through Julien’s eyes, we gain an insight into what we might stand to learn if we don’t.

Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, what your early interests were, and what you went on to do?

My name is Julien Fumard. I was born in Marseille, in the south of France 39 years ago and lived there until my mid-twenties; I now live in Meyrargues, about 50kms up north. Since my teenage years, I’ve been passionate about music, especially the hard kind, the one that gets your head banging and gives you the strength to overcome anything: metal. I even played in a band as a guitarist for a few years. That was THE thing for me! At that time I had absolutely no interest in photography, and it remained like that for quite a while. I also had a growing interest in nature which was kind of hard to fulfil, living in a big city like that. So I was very frustrated in that sense, but sometimes with friends, we would borrow my parents’ car and drive to a nearby forest, make a big bonfire - which was absolutely forbidden (and stupid considering how dry the region is) - and partied the whole night before dropping asleep in bags that were barely warm enough. I loved these short moments in the wild. I guess my parents bringing me to the mountains was the reason for my interest in nature. When I was a child I loved watching forests where creatures of myths and legends were living hidden from human sight.

I guess my parents bringing me to the mountains was the reason for my interest in nature. When I was a child I loved watching forests where creatures of myths and legends were living hidden from human sight.

I still try to imagine these creatures today, although with age and a more Cartesian mind the magic tends to dissolve. But music, travelling and to a certain extent photography somehow bring me back to these childhood feelings of wonder and mystery.

Later on, the woman I still live with now pushed me to go on a trip to Scandinavia. She had been there with her father as a kid and well, Norway was the country of black metal and trolls, so that sounded like a really great idea. We left with our car, a tent and a trunk full of food - and wine - and there we went up until the northern tip of Norway. Despite the hardships, this month long trip was a revelation to me. I remember using my girlfriend’s pocket camera all the time - it was actually a gift I’d just made for her birthday. That’s when I started to get interested in photography. It was not yet a passion but the travelling bug on the other end had bitten me. I went to finish my studies in Canada, then back to France where we moved to different places, then up to Tromsø, Norway. My dream of living in Norway had finally been realised… only to be crushed seven months later when the company I was working for as a software developer shut its doors. But at that time a new passion, photography, had emerged thanks to the crazy lights of polar latitudes. The end of a dream would become the beginning of another. I would travel further, longer, but this time with a purpose: photograph the wonderful world we live in.

Alfredo Mora – Portrait of a Photographer

By Matt Payne | April 14, 2022

Landscape and nature photography often follows a familiar path for a lot of photographers. Today’s busy world emphasises economic growth above all else in life and instils certain cultural values in most of us, albeit mostly without us knowing or taking stock. Through school, we are trained to focus on results – to “get good grades” and achievement is rewarded more than any other accomplishment. It is part of our culture for athletics, when we get our first jobs and in almost every aspect of our lives. This cultural undercurrent is a constant reminder that results are of critical importance in every pursuit in life.

This cultural undercurrent is a constant reminder that results are of critical importance in every pursuit in life.

This undercurrent often weighs heavily on us, often without us understanding what the root cause is, and we seek refuge from it through creative pursuit vis-à-vis photography and by escaping into nature for peace and solace. For some of us, that drive for results sneaks into our passion for nature and photography and we lose sight of why we escaped into nature, to begin with. That is the story of Alfredo Mora, the focus of today’s essay. Like me, Alfredo grew up hiking and spending time in nature and developed a strong bond with it throughout his years. Alfredo pursued a career in Information Technology as a Systems Architect for the United States Space Program, where the stakes are certainly high, and he found that his need for spending time in nature with his camera was a high priority. He relocated his family to Denver, Colorado so he could be closer to the mountains and amazing landscape photography opportunities. Then the pandemic happened, and Alfredo found himself reflecting on his photography and his motivations for spending time in the outdoors. Alfredo did not like what he found.

Winds of Change

By Samuel Fradley | April 11, 2022

Winds of Change reflects on a difficult and uncertain time in Britain’s history and my own personal fears and anxiety about not only Britain’s future, but the future of the world and its effects on those close to me. The old world is dying, the one that we knew has gone. As echos of 1930s Europe engulf Asia and the United States, it has become clear that the balance of power and future of humanity has changed. Where Britain belongs in this new world is yet to be found.

After Britain’s exit from the European Union, many have wondered what Britain’s place in the world is, what it should be and what it could become? Whether you were Pro-Brexit or for Remain, Britain is a remarkably powerful and resilient country given its strength, economy and size, predominantly due to our relationship with the world's pre-emptive superpower, the United States.

However, diving deep enough and slicing through the aura of British strength, we can see Britain in a continuing state of decline, a country struggling to accept the magnitude of its fall from the days of the Empire.

Scenes from the Lounge

By Mike Langford & Jackie Ranken | April 8, 2022

Photography duo Jackie Ranken & Mike Langford are well-known for their symbiotic photographic projects that have resulted in many photographic exhibitions and books, have now produced a new book titled 'Scenes from the Lounge' where they both photographed the view from their lounge over a period of ten years while living in Queenstown New Zealand.

Right from day one of moving into this view with a house, we had it in our minds to make a book of it.

This fits with our philosophy of always thinking about the final product before taking the first step into a new project. Without this way of thinking the book would have lacked structure and direction and would have probably never been fully realised.

This very selective body of photographic work spans a period of ten years while living in Queenstown in the South Island of New Zealand.

Most of the photographs have been made from inside the lounge looking out, or just outside the lounge from one of the two balconies looking over the view of the tourist town of Queenstown, the magnificent Lake Wakatipu and the Remarkable Mountain range beyond.

It was the storms that got us most visually excited.

From the safety of the lounge we would watch them grow – then quickly leap out onto the balcony to fire off a few frames before getting soaked by rain or beaten by the wind – then retreat to the lounge once more, still watching and waiting in case some more magic light appeared. Not long after a storm had completely passed, we would start shooting again. This is the period of what we call ‘Quiet Light’, when everything becomes soft, gentle and dream-like and you are left feeling like life is about to start over again. There was always a little tingle of excitement that came then.

We loved it!

Some of these images were made early in the morning, but as we really like our late morning sleep ins, it was mostly in the evenings that we would set up our tripods and wait and watch. That’s when the light expressed itself most eloquently as our view was mainly to the south and southwest.

Most of these images are true to each of our thoughts and emotions at the time of making them and not reconsiderations during post production. However, when we first recorded one or two of them, we captured them as black and white in the JPEG capture – mainly because of the drama it added as stand-alone images. We still both like this effect when they are hung on the wall as art pieces. Jackie also likes to do in-camera multiple exposures that add to the visual excitement of what was happening in the scene.

When reinterpreting the collection for the book, we felt that the images needed to be connected to each other, showing the differences in the scenes and not the processing styles. As a result, we returned to the raw capture from the camera and processed them again in colour. We both felt that this makes the book more cohesive and adds power to it as a body of work.

We have written a brief description of what was happening at the time of photographing to support each image. Hopefully, it also tells you something about Queenstown and what it was like for us to live there.

The images featured here illustrate only some of the visual stories made from the lounge many of which are in the book. We both photographed the TSS Earnslaw at least two or three hundred times over the ten years. Picking which photograph to use for each subject was the most difficult part of the edit.

The requirement was for each image to tell a new story that added to the whole. Each one needing to be different enough to keep the visual story interesting and compelling.

Seasonal changes are very dramatic this far south with temperature changes from the thirties Celsius in summer to minus numbers in the winter. The temperatures are tempered somewhat by the adjacent Lake Wakatipu, the waters of which sit between eleven and thirteen degrees all year round due to its depth. Each season is also very distinctive with dramatic changes in colour and foliage.

Our friends tease us that the hardest part of the making of these images for us was having to put down our evening glasses of New Zealand wine to take the photographs.

So, this is it – the changing play of light over a decade in time, as seen from one room – during what was the happy story of our lives in Queenstown New Zealand".

Scenes from the Lounge book is available to buy on their website, NZ$30.00 plus postage.

The Images

Mike Langford

It is fitting that this first image is a six-frame panorama stitch of the scene from the lounge made on the day that we moved in. This visualizes the foundation for what follows and gives context to the story.

This photograph isn’t a usual way of seeing, as it shows everything at once, yet at the same time, it shows nothing specific at all. Most times we like to make images that are more singular in content, more specific about a single idea or vision so that when you look at each image you know exactly what it is saying.

Jackie Ranken

As an opening image, this encapsulates the essence of what it felt like living with a view over Lake Wakatipu and the mountains beyond. Regardless of the weather or season, it was always breathtakingly beautiful The little dark speck on the lake to the left is the TSS Earnslaw making its way to Walter Peak Station on the other side of the lake from Queenstown. It gives a sense of scale to the vastness of the scene before us.

Jackie Ranken

Jackie Ranken

The long summer evenings regularly produced plays of light either on the mountains or over the lake in this case in the form of crepuscular rays over Walter Peak Station.

An in camera multiple exposure helps create a dream like vision of the TSS Earnslaw leaving Queenstown Bay and the mountains beyond

An in camera multiple exposure helps create a dream like vision of the TSS Earnslaw leaving Queenstown Bay and the mountains beyond.

Jackie Ranken

Jackie Ranken

Details of summer light caressing the mountains on the opposite side of the lake with the shoulder of Cecil Peak on the left and the top of Walter Peak on the right.

This storm came in from the north, which is behind us and in a direction, that we seldom get storms from. Even though we could smell the rain approaching, it suddenly just got dark and then it was there, coming over our shoulder like a heavy cloak of rain and darkness.

Mike Langford

Mike Langford

Mike Langford

This is one image that changed our thinking about the book. Originally it was captured in monochrome, as this made the crepuscular rays, as well the signature smoke from the TSS Earnslaw more dramatic. We now also like this version, as it also talks about the soft pastel light of autumn that adds a tranquility to the scene.

Mike Langford

Jackie Ranken

Skyscapes are huge and spectacular in the Wakatipu Basin. When you have lived in Queenstown for a while, you get to read and know what they mean, so you can prepare for what is going to happen next and sometimes what clothes to wear.

An early morning shot of a steaming Lake Wakatipu. This doesn’t happen very often but when it does it’s a spectacular and exciting sight. This phenomenon only occurs when the air temperature is dramatically cooler than the water temperature.

Mike Langford

Jackie Ranken

The view looking south on a winters day. This is the direction that very cold weather comes from. It comes up the lake from Kingston in a rush, turning the surface of the lake into a froth of white caps. The sky grows dark and ominous and the clouds feel menacing. Snow mostly comes from this direction, sometimes even in the summer months. It brings with it a sense of excitement!

Jackie Ranken

Spectacular gusts of wind from the west whip the surface of the lake into a visual frenzy, indicating that wind speeds are over 100 kilometres an hour. It’s sudden changes in conditions like this that make Lake Wakatipu such a dangerous lake for watercraft.

Another violent summer storm this time coming from the south. Adding to the spectacle is the contrasting tranquil shaft of warm light coming through from the west in the background.

Mike Langford

Another violent summer storm this time coming from the south. Adding to the spectacle is the contrasting tranquil shaft of warm light coming through from the west in the background.

Mike Langford

Summer north-westerly storms regularly come down the lake from Glenorchy and show their raw power best as they crash into the buttress known as Walter Peak, where they can curl back into themselves creating powerful graphic shapes in the clouds. On this occasion, there was a gap in the clouds further up the lake that let a shaft of light illuminate this phenomenon in an especially dramatic way. The low angle of the light is what has given the scene the warm and glowing colour that separates it out from the cooler colours beyond in the background.

Jackie Ranken

We couldn’t put together a book of images from the lounge without including a super saturated red sunset. We photographed many over the ten years and it was like each sunset was trying to outdo the previous one in its grandness.

Winter snowstorm blanketing the town and the valley. The snow seldom settles on the lake shore for long due to the moderating temperature of the lake which is only 300 meters above sea level and at 45 degrees latitude south.

Mike Langford

Mike Langford

The hazy tranquility of the change in season looking south down the lake towards Kingston in early summer.

Mike Langford

New Year's Eve from the balcony. Queenstown has always been a party town!

: Mike Langford

: Jackie Ranken

: Jackie Ranken

: Jackie Ranken

: Jackie Ranken

: Jackie Ranken

: Mike Langford

: Mike Langford

: Mike Langford

: Jackie Ranken

: Mike Langford

: Mike Langford

: Jackie Ranken

: Jackie Ranken

: Mike Langford

: Mike Langford

: Mike Langford

: Mike Langford

: Mike Langford

: Jackie Ranken

Landscape Poetography

By John Hardiman | April 5, 2022

Some time ago I came to the conclusion that photographs, on the whole, have little to do with photography at all. They represent something else. The million and one photographic techniques, styles and genres all lead to the same place, they make commentary on the world, about life and about ourselves. It’s probably no revelation to any artist that photography, at least photography as an artwork, draws parallels with other arts such as music, painting, sculpture and even poetry. They all play to the heart in one way or another. Songs, paintings, photographs and poems are simply messengers, tapping on the same door.

Landscape photography for me, in my little world, isn’t so much about a place, although it can be at times. It comes as a result of pondering and exploration. A need to seek a space away from the built-up world, out with nature where experiences and thoughts roam free and morph into the unexpected. It’s a place where the poet walks in, occasionally at least.

I’ve wondered about poets. It seems they were a little more prominent in days gone by, before mass media, commercialism and screens took over all our minds. My Grandmother grew up in the nineteen thirties in regional Australia. While studying the paintings of Constable, she was asked to describe the colours and features in his painting, The Hay Wain, with little more than a black and white drawing in a textbook for reference. No wonder the poets still had their voice, their words able to permeate the page in perfect form.

My Grandmother grew up in the nineteen thirties in regional Australia. While studying the paintings of Constable, she was asked to describe the colours and features in his painting, The Hay Wain, with little more than a black and white drawing in a textbook for reference.

Eighty years on and my grandmother can still recite the flowing words of James Lister Cuthbertson’s poem, The Australian Sunrise among others. Despite her failing eyesight, the words have become a part of her, returning her to her childhood. Her experiences in nature re-lived and intertwined with Cuthbertson’s, as if shared heart to heart. It’s these glimpses of poetry throughout my life which have made me curious, what else is there to be discovered? Can landscape photography translate the same experiences of nature and life as these seemingly simple words?

The Australian Sunrise

The Morning Star paled slowly, the Cross hung low to the sea,
And down the shadowy reaches the tide came swirling free,
The lustrous purple blackness of the soft Australian night
Waned in the grey awakening that heralded the light;
Still in the dying darkness, still in the forest dim
The pearly dew of the dawning clung to each giant limb,
Till the sun came up from ocean, red with the cold sea mist,
And smote on the limestone ridges, and the shining tree-tops kissed
Then the fiery Scorpion vanished, the magpie’s note was heard,
And the wind in the she-oak wavered and the honeysuckles stirred;
The airy golden vapour rose from the river breast,
The kingfisher came darting out of his crannied nest,
And the bullrushes and reed-beds put off their sallow grey
And burnt with cloudy crimson at the dawning of the day.

If paints were never invented and if photographs did not exist, I suspect that more of us would still be writing poetry. Here’s what Georges Lafenestre had to say as he described the work of French landscape painter Paul Huet, who was influenced by Constable and whose works went on to inspire the impressionists. “It is when the artist-poet is alone, when he sinks into the woods, aimlessly, at random, in the thickets and coppices, that he feels best penetrated and revived by the diffused freshness of budding greenery and intertwined twigs, and by the quivers, splinters and caresses of light flowing through this rustling and fragrant congerie.” Such poetic words in themselves. I love how Lafenestre refers to Huet as an artist-poet, where his experience in nature becomes part of the artwork itself, it becomes poetry on canvas.

I’ve read some poetry myself, enough to get the gist and I can’t help thinking we come from the same frame of mind. My viewfinder may see the trees and the fields, but I aim to capture something else, something deeper. I may not be a poet with words, so perhaps I’m a photo-poet out in the landscape. Maybe that’s what landscape photographers are.

My viewfinder may see the trees and the fields, but I aim to capture something else, something deeper. I may not be a poet with words, so perhaps I’m a photo-poet out in the landscape. Maybe that’s what landscape photographers are.

Some of us at least.

You use words.
I use pictures.
We can both share nature.

There’s a well known poem by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, which wrenches my heartstrings every time. Frost inspired countless others with his poetry and was even acknowledged by the government of his day, with a tribute stating “…These poems have helped to guide American thought and humor and wisdom, setting forth to our minds a reliable representation of ourselves and of all men…” I for one, would like to see more of that today.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Frost’s poem doesn’t really seem to have an answer at first, it contradicts itself as the writer ponders a decision, inferred by a fork in the road in a yellow wood. The words are full of ambiguity and uncertainty, as we may feel in the same situation. What would I choose? Then, just as we are led from the visuals of a yellow wood to the decisions of life, the layers of meaning build on each other even further. The lines “I shall be telling this with a sigh…. Somewhere ages and ages hence” add yet another layer of depth. Perhaps they are a humbling commentary on human nature itself, which I’ll leave for you to ponder as the implications are so vast I can’t even begin to turn them into words. Besides, the poem will speak much more elegantly than I can.

When I wonder and ponder in the landscape, I may not have such a way with words, but I can see them in the trees and the grasses. Puzzles of life, of the heart, revealed in every direction. Beauty. Time. Family. Danger. But strangely, it’s not the camera or the photograph which captures life in a picture, we draw these connections ourselves. We need to feel them in order to capture them and make them known. Lifelong stories, curiosities and dilemmas which float around us everywhere, waiting for their time. With a careful touch of colour and tonality, flavoured to taste in just the right way, we can create our own visual poetry, which I’ll call “landscape poetography”. I wonder if it will catch on.

Now I’m no literary expert, English was my worst subject at school, but I would liken the structure of a poem to the composition of a photograph. The way words flow from one line to another is mimicked in the line, colour, tone and layout of a photograph. Deliberate changes can throw the reader off surprisingly or make them feel uneasy. Whatever is needed to support the underlying story. Words, colours or tones could all be used to make us comfortable or mixed appropriately to raise questions and ambiguity. Photographs and poems can both be metaphorical, drawing on the visuals but meaning something else. They can both reflect the human heart.

I would be more than happy to make poetry with my photographs, but let me twist that around for just a moment. Here’s a poem I wrote about the way I feel in nature, with a camera in my hand.

Natures voice

Nature sways with inspiration,
reflecting ourselves, she is our teacher.
She shares our struggles and changing moods,
soaks in, adapts;
the dew falls upon her.
A fiery day withers and creaks,
and into our soul directly she speaks.

After writing this piece, I decided to emerge from my cocoon to see if ‘poetography’ already exists somewhere out there. You might think I would do that first, but I feared my mind would be sucked into an abyss and these ponderings wouldn’t exist at all. It turns out there are already references to the term poetography and the concept is along the same lines, the same twisted turning lines of an old tree branch. So maybe it will catch on after all. Maybe we are already ‘landscape poetographers’ and we just don’t know it yet.

Enjoy!

Issue 252

By Tim Parkin | April 3, 2022

Click here to download issue 252 (high quality, 143Mb)

Click here to download issue 252 (smaller download, 88Mb)

End frame: Dukan Lake, 1974 Kurdistan Region, Iraq by Bruno Barbey

By John Maillard | April 2, 2022

It's tough to pin down one landscape you want to write about.
My mind goes back to one of my favourite books, by Magnum, titled "Magnum landscapes".

I found it in a bookshop in 1998 even though I was broke I bought it, love at first sight. I realise that this book has deeply influenced me. I can almost see a little bit of my photography in every photograph in the book, inspiring me and moving me.

My images of people, my rendering of landscape, the way I look at colour, the way I look at light. Even some of the quotes in the book seem to be part of me and my ideas. There are photographs from all the greats of Magnum, even Martin Parr, who visited to share his work when I was an innocent art student in Surrey. This book inspired me to study photography as a postgraduate student with Paul Hill that year.

Book Reviews

By Tim Parkin | April 2, 2022

Claude Fiddler

The luxury of having more time to prepare an interview with a photographer is that I can spend a bit of time trying to find any publications they’ve produced in order to get more background information. In Claude Fiddler’s case, I found two of his previous publications and managed to get them delivered quite quickly. You can read a bit more about the work behind these books in Claude's interview elsewhere in this issue.

The High Sierra. Wilderness of Light

The first is “The High Sierra, Wilderness of Light”. Although Claude’s High Sierra book “Inside the High Sierra” is published soon, if you want to sample some of his large format images of the area, you can get a copy of this book second hand for quite a reasonable price. It tells the story of a few of the early pioneers who explored the ranges and scaled the heights and who also told stories about what they found. After this narrative, there are a series of images from Claude, each of which includes an extract from one of these explorers. There are some beautiful images included and the reproduction is generally good for its age. I’ve included some of my favourite images in the extracts below.

You can search for this book via its ISBN 9780811809702 / 0811809706

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A Vast and Ancient Wilderness. Images of the Great Basin

The second is a copy of “A Vast and Ancient Wilderness, Images of the Great Basin” which was produced in 1997 and is an overview of the vast area covering parts of Oregon, Utah and California and most of Nevada. It’s mostly seen as a ‘desert’ and the stories that are included in the first part of the book of the history of the hunters, trappers and early migrants certainly backs that up. Those migrants took a massive risk to find a new life on the West coast and later migrants gambled all on the chance to find gold in “them thar hills” (sorry - I couldn’t help myself). But, like most deserts, there are surprising places rich with life to be found. Claude’s photographs document the area well and although some of the reproduction looks a little dated, most of the photos show a strong aesthetic and obvious engagement with this difficult landscape.

You can search for this book via its ISBN 9780811815024 / 0811815021

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Trym Ivar Bergsmo

My Land

Charlotte and I were lucky to spend a few weeks with Trym a few months before Covid broke out. Although we did visit the more ‘classic’ areas of Lofoten for a few days, most of our trip was spent being guided around Trym’s “local patch” at the base of the peninsula. The area is has a few ‘famous’ spots (Trollfjord for instance) but most of it is just off the beaten track Norway. And if anybody is well placed to produce a book like this, Trym is the person. I may be biased but from an outsider’s perspective, Trym has all the appearance of Norway’s national landscape photographer, a Scandinavian Joe Cornish with a nice line in Fjords perhaps. Unlike many professional landscape photographers, most of Trym’s well-known work has been produced in his own country and the vast majority of that in the North.

For an ‘off the beaten track’ backwater, it’s still the most consistently beautiful area I’ve ever visited. The book that Trym has produced is a personal take of the views on his doorstep. Yes, there are classically sublime views of Stetind, Norway’s national mountain, but that’s because you can see it from his kitchen window, I’d say that’s fairly local (although it’s a long way across Vestfjorden, admittedly). There are also intimate details of seaweed strewn beaches, simple landscapes of sand and snow.
The extra large format book is beautifully printed and builds a feeling of Trym’s home as you browse through it. By the end, I felt a strong pull to return to see Trym again. I can heartily recommend this book to anybody with an interest in the Scandinavian North. If you do buy a copy, don’t forget to tell Trym what you think of the book, with the amount of love he has put into this book, I’m sure he’ll appreciate some in return.

As Hans Strand says in his foreward, “Browsing through this book, over a glass of win or a cup of coffee, is something I feel every intelligent human being should indulge in”. Indeed!

You can by Trym's book direct from his website.

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The Deed and the Glory

By Guy Tal | April 2, 2022

You will never find yourself unless you quit preconceiving what you will be when you have found yourself.~ Robert Henri

I don’t photograph when teaching workshops. My temperament is such that I can’t produce meaningful work when other people are present when I can’t take a prolonged time to become mindful, to contemplate the nuances of my surroundings and my inner experience, and to consider creative possibilities. Certainly, I can make beautiful, successful photographs without these things, but such photographs would be meaningless and unsatisfying to me. As such, my favourite parts of leading photography workshop are times spent in the classroom, especially when conversations drift beyond the scripted material to more philosophical topics related to living and working as an artist. One such recent conversation was about the topic of success.

Discussions of success often revolve around how one defines the term. This time, however, the conversation started when one of the participants asked a different question: how do you know you have achieved success? Thinking about success in these terms—reflecting on past experiences rather than aiming for future accomplishments—proved revealing. My response (paraphrased from imperfect memory) was this: some days, especially when out in a remote natural place, revelling in peace and beauty, conscious of and grateful for my good fortune to be able to be where I am, to do what I do, feeling inspired, even awed, recognising that these are not fortuitous anecdotes but the theme to my everyday life—or even just the memory of such experiences—I feel I have succeeded.

Most people think about achieving success as a forward-looking progression: first, define what success is, then design a strategy to accomplish success, finally congratulate yourself if you have succeeded in what you set out to do (or wallow in self-recriminations and doubts about your self-worth if you haven’t). This strategy has never worked for me. Even in times when I set grandiose goals for myself and managed to achieve them, I didn’t experience the elation that most people expect to feel when achieving success. On the other hand, when reflecting on my life—the things I got to see and experience, the improbable and turbulent path I took to get where I am—I take pride not only in finding success but also in learning—by experimentation, by occasional failure, by coincidences and serendipity—what success means to me, which I could not have known until after I found it.

Recalling some job interviews I’ve had in former lives, I remember my difficulty answering such trite questions as “where would you like to be in 5 years?” Of course, at the time I made up a contrived answer having to do with professional aspirations: a feigned desire for more senior titles, greater responsibilities, higher pay. Still, as my mind was attempting to formulate this answer, I would also hear a voice within me answering inaudibly but earnestly, “I would like to earn my living doing something more interesting than working here,”.

Before becoming a professional, I imagined it to mean being able to spend as much of my time outdoors as I wanted, photographing almost any time I wanted to, having more time to pursue personal interests, and learning to make do with less income than I had in my former corporate career.

“I would like to spend more time outdoors,” “I would like to have more free time,” “I would like to be my own boss,” “I would like to decide each day how to best spend my time,” “I would like to learn more about science, philosophy, and art,” “I would like to live in a beautiful place, close to nature.” Although I could not have predicted it at the time, I have in fact succeeded in all these things. It took considerably longer than 5 years For much of that time, it never occurred to me that I may find this success by becoming an artist. For most of that time, I didn’t know what being an artist meant or would come to mean, for me.

Over the years, I have heard many accounts of professional photographers lamenting that the reality of their lives is very different from what they thought being a professional would be like. This has not been my experience. Before becoming a professional, I imagined it to mean being able to spend as much of my time outdoors as I wanted, photographing almost any time I wanted to, having more time to pursue personal interests, and learning to make do with less income than I had in my former corporate career. This is exactly what becoming a professional turned out to be for me. That may sound like a success story, but what I couldn’t know in advance is that this was just the first chapter.

What I couldn’t foresee when deciding to take the proverbial plunge into professional photography, was that these accomplishments in themselves would turn out to be means, and not ends—means for discovering greater ends than I knew, or could have known, are possible.

What I couldn’t know was how living as an artist, spending more time outdoors, investing more time in experiences and in pursuit of personal interests, and making do with less income, would change me as a person.

My true measure of success as I consider it today, is not any goal I had set for myself in advance nor any anecdotal accomplishment I might list on a professional CV. My true measure of success is to live and to have lived, a considerable portion of my life as an artist, scholar, and explorer—the things I get to experience and to learn, the constant and oft-rewarded anticipation of greater knowledge and unforeseen discoveries, my joy in communing frequently with wild places and wild lives, my daily doses of inspiration, beauty, and creative challenges. All these things upon reflection have this in common: so long as I can sustain them, their value to me will not diminish one iota if nobody else even knows I have accomplished them. In the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The deed is everything, the glory nothing.”

I believe many people set themselves up for disappointment by pursuing some form of glory—fame, wealth, prizes. If I had tried to define success in such terms before embarking on my artistic journey years ago, I likely would have been much poorer today if all I had managed to achieve was exactly what I set out to do. It’s no wonder that so many who achieve such preconceived notions of success, find themselves unsatisfied even if successful by their own prematurely decided definition.

Certainly, I find pride and satisfaction when learning that my work, writings, and experiences have been useful to others. I must concede that, although a wonderful bonus, this was never a goal I pursued explicitly. I mention this hoping it may allay whatever guilt or concern may plague those who feel it must be their priority to be of service, to fall in line with (or at least avoid upsetting) some tradition, or to bind themselves to other people’s notions of propriety.

Rather than hoping for glory by aiming for known goals, I believe that art can be more satisfying as a means of discovering things about yourself—the kind of person you are, the kind of things that bring you joy and satisfaction in accordance with your own personality and philosophy, learning what success means to you, if only to you alone.

Robert Henri was correct in observing, “Your only hope of satisfying others is in satisfying yourself.” This, of course, is not inevitable, but it is a likely consequence of leading by example: doing your best according to your own sensibilities, in whatever way suits your unique talents and temperament, within the opportunities available to you, and in doing so also helping others discover what may be satisfying to them, and demonstrating that it is not impossible.

You may learn, as I have, that success measured by some form of glory—trophies, milestones, riches, or some other forms of “notches on your belt”—is much less satisfying, and much more ephemeral, than the rewards of everyday living according to your nature: doing what is interesting and meaningful to you, pursuing experiences, sensations, and contemplations for their own sake and not for any measurable outcome.

Flash and Medieval Art

By Przemyslaw Ziemacki | April 1, 2022

Using artificial light when it's dark lets photographers colour the landscape. This way, nature photography can be more open to the artists’ imagination and may give intriguing aesthetics.

One of the consequences of the lack of sunlight at night is that photographers focus their attention on the sky. Often when we hear about night photography of nature's landscape, we assume that it is some pictures in which the Moon or stars’ formations play the main role. So the landscape becomes a background or a kind of a frame for the sky. By using artificial light the situation changes 180 degrees. It is how architecture photography works after getting dark while many buildings are lit with street lamps or even dedicated spotlights. Preparing such lighting conditions in nature is probably not a good idea but incorporating smaller kinds of lighting equipment seems to be promising.

However, the above conclusion is only post rationalisation. To start the project called “Night”, I walked a path of fascination, inspiration and coincidence. I believe my fascination with the night came from two sources, both much older than my photography. The first one was animals’ activity from dusk to dawn so the reason connected directly with an interest in nature.

The second one was rather cultural as in the 90. I watched the “Twin Peaks” and “X files” series as well, as I was interested in cold war secret aircraft. So the night was a territory in my mind where spirituality, new technologies and wildlife met together. During my studies, I got SLR and DSLR cameras and I was looking around at famous photographers’ works, both representing classical and unconventional approaches to nature photography.

It is a bit unusual in landscape photography to build dramaturgy of a photograph by controlling the light, shadow and colour because in most cases landscape photographers rely on found conditions.

That was the moment when the inspiration came – I saw Michael Frye’s night shots of the American desert landscape (in general his photography is really worth watching!).

The key idea is to not only light up objects in the landscape but also to do it with colour filters, in other words – to colourise them. It is a bit unusual in landscape photography to build dramaturgy of a photograph by controlling the light, shadow and colour because in most cases landscape photographers rely on found conditions. Right away I felt I found a technique I could engage in and make long term use of. The sources of light that I decided to use were not anything unusual in photography – firstly a flash and a bit later a torch. But choosing the colour filters was the coincidence in all this story. Very shortly after starting my photography, I was looking for an opportunity to exchange views. That was how I met Tomasz Pućkowski who was older and had more experience in landscape photography than me. But his main job was stained glass making.

Stained glass has roots in ancient times, but its glory days were definitely in the Middle Ages when overpainted coloured glass was turning churches into more mystical places. During the secession, stained glass became popular in homes and public buildings and nature motifs, especially plants, became common.

Naturally, I do not carry a stained glass window to make a photograph, I just use small pieces of stained glass as filters instead of professional lighting filters

Naturally, I do not carry a stained glass window to make a photograph, I just use small pieces of stained glass as filters instead of professional lighting filters. At first, it was mainly an easy choice - I was given what I wanted to get while drinking damned fine coffee - but with time I made a decision to keep using stained glass pieces because of two reasons. Both are my subjective feelings and I have not done any comparisons with professional colour filters.

The first one is about what they are in my hand. The stained glass pieces, cut mostly from leftover glass and with no right angles, are far away from professional looking. Often the glass is not homogeneous. The pieces have different thicknesses. Feeling them in my hand creates less of a high tech feeling, like having an old fashion wooden steering wheel aboard a modern yacht. The second one is about what aesthetic effect they give and how they influence on taking photographs. The stained glass absorbs a lot of light so to get something illuminated enough it is necessary to engage the flash several times. It is pretty difficult to overdose lighting and it is possible to set shooting parameters on feel. One does not need to count everything, just opening a snapshot and walking around flashing from time to time. I think the colourised glass gives more austere colours to my photographs as well.

As colours play the main role in the “Night” project the firmament full of stars is not so important, sometimes even a dark blue empty sky is preferable – it becomes a flat homogeneous surface, blue or purple. This is why quite many photographs have been taken at the end of blue hour. The first subjects are rocks and trees, especially skeletal, wind-shaped trees and deciduous trees without leaves. Often colours given to them are cultural related. Connecting blue and red on a single frame can be interpreted as the warmth of the fire and the cold of the night. This motif has engaged people since prehistory. In general, the night is full of similar contrasts. Darkness drives us to sharpen our senses. The world seems calm, although the approaching night is mysterious and fearful. Violet and aquamarine recall the mood of night – calm and mysterious. Lighting up leaves with a green filter strengthens their natural colour taking them to a higher level of intensity. Also having both artificial and natural lighted green objects on the same frame delivers interesting variations within one colour range.

Connecting blue and red on a single frame can be interpreted as the warmth of the fire and the cold of the night. This motif has engaged people since prehistory.

One green is fresh and intense while the other looks soft and calm. A photograph from the “Night” project does not need to be night-looking. The idea could be to contrast a colourised object with very light, almost white, background. It is still night photography in an "after-sunset" meaning but the impression could be confusing as well as intriguing. Colourising natural objects in the night landscape also make us consider how other animals see their environment. It has been not my intention to try to imitate the sight of particular species but looking at the "Night” collection one can imagine a reflection of the natural world.

Inside the High Sierra

By Claude Fiddler & Charlotte Parkin | March 30, 2022

Claude Fiddler was interviewed on one of Matt Payne's f-stop podcasts and we thought it would be great to include him in On Landscape, especially regarding his book "Inside the High Sierra". Claude has is a photographer for whom the experience of being in the wilderness is paramount in order for him to create photographic works that resonate.

Mount Russell, Constitution Peak, Mount Whitney, and Mount Hale, Sierra Nevada,

Tell me about the photographers or artists that inspire you most.

Van Gogh for the colour in his paintings, his use of perspective, the geometries he creates and the movement of the geometries through the frame. Joel Meyerowitz for the use of one lens, the 250mm wide-field Ektar on the 8x10 Deardorff field camera. His seeing of light, scale, and the precision of elements placed in the frame. His variety of subject matter. Meyerowitz's book Cape Light was a revelation for me. Richard Misrach’s book Desert Cantos affected me in much the same as Cape Light. Steve Solinsky for his seeing the ordinary as extraordinary. Joseph Holmes for his landscape compositions and his perfection of craft from exposure to print. John Wawrzonek for his vision of New England.

What books stimulated your interest in photography and who drove you forward, directly or indirectly, as you developed?

Besides Cape Light and Desert Cantos, The Daybooks of Edward Weston and Weston’s seeing that could be directly attributed to Edward Weston influenced and amazed me at first. I was driven to find my voice. Something I could call my own.

Tell me about why you love landscape photography? A little background on what your first artistic passions were.

I love recording my amazement with the mountain landscape. I also, love/hate the challenge of making a perfect composition. I hate the technical aspects of photography but love it when I solve "the problem". My first artistic passion was recording my early experiences climbing and backpacking in the Sierra Nevada. I loved the alchemy of taking a picture, and then developing the film, making a print and recreating the experience. Absolutely nothing artistic. Purely mechanical snapshots. But that was the start. After seeing photos in climbing magazines, I recognised that a photo could resonate with an audience. It could communicate something. I became keenly aware of this looking at Ansel Adams photos. As being in the mountains took on more importance in my life, Adams’ photos communicated the emotions of being in the mountains. I wanted to make pictures that did the same.

Huibo Hou

By Huibo Hou & Michéla Griffith | March 25, 2022

For this issue, we’ve chosen to talk to U.S. based Huibo Hou. For many years she has been passionate about landscape photography despite her circumstances allowing little or no time for it. I suspect others would have given up or moved on to other things.

Huibo has a particular love of black and white which she feels gives her greater creative freedom. She does however work in colour and although we’ve only included a limited number of these images, I was impressed by their delicacy in contrast with her bolder and more graphic monochromatic images.

Huibo has progressed from a pre-conception of what images might be found to a more open and intuitive way of working which it can be argued has been accelerated by the travel restrictions associated with the pandemic, allowing a closer and more personal focus to develop.

Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, what early interests you had, and what you went on to study and do for work?

I grew up in mainland China. I moved to the U.S. in 1995 to pursue my graduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Two years later I decided to drop out of my PhD program and moved to San Diego, California, to work for a wireless communication company as an engineer in mobile device chip design. After working for the same company for almost 21 years, I decided to take a long break. Now I am a full-time mom and a part-time landscape photographer.

How and when did you become interested in photography? Did anything, in particular, prompt you to become serious about it?

Yes, there was one particular trip that prompted me to seriously think about how I could take better pictures. In summer 1998, shortly after I moved to San Diego, my parents came to visit me from China. I took them on a road trip and proudly showed them the iconic places such as Yosemite, Grand Canyon etc. The scenery was obviously very impressive but most of my photos were not. They didn’t do justice to what we saw, and I was disappointed. At that time, naturally, I blamed everything on my point-and-shoot camera. After doing some research, I purchased my first SLR, hoping to improve the quality of my pictures.

A Morning in a Magical Forest

By Artem Sapegin | March 22, 2022

A forest not far from my home in Berlin, Germany that I call “My Forest”. I go there several times a month and rarely see any people. Sometimes, a lonely dog walker or a jogger, but most of the time it’s just me and my tripod. And it’s only about 40 minutes by train from my home.

My Forest isn’t very big and isn’t exactly wild, meaning that sometimes you need to photoshop a traffic light or a road sign peeking behind the trees on a photo. Or you need to take some plastic wrapping out of the forest.

It consists mostly of mixed deciduous trees: birches, oaks, maples; and a few areas of pines. It has a couple of small and not so pretty ponds (which are, however, nice for a summer picnic). It also has an area with highland cows — super cute and fluffy — surrounded by beautiful, sparse birches. Be careful not to step into cow poo!

I rarely check the weather forecast because I don’t want to have any expectations of the weather and the conditions — I just go there to see what I can find.

I like to go to my forest around sunrise. I rarely check the weather forecast because I don’t want to have any expectations of the weather and the conditions — I just go there to see what I can find. This kind of routine approach makes it easier for me to wake up early and leave the comfort of my home, and avoid doubts like “maybe the conditions won’t be good today, maybe I should just brew another cup of coffee and read a book on the sofa with my dogs”.

I usually spend there two or three hours and find these moments of quietness and aloneness very rewarding. They give me time to disconnect from the city, from my work, and all the problems of existence. It gives me time to think, or even better, not to think.

Berlin is not the best place for moody landscapes. For example, we have dense fog probably just a couple of times a year. And if I was going out only when the conditions are promising, I’d have probably stayed at home all the time. So I just go. Most of the time, I end up shooting something. However, not every time do I have something worth keeping.

Anyway, even if there’s nothing to shoot, I enjoy the walk, nature, occasional encounters with wildlife, and of course, coffee. There’s nothing better than sitting on a fallen tree, chewing a semi-fresh croissant or even some homemade banana bread, and drinking hot coffee from a thermos.

I had many lucky mornings when I managed to catch great light or amazing conditions in my forest. However, one particular morning in winter 2020 is by far the best of all and the most memorable. I don’t think I’ve seen such incredible conditions anywhere in the past decade or so.

One particular morning in winter 2020 is by far the best of all and the most memorable. I don’t think I’ve seen such incredible conditions anywhere in the past decade or so

The following piece is adapted from my journal and was part of my first photography zine that I’ve published in the autumn of 2021. All following photos were made on that morning.

The sun promised by the weather forecast is nowhere to be seen. Instead, all the trees are sparkling with frost! It’s so strong — I’ve never seen anything like that in my five years in Berlin. The frost and a touch of fog are transforming a regular forest into a truly magical landscape.

A flash in the corner of my eye — a white deer’s bum behind the trees. Another deer is crossing a path right in front of me. I see six of them, and they aren’t running away until I try to come closer.

The fog is denser on a field — I can’t see the trees across the field. Shouting loudly, birds are flying above the horizon. Woodpecker’s knocking is echoing from the other side of the field. Another photographer is shooting a lone tree — the one I’ve tried to shoot so many times before, none successfully until today. Fog and frost are the best photographer’s friends!

I drink hot coffee, looking at a frozen pond, and eat a cold croissant I’ve bought at the train station. Two swans are flying over the pond. Birds are tweeting and jumping from branch to branch — I guess everyone is having breakfast in the forest. Only barely audible noises of the road and occasional dog walkers and joggers remind me that I’m still in the city — not in a magical forest.

Issue 251

By Tim Parkin | March 20, 2022

Click here to download issue 251 (high quality, 151Mb)

Click here to download issue 251 (smaller download, 86Mb)

Book Reviews

By Tim Parkin | March 18, 2022

Dan Baumbach / Haiku

I have to admit to being a big fan of Dan Baumbach’s work. His eye for a complex but elegant detail and commitment to working in small geographic areas have really paid dividends over the years. You can read more about Dan’s background and working methods in our featured photographer article from a few years ago.

Dan kindly sent me a copy of this self-published book a few weeks ago and I’ve been enjoying dipping into it now and again whilst having a coffee break. Dan has worked with Paul Jonathan Rowland to create a book that contrasts Haiku with photography. The Haiku are short ‘poems’ that conform to a rhythmic structure, a skeleton onto which words sit to evoke moods or feelings. They work exceptionally well set alongside Dan’s images which, although it sounds cliched to say so, have the feel of visual haiku themselves.

This is only a short book of 20 photographs but it is one which I really enjoyed. You can buy a copy directly from Dan’s website.

Joseph Holmes / Natural Light

I’m a bit late finding out about this book but I’m very happy I finally did as it’s a bit of a treasure. Joseph Holmes is an absolute guru as far as image quality, colour management and camera technology are concerned. But he’s also an excellent photographer and one of the only ones I know that fairly seamlessly migrated from large format to digital capture. This book was supposed to be the first and showcase release for “The Nature Company” and they seemed to have thrown a big budget at it. Sadly they stopped shortly after producing this. The quality is amazing and the reproduction is exquisite - although I would expect no less from Mr Holmes. The selection of images include some of Joseph’s best work of the time and many of my absolute favourites. There is a fantastic introduction by Barry Lopez, touching on themes of the environment (a cause which JH has long been vocal about) and referring to photographers such as Joseph with the fantastic title, “Historians of Light”. For ourselves, sitting looking for a book to buy nearly 40 years later, we stand a good chance of finding an absolute bargain. When I purchased my copy, I paid only £5 for it with free postage in the UK. There are a couple on Abebooks and Ebay at the moment for around £10 delivered. Snap them up!! If you can’t find one for these sorts of prices, I’d still recommend a purchase for four or five times the price. If they’re all gone as well - buy “Arctic Dreams” by Barry Lopez and read it while you wait for one to appear, you won’t regret it. Highly recommended!

End frame: Weed Against Sky, 1948 by Harry Callahan

By Kathleen Pickard | March 18, 2022

When I was approached to write a piece for Endframe it didn’t take me long to decide upon my image selection, “Weed Against Sky, 1948" by Harry Callahan. The photograph is deceptively simple - an arrangement of black lines sitting comfortably on a white ground. It is not a descriptive image. There is no colour, no scale, no context. It is an image distilled to its minimum; sparse, cool and abstract. It challenges the viewer to engage with it.

In 2010 I attended an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It had the title of “Abstract Expressionists New York: The Big Picture.” It was a comprehensive display of the art scene of New York in the 40s and 50s. The usual suspects were in attendance: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, to name just a few. To my surprise, among the large colourful canvases, I found a group of modestly-sized black and white photographs by a photographer with whom I was totally unfamiliar, Harry Callahan. The images were a shock to me, not just because they were there at all, but because his subject matter was my subject matter: weeds in snow, stones in the sand, reflections on the water. Things that most often go unnoticed in the larger landscape.

I felt an immediate sense of kinship with this unknown (to me) photographer.

I needed to explore and find out more about him.

I discovered that in the art world he is considered one of the most influential American photographers in the 20th century. He is credited with being the first photographer to make abstracts in nature. Between 1946 and 2020 his work was exhibited 51 times in that temple of modern art, MOMA. In 1978 he was the first photographer to represent the USA at the Venice Biennale. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1996. And that is just an abbreviated list of his achievements. Why then is he not a household name?

Callahan was a late starter. He was 26 before he took his first photograph. He had no training in photography and was largely self-taught. He joined the Detroit Photographic Guild but found that their favoured genre, pictorial photography, accompanied by their dogmatic views on how it should be made, was not to his taste. He termed it “murky junk”.

However, it was at the Guild where he experienced his photographic epiphany. He attended a lecture and workshop given by Ansel Adams. Adams’ work exhilarated him; but it wasn’t the famed grand landscapes he found exciting, it was the less-appreciated images of grasses. Seeing those photographs freed Callahan. They gave him permission to photograph anything, anywhere. He decided, right then and there, that his life would be making fine art photography. In reality, as he soon discovered, there was no prospect of earning a living from his photography.

Adams’ work exhilarated him; but it wasn’t the famed grand landscapes he found exciting, it was the less-appreciated images of grasses. Seeing those photographs freed Callahan. They gave him permission to photograph anything, anywhere. He decided, right then and there, that his life would be making fine art photography.

When an offer of a teaching position at Chicago’s Institute of Art came his way, he accepted it, despite having no formal education in photography, or art, or teaching. To his surprise, he “took to” teaching and he spent the rest of his working life mentoring students there, and, subsequently, at the Rhode Island School of Design.

His good friend and colleague, Aaron Siskind, termed Callahan “a restless photographer’’. Fortunately, his income from teaching supported his family while allowing him to follow his own photographic path. He would photograph a subject until he felt he “got it right”, however long that took, be it hours or years. He would then move on to new subject matter, a new camera, or new experimental techniques. He returned to nature repeatedly throughout his career but also shot street, urban, and architectural photographs. His wife, Eleanor, was an unending source of inspiration. He photographed her almost daily for over 15 years.

Callahan was a pioneer in colour photography, shooting transparencies from as early as 1941. Unable to afford dye-transfer prints of his work at a teacher’s salary, the slides went into storage and were shown only after 30 years had passed. He shot in-camera multiple exposures and what would now be called Intentional Camera Movement. He explored ideas to their limit, performing hundreds of variations until he was satisfied. His perseverance resulted in an archive of over 100,000 negatives and 10,000 proof prints that was left in the care of the Centre for Creative
Photography at the University of Arizona when he died in 1999.

So, I had to wonder, given his accomplishments and innovations, why I wasn’t as familiar with his name as I ought to be.

Perhaps there are several reasons.

His portfolio is so diverse that he defies categorization. He actively avoided developing a style saying that when you did you were “sort of dead’ creatively. It’s not easy to recognize “a Callahan” in the wild.

His confidence in his art was rock solid, but as a person, he was shy in the public eye and spectacularly self-effacing. A somewhat dated 1981 interview with him, available on YouTube, provides ample confirmation of that. Self-promotion must have posed a significant challenge for him. He let his photographs speak for him.

Mostly, though, I think it is another factor that contributes to making his profile lower than it deserves to be. At the time he was photographing there was a large market for both social documentary images (think Life Magazine and its ilk) and the Grand Landscape. The work of the photographers in those genres was out there in the public eye, available to be seen and thus more likely to be recognized and talked about.

Callahan was a photographer of the intimate landscape, or as John Szarkowski, Director of Photography at MOMA, put it, his photographs “were the interior shape of his private experience”. At that time there simply wasn’t an appetite for that kind of photograph in the market.

Whatever and however Callahan photographed it was done with great authenticity. To Harry Callahan photography was life and his life was photography. In his own words, “I’m interested in revealing a subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can’t always see. Wanting to see more makes you grow as a person and growing makes you want to show more of the life around you. I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively, that when photographs are looked at, they will touch the spirit in people.”

You can read more about Harry Callahan in a short article On Landscape wrote in 2011 alongside the books "Elemental Landscape" and "The Photographer at Work" which we can highly recommend.

Richard Martin – Portrait of a Photographer

By Matt Payne | March 17, 2022

Landscape and nature photography takes on many forms, from literal translations of moments of dramatic weather, incredible light, and grandiose views - to artistic interpretations of quieter, more contemplative scenes and photos that transform the literal into something imaginative. Additionally, I personally believe it to be possible for photographs to occupy all or none of these forms simultaneously; however, lately, I strongly find myself gravitating more towards work that can use literal form as a base while transmuting it into something requiring imagination, contemplation, and use of metaphor to create and appreciate.

To best describe how Richard creates such unique nature photography, imagine combining the analytical qualities of an architect with the artistic sensibilities of a painter.

It is no surprise then that I have found myself enjoying the work of photographer Richard Martin, whose photos are always engaging, thought-provoking, and unique. Richard is proof that literal forms of nature can be used artistically to express ideas, feelings, and emotions.

Regarding Passion

By Cody Schultz | March 17, 2022

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.~ Gandhi

While looking into artists who had dealt with mental health for the previous article, Art and Mental Health, a painter by the name of Pierre Auguste Renoir came up a time or two. His story is worth highlighting:

At the age of 51, Renoir began developing rheumatoid arthritis. Fifteen years later, in 1907, he moved to a farm close to the Mediterranean sea, where he continued to paint for the last twenty years of his life. While his arthritis severely limited his mobility, he largely ignored it the best he possibly could. He ended up developing progressive deformities in his hands, along with ankylosis - a stiffness of the joint - of his right shoulder, which ultimately forced him to modify his painting technique. And though he maintained his ability to grasp a brush, his assistant eventually had to place it within his hand, which was often bandaged as to prevent skin irritation.

Jocelyn Horsfall

By Jocelyn Horsfall & Michéla Griffith | March 15, 2022

Once you look down a macro lens, the world (and often your back) is never quite the same again. In my experience it’s a good option to explore if you want to move away from representational photography; so many possibilities open up. Jocelyn Horsfall grew up surrounded by photographers but like many of us was encouraged to pursue academic subjects. Ultimately her inherent love of nature and colour has closed the circle. Increasingly drawn towards minimalism and abstraction, she is now employing a variety of techniques in camera, during processing, and at print stage to distil the essence of her subjects.

Oriental Cherry Blossom

Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, what your early interests were, and what you went on to study and do?

I had an itinerant childhood as my father was in the army and we moved every 2-3 years. Apart from a wonderful stint out in Singapore when I was very young, experiencing a completely different culture, it was mainly around the UK. I think you become more adaptable and resilient dealing with that sense of impermanence, and a changing backdrop to life. I remember enjoying the exploring of new places, particularly around the Cotswolds and the beautiful scenery of the West coast of Scotland, but not all the new schools I had to face!

Seasons

By Richard Rawlings | March 14, 2022

It can often seem like one season blurs into another. The individual distinctness of each one has, over the years, fallen away. Winters become milder and summers become changeable. However, once you get away from the rat race of faster cars, even faster phones and the daily pressures of work, the countryside still recognises each season and changes can be clearly seen.

Seasons start and finish at given times of the year. The Met office works on March, April and May for Spring, June, July and August for Summer. September, October, and November for Autumn and finally December, January, and February for winter. Astronomically seasons are based around the equinox and solstice Spring starts 21st March, Summer 21st June, Autumn 21st September and Winter 21st December.

Autumn

No season tells us its arrived in quite the style of Autumn. The heady days of summer are still fresh in our minds. BBQ’s, late nights and early mornings and the long hot days, that, normally, mark summer. Suddenly its gone! It’s getting dark at 7.30pm and getting light later and the early morning stagger to look out of the window becomes a little easier with more sleep. The car is now covered with heavy dew and the grass now soaks the feet, training shoes are out and boots back in.

Travels with a Seneca 8×10 Camera

By Emilio Barbaresi | March 11, 2022

Large Format Photography has led me to re-evaluate many aspects of my research of images. First of all my vision and the landscapes on which I focus. No doubt.

The transition from 4x5 format to 8x10 has further accelerated this growth, opening the doors to a new dimension of photography; from the study of the image through the large focusing screen, up to the print, and therefore a real and concrete image previously elaborated, inverted and imagined.

One of the landscapes that has been inspiring me for years is Lake Campotosto which is in the Gran Sasso National Park in Central Italy. I will never get tired of heading there just to visit it, confront myself with it and with my changes, or more resolutely go there and take new images

It is one of the Apennine landscapes still capable of that feeling of non-contamination in its purest form, and where there is a wide choice of contexts, from its high rocky peaks (the surrounding mountains are the highest in the whole central Italy, with the colossus of Corno Grande or with the shocking geological conformations of Monte Corvo) to the dense forests of beeches and red maples, or the crystalline waters of high-altitude lakes.

I decided in a window of good weather between the Covid restrictions at the end of last winter, to plan a trip and to spend a few days alone in the places that represented the beginnings of my photographic research. This location inspires me more than ever in dealing with my Seneca 8x10 Camera. It boasts its year of production in 1927 and so its wood is almost a century old.

My intent is mainly to take a wide panorama from an elevated position overlooking Lake Campotosto. The lake is an artificial lake and if the weather conditions allow it, I planned to explore along the banks and track down some large boulders which exist because of its man made origin; it is, in fact, the second-largest artificial basin in Europe.

I arrive at the place where I will spend the first night. The beauty of the lake excites me as always but the temperatures were considerably lower than I expected. Never mind, I expect that during the next day, large cloudy banks will intensify right on the lake, which will add an intriguing element.

The first day I decide to hike in the mountains that surround me, so I head towards the Laga massif, to its south-facing point, which borders the Gran Sasso group. I realise how underrated these mountains are and how much they offer in terms of landscape and personal challenge. I am deeply satisfied: with the way the mountain responds positively to my enthusiasm for freedom and discovery. Besides the photographic features, where dedication and concentration are a primary part, I felt a physical need to approach the landscape on the emotional side.

On my way back, I know that all the work for which I am here has yet to come. I calmly observe the weather conditions. A strong wind has risen and, the lake's water ruffles and thick clouds from the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian coasts collide here. The scenario is more than favourable to the eyes of a photographer.

I realise how underrated these mountains are and how much they offer in terms of landscape and personal challenge. I am deeply satisfied: with the way the mountain responds positively to my enthusiasm for freedom and discovery.

I wander a bit in search of a view that reflects the image that I visualise mentally and that I would like to create. The Large Format and the 8x10 format, in particular, have taught me that the self confidence with the workflow and consequently of the ideas that contributes considerably to eliminating waste in terms of time and material. This time I have brought with me only two plates to be exposed, with the very intention of using only one. In short, a good training ground for acquiring precision in what you are doing, as well as acquiring spontaneous attention to the more or less suitable light conditions, especially in very changing situations such as the ones in this case.

I have a clear image of the photo that I would like to take, in which there is a well-defined foreground and in the background, there is a remarkable scenery of the beautiful and massive mountains still covered by snow. To do this I rely on a wide-angle lens; I found myself using it more and more, with great joy.

It is satisfying to have a lot of air in the frame, to give plenty of breath to the elements, and at the same time immersing myself in the context. I took with me a beautiful Schneider Kreuznach 210mm which in the 4x5 inch format would be equivalent to a 70mm medium telephoto but in the 8x10 format it is a 35mm! Not too distorting but wide enough to be able to realize what I imagine, great!

I walk a bit, quietly, completely alone, not only because I have no company but because Campotosto lake is isolated in this season. In fact, it isn't a tourist destination, given the cold and the altitude (over 1300 meters above sea level). In my opinion, it is a treasure to be kept carefully, which makes me live it with a feeling of affection, despite its austerity.

In fact, it isn't a tourist destination, given the cold and the altitude (over 1300 meters above sea level). In my opinion, it is a treasure to be kept carefully, which makes me live it with a feeling of affection, despite its austerity.

In order to find the right composition, I want to first understand the landscape, which is always very different from the way I keep it in my memories. Basically, this is the engine that always leads me to return to places I know, towards something that I can find in a new and unexpected way.

This time, moreover, there is the 8x10 Camera which I have already used in various contexts, including high mountain ridges. From now on I want to push its technical possibilities.

After considering the most harmonious lines and shapes among a set of rocks and having balanced the right weights on the frame I find an arrangement that is just right. The most complicated part is yet to arrive: focusing on the foreground and, at the same time, on the mountains in the background. In fact, my Camera, especially with these older wide-angle lenses, does not allow large movements like modern models and you can easily risk clipping or vignetting the edges of your frame. However, the image projected on the focusing screen inspires me a lot. I take great care with it without wasting precious time because I see that the orange-toned light of the sunset is rapidly losing intensity to make space for the night. It’s done, a few seconds and the image is exposed.

I don't know about the actual result, I have to wait to develop and then print the final image, essentially bringing it to life. Is fine tonight, though. I have the vital feeling of recognising the path I have chosen. Now it's time to return with the satisfaction and the beauty I have experienced and breathed once again.

Issue 250

By Tim Parkin | March 8, 2022

Click here to download issue 250 (high quality, 186Mb)

Click here to download issue 250 (smaller download, 115Mb)

End frame: Puglia 1978 by Franco Fontana

By Kate Maxwell | March 6, 2022

I came to photography from an interest in art; indeed I bought my first digital camera as a kind of sketchbook, to record what I saw as references for future paintings. So when I stumbled upon the work of Franco Fontana, I was mesmerised. His vividly colourful abstract images of the Italian countryside reminded me of some great 20th century painters: Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, Piet Mondrian, Nicolas de Stael.

Here was something completely different from what I was used to seeing in landscape magazines or Instagram. There are no epic vistas, moody mountains, glowing sunsets or Big Stoppered rushing rivers.

Fontana, now 88, is little known in the UK, but his photographs are in major collections all over the world, including the V&A in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has published over seventy books and been widely exhibited in the world’s classiest galleries. He has also worked commercially with big brands such as Volkswagen, Versace, and Volvo, and his images have been featured on jazz album sleeves.

The Italian landscapes that caught my eye were shot during the 1970s and 1980s on 35mm transparency film, with a telephoto lens, underexposed slightly to saturate the colours. In a 2009 documentary (available on YouTube) he describes how he then photographed the slide with negative film, which had the effect of intensifying the colour and removing the shadows, giving the flat colour blocks that make his work so distinctive.

At the time, serious landscape photography was mostly in black and white, and in Britain usually had a documentary slant - Fay Godwin and James Ravilious are two examples who spring to mind. This lends a fine art feel because it is not how we actually see the world; stripped of familiar colour, it is already an interpretation using tone and graphic shapes. Colour at the time was considered too realistic, too amateur, too commercial. There were colour photographers in America who challenged that belief, such as Joel Meyerowitz and William Eggleston. However, their work was strongly rooted in time and place; with most of their images, you feel you could walk into the scene and become part of it. There is a narrative, storytelling aspect to them. Fontana’s images seem to transcend place and time; they are not of something, they are about creative vision. His landscapes are real places taken in real time, but they are not literal depictions of the scene. They are, like a modern painting, less about the subject than about the photographer’s response to the subject. He is quoted as saying: "Photography should not reproduce the visible; it should make the invisible visible”. Through his eye and mind, the landscape is transformed into something beyond what you or I might have seen had we been standing next to him.

The image here, just titled Puglia, 1978 (as is the whole series), could be said to break most of the composition rules to which landscape photographers today are often slaves to. The horizon line cuts across the centre of the image, breaking it into two halves. The two clouds (even, not odd numbers) and the distant hill are dead centre. There are no leading lines to take us into the picture, and there is no single focal point. The sky is blue, not dark and moody or inflamed with sunrise or sunset. There are no shadows to create form.

The horizon line cuts across the centre of the image, breaking it into two halves. The two clouds (even, not odd numbers) and the distant hill are dead centre. There are no leading lines to take us into the picture, and there is no single focal point.

He would have had to wait for the clouds to line up (no patch tool work here) and for the light to cast the distant sliver of hill into shadow. The yellow crop is in soft focus; did he use a slow shutter speed when a breeze was blowing or is the effect a result of the compression of a telephoto lens? I doubt he used a tripod - in the film mentioned above, he wanders with camera in hand, seizing the fleeting moment his eye catches something interesting.

The scenes for which he is famous, of Puglia and Basilicata in southern Italy, are probably unremarkable country scenes which most of us would drive through on our way to something more spectacular, only stopping to make an image if the weather conditions or light made them remarkable. The cultivated agricultural landscape is not dramatic, it is just rolling farmland, similar to what we might find in southern England. He was, he says, attracted to this area because of the wide open spaces, with few trees, telegraph wires or roads to break the rhythm. By focusing on the essential shapes and patterns of the fields, Fontana transforms them into something unique with his exceptional eye.

Today he uses a DSLR and Photoshop but, like many masters, he says the camera is just a tool, as the pen is to the writer. It’s what you do with it that counts: “The camera is simply the instrument that allows us to represent our thought.” This, he says, can be achieved with a camera phone, and he welcomes the new technologies which enable more people to express themselves. His other works are also worth looking at; his minimalist seascapes have the same central horizon and flat colour planes. He also has a great collection of geometric American urban landscapes, with shapes and bright colours flattened under a blue sky, and his series Asphalt cleverly observes the graphic lines which you see if you look down towards your feet on roads and pavements.

I think we can learn from him that great photographs don’t have to be of spectacular, iconic places. There are interesting images to be made all around us; we just have to look harder, and pursue what resonates with our own personality, curiosity, and imagination to find our own voice.
It’s the mind, not the camera, that creates a memorable and unique photograph.

Subscribers 4×4 Portfolios

By Chris Salm, Claude Hamel, Derrick Sansome & Paul Flatt | March 5, 2022

Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted from our subscribers. Each portfolio consists of four images related in some way.

Submit Your 4x4 Portfolio

Interested in submitting your work? We're on the lookout for new portfolios for the next few issues, so please do get in touch!

Chris Salm

Mooloolaba Beach

Claude Hamel

Winter Jewellery

Derrick Sansome

Sky/Skye

Paul Flatt

Forest Decomposition

By Paul Flatt | March 5, 2022

I first got into landscape photography to record wild places I visit while backpacking. I have taken lots of pictures of the grand landscape with mountains, lakes, sunsets, or other big things visible. When I look at most of my pictures I see many of them just don't show the grandness that I observed and felt when the pictures where taken. So being the inquisitive person I am, I started aiming my camera at other things smaller things. Not that I have given up on the grand landscape.

Indeed most of my pictures continue to show larger vistas. But being the type of person that doesn't sit still well, I get outdoors in all sorts of weather. This includes cloudy grey days when the grand landscape is obscured in cloud. So these images were taken while on hikes in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, Northern California and Oregon. Two of the images were taken on (or near) the forest floor under a canopy of coastal redwood trees. And two of them were taken about a meter above ground as they were attached to growing bushes. While hiking I can frequently be found slightly off the trail kneeling or laying in the dirt as I find myself getting closer to something small close to the ground, usually in the form of a plant or fungi. Fungi are a critical part of our forest ecosystem. They slowly return the dead tree material to the earth, where the minerals can be used again by another generation of trees.

Sky/Skye

By Derrick Sansome | March 5, 2022

My son and daughter in law invited me to join them on holiday on Skye in October and subsequently invited my daughter as well telling her “you do realise that this trip will simply consist of taking dad from one photo location to another don’t you?”

I successfully convinced them we were simply visiting all the best bits, of these four images three were taken at or near the best bits but looking in the other direction or whilst travelling to/from those locations. It was a wet windy week but that brought both variety and opportunity that I really enjoyed and a variety in the sky above and I am very grateful for the invitation.

Winter Jewellery

By Claude Hamel | March 5, 2022

I live in the town of Rimouski in the Lower Saint-Lawrence region of the province of Québec in Canada. In the centre of town, at the foot of the hills, one finds a small park, called parc Lepage. It is a charming place, with few visitors, especially in winter. Light is often dim in some sections because of the canopy and the angle of the sun. I go there often with my snowshoes and end my stroll by the little stream that flows through the park. It comes from the hills and runs under buildings and roads until it enters the grounds through a large cement pipe.

From there, it gurgles and even giggles with joy until its freedom is once again robbed from it. There, it is made to disappear through another large city pipe, not to be seen again – not unlike the fate of a great many of us. The stream does not freeze over in winter and during its short musical journey in the open air, when the temperature is quite cold, it turns itself into a jewellery artisan by lapping the snow around rocks, branches and roots. Surprisingly, I never seem to see anyone else stop by to admire or photograph the delicate artefacts being sculpted right before our eyes by Dame Nature!

Mooloolaba Beach

By Chris Salm | March 5, 2022

Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia is one of my favourite beaches. Mooloolaba derives from the aboriginal word mulu which means snapper fish or mulla which means red-bellied black snake.

At the time, I had just been introduced to ICM, so as an experiment I decided to see what interpretations I could get using ICM over the next couple of days. Most I have kept as is but one I have played around with the colours

Moments of Grace

By Guy Tal | March 5, 2022

I strive to undo my reactions to civilization’s syncopated demands and hope that inner peace, quiet, and lack of concern for specific results may enable a stance of gratitude and balance—a receptiveness that will allow the participation of grace. This meditative form of inaction has been my true realm of creative action.~ Paul Caponigro

On a recent winter hike, I arrived at the rocky summit of a small desert mountain—one not even impressive enough to merit its own name but that still afforded a grand view of a little-visited portion of the Mojave Desert. I’ve made the long drive here a couple of days earlier, feeling stressed and emotionally depleted, as much by recent personal setbacks as by the dispiriting effects of the long, cold winter.

The view before me was vast: undulating hills stained in beautiful pastel hues, stratified cliffs, endlessly branching alluvial washes, broad plains covered sparsely in desert brush and large boulders, all glowing in the low winter sun, stretching as far as I could see. With temperatures dropping below freezing each night, and no significant winds in the preceding days, the air was almost completely free of haze. Everything, from the small plants at my feet to the distant mesas on the horizon, appeared crisp and as detailed as my eyes could resolve. Far below me, I could hear a wild burro braying. I have seen him on occasion on each of the previous afternoons, arriving in the vicinity of my campsite just before sunset to bed among the creosote bushes.

I removed my pack, made myself comfortable and retrieved the lunch I prepared earlier, before leaving camp. It didn’t take long for a pair of curious ravens to approach. I watched them circling me, cawing on occasion, their gaze fixed on me, likely deciding if it would be worth waiting for my departure to see what morsels I may leave for them to feast on. Every few moments, one of the birds would flip upside down mid-air for no obvious reason other than just having fun.

Sweaty and huffing from my scramble, I removed my jacket and sat with my back against one of the larger rocks, savouring the pleasant mid-day warmth. After eating my sandwich and sipping some water, I scooted a bit to make myself more comfortable, closed my eyes and turned my face toward the sun. Suddenly I felt a familiar sensation as if I had woken up from a prolonged anxious dream that, up to that point, I did not realise was a dream. A great emotional burden I had carried with me in the prior weeks, suddenly ceased for no reason I could point to. At once, everything around me seemed more beautiful and peaceful—a familiar and welcome state I remembered vividly from prior occasions, but that I had not felt—or remembered I could feel—in a long time.

Admittedly, I am not one prone to flowery prose. Terms like “grace,” at least when used in certain contexts, often bring out the cynic in me. But perhaps this is as good a reason as any why someone like me—a philosophical materialist and obsessively analytic thinker—should attempt to reclaim, at least in part, the idea of grace in the name of fellow platitude-averse, soft-hearted curmudgeons who may likewise find value in it. There is a reason, after all, that despite our prickly exteriors, dry humour, and stoic attitudes, we still revere art and spend much of our time in pursuit of inspiration and beauty, and experiences such as I’ve had on that lonesome desert peak: moments of grace.

Suddenly I felt a familiar sensation as if I had woken up from a prolonged anxious dream that, up to that point, I did not realise was a dream. A great emotional burden I had carried with me in the prior weeks, suddenly ceased for no reason I could point to.

In photography, as in many other areas of life, many place great importance on productivity, often unbalanced by other forms of reward to be found in our experiences, in the pursuit of photographs, in striving to engage with the world in meaningful ways. These are common intuitions to many photographers: “I’ve invested time and effort; I’d better have something to show for it—a photograph, a piece of writing, a tangible artefact.” The more, or the more popular, products we create, the more we feel that time, labour, and expenses needed to produce these products, were justified and worthwhile.

This attitude, when it becomes innate and implicit, comes with the risk of becoming the dominant—or only—way we experience the world. We begin to measure the value of our experiences in terms of the quality or popularity of the photographs we make, sometimes not realising when the balance had tipped: when we begin to favour photographs to qualities, depth, and richness of experiences. Photographs become the only worthwhile outcome of any trip we make, the justification for money spent on expensive gadgets, the “proof” that we are “serious,” the indisputable evidence that we had not “wasted” our time. It is only when a moment of grace presents itself unexpectedly that we are reminded and become aware of how much poorer a life is that does not also reward in intangible, emotional, inner-directed ways. It is in such moments that we realise, jarringly and vividly, how much more ennobling and profound such feelings as gratitude, calmness, and freedom from distractions and anxieties are than any photograph or other material creation on its own can be.

Dictionaries define grace in terms like elegance, refinement, poise, and finesse—qualities that, at least in the realm of art, can be thought of as antithetical to qualities such as triteness, banality, dullness, and gaudiness. To be sure, the judgment of these qualities is primarily a matter of personal taste, for each of us to consider in our own work and life, by our own sensibilities. I mention them not as objective measures of artistic or photographic merit, but as things worth considering and striving for consciously, in the ways we experience and engage with the world, and in the ways we approach making photographs. In this sense, aspiring to feel and to express grace in our photographic work stands in contrast with some common attitudes toward photography, such as trophy-hunting, preconception, competition, imitation, or striving for no higher a goal than to just “get the shot.”

The experience I refer to as a moment of grace is perhaps best described as a jarring realisation of finding oneself unexpectedly in an unusually elevated state of being—a state where troubling and mundane considerations if they not entirely absent, seem of lesser importance and become easier to set aside in favour of worthier feelings, loftier ideas, deeper thoughts, more intensified emotions, and greater clarity of mind. A useful way to define such experiences is in contrast with some better-defined states, such as awe, sublimity, flow, and mindfulness.

Awe is commonly defined as the experience of profound reverence mixed with a sense of fear. Likewise, the sublime is characterised as an encounter with something astonishingly grand and at the same time mortally dangerous. Grace, on the other hand, while still possessing the same elements of encounter with great beauty and power, does not involve fear of dying, but rather the comfort and promise of deeper, richer livingness. I believe it is the feeling Dostoevsky referred to in The Possessed when he wrote, “There are seconds—they come five or six at a time—when you suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained . . . This feeling is clear and unmistakable; it’s as though you apprehend all nature and suddenly say, ‘Yes, that’s right.’”

Compared with other elevated states, like flow and mindfulness—which involve one’s attention being overwhelmingly consumed for a time when immersed in some prolonged experience—moments of grace make one acutely aware of the importance of a singular, present moment. Among the defining characteristics of a moment of grace is surprise: the sudden realisation of how long it had been since the last time one had felt such a moment; how much time was spent up to that point in lesser preoccupations, more tedious concerns, duller and less inspired feelings, more prosaic thoughts.

In a moment of grace, one does not necessarily feel compelled to any action—creative or other—but rather to appreciation, to satisfaction, to hope, and to acceptance. However, when a moment of grace does happen to coincide with a creative idea, it can rightly be considered a moment of inspiration—a moment when one not only feels grateful and elevated, but also is moved to express these feelings artistically, to render them in some aesthetic way by use of some medium, so that others may also share in, and be moved by them.

Another defining characteristic of a moment of grace, is a sense of immense gratitude for the reminder that there is more to life than mundane frustrations, more than anxiety, more than cynical wit, more than dissatisfaction with other people, more than discontentment with whatever petty or unfortunate events may unfolding in the world or in one’s life beyond the present moment, more than concern for producing some tangible artefact to “prove” to others that one had been working—gratitude for the affirmation that one is capable also of loftier, nobler, more exalted, and more beautiful feelings, and that these feelings are worthwhile in themselves even if no one other than you even knows you had experienced them.

A moment of grace is not necessarily a moment of creative epiphany. In a moment of grace, one does not necessarily feel compelled to any action—creative or other—but rather to appreciation, to satisfaction, to hope, and to acceptance. However, when a moment of grace does happen to coincide with a creative idea, it can rightly be considered a moment of inspiration—a moment when one not only feels grateful and elevated, but also is moved to express these feelings artistically, to render them in some aesthetic way by use of some medium, so that others may also share in, and be moved by them. I believe that one of photography’s greatest powers as a medium for expressive art comes to the fore exactly in such moments. Photography’s immediacy and availability to be employed with no elaborate preparations, and with little reliance on materials requiring specialised skills and conditions, narrows the gap between inspiration and expression more than any other artistic medium.

In a moment of inspiration, photography allows a creative artist, not only to visualise or to conceptualise a work of expressive art but to instantly engage in the production of it—to accomplish at least a considerable portion of it while still in the throes of grace, with the raw emotions still vivid and visceral, rather than recalled later from the few anecdotes one retains in one’s imperfect memory.

There is no need to stretch a canvas, no need to mix pigments, no need to scribble words or musical notes, no need to hammer away for hours at a chunk of rock before it begins to resemble a finished piece. The work begins to take form immediately.

Of course, not all works of creative artistic expression ensue from moments of inspiration—from the fortuitous convergence of grace and creative epiphany. (Indeed, some notable artists have expressed outright disdain for the idea of inspiration as a necessary precursor to artistic expression.) With some exceptions, independent of any other merits (which may be impressive and important in their own right), and conceding this to be an entirely subjective judgment, I admit I generally find such works to be aptly characterised as graceless.

Beyond momentary rewards, states of grace also have a wonderful dynamic: they self-replicate. Every such experience shapes one’s attitude, making the mind more attuned and predisposed to seeking and striving for them. One becomes more sensitive to circumstances and nuances that may yield more such experiences. I think Minor White was describing this effect when he commented in an interview, “Watching the way the current moves a blade of grass—sometimes I’ve seen that happen and it has just turned me inside out.”

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Amanda Harman

By Amanda Harman & Michéla Griffith | March 4, 2022

In 2019 Charlotte spoke to Amanda about her book ‘A Fluid Landscape’, which had just been published by Another Place Press. In it, she explored the changing landscape of the Somerset levels, an area which through human intervention had transitioned from sea to land and which in recent years after extensive and damaging management has begun to be returned to a richer landscape of water filled rhynes, damp fens, wet woodland, salt marsh and open water fringed with reed beds.

Since then, a second book ‘Garden Stories’ has been published by APP featuring images made around the gardens and outbuildings of an English country house which Amanda has described as a series of unintended or ‘accidental’ still-lives, seeking to make visible the unseen and often unsung work of the gardeners.

Over the past few years, Amanda has been working close to her own home near Stroud in Gloucestershire, UK, exploring landscapes that we have altered and left as a legacy. A lot of time can be spent looking for the ‘perfect’ landscape but we learn more from the imperfect and the ephemeral… a slow burn, rather than fast love - coming to know a place. There are so many quiet stories waiting to be told if we choose to listen. Ahead of two forthcoming exhibitions that will feature her work from Golden Valley, we catch up with Amanda.

You talked about your education in our previous interview, so perhaps we can open with a little about yourself – what interests you have and where you’ve currently come to rest?

I suppose my personal interests and my photographic concerns have a large area of overlap, which I imagine is not uncommon! I have always loved walking in the landscape, exploring on both a macro and micro level. This love of being outdoors and connecting to the landscape has extended into related areas of interest, conservation and re-wilding, flooding & flood management and habitat restoration, and the impact of this on the environment, flora and fauna. I also love cycling and living in a super hilly place as I do, I have just acquired an electric bike with paniers for carrying my camera bag! I love to work on my garden, especially the planning and planting. Connecting and collaborating with other artists and particularly those working in other mediums, such as painters and writers is something that I also enjoy

A gift of a camera at age 18 sparked your passion for photography. What were your early influences, and what do you remember of the images that you made? Has anything remained as a constant?

I think I always had an innate interest in picturing the landscape, especially those liminal places where land, water and sky merge and reflect, such as estuaries and marshes where there are levels and layers of light and reflections. The degree course I went on to study had a strong documentary bent and my work was very much influenced by this at the time and for many years later. In more recent years I have found my way back to following my heart and my interests, and to find my own voice with the subjects that fascinate me.

The Intimate Panorama

By Keith Beven | March 2, 2022

It is nearly 25 years ago now that I first switched to a medium format film camera from 35mm. That was to a Mamiya 6 with a 6x6 aspect ratio, which I embraced with some enthusiasm (undoubtedly influenced by the work of Fay Godwin, Michael Kenna and Charlie Waite). A few years later I got a good deal on a used Linhof Technorama 617s and started to explore the world of panoramic photography (initially influenced by the work of Colin Prior, and later Ken Duncan’s books Australia Wide and America Wide). The Linhof was taken on several trips with the Mamiya 6 (including through multiple security checks in the United States immediately after 9/11, but without any real problems apart from the long, long queues). I cannot remember now why I sold or traded the Linhof, but its loss was soon regretted and it was replaced by a Fuji 617 (the Linhof had already dramatically increased in second-hand value; the Fuji less so).

River Eden in Mono, Mallerstang

High Force, Teesdale

The point of this potted history is that over the period of time of using these film cameras I became very used to composing in the 1:1 and 6:17 formats. They were generally used for different purposes (1:1 often for more intimate landscape shots; 6:17 for the more extensive view). This then carried over to the digital era. One of the features I looked for in selecting a digital camera was the ability to show different aspect ratios in the viewfinder (such as an early purchase of a Fujifilm X10 for travel), particularly the 1:1 ratio. It is much more satisfying to see the crop in the viewfinder rather than impose it later in post-processing, even if working from RAW files that are saved at the full sensor size. Some manufacturers still do not do this (it has been a really good excuse not to have to think about buying a Leica for example). The 6:17 format has not often been supported, at least not until the appearance of the Fuji GFX series of cameras and then in the form 24:65, which was the aspect ratio of the Fuji TX-1/2 35mm cameras, also produced for Hasselblad as the XPan (all of which are now astonishingly expensive given the potential for electronic shutter failure¹). 24:65 is not exactly 6:17, but then a 6:17 film negative was not exactly 6:17 either but rather 56:168 (just slightly wider than 24:65).

Kurt Budliger – Portrait of a Photographer

By Matt Payne | March 1, 2022

As some readers may or may not know, I originally come from the psychology and counselling field and so, I often see the world of photography and therefore, photographers, through that lens. Throughout my career as a therapist, and later as a manager of people and processes, I have consistently been reminded (often through my own mistakes) that relationships are foundational to our success as human beings and that effective two-way communication is a key tenet in establishing and maintaining those relationships.

An Interview with Gregor Radonjič

By Gregor Radonjič & Alexandra Wesche | February 27, 2022

One can say many things about social networks and the majority of them would likely not be positive. However, sometimes one of those rare moments happen, when we meet someone online, with whom we instantly share a connection. In this case, it happened on Instagram and with fellow tree enthusiast and creative photographer of metaphorical and metaphysical spaces: Gregor Radonjic.

Originally I was just interested in purchasing Gregor's photo book 'Drevesa' (Trees) because I enjoyed his work and it's also my favourite topic. This first contact has since turned into an enjoyable email conversation on photography, books and art in general, from which some topics have been taken up in my interview with Gregor.

9 From the series Trees

Alexandra: Can you explain a bit about your background? When, how and why did you start to practice photography?

Gregor: I started relatively late after I graduated from university. I was very much into music before I took on photography. But at some point, I started to observe certain interesting photogenic details on streets and outside urban areas and wanted to capture them. That was at the end of the 80s and it all began very simultaneously. I started completely analogue and I still have an equipped darkroom at my home. Soon after I took on photography, I joined the local photo club. That was long before the Internet and I learned a lot from experienced members. But the most important of all, I’ve practised for hours and hours, days and days in my darkroom. At that time, I used colour slide films a lot as well. I’m so grateful that I worked long enough with analogue techniques. That still helps me a lot with my digital approaches. When in front of the computer today, I’m thinking very similarly as I was thinking in my darkroom in a sense that I mostly use those manipulations that I’ve already used manually in the darkroom, except for some necessary colour interventions, of course.

Frosted Leaves

By Adam Pierzchala | February 23, 2022

Frost. It’s quite common throughout our land and most people hardly give it a thought – other than that it can be a nuisance to e.g. crop farmers, car drivers and mass transportation systems. Frost can damage crops, lead to slippery roads, iced-up power cables, seized railway points and signals. Even worse, ice forming on aircraft wings upsets their aerodynamics hence de-icing procedures in winter.

Yet frost is one of nature’s wonders requiring particular conditions of temperature and humidity, producing potentially beautiful miniature worlds. Variations in these two key parameters produce different types of frost, but basically, frost is just a cold version of dew requiring water vapour from the air to be deposited on much colder surfaces to form the tiny fragile ice crystals.

Here in the British Isles we most commonly see hoar frost which, from what I’ve gleaned around the Internet, is formed when water vapour from low humidity air at above 0˚C is deposited onto sub-0˚C surfaces. Less common is white frost which is formed from vapour in higher humidity air (90%) depositing onto surfaces at below -8˚C. Then there is advection frost formed by very cold wind flowing over cold surfaces. There are also window frost creating lovely patterns on glazed surfaces, black frost which is actually blackened frost-damaged vegetation and occasionally rime when ice forms from rain settling and immediately freezing on extremely cold surfaces.

It was several years ago that I first properly noticed frosted leaves on the ground, their edges, veins and stalks outlined by a sprinkling of fine white crystals. I made some close-up photos trying to bring out colour and textures and sinuous organic curves contrasting against the angular crystals. Shiny/leathery holly leaves picked up blue from the clear sky above adding to the feeling of a cold crisp morning. I enjoyed the session so much that I resolved to repeat the exercise each winter whenever conditions were right – which isn’t too often in my part of the world! However, even when the promised frost fails to materialise, being out in the early morning with only the occasional dog walker for company is a pleasure in itself and with my macro lens mounted on the camera, I can enjoy exploring the skeletal remains of leaves ravaged by harsh late autumn and wintry weather.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this has become a project, but it is a subject I actively look out for in the cold season when out for woodland walks. I do have the feeling that close-up photography that records nature’s details is perhaps more akin to documentary photography rather than creative art, after all, it is nature that creates the beauty we love to photograph.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this has become a project, but it is a subject I actively look out for in the cold season when out for woodland walks.

Arguably though, achieving a pleasing composition does require some creative selection and arrangement of what’s in front of the camera, while post-processing allows some gentle adjustments to shadows and highlights, to contrast and where appropriate a little enhanced colour separation. More recently I have been consciously looking for leafy subjects that work well together, aiming at small groups of 3-4 images with some commonality between them be it colour, tonal value, specific types of leaves etc. Here again, the photographer has to seek, find, select and arrange several images that together form something more than just 3-4 separate pictures.

This winter I’ve been struck by how muted the colours are compared to previous years. The intense blue I’ve seen previously seems to be greyer or missing altogether and there is more in the way of browns, oranges and yellows. This may be due to differences in light, the actual tree species that shed the leaves or maybe that the leaves have undergone more decay as the frost seems to have come a bit later this year.

Be that as it may, I tell myself that it’s a harmless pursuit allowing me to revel in nature’s details and enjoy being away from daily routines, losing myself in pursuit of beauty in miniature. On my last outing, a lady approached me as I looked intently at the ground around me, asking whether I had lost something. I almost replied “only my marbles” but thought better of it and said that I was photographing frost patterns for a science project. “Oh how lovely” she replied and wandered away. What she really thought will never be known…

Issue 249

By Tim Parkin | February 20, 2022

Click here to download issue 249 (high quality, 150Mb)

Click here to download issue 249 (smaller download, 91Mb)

End Frame: Rydal Water by Paul Sanders

By Kate Somervell | February 18, 2022

So what are we looking for in a photograph? To be inspired, to want to rush to that location, to be hit between the eyes by something dynamic or to be stopped in our tracks or to swipe through images on the latest gadget giving them scant attention, a quick fix? Perhaps we would prefer to be transported to another place, then in wonder and awe a wave of calm overtakes us, we take a breath and we are transfixed, gently meditating on something that we can connect with on a deeper level, which holds our attention, an image that you want to look at time and again, or even put on your wall and live with?

In the early part of his photographic career, Paul Sanders worked in fashion and advertising before moving into the world of newspapers and eventually becoming picture editor of The Times. This incredibly stressful and demanding time of his life had a severe effect on both his physical and mental health. Out of the darkness, Paul found solace in the landscape, where he found a way to express himself by connecting with the natural world. Working in a mindful way allows Paul to create images in a calm and meditative way, truly connecting with his subject matter. Predominantly shooting in black and white, Paul embraces the landscape with a depth of emotional layering, and portrays an ethereal and subtle beauty, filling his images with both heart and soul.

Joe and Tim Droning On About …

By Joe Cornish & Tim Parkin | February 18, 2022

This conversation between myself (Joe Cornish) and Tim Parkin was one where we hoped to explore the arrival of the drone in landscape photography and try to understand its impact. Tim is an occasional drone pilot, Joe has never even touched one. Our ruminations briefly explore the idea of aerial photography generally, and then quickly run into the impact of drones in their current role in the landscape, and especially in how they have become widely disseminated through photographic competitions. We draw no hard conclusions, but acknowledge that while they have many uses and represent an exciting new frontier in photography there are also drawbacks to consider. We chose to illustrate the article with "drone-like" photographs from both of us plus a couple of historic aerial photographs from the previous century.

Joe Cornish: Well, while drones are still relatively new to me, would it be fair to say that they have already revolutionised landscape photography?

Tim Parkin: Yes, probably. Previously there's been professional aerial photography from planes and helicopters, but the introduction of low-cost drones has definitely democratised aerial photography.

Earth From Above, Yann-Arthus Bertrand

Do you remember Yann-Artus Bertrand? He was one of the pioneers of aerial photography… many people will know his work. It was groundbreaking at the time, especially being shot on colour film.

JC: Do you remember Yann-Artus Bertrand? He was one of the pioneers of aerial photography… many people will know his work. It was groundbreaking at the time, especially being shot on colour film. The Earth from Above is a huge volume, and his most famous book; sold over 3 million copies worldwide, according to Wikipedia! It highlights the geography and beauty of the planet; you could argue these are the great purposes of landscape photography. Incidentally, it was all shot from helicopters and hot air balloons. And it probably would never have happened if UNESCO hadn’t sponsored it. Imagine the cost!

TP: Aerial photography has definitely been around for a while, have you seen that classic photograph of a biplane over Edinburgh castle? (Alfred Buckham) Just an extraordinary landscape photograph. That perspective is so surprising.

Alfred G. Buckham, Edinburgh, c1920

JC: The other kind of aerial photograph we might be familiar with are those made from hot air balloons, over Africa. The sort of pictures you might find in an article on the Masai Mara in the National Geographic, circa 1978, of elephants, acacia trees, camels, the wildebeest migration etc. Or a desert antelope walking along the ridge of a sand dune with long shadows. Balloons can be quite quiet when the burners are not running!

Alex Hartley

By Alex Hartley & Michéla Griffith | February 16, 2022

Talking to Alex Hartley it becomes clear that photography can be much more than just a two-dimensional representation. At first sight, you might be tempted to think that his images record that which he has encountered or seen, but that would fail to understand the nature of his work which is as much about sculpture as it is photography. His output is varied, though there are common threads that run through and above all a concern for the human condition and the planet. I’ve been particularly interested in what he says about photography being used to disseminate and ultimately measure the success of exhibitions; the blurring of the lines between exhibit and gallery; and how his works not only reintroduce 3D into their display but immerse the viewer in them.

Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, your early interests and education, and what that led you to do?

I grew up in commuter-belt suburban Surrey and moved to London as soon as I could. I didn’t particularly shine at school and art was the only thing that didn’t feel like a struggle. I spent a lot of time as a kid on my bike, in woods, killing time at the edges of suburbia. I went travelling in India and Nepal on my own at eighteen trying to work out what to do next. Growing up, there was no family relationship with the landscape, and it was only after I got a car and a tent in my twenties that I discovered a love of walking and hiking in the natural world beyond the city.

I went to Camberwell School of Arts in South London for foundation and continued there for a degree in sculpture. Trips and excursions out from London were quite formative, camping and making sculptures in the quarries on Portland, visiting Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and tentative hikes in the Cairngorms and Grampians. During the Foundation year, something clicked and I started to get properly excited about the freedom of art school and the possibilities of making. This was the nascent period of the YBA’s coming through Goldsmiths, characterised by a strong theoretical grounding and a collective support structure. Camberwell on the other hand felt like we were offered fantastic space and facilities and essentially left to get on with it. This largely suited me and I had a fantastic time, but it left a lot of catching up to do when I arrived at the Royal College for MA Sculpture where most of the other students had a more developed understanding of conceptual discourse, career direction and ambition.

Art and Mental Health

By Cody Schultz | February 13, 2022

Please note, This post discusses mental health issues.

Painting is no problem. The problem is what to do when you're not painting. ~ Jackson Pollock

At the age of 27, Vincent van Gogh penned a letter to his brother, Theo, which read: "My only anxiety is, how can I be of use in the world?" Ten years later, after creating a multitude of stunning paintings (including Starry Night), while in a mental hospital, he took his life.

Roughly three years later, Edvard Munch had a mental breakdown whilst walking with two of his friends along the road. He described the sky as suddenly turning into blood and feeling a sense of melancholy, quickly becoming dead tired. While his friends went on though, he stood still, "frightened with an open wound in [his] breast," Munch felt a "great scream pierce through nature." It was not long before he painted his most famous piece, The Scream.

Upper Loch Torridon

By David Tolcher, Guy Aubertin, Jon Brock & Joe Cornish | February 11, 2022

Torridon is a well known area of North West Scotland that for many embodies what the Highlands are about. It is wild, rugged, quite remote and has stood from ancient times withstanding all that the Atlantic weather can throw at it. Standing on rock 2.6bn years old scattered with erratic boulders (a mere 750m years old) precariously balanced on tiny stones while yourself being pounded by wind and a mixture of rain, sleet and snow is very humbling. The pillows of gnarly gneiss are particularly tactile, almost visceral in the quality of the surface. A magical place with ever changing weather, magnificent trees and water of every flavour both on the ground and in the air.

Myself and a small group of friends have been visiting this area for the same week in January for the last 5 years with the exception of 2021 when Covid prevented us from travelling in what somewhat ironically was the best Winter for years. In 2022 we were able to return, staying in a new cottage on the shore of Upper Loch Torridon (abbreviated to ULT from now on) having been ‘moused’ out of our previous venue. This year the ‘four’ included Joe Cornish in addition to regulars myself, Jon Brock and Guy Aubertin.

In the event we had 4 days together in 3 quite different locations in very different weather!

Talking of the weather… visiting this part of Scotland at any time is a bit pot luck with what you get. Normally in January, you can expect snowy peaks and if unlucky polka dot snowy bottoms, rarely full coverage. This year has been a real exception as the peaks were almost completely snow free and temperatures hit 13c at one point. A NW flow peppered by heavy Wintery showers is probably the ideal and we enjoyed that on a first visit in 2017 but only had odd days in the intervening years. In 2022 we had a good forecast for the Thursday that we counted down to from early in the week so advanced planning was possible.

Figure 1 Photographers at Work

Torridon is a vast landscape stretching over many miles and has to be broken down into chunks to make any sense of it, also to maintain sanity as the travel times are long to anywhere other than just down the road. In previous years we had spent a lot of time in the pine woods around Shieldaig, the Kinlochewe road past Loch Clair and also down the Applecross road to the West (not the Bealach). Our accommodation location this year placed us close to the ‘Pass of Goats’ to Diabaig so our focus was the area on the North side of ULT and the peninsula beyond perhaps best known for grand lone boulder pictures by some well-known photographers.

Figure 2 Weather Inbound

The week proved to be a great opportunity to compare and contrast output from 4 quite different photographers and to see how they tackled the challenges of the often difficult conditions in ULT.

Ben Shieldaig Woods

The forecast for our first day out together had us on a bit of a battleground between the high pressure that blanketed the UK and the fronts skirting round the top from the Atlantic. Being on the wrong side meant that we had almost constant light rain and periods of wind – actually good for woods. The three of us had spent quite a few wet days previously in the amazing Caledonian pinewoods that clothe the steep cliffs beneath Ben Shieldaig but Joe had not visited them before. With that in mind, the day’s agenda was now settled and with the weather we experienced it proved to be a good choice.

Figure 3 Typical Pine Forest in Ben Shieldaig

These woods were bought with a donation campaign some years ago, are well managed although deer numbers clearly remain high. I hope that they don’t become enclosed by the high prison style deer fence that seems to be spreading at a very fast pace across Scotland.

The terrain is very tough, wet underfoot and many knotted roots and grass clumps up near vertical cliffs. It is arranged like a wedding cake in a number or tiers. The top tier has large mature pines arranged like matchsticks together, quite a sight. Lower tiers are peppered with both living and skeleton trees with a preponderance of birch and smaller native pine towards the bottom. We spent time on each of the tiers working much of the way between the Applecross turning and the start of Loch Dughaill. Composition is more difficult the higher up you go as the opportunity to use the wall of trees and rock diminishes and shooting out or up/down the woods. Sky is typically not your friend here. My own view is that the location would suit a project rather than having an expectation of too many ‘hero’ images.

The Pictures

This picture from Jon looking over Shieldaig gives a pretty good feel for the woods and their environment. Looking into the weather gives a lovely recession down the rolling hills towards the West.

Figure 4 Shieldaig from Ben Shieldaig Forest (JB)

Figure 5 Woodland details (JB)

A woodland detail from Jon from the lower area of the woodland taken with a Cambo Actus and GFX100S. Jon used camera movements to get the spatial arrangement just right.

Figure 6 Twisted Pines (JC)

Joe solved the problems of difficult backgrounds by using a longer lens (85mm) on the Sony A7Riv. This is typical of the complex treescape of pines in the reserve.

One of the brief less rain interludes and a bit of light. The North/South orientation of the valley means that any breaks in the weather floods the trees with beautiful light and they just glow.

Figure 7 Ben Shieldaig Pines (GA)

One of the brief, rain-free interludes with a bit of light. The North/South orientation of the valley means that any breaks in the weather floods the trees with beautiful light and they just glow. Taken with a Contax 60mm lens from the film era on a mirex adapter and still one of the loveliest long normal lenses. Sony A7Riv.

Figure 8 Forest and Rain (DT)

At times during heavy rain there can be a period where perversely the light level rises and the foreground really glows. In this case the rain has veiled the somewhat distracting background and given the separation for this cameo woodland scene. Taken with Digitar 60mm lens on Arca Universalis and GFX100S.

The complexity of the woodland is quite daunting. This is from the 2nd tier looking into the light. Rain sweeping down the valley softens the hills with the lovely gesturing of the trees drawing through the image.

Figure 9 Looking South to Loch Dughaill (GA)

Bealach na Gaoithe and beyond

The climb up from Torridon village along the coast passes through interesting but small pinewoods presently being intensively rescued from invasion by rhododendron and protected by extensive deer fencing. We spent some time up the Coire MhicNobaill later in the week as the light faded. The road climbs above Inveralligin to an area called Alligin Shuas. There is an extensive area punctuated by lochan and rock of broadly similar heights on both the East & West side of the road as it crosses the pass. Many erratic boulders litter the landscape mostly balanced on one edge by the tiniest stones or just held by friction on impossible rock slopes. The geology is utterly fascinating. Either side of the road is interesting but the lochans on the East are perhaps better known and more visited with a wide vista towards the South encompassing the full range of mountains; Beinn Damh and Beinn Shieldaig being the most prominent. A couple of boulders on the West side have made it into photographers folklore.

Figure 10 Photobombed

On this trip we focussed on the West side hoping to get down to the trig point on Creag an Fhraoich and exploring the buttresses that run down to the coast. As it happens we did not get that far because there was too much to explore in the area in between. Wednesday was a poor forecast with strong SW winds and mostly rain and Thursday the sought after NW flow with showers after a clearing cold front around dawn. Wednesday was scouting, Thursday was when we expected to get the light and conditions. As it turns out we managed to get good material on both days.

The Loch is a strong separation between the foreground and background and aside from that looking South from this vantage point into the Winter arc of the sun means that it gets very ‘hot’ as soon as any brightness comes through.

It is a stunning but difficult location to take pictures. There are a number of compositional puzzles to solve. The Loch is a strong separation between the foreground and background and aside from that looking South from this vantage point into the Winter arc of the sun means that it gets very ‘hot’ as soon as any brightness comes through. Typically composition compromises around closing the loch at each end have to be made by using foreground buttresses or other features as the distant closure can only be achieved by the use of a very wide angle lens and/or stitching. Connection and balance between the foreground and background are difficult to achieve.

The second area is how to use the foreground where there is a vast array of interesting erratics. Is it a picture of a boulder or stunning view or both and if so how do you connect them meaningfully? The Loch doesn’t help here because it is hard not to separate your boulder composition from the mountainscape with a large body of bright water. The view we reached, in the end, is that some of the small bodies of standing water were a better foreground than the boulders, perhaps best exemplified by Joe’s and Guy’s dawn pictures which successfully integrate the foreground and background although separated by many miles.

The Pictures

Figure 11 Perched (DT)

This was taken on the ‘scouting’ day in the rain. This erratic is perched unusually not on any little stones. The recession from the heavy rain is really important to the image, returning the next day with no rain and the composition was totally nondescript and of no interest. Taken on a GFX100s and the long end of 35-70mm zoom.

Figure 12 Into the weather (DT)

This was a remarkably difficult image to take and quite a testament to the quality of modern IBIS. Dave’s tripod was being blown off the ground in the near gale force winds. Clouds of rain were being blown up Beinn Damh onto the mountains with some lovely light behind. This is a another feature of the location where the light often really pours through from the South. GFX100S and 35-70mm zoom.

Gfx100s 22 01 26 11 25 Am Dsf3585 0 Scout

Figure 13 Erratic (JB)

In the discussion at the beginning I mentioned the compositional challenges of the location. The echoing shapes and careful processing has managed the pull through from the foreground boulder to Loch Damh and the dramatic sky just before a sheets of rain blocked the whole scene. Utter nightmare on an exposed ridge in gale and rain to set up a technical camera. Cambo Actus and 60mm Actar.

This was taken on the scouting day where the weather had better brightness than forecast at times. Checking out some of the other Lochan on the East side of the pass this was taken on one of the knolls above the road. .

Figure 14 Scouting above Pass of the Goats (JB)

Figure 15 Exploring Gaoithe (JC)

A last image from the scouting further working on how to deal with ULT and the foreground. Fantastic cloud swirled around Beinn Damh after one pulse of rain came through. Sony A7Riv.

Moving on to dawn the following day when the promised clear out should have happened just in time for some dawn light. A long day in the field followed!

Figure 16 Sunrise (JC)

Joe scouted this location the day before and tested the composition allowing him to dash straight here on arrival in the half light before dawn. The use of a ND filter to blur the sky has really helped with managing the hot spot from the rising sun and to smooth out the puddles. Taken on A7riv and Sigma 24mm lens.

Figure 17 Dawn towards Shieldaig (DT)

Taken slightly later than Joe’s picture when the sky had lit up much more strongly. Dave scouted this the day before and shows the challenges with the foreground. A really difficult choice between the wider landscape view and a tighter portrait of the LHS only. Arca Universalis with Pentax 645 35mm on GFX100S.

Figure 18 Blue Dawn (DT)

Alternative portrait taken with 60mm Digitar lens.

Guy and Dave were only metres apart and the almost 90 degree different orientation picks up the light and colour quite differently. Both Joe and Guy made really good use of the water based on observations made on the scouting day. The problem of what to do about ULT solved by eliminating it.

Figure 19 Dawn looking East towards Torridon (GA)

Taken with Contax 35mm PC lens on Sony A7Riv.

Figure 20 Distant Torridon (JC)

The warmth of the erratic nestling in the pocket of quartzite makes for a lovely foreground for the view down to ULT and the mountains beyond. Taken on Phase One IQ4 with 70mm lens.

Torridon House Estate

Torridon is a vast area to explore with opportunities around every corner to find good compositions. We had a couple of fill in sessions in the area around our accommodation which ran down to the beach in Inveralligin and in the woodland surrounding Torridon House.

Figure 21 Inveralligin Beach (JC)

The beach at the front of our accommodation was a cornucopia of small delights but this image from Joe caught some beautiful last light looking out towards Beinn Damh. Taken on Phase One IQ4 and 50mm lens.

Figure 22 Abhainn Alligin (JC)

Big Daddy. An amazing rock just dumped in the burn above the accommodation. Taken with Sigma 50mm F1.2 on A7Riv.

Figure 23 Towards Shieldaig (GA)

Some dramatic conditions and light as the Storm Malik started to make its presence felt. By this time we had water devils meandering up ULT and first sheets of rain coming in from the West. Batis 25mm on Sony A7riv.

The woodland surrounding Torridon House and the finger that extends up on the path alongside Mhic Nobuil has some lovely mixed woodland. This is being cleared out after being devastated by an invasion of rhododendron and is going to be a lovely location to work in the coming years.

Figure 24 Woodland (JC)

Figure 25 Beach Detail (JB)

The grass surrounding the rocks on the beach has been sculpted by the extra high tides and made it look like they were in nests of grass. The soft blue end of daylight in the rain lends a lovely quality to the light in this composition from Jon. This was taken at the same time as JC image earlier of Inveralligin Beach using the same dusk light.

Figure 26 Dead Rhododendron & Pine (DT)

The consequence of killing the rhododendron that has overwhelmed much of the area around Torridon House. Sadly many are growing back from the base despite heavy use of targeted herbicide. Arca Universalis, 60mm Digitar and some tilt, GFX100S.

Gfx100s 22 01 28 4 13 Pm Dsf3896 0 Lastday

Figure 27 Woodland Study (JB)

Another composition from Jon using movement on the Cambo to loom the foreground boulder creating a study that reflects the feeling of ‘place’ in the woodland.

Epilogue

Figure 28 A very very wet camera and lens ! (DT,JC,GA,JB)

A really interesting and quite addictive week in Torridon. Although we did not get any of the Winter weather we hoped for the conditions were actually quite good for being out and taking pictures. Storm Malik really interfered with the journey home so we can be grateful that the conditions were not like that all week especially as Storm Carrie followed along 24hrs later. Booked for the same week next year with anticipation.

: Figure 1 Photographers at Work

: Figure 2 Weather Inbound

: Figure 3 Typical Pine Forest in Ben Shieldaig

: Figure 4 Shieldaig from Ben Shieldaig Forest (JB)

: Figure 5 Woodland details (JB)

: Figure 6 Twisted Pines (JC)

: Figure 7 Ben Shieldaig Pines (GA)

: Figure 8 Forest and Rain (DT)

: Figure 9 Looking South to Loch Dughaill (GA)

: Figure 10 Photobombed

: Figure 11 Perched (DT)

: Figure 12 Into the weather (DT)

: Figure 13 Erratic (JB)

: Figure 14 Scouting above Pass of the Goats (JB)

: Figure 15 Exploring Gaoithe (JC)

: Figure 16 Sunrise (JC)

: Figure 17 Dawn towards Shieldaig (DT)

: Figure 18 Blue Dawn (DT)

: Figure 19 Dawn looking East towards Torridon (GA)

: Figure 20 Distant Torridon (JC)

: Figure 21 Inveralligin Beach (JC)

: Figure 22 Abhainn Alligin (JC)

: Figure 23 Towards Shieldaig (GA)

: Figure 24 Woodland (JC)

: Figure 25 Beach Detail (JB)

: Figure 26 Dead Rhododendron & Pine (DT)

: Figure 27 Woodland Study (JB)

: Figure 28 A very very wet camera and lens ! (DT,JC,GA,JB)

The Colour of Silence

By Clare Newton | February 9, 2022

Bang! I wake with a start. Bang-bang! I open the shutter to peer into the blackness of the countryside. Another and another – I shout in the hope of stopping the massacre.

A cold thought trembled through me. Earlier that morning I was sitting in a Berkshire field enjoying the warm sunshine, when a family of deer meandered out of the shady woodland, to graze on the nearby grassy wasteland. I must have been upwind as a mother and young fawn strolled just feet away, unaware as I crouched in the tall Fescue blades of grass, transfixed amazement.

The next morning revealed evidence that the entire herd had been wiped out, 12 deer, the only herd in the district. This deeply affected me – my first question as I awoke “What right does a human have, to say whether or not another living species has a right to live?” The contradictions about overpopulation and why is it we look at every other species to blame but ourselves.

I think this is what triggered the making of my book The Colour of Silence.

How did it all begin?

I have taken a strange road into photography, yet it has always been part of my life. I am not talking about happy snappies, but the actual pleasure of picking up a big DSLR and making fine art images.

My true vocation started after a depressingly ignored milestone birthday; I stormed off and discovered large format cameras for sale along London's Tottenham Court Road. Later I introduced my new camera to a friend, who responded by showing me his latest panoramas he had been working on. This new style of photography completely captivated me... and that was the beginning of my new world into photography.

The artist in my photography

You could say I am quite an eclectic photographic artist – I really like pushing myself hard into the different areas that photography offers.

My early work explored the possibilities of panoramas, which evolved into highly complex composites. These artworks really tested all my knowledge for shooting, as some pieces used as many as five separate shoots e.g. Studio light portrait, individual prop shoots through to many landscapes around the country. That’s how I learnt my camera skills making sure to match the time of day with sunlight angles, fix the right ISO and all manual settings.

Concerning equipment, I am glad to say that all of my gear is almost vintage and second-hand. Apart from being careful of waste, photography is an expensive pastime, and walking into a camera shop and seeing new powerful cameras with big price tags may be very off-putting. So first I go to a friend who is a professional photographer and ask for a certain piece of equipment to borrow. If the kit appeals to me and aids in the production of a new style of photo that I've imagined, I go to a second-hand website and search for a comparable model. It's a lot of fun and gives me a lot of options.

Choosing the subjects and themes in the book

In my childhood, my favourite subject was biology - mainly due to having a very understanding teacher. I loved dissecting plants then peering through a microscope and drawing their intricate capillaries. This childhood experience has in some way influenced my excitement for discovering the little things I find in nature. Another aspect is that during lockdown we all were discouraged from travelling around. This meant I needed to think laterally about the subjects that I could access and become enthusiastic about. The process of finding the subjects that matched my interests was gradual, starting with conceptualised pieces such as the feathers. This idea is based on how plastic (now a bit of a cliché) interferes with nature. I formulated the sets based on layering with class and translucent plastic then allowed natural sunlight to play on the feathers. However it was too strong so I opted for the diffusion of overcast weather and then used long exposures to get the ethereal effect, mixing feather detail with others having a misty quality to signify different ideas such as disappearing species.

The subjects I chose were ones that could connect to make a curated and undulating journey from the beautiful (could I say traditional forms of nature photography), entertaining through to the unpleasant issue of rubbish accumulation.

The book begins with a series of close-up images designed to look like miniature worlds, reflecting the microcosm of interacting ecology that exists all around us; a bit like following in the footsteps of Darwin – “in the beginning there was the….” I wanted to draw the reader into an ‘observational’ frame of mind and show how bewitching the simplest thing can be if we just take the time to look.

The book begins with a series of close-up images designed to look like miniature worlds, reflecting the microcosm of interacting ecology that exists all around us

The second transition for subject matter looks at the importance of trees. For me this is a pretty emotional subject because in both the city and countryside I see authorities and landowners tear up mature trees as if they are ‘sustainable’, which trees aren’t really - it takes 100 to 150 Years for a tree to get to a point where it can become an effective ‘carbon sink’, an important point that really needs a great deal more publicity around. My set of images for this section opens with a large composite of a mature oak tree changing into its autumnal cloak of gold (if the image was enlarged to its true size it would measure 1.5 meters, from which you can see every leaf in glorious detail). The following images counteract the complacency of attractive images with the shocking destruction of a mature tree in a forest, where the tree’s soul is ripped out of all existence – there should be no excuse for such an act – the tree was healthy, providing a complex ecosystem as well as effectively scrubbing poisonous carbon from the atmosphere.

It is only recently discovered that untouched woods in Poland, have very wide biodiversity – and that diverse richness when left untouched has a way of regenerating degraded land nearby; a very important lesson that is being learnt by scientists – because take one microorganism out of the equation and the system no longer has the right combination of tools to recover. I am thinking about expanding my thoughts towards making a second book that looks into this new and exciting science. Because this section was so intense, I wanted to lighten the mood with something amusing, thus the switch to anthropomorphism. It was a lot of fun making figures out of garden weeds and combining them with an amusing quote from Lawrence Anthony to create an upbeat mood change.

This ebbing flow of information from passive to acidic can be found throughout the book. I believe it is critical; otherwise, I suspect it is difficult to digest when subjects are all one onslaught of shocking information.

Collaborating with Contributors

Since I don’t have an expert naturist background even though I have a great love for it, I felt it was extremely important to not make the book about my opinions but to give it a wider authoritative context in the narrative. This could only come from professionals in nature and conservation. As I worked up each chapter and subject I spent many hours reading papers and studies, after which I wrote off to many researchers and scientists in their corresponding field of interest. It took a while but by the end, I had eight senior specialists who gave me articles to include.

Using my emotions to express a point in photography

Since lockdown prevented travel, I decided to camp in my dad’s apple orchard for most of last year’s summer. It was here, that I became aware of how a city-dweller’s view of the countryside, differs from a local farmer’s.

In the city, there is so little wildlife that the little we do see, we treasure the moment it comes into view. The farm people I came into contact with see fields as a job to be done – they flay the hedgerows, mow flowering footpaths, shoot rabbits, deer and buzzards. For me, the intense destruction was overwhelming.

We lift our cameras and see the incredible variety that inspires us. For me I really enjoyed what the British countryside has to offer, even the mundane, as it changes my mindset into hyper awareness… spotting the contrasts across shadows or beads of sunlight that highlight in exceptional detail of small dark things hidden in woodland, making the ordinary become beautiful.

The funny thing about nature is we take it all for granted – ‘It will always be there – it will grow back’. We lift our cameras and see the incredible variety that inspires us. For me I really enjoyed what the British countryside has to offer, even the mundane, as it changes my mindset into hyper awareness… spotting the contrasts across shadows or beads of sunlight that highlight in exceptional detail of small dark things hidden in woodland, making the ordinary become beautiful.

This difference between the farmers and myself became a catalyst for collating 6 years of material I had built up, which gave me the determination to portray the delicate elements I found on my walks, showing their intricate fragility. But most of all I wanted to highlight through my work a change of mindset – focusing closer to the fact that humans need to allow nature to exist making room to perform its miraculous duties.

Only as the project progressed did my solitary fears about nature's plight show themselves to be a far larger concern. I realised I was living in romantic illusions, believing that everything was fine and that difficulties only existed in faraway places like Africa or the Amazon. Following some investigation, I started posing acidic and seemingly nonsensical questions to aid my photography;

How many people would it take to keep a tree alive until it reached a maturity of 100 years?
With the growing human population versus deforestation, would we run out of oxygen?
Can something be done to change a mindset of disposable?

I believed it was vital to clarify my ideas with the support of prominent scientists, environmentalists, and nature specialists, asking them about some of the themes I wanted to discuss, after creating the original artworks for the book.

The artistic influences are the result of an extensive investigation into the subject. I enjoy starting off with no knowledge at all because it allows me to connect with my readers and experience the new information through their eyes... As a result, I'll have to offer a subject in chronological order and in an understandable manner. The experts I meet keep me on track and precise on each point, advising me on how to emphasise or identify each message. It's critical that when learning new things, you don't rely on hearsay or assumptions. It gets very messy!

Could there be a different way of perceiving nature?

Nature photography, I believe, is one of the most popular areas in photography, with notable black and white photographers such as Ansel Adams, Fay Godwin, and John Sexton enriching our images of the landscape. Lucie Averill, Charlie Waite, and David Noton, for example, travelled the world to provide us with stunning enriched sunsets.

Rather than emulating these incredible artists, I choose to admire them since I felt I’d be depreciating their genius and originality if my work mirrored theirs. Also, I'd never be able to do justice to my own unique thoughts and photographic style.

In many ways, once I had come to terms with not needing to follow in their footsteps was very freeing, it meant I could experiment un-inhibited and discover where I could fit in with expressing my way of interpreting the vision or how I would push my signature style, enabling me to develop captivating photographs of mundane elements, without them becoming a cliché.

This, I believe, is my basic idea on how to structure a subject in a unique way. Being original and thinking without creative influences is essential to me. I despised it when lecturers would come up to me and suggest things like, 'You should do this – or- look at how good so-and-so designs are.' Yes, these remarks made me quite the rebel! Perhaps my obsession to be unique stems from my training as a graphic designer, when designs were only sold if they were original. This is an excellent discipline for continuing to develop ideas and moving one's thoughts forward rather than relying on trends to guide your style.

Yes, it has negatives as well! – Having doubts regarding the outcome of the handiwork being the right way to portray a message. Ideas and creative influences come from the research into the subject. This leads me to conceptualise about how I am going to explain the subject or story, where the emphasis needs to be, or what’s the best technique to help get the message across.

I think this extract is very helpful to understanding about perceptions in image making;

Perceptions shape the interpretation of information when it enters a social system from an ecosystem, and perceptions shape the decision-making process that leads to actions affecting the ecosystem. While every perception has a basis in reality, some perceptions of nature are more useful because they embrace reality more completely or accurately.~ Gerald G. Marten

When it comes to interpreting thoughts. Traditions and tried-and-tested formulas, I believe is important to let go and trust yourself. Ideas are self-contained by their very nature, as everyone has an independent opinion on a subject. However, as a photographer describing a subject, it is more valuable to create work that does not compromise the truthfulness of a situation. Purity is especially vital when dealing with a delicate subject like nature in close proximity since the reality of truth must exude in order to distil an emotion or mindfulness from the reader.

My work as an artist photographer

I like to call myself a photographic artist rather than an art photographer, as there is a quite big difference between the two. A photographic artist uses the camera much like a paintbrush. Sometimes it’s about shutter dragging but for me, it’s about making composites; each photo is an accurate facsimile of the subject – it is merely a jigsaw piece to a bigger puzzle or vision.

For this project, and for the first time I decided to capture single shots and experiment with different lenses for the first time - yes, I had to overcome my fear of the unknown. However, it allowed me to experiment with new ways of expressing my feelings and create artworks with a clear meaning that could change throughout the book. (By the way, when I say artworks, I'm referring to images, some of which are composites that have been prepared for publication.)

As an experimental photo artist, I felt it was critical to avoid traditional documentary or heightened landscape photography. The voyage heightened my awareness of the image, with some images serving as metaphors to depict the journey.

Nature is an incredibly big subject, so as the project took shape it became clear that through artistic interpretation, there was a need to reveal a narrative – a gentle curation exploring the curious and rich depth of each small subject.

To show life as it actually is, not as we might imagine or desire it to be

Covid's lockdown helped in many ways because I couldn't travel anywhere – all I had to photograph was what was around me. This is a great experience to increase one’s awareness without distractions. During my camping trip, I became a bit of a recluse, removing myself from all human interaction and technology (save the camera and hard drive) so I could focus totally on the task at hand.

I'd spend days ambling over the Ridgeway's woodlands and hedgerows, just gazing and gathering odd items that struck my eye — a skull, a severed limb intact with seeds, or upside down bugs who'd perished in the search of love. The next day, I'd play about with my freshly discovered treasures, watching their shapes change in the midday sun. Textures, translucency, and reflections within reflections would arise, each providing a unique perspective and ‘what-if' scenario. I put them on glass, plastic, and even poured syrup over them. I sprayed, splattered, and hosed until something wonderful happened inside of me!

During the experimental stage, I discovered myself and a new way of understanding the results – it wasn't what was covered, but what wasn't covered that gave me insights into the truth messages — the magic demonstrated that I could develop a metaphor language from what was left untouched. Once I had built the backbone of image style, I worked on complementary landscape photographs that might expand the context and push the story farther to cover the environment, where the small things existed.

Another reason for the style of images not to become stuck in one formula is that a book must be enjoyable before it can be educational; otherwise, people will not want to turn the page. Every page must be exciting – a new experience or bring a sense of adventure. Once that has been achieved the supporting narrative can offer something a bit different – unknown and interesting. That’s where the mountains of research and introductions to specialists are so important in the early stages.

Influences that inspired the making of the book

This quote was written by one of the contributors, it was very influential in helping me chose the right material for the book:

Our human appreciation of the natural world and its processes has been diminished during recorded human ~ Dr Alan Rayner

In the back of my mind, I noticed that today's city generations are completely engrossed in personal technology. People walking with their heads buried deep in their phones, implying they haven't experienced anything of their journey or seen the green treasures along the road. The goal of the book is to show both the distilled essences of nature and to deliver it to people directly. Demonstrating that our natural flora and fauna are one-of-a-kind gems that require people's active engagement with.

The subjects I chose were the closest I could get to something that everyone could find. That way, I could show off their beauty whilst raising awareness. We all see wasps, but how many of us notice the graphic stripes and how distinct each pattern is? We all see spider webs, but can we see how each one is unique and how they catch dew-drops? Or, if one looks through a grove of beech trees crowning a hill, can one see the golden fields behind them and how the moody grey clouds complement the corn?

The book's layout was meticulously planned to provide a balanced speed and undulations between themes. The book begins with a series of familiar but artistic images depicting a variety of things we take for granted, then progresses along the sensitive scale of awareness to the first cruel act of people tearing the heart and life out of a tree. The language moves from debate points to entertaining tales, with pauses to slow down the pace before returning to a highly charged, thought-provoking subject.

As the book draws to a close, the focus shifts to disposable rubbish from the home. It's all too easy to throw anything away, but there isn’t enough imagery to convey the magnitude of the waste problem, or pictures to show that simple packaging doesn’t biodegrade as quickly as one imagines.

I have watched pedestrians toss absent-mindedly a tin can or plastic snack packet into the side of the grassy path - when asked what will happen to it – they just say – “don’t worry it will degrade, nature will take care if it!” So I included images to demonstrate that waste doesn’t dissolve when it is thrown into vegetation – it just stays there, never truly deteriorating.

I will feel fulfilled if my book has improved a sympathetic mindset from readers displaying the beauty within the ordinary side of nature, stimulating a better appreciation for the care that our environment needs from us.

If you would like to buy a personally signed copy of
Email: at Carle at Jump4London@gmail.com

Colour of Silence is published by Happy London Press, £25.

$Cnewton Illfracoombe Seascape$

Issue 248

By Tim Parkin | February 8, 2022

Click here to download issue 248 (high quality, 171Mb)

Click here to download issue 248 (smaller download, 94Mb)

Endframe: Hoarusib River Bed by David Ward

By Julia Moffett | February 7, 2022

It was 2017, for months and months I had seen the occasional “elephant passing through our camp” snapshot. But there had been no sign of any of David Ward’s heart stopping, beautiful, keep you looking over and over again pictures.

Then this appeared. Perhaps cool water to a parched throat, but pwhooar!

I am not even sure if it is the first one he posted after a couple of years during which he left both camera and social media pretty much locked in a cupboard. However, this is the one that has stuck in my head.

Book Reviews

By Tim Parkin | February 7, 2022

Arild Heitmann - Heime

Arild Heitmann’s portfolio is not short of the sublime images that many photographers aim for (but mostly miss). He has many photographs drawn from trips to the mountains of Italy or Iceland or of the iconic Arctic hotspots of Lofoten or Sejna. But it’s the photographs he takes from his backyard on the mainland of Arctic Norway, a literal hinterland, that are the subject of his first book. A choice that might seem contrary to some given his access to such amazing places, but Arild’s logic that work based on the intimate knowledge of an area trumps the transient, drive-by shooting style many prefer, has resulted in something with more depth than a ‘greatest hits' or “Now That’s What I Call Lofoten 2020” book. Heime, or Home, is a meal to be savoured, an experience more akin to a Movie than a Tik Tok short.

The book itself is large, not so large to make it hard to handle but deep, both physically and creatively. The printing is a bit different from many books I’ve seen. It’s on thicker, more textured paper and done in a way that gives a little less contrast. The effect is more of a fine art print on watercolour paper.

It's fair to say that Arild's 'Home' is still more amazing than most and that is definitely reflected in the work. However, the photographs eschew the instant hit and theatrics that seem to be the mainstream and transition through the seasons and subjects with a good balance of intimate and large scale views. Take a look at Arild’s website and if you like the work there, I’m sure you’ll like the whole book.

Alongside the book, and included in its purchase, is a smaller book, I suppose you might call it a large pamphlet, with some background on the creation of the work (see the final photo in the gallery).

You can find more information and a link to purchase the book at Arild’s website.

Hans Strand - Beyond Landscape

We’ve featured Hans Strand’s work a few times in On Landscape and it’s no secret that we’re big fans. Hans has a strong eye for the intimate, whether it be nearby abstracts or aerial compositions, so a compilation of these kinds of images makes a lot of sense. Hans' photo book output has been quite varied over the years. I really liked Triplekite’s "Above and Below" and loved "Den Åtond Dagen" (sadly difficult to get hold of). Triplekite’s “Intimate” was good, but a few copies I saw had printing problems. There are some great photographs in “Island” but it’s a hell of a tome and you need deep pockets and a deep love of Iceland (and strong arms!) to make the most of it.

So it was good to hear that Kozu were printing a book of Hans’ work which includes a lot of his more intimate work and also his aerials. Here we have a mix across most of Hans’ photographic output from the 2000s onwards and which includes many of my favourites and a broad range of new work including some amazing Icelandic glacier aerials and ‘hand of man’ photographs of European farming and mining practices (it’s only fair that Hans steps on Burtynsky’s shoes being as Burtynsky stole a whole swathe of Hans work, one of many photographers to do so).

I only have a couple of pictures from other photographers on my wall at home. A photograph by David and Angie Unsworth and a large aerial from Hans Strand. That should make it clear how much I like Hans’ work and I'm very happy to see a well-printed book published.

You can buy Hans’ book at Kozu’s website here.

Adam Gibbs - Quiet Light

I’ve known of Adam’s photographic work since I started photography. He’s always had an excellent eye for composition and although his early work was primarily botanical, when he moved to the larger landscape, this eye for light, balance and form found a perfect home. That eye won him a couple of awards in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition and, latterly, a win in the International Landscape Photographer of the Year competition (a very worthy one!). Kozu books were obviously following his successes and his popularity on YouTube and published “Quiet Light” a compilation of some of his best work, now on its third edition! You can buy from Kozu directly via this link (I'd get in before the 3rd edition runs out, there may not be a 4th).

Adam Gibbs - Aspen

Kozu also recently published a short book about an amazing project of Adam’s based on a small area near Abraham Lake and the Kootenay Plains in Banff National Park. Here, a silica blue lake had flooded an Aspen forest. Timed perfectly for autumnal colour, Adam had the trip of a lifetime and produced a set of images that any photographer would be jealous of.

Aspen can be bought directly from the Kozu website here.

Subscribers 4×4 Portfolios

By Andy Gawthrope, George Bull, Subham Shome & Tom Zimberoff | February 4, 2022

Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted from our subscribers. Each portfolio consists of four images related in some way.

Submit Your 4x4 Portfolio

Interested in submitting your work? We're on the lookout for new portfolios for the next few issues, so please do get in touch!

Andy Gawthrope

Woodland Photography near Bristol

George Bull

Acer at f/1.4

Subham Shome

The Himalayan Blues

Tom Zimberoff

Stepping Back Into Landscapes

Woodland Photography near Bristol

By Andy Gawthrope | February 4, 2022

Prior to last year, I hadn't done much woodland photography but this year I set myself a goal very early to make the most of Autumn and when lockdown's ended, I started exploring local woodland with the intention of identifying compositions. This didn't really work as it was too difficult to pre-visualise how they may look in Autumn whilst swathed in a cloak of green. But it did give me a good understanding of geography including paths and, notably, areas that definitely wouldn’t work. e.g. the small pockets of evergreens.

I strive for a realistic look in all my photography; not the punchy, ‘smack it too em’, heavily saturated colours associated with a lot of social media. My aim was to make photographs that conveyed the beauty of natural woodland through utilising shapes, arrangements and colours. I hope I’ve managed to achieve that with these photographs.

Three of the photographs are from near the old market town of Wickwar in South Western England and the fourth - with sticks on the forest floor - from the Forest of Dean.

The Himalayan Blues

By Subham Shome | February 4, 2022

On the eastern part of the mighty Himalayas in North Bengal, we can see multiple small hills which form a brilliant layering as well move towards the snowy peaks from the lowlands. What is more intriguing about these hills is the fact that clouds get accumulated in between the hills and form majestic landscapes. There are number of tea plantations here as well, but the clouds above the hills and the ones below them, in their troughs come together to create beautiful sceneries.

During sunrise, the views become even better and just before dawn, during the transition between blue hour and golden hour, the sky lights up like fire and the ground remains blue, giving a once in a day opportunity to enjoy the most mesmerising views of the mountains.

Himalayan Blues Sky Hues

Before Sunrise

Sunrise

After Sunrise

Acer at f/1.4

By George Bull | February 4, 2022

One of the most colourful trees in our garden is the Japanese maple, Acer palmatum, which we bought not long after we moved to this house. Known best for its fiery red autumn leaves, its appearance changes every day as the seasons bring with them new buds and green shoots, tiny flowers followed by the characteristic spinning seeds or keys, dormant twigs or a riot of colour. The weather too, rain or shine, heat or frost brings out different characteristics. One day the twigs may be laden with raindrops, the next the leaves might be blown ragged in the wind.

I decided to try to capture one year in the life of this lovely tree in a series of photographs. We’re all familiar with big pictures of big trees, but I decided to get in close and shoot at f/1.4. In the course of doing that I got to know this familiar tree – a friend of almost 40 years’ standing in the garden – better than ever before. I realised too that it’s not necessary for a photographer to travel long distances in the hunt for subjects.

Stepping Back Into Landscapes

By Tom Zimberoff | February 4, 2022

By professional reputation, I’m a portrait photographer. The late film director, John Huston, whose portrait I earned the right to shoot with a winning poker hand during a poker game in Budapest, had a face like a road map of Hollywood. I’ve enjoyed memorializing the landscapes of faces like his.

Over the piles of cash we anted up (local Hungarian forints made it seem like we were playing with Monopoly money) Huston told me, "It's not poker unless someone gets hurt.” I tried not to hurt anyone with my camera by getting close enough for a good clean shot — close as in rapport, not just proximity — to avoid inflicting gratuitous wounds.

We don’t LOAD cameras much anymore, but we still AIM them and SHOOT pictures. With that in mind, I still get a bang out of describing my pursuit of portraits as a predatory sport, hunting big game: the famous and the simply fascinating.

To memorialise each encounter with an interesting human being, in one shot so to speak, epitomizes the hunt. When I was proud enough of a new portrait to add it to my collection, it was because the subject allowed me to reveal something personal framed within a graphical composition. Predatory? I’d bag my quarry by looking through a lens, not down the barrel of a gun. But I still hung their heads on a wall to admire like trophies.

I rarely had time for landscapes. Now, I'm making time, hunting for places as much as people and showing others what I’ve been lucky to see and distil through my viewfinder.

Regrettably, the words PORTRAIT and LANDSCAPE have been commercially appropriated. To some people, it simply means the vertical vs. horizontal framing of a picture. But both portrait and landscape are art forms, not formats.

After a long hiatus from my early attempts, I thought I'd step back into landscapes again. I've included one of my old favorites, "Conzelman Road," made in 1987 above San Francisco's Golden Gate in the Marin Headlands. It was shot on film, of course. Now, I've gone digital with a Hasselblad CFV II 50C fastened onto the same ELX 2¼ camera I used decades ago to make that photograph AND a new Cambo Actus DB onto which I can fasten the very same digital-capture device as easily as I could swap out a Hassy 12-exposure film back, which both replaces looks like. No! It looks better.

The results with both set-ups are equal to the quality I achieved with a 4x5 film camera. Now, though, my gear is more portable, allowing for an increasing number of peripatetic expeditions. Incidentally, I used my 4x5 for portraits as often as 2¼.

For my ”4x4” I chose three landscapes shot within the past month plus one made nearly 35 years ago, to make a point about digital interoperability.

Since I acquired a 28mm Digaron lens, I decided I had to have the Cambo's technical movements, too. I used that Cambo combo to photograph the Ocean Beach Sea Wall. With the Hasselblad back's 43.8 x 32.9mm sensor size, I have the equivalent of a 20mm lens on a 35mm camera (and about the same size) but with the resolution of 4x5 film. Ya can't beat 50MP. Well, yes you can with Hasselblad's pixel-porn H6D-400C. Yes, That’s 400MP at a correspondingly radical price point. I'm sure Hassy's X System will eventually drop a 100- to 400MP sensor in our laps.

For the tree roots, I used a Hasselblad 907X with the same CFV II 50C that I used to photograph the pebbles in beach sand, but attached to an antediluvian Hasselblad 500C/M instead.

Bye-bye film.

The Art and the Artist

By Guy Tal | February 3, 2022

There are two approaches, maybe three, to any art: you can make it a real business first of all, in which case ‘Art’ could, probably would, be killed; or you can live for your art, and maybe grow lean in the living, or try to combine the two approaches. In trying to achieve the latter, I have learned that you can’t make a lot of money, get rich, out of your own hide, no less than the corner grocer.~ Edward Weston, in a letter to his son, Cole

There are those who (legitimately) refer to themselves as artists by virtue of being skilled at producing artistic creations. There are also those who refer to themselves as artists by their conviction, beyond just producing art, to live as artists. To the former, the highest purpose of being an artist is to make art, often alongside or in deliberate contrast to less-artistic aspects of life.

There are many who live their lives as artists but earn a living in other professions (or perhaps are fortunate to not have to earn a living at all), and there are also many professional artists for whom art is primarily a means of earning income rather than an expression of an intensified life.

To the latter, the opposite is true: the highest purpose of making art is to sustain an artistic life by occasionally giving tangible form to certain experiences that ensue naturally out of such a life.

Letter To The Lakes

By Tom White | February 2, 2022

It’s hard to think of a point in my lifetime when the focus on humanity’s impact on the environment was more at the fore than now, and long overdue it is. Recently I watched “Don’t Look Up”, the new Netflix feature length film satirising the climate crisis by depicting the reaction to a giant comet hurtling towards earth, and it brought home once again how devastating and ludicrous our response has been to the damage we are doing.

As photographers who spend so much time in the landscape, it seems to me we have a deep responsibility to set an example in what we can all do to mitigate our impact on the earth, as well as sharing and engaging with photography that focuses on climate change. In this desperate context that we live in, I also find it staggering that so many photographers seem keen to pour thousands of kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere just to make a quick buck through selling NFTs. Although that discussion is probably for another time…(see Tim's editorial for issue 247.)

Nature’s ability to adapt and regenerate does give us some hope, and on a much smaller level, this can be seen from disasters such as Chernobyl or the scarring of landscapes from industry. For many years I have enjoyed photographing abandoned slate mines across the Lake District as they have been reclaimed by nature, the slow creep of regeneration producing a strangely beautiful concoction.

For many years I have enjoyed photographing abandoned slate mines across the Lake District as they have been reclaimed by nature, the slow creep of regeneration producing a strangely beautiful concoction.

Elvis Dallie

By Elvis Dallie & Michéla Griffith | February 1, 2022

Behind The Waterfall

However we come across photography, it has a tendency to transform our lives. It’s often a sudden change, which makes a dramatic difference to how we both view and interact with our surroundings. In this issue, we find out a little more about Dutch photographer Elvis Dallie who has a secret friend to thank for sparking his passion.

Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, your early interests and education, and what that led you to do?

I am of Indonesian descent. My parents came to the Netherlands when I was two years old. It was only at a later age that I understood that it was for a political reason and that life there was not good then under President Sukarno. It also had to do with the fact that my father was a soldier for the Dutch army. Anyway, it's a long story and I don't want to explain everything in detail. When we came to the Netherlands and were the first foreigners to come from Indonesia to the Netherlands, we lived in a guest house in Oosterbeek, not far from Arnhem where I still live today. Arnhem is located in the Province of Gelderland and I like it very much to this day. My childhood was very good, which I owe to my parents. My father died when I was seventeen and my mother in 2015. My brother two years before. I come from a family of three children but I have no contact with my eldest brother. After the death of my father, we each chose our own path to process it and while you would think you might grow closer together, unfortunately, that was not the case. I have had a lot of love from my parents and I know what love means.

Sarah Marino – Portrait of a Photographer

By Matt Payne | January 29, 2022

Recently in a conversation with several other landscape photographers, it was suggested to me that photographs of small scenes in nature such as fallen leaves, mud patterns, and ice formations should not be considered landscape photography since they don’t include the sky or other contextual features of the ‘land.’

Potsherding

By Douglas Butler | January 26, 2022

When I was younger, I had a friend who was twice my age in years and four or five times my age in life experience. Darrell seemed adept at anything that fixed his attention or fired his passion. When potsherding with him, that is hunting for indigenous peoples relics in Massachusetts’ spring ploughed fields, Darrell taught me much about discovery, storytelling and conservancy that influences my image making to this day. That influence can be seen in images I’ve made at Foxbard and Bardwell Farms, two of the Pioneer Valley’s first farms, each established in the 18th century.

Foxbard

Lessons & Similarities

Darrell was a remarkable outdoorsman. For several years he lived alone in a cabin—with no electricity or running water—on an island set on an isolated lake in the backwoods of Maine. It was there he acquired his encyclopedic knowledge of foraging in the forests of New England. Darrell could tell you which plant could sustain, which could cure and which could injure. A hunter, he used every bit of an animal, even beyond simple sustenance. A talented and diverse artist, he collected deer and moose antler shed in winter, sculpting it with dentist tools into exquisite animistic statues—shamanistic and surreal depictions of elegant, sinuous beings that overtook the flow of the bone.

This seemed even more so when we went ‘potsherding’—that is, methodically plodding the newly ploughed sweetcorn fields of southeastern Massachusetts looking for indigenous people’s artefacts in the fresh furrows.

He was equally adept at pen and ink renderings of the moose and other wildlife of his native Maine. Darrell stood where the clichés ‘jack of all trades’ and ‘font of wisdom’ intersected. This seemed even more so when we went ‘potsherding’—that is, methodically plodding the newly ploughed sweetcorn fields of southeastern Massachusetts looking for indigenous people’s artefacts in the fresh furrows. Fields similar to those I often plod nowadays in the Pioneer Valley looking for nature’s artefacts to place within my frame when image making.

Issue 247

By Tim Parkin | January 22, 2022

Click here to download issue 247 (high quality, 148Mb)

Click here to download issue 247 (smaller download, 75Mb)

Endframe: Full Moon over Mayo by Paul Kenny

By Keith Beven | January 20, 2022

As has been the case with nearly all other End frame recommendations, having been invited to choose an image to present in this series, I found it extremely difficult to make a choice. In previous recent articles for On Landscape I have already mentioned one of my favourite Ansel Adams images, and my favourite LPOTY winning photograph of Mark Littlejohn. Many others came to mind, particularly Michael Kenna, John Sexton and Fay Godwin, but I decided to go with an image that has been hanging on my wall for quite some time now: Full Moon over Mayo by Paul Kenny. Paul’s work should be known to many of the readers of On Landscape by now, not least because of his talk given at the last Meeting of Minds conference in 2018.

I was fortunate to meet Paul at an early stage in his photographic career as the result of an exhibition in Lancaster, close to where he lived at that time in Churchtown. I bought one of his prints then (Blackstone - Bright Water, 1992), when he was still working with a camera, and we stayed in regular contact. We also managed to organise an artist-in-residence position with the Environment Centre at Lancaster University, soon after it was formed. That produced an interesting body of work, including some images of waste items from the laboratory being taken back out and photographed in the environment. Later Paul started to exhibit the prints he had made produced in other ways than through a camera, and I was immediately struck by the nature and intensity of these images. That was when I bought a copy of Full Moon over Mayo. It has been on the wall ever since.

The Magic of the Forest

By Gill Moon | January 17, 2022

Some wild places have the power to captivate all who visit them, not because they have unrivalled views or superior scenery but because they instil in the visitor a sense of wonder and awe. In 2018 I discovered one such place.

At this time my photography was primarily focused on the coast. I was an experienced yachting photographer and I loved the sea and this was the environment I was naturally drawn to when I ventured out with my camera. However, that all changed when I read a book by Sara Maitland called Gossip from the Forest. It featured a chapter on a local woodland that I had never explored but felt compelled to visit.

First impressions are always important and they are usually what guides me as a photographer. As soon as I stepped off the road and into the cool depths of the wood I knew I wanted to produce a body of work that captured the essence of this amazing location.

It is an ancient landscape of fairytale qualities where vast oaks, some over 500 years old, stand side by side with some of the tallest holly trees in Britain.

The wood is a special place that has been well documented. It has been studied by Oliver Rackham, a leading ecologist of British woodlands, and described by eminent woodland expert George Peterken as being as near to primal forest as anything else in the country. It is an ancient landscape of fairytale qualities where vast oaks, some over 500 years old, stand side by side with some of the tallest holly trees in Britain. Reminiscent of childhood stories, the area is a chaotic tangle of twisted branches where light is sparse and evergreen curtains of holly hang in the air. Dead and decaying boughs and trunks litter the floor and even on the brightest of days the air is cool and the forest dark. The treescape has a Tolkienesque quality revealed in the gnarly shapes of the oaks, the characters imagined in the deadwood and the symbiosis of its compound trees, formed as different species grow on top of one another. For all who enter this magical landscape, mystery abounds and imagination runs wild.

While the wood may have started its life as an oak wood today holly is the dominant species. The evergreen trees are regenerating at a rapid pace and tiny seedlings can be seen all over the woodland floor. But for the oaks, the future is less bright. There has been no successful natural regeneration in the last 100 years and so the dynamics of the woodland are changing. There is a conflict between the hollies and the oaks born from competition for sunlight, which over time has contributed to the enchantment of the forest but will ultimately change its nature forever.

As someone who had never attempted woodland photography before, the ancient forest presented some major challenges, the most difficult being the chaotic nature of the habitat. When I entered the wood for the first time I was confronted by a mass of trees and foliage that felt almost impossible to penetrate. Everywhere I looked the scene was busy and chaotic.

I began by getting to know the wood, visiting with my camera but focusing very much on connecting with the environment and observing the wildlife in its natural habitat. The more I explored the more I felt I understood the landscape and the trees that surrounded me.

The evergreen trees are regenerating at a rapid pace and tiny seedlings can be seen all over the woodland floor. But for the oaks, the future is less bright. There has been no successful natural regeneration in the last 100 years and so the dynamics of the woodland are changing.

There was something very powerful about immersing myself in this ancient oak wood. The gnarly trees have been old for longer than I have been alive and have lived through huge changes in the landscape. Most are between 300 - 500 years old and although they are hollowed and broken and are being crowded out by the surrounding hollies they are still alive and very much part of a vibrant ecosystem.

I was in awe of these trees every time I visited and felt a deep connection with the past and an almost spiritual connection with the wood. This ultimately gave me an idea for the project and influenced the decisions I made regarding photographic style.

I began taking photos in the autumn and deliberately decided to shoot on rainy days when the moisture in the air acted as a filter, simplifying the background but at the same time saturating the colours of the vegetation.

From my initial visits in the autumn of 2018, I produced a panel of 6 images that I felt showed the enchantment of the forest but also hinted at the dark and chaotic nature of the habitat. I entered this panel into the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) photography competition and was shortlisted to exhibit at the Art and Photography show which took place at the Saatchi Gallery in London. I was thrilled to be awarded a Silver - Gilt medal for my work and inspired to put together a book that told my story of the forest.

By this time I had been visiting and photographing the wood for two years. I had built up a huge collection of images across all four seasons and in very different weather conditions. However, I didn’t want to produce a book that told a chronological tale through spring, summer, autumn and winter. Instead, I chose to tell a story of a connection between two tree species (holly and oak) and also between man and the natural world.

As a regular visitor to the wood and an observer and lover of the natural world, the wood seemed to me to display many characteristics of a human community. It is rooted in time, and nature, connected spirituality (particularly in the past) to those that live among it, made vulnerable by change and afflicted by conflict and mortality. It is these characteristics that I chose to form the structure of my story.

The result is my book Rooted which I published at the beginning of December. Although this is principally a tale about a special area of ancient woodland it is also a personal story of the connection between myself as a photographer and the landscape I work in.

The wood is somewhere that has had a profound effect on me since I first visited in 2018. It has shaped my art and has provided me with a peaceful natural refuge to explore with my camera.

Whilst my images took just over two years to gather the words for the book were written in 2021 in the run-up to and during the international climate summit COP26 which took place in Scotland.

With the news coming out of Glasgow on a daily basis I found myself drawing comparisons between the threats the planet faces and those currently affecting the wood. Rooted is a story of an ancient place, battling for survival in its current form and one that in many ways mirrors man's own story.

I very much hope that I have succeeded in portraying, through my images, the magic and fragility of the woodland and my deep love for this awe-inspiring habitat.

You can buy Rooted from Gill's Website, £28

Photographic Projects

By Tim Parkin | January 13, 2022

The idea of photographic projects, bodies of work that are related through geography, subject matter or ideas, have been promoted by most photography practitioners as a way of developing your vision and making your work more meaningful. Although the single image is the goal of many photographers, the relationships between images in a project can convey more about the subject and how the photographers see it, than any single image.

As such, it was a goal of ours from the start of the competition to include a project category with the hope that it would be well supported. We needn’t have worried though, we received 4000 images across nearly 400 projects on a whole range of subjects and there were some amazing entries. I thought it would be interesting to share some of our winners here and also some of the more interesting project submissions (with a bias to the ones that I particularly liked).

Matt Palmer, Winner

Ash

ASH documents unprecedented fires in Tasmania from 2019. Areas photographed include Hartz Mountains National Park, Franklin Gordon River National Park, Great Lakes, and Tasmania's East Coast. The project documents the destruction of these fires, the thin line between survival and destruction, and the re-emergence of life, albeit affected by a habitat that has lost many fire vulnerable species.

Carl Smorenburg, Runner-Up

The Drakensberg

The Drakensberg has been a passion of mine for over a decade now. You’ll find this mountain range on the eastern side of South Africa, bordering Lesotho. The Zulu nation calls it uKhahlamba, which means ‘Barrier of up-pointed spears, and it is clear to see why.
I have been hiking and photographing the Drakensberg for 15 years now and every single time I go, I find a fresh perspective in this ancient place. It inspires me to show the mountain rage in all its beauty, because each season brings a different set of conditions, colour tones and light.
The Drakensberg is a lifelong project for me, and I hope you too will fall in love with this small part of Africa.

Hans Strand, Third Place

Icelandic Highlands From Above

I made my first trip to Iceland in 1995 and ran into a book with aerials by German photographer Klaus Franke. The images and the landscape photographed from above blew me away. I had never practised aerial photography myself at that time. Now 26 years later I have been flying about 140 hours over Iceland. This collection of images consists of images all from the Icelandic Highlands. A few of these have ended up in 3 of my books: "Iceland above and below", "Island" and "Beyond Landscape". Iceland is for me a lifetime project and I will most likely continue to go there and make new photographs as long as I have the health to do so.

Martin Longstaff, Fourth Place

Nun'Yunu'Wi – Dressed in Stone

Hunting is still a major pastime in the mountains of NW Georgia (USA). Yet, many years ago, before the 'Trail of Tears' (~1835), it was Cherokee Native Americans who enjoyed these same mountains and forests. This project is loosely based on the legend of Nun'Yunu'Wi, an old man dressed in stone.
The Nun'Yunu'Wi terrorised Cherokee hunting parties, tracking them down and eating them. It was said that his skin was made of stone, that his cane could transform into a rock of any shape and size, and that he used the cane to sniff the air and track his prey. In my adaptation, the rocks and boulders are a community of these stone people, still thriving within these remote mountainous forests, perhaps still feeding on the occasional unsuspecting hunter. The images are taken during the 'Fall', when changing colours transform the landscape and misty mornings start quiet and cool. This is also hunting season and access is restricted to those with a bow, or a gun, seeking deer, bear or wild hog.

Nikhil Nagane, Fifth Place

Bogs of Adirondacks

Bogs are wetlands consisting of wet and spongy ground where water and land interact with each other in a very intimate way. In this project, I have tried to capture that relationship between water and vegetation on the ground. Various seasons bring in vast variations in the bogs and I have tried to observe that change. The Adirondack Mountains in New York are known for their mountains, but what really attracts me to them are the bogs of Adirondacks.

Trym Bergsmo, Commended

The Intimate North

My submission in this contest is a selection of images from the North of Norway. I have always enjoyed this kind of photography; the search for the universe in the details. This gives me great satisfaction, to experience the grand landscape in the details. My imagination is triggered in a different way and the sense of the natural beauty and drama of the landscape becomes very much alive and different from the sensation of an overwhelming view from the top of a mountain. I don’t have to travel far to find these locations. To me, the environmental aspect of not travelling around the world to visit iconic sites is a great motivation and inspiration.

Horia Bogdan, Commended

The Beautiful Dead

In 1991, a small natural landslide stopped the flow of a little river and allowed for the creation of one of Romania's most beautiful lakes: Cuejdel. Once the water level rose, it drowned the nearby forest, creating an "army of trunks" that slowly rot above the water. The remnants of those trees combined with the ethereal mood of this place, made me visit it over and over again, in each season of the year and resulted in this photographic project.

Andrew Baruffi, Commended

Delicate

Zion National Park is a solemn and quiet place to those who need it and seek it. Grandeur and vistas dominate the area, but I believe there’s more to be said in the intimacy hidden within its walls. This is a celebration of the ice nestled between the sandstone; the delicate scenes on the ground beneath my feet, waiting to be noticed. Sweeping concentric lines, leaves caught in a natural pause, and the simple power of reflected light. A condition as fleeting as ice cannot be planned or expected, but rather found when it’s ready to be found. Zion is an easy place to see superficially and disregard its deeper potential, but much like ice; with time and patience beautiful things can be formed and found.

Joe Rainbow

Fractured

I have known this Cornish beach my whole life, playing on the slate rocks as a child and continuing to visit this local spot regularly. My aim with this project was to create an ambiguity of scale, to transform and transport, to free the mind as a child and see towering peaks, marble quarries or aerial views. Landscapes within landscapes, I am inspired by the great abstract painting tradition of Cornwall.

David Southern

Coastal Sandstone of Northumbria

The Northumbrian coastline provides endless opportunities for photography but it is the less obvious subjects that attract my attention most of all.
Soft sandstones have been eroded through the constant pounding of the North Sea resulting in ever-changing rock features and landscapes in miniature. These sedimentary rocks are made up of many layers. When exposed to the elements it is these layers that create wonderful shapes, colours and patterns. Apply a little imagination and the discoveries are boundless; rocks that look like waves on a choppy sea, low lying hills or a mountain range. Time and tide erodes channels in the stone that could be great canyons and intertidal pavements that seem like the surface of a distant planet.
Over time this dramatic coastline will no doubt reveal new and often beautiful landscapes that will continue to fascinate and fuel my imagination.

Andy Hall

Close Encounters

Intimate landscapes offer me the opportunity to absorb and distil beauty and design elements that exist in the natural world that would otherwise go unnoticed. By adopting a magnifying glass approach, I can create images that I know will be wholly original.
In this collection, mostly photographed within a five-mile radius of my home, I've enjoyed aesthetic components of lichen, frost, water, stone, moss and seaweed by combining colour, shape, pattern and texture in close-up detail.

Bonnie Lampley

Colours of the Aftermath

The colours of the landscape after a wildfire burned our area were surreal and oddly calming at the same time. While the smoke was still thick, the colours were muted, desaturated to blackened tones. As the smoke cleared, but still lingered a bit, the landscape turned to soft browns and greys. As summer waned, and fall approached, plants emerged along waterways, their exuberant greenery vividly surreal in the burned landscape. The subdued colours in the quietness of the burned landscape were the calm after the storm.

Kenny Muir

Caledonia

In the not too distant past, northern Scotland was a very different place. The Caledonian forest, an ecologically diverse temperate rainforest, covered much of the Highland landscape. Only a small number of remnants of this great woodland now exist. This selection of images taken across the seasons, aims to highlight the importance of preserving these areas of natural beauty.

Karl Mortimer

25 Square Metres

Images produced from one 25 square metre section of the Rhinogydd in North Wales as a magnificent sunset developed to the west across the Irish Sea. An exploration of landscapes within landscapes and the fractal nature of those landscapes and the geological processes that shape them from a macro to a micro level

David O'Brien

Compositional film pinhole curves

Compositional curves is always a photographic device I search for with my film pinhole camera; the simplicity of composition matched with the simplest form of camera always manages to record the simple forms of nature so well; be it the curve created by light, the sweep of a rock, the movement of clouds or sand patterns left by a retreating tide. The square format and black and white film frames a curve so pleasingly. With no viewfinder and a field of view that only continuing experience can master, the end result is never assured but always welcomed when all the elements come together. Just simple things achieved by simple lensless cameras to create a basic emotional connection!

Larry Monczka

Winter Images--Lake Erie North Shore

From November through March, I am often the solitary witness to Lake Erie's varied moods. Throughout the winter months, at the top and tail of the shortened days, one can experience the dramatic, the ephemeral and the serene. Though close to home, it often feels like an alien realm.

Max Cooper

Lensless Falls: Pinhole Photography from North Carolina's Over-Photographed Waterfalls

As a mountain “local,” I see photographers everywhere. Pros with all their gear and tourists with their phones. We jockey for space in our most beautiful places and try to capture them with our gadgets. The sharpest lens and newest sensor can’t render what it’s like to stand in these scenes, but thousands of photographs are taken of them every day. What service would it be to add my own?

But a pinhole camera is simple. I take mine to these places precisely because they are so over-photographed. The camera's tiny aperture is literally nothing: A hole. A lack. An empty space. When modern photography makes a statement, this primitive photography listens. And when you really listen to a waterfall's roar, you will hear that it defies our statements and that it is not ours to capture.

Alexandre Deschaumes

Statues de Glace

The Frozen claws of Winter. My vision here is focused on the texture. I am looking for a kind of 'emotional connection' with the atmosphere revealed on the mountains.

Jan Eigil Marthinsen

Potholes of Telemark

For thousands of years, these rock formations were hidden from plain sight. It was after they made a power plant and diverted most of the water through pipes these wonders were reviled to us. Massive stones had been churning around, creating the potholes hidden underwater. What really made this special was the discs of ice floating on the surface the day we were there. Replicated the very same twirling pattern as the rocks had been doing for thousands of years.

Mariusz Oszustowicz

Looking for harmony

It's Winter 2020/21. There's a pandemic in the world. Like many people around the world, I am learning to live anew. You cannot travel, you cannot meet friends... There are feelings that I did not know before. Searching for harmony in nature becomes a perfect therapy. For me, it is a cure for everything. The project is my photographic story of longing for harmony. I found her near my home. I am looking for her again in my life. I believe I will find her.

Alexej Sachov

A world of fantasy underwater

The tale is told underwater in Egypt. Diving in canyons, caverns and caves, you see an amazing dance of light and fish.

Natural Landscape Photography Awards Book

By Tim Parkin | January 10, 2022

My last few weeks of 2021 were spent immersed in the world of photography books. And, for a change, I wasn’t looking at other people’s books but designing one of my own. Well, our own, because I refer to the Natural Landscape Photography Awards that I run with Matt Payne, Alex Nail and Rajesh Jyothiswaran. After we realised that we could raise enough money to be able to print a high-quality portfolio book to go alongside the competition, we just had the challenge of “what was it going to look like?”. I have a fairly large library of photography books and so I spent a few days trying to find some inspiration. We knew we wanted the book to be more than just a simple ‘catalogue’ of images and we had already approached a few judges and entrants about writing essays to include in the book so the main challenge was one of ‘style’.

You would think that there wasn’t much you could do with a photography book, after all the main thing is that the images appear as large as possible and there are a lot of them. But it turns out that the books that I really enjoyed coming back to had something extra about them. They had a rhythm of presentation, a subdivision of content into logical sections, supplementary content alongside the photographs that didn’t get in the way but gave a little bit of context. For example, Joe Cornish’s first light has a short description next to each image but also a secondary image that “didn’t quite work”. This added a little extra context about why the main picture worked in comparison.

I should thank Eddie Ephraums at this point as whilst researching the types of design I liked and thought worked the best, the books he edited were, in my mind, some of the most interesting and best designed. He uses classic design elements sparingly to create published works that complement but don't overpower photographic portfolios. Have a look at Joe Cornish's "First Light", Light and Land's "Developing Vision and Style" & "Working the Light", Paul Wakefield's "Landscape" and David Ward's "Landscape Beyond" and "Landscape Within".

A designer colleague told me once that the content of a photography book can be considered the words of a story and that without punctuation, paragraphs, grammar and chapters, even the best writing would be almost unreadable. As a designer, we need to think of everything that isn’t the photographs themselves as the grammar and punctuation of the presentation. One of the most significant elements at our disposal is pretty much invisible and yet has the biggest impact. White space is one of the, if not the most important aspect of graphic design. It informs the composition of the page and as such, it is essential to use well. For instance, as much as many photographers want all of their photographs to be as large as possible, varying the size, alignment and distribution of photographs on the page. Let’s have a look at some of the ways we can present photographs.

Example Photo Spreads

As you can see - if you mix these up you can get quite a lot of variety. Full bleed images can be a little bit of a pain because you do lose a couple of mm where the picture meets the edge of the page but they can look good and if you choose your alignment well, you don’t clip important features of the images used.

The next aspect of book design is to create the broad rhythm of the book, the categories and sections. With the Founders Awards (Mountains, Trees & Forests, etc), the projects, the portfolios and the essays, we had quite a few different things to create visual and content structure with.

Here’s a list of the sections we’ve included as seen on our table of contents page.

Table Of Contents

Just with these sections, we start to introduce some rhythm and variety. We can treat each main section as a slightly different design template as well. For instance, the main categories can appear in white text on a dark background with a full bleed image. Here’s an example of the Grand Landscape category.

Grand Landscape

And we can use this concept for the big subsections such as the photographer of the year or the winner of categories. Here’s a panel showing a few different examples.

Other Category Spreads

One of the things that I wanted to include in the book is a short caption alongside each image describing why we liked the image. We used a simple vertical line to not only act as a boundary for each caption but also to indicate which side of the page it was referring to (only really useful on a couple of pages where captions appeared opposite the image.

Here are three examples of the captions which include examples of one of the judges captions explaining why the image was one of their favourites in the competition.

Image Caption Examples

To cope with the various aspect ratios of the images, we have had to lay out the captions quite differently. Also, in order to choose complementary images across each spread that fit in terms of aspect ratio creates a sort of puzzle with multiple solutions. With enough fiddling around, satisfactory solutions eventually appear (albeit they’re a little bit of a fight).

To be honest, this was one of the most fun parts of designing the book. To have such a collection of amazing images to work with and free reign to organise them in a complementary fashion was such fun. The only disappointing thing was not being able to include more images. Unfortunately, we’ve been told that beyond a certain size a book gets difficult to pick up and read. How annoying!

Now we’ve got the bulk of the single image photographic content designed in, we need to add some of the gallery or portfolio pages. We wanted to include a few photographic projects (as you’ll be able to see elsewhere in this issue) but we could only do this by showing a full project on a single spread or even a single page for some of them. Here are the designs I created for these pages.

Regular Project Layouts

We were quite lucky with some of the projects in that the photographs included were mostly similar aspect ratios. Working with variable aspect ratios has its own challenges, for instance on Trym Ivar Bergsmo’s spread and also on Andrew Baruffi’s page, we just had to work with a constant height and try to distribute the images to make visual sense. I think the ‘filmstrip’ solution looks OK here. It shows that you don’t need to be a slave to a layout design and your eye can forgive a little bit of variance across pages.

Less Regular Project Layouts

"Free fonts!"

I would highly recommend anybody would designs books to prioritise readability over style for the main body fonts. It’s tempting to find something novel to give your book a new look but your main header fonts and general book design are the places for creativity, not the body copy meant for extended reading at small type sizes. The free fonts that come with your graphic design or operating system are often maligned (with Arial and Georgia only useful for web text) but some are actually way better than most commercial fonts. For example, we chose “Minion” as our body font. It comes free with Adobe software but you know it’s a good font when it’s used to style the body copy for the seminal “The Elements of Typographic Style” by Robert Bringhurst. Read more about Minion here.

For the essay sections, I admit to copying various aspects from books that I already own. There are quite well-recognised font sizes recommended for book copy which we used (from newspaper readability and content style guides) and we chose to use a very common font that was designed for readability (see caption). The main headers were already chosen for our logotype but we bought a non-rounded version for print.

The use of multiple columns is, I think, important if you have a landscape orientation book, it makes it a lot easier to scan each line and breaks up the page nicely. It also allows you to embed pull quotes or images without reflowing the page too much.

Here’s Joe Cornish’s essay, which appeared in our previous issue. As you can see, the inclusion of a couple of images and a pull quote, which flow into the text column slightly, breaks up the page layout without making the content any less readable.

Essay Style

Finally, we have a couple of extra page desigs for the Judges and the Organisers. The judge's page was originally going to include a few of the judge's photographs but we thought that it might be better to include the responses to a few short questions about the judging process. We also included the judges top pick from the competition and a short caption on why they selected it.

For the ‘organisers’ section, it made sense to include a few images as people are less likely to know who we are than the judges, plus we have already created a website and a book that discusses what we think about the competition - you don’t really need much more. So we chose a few of our favourite images to show people the sort of thing that we produce when we’re actually taking photos rather than organising competitions!

Judges And Organisers

There was a fair bit of going back to the document repeatedly to fine-tune things. Spacing between captions and vertical lines, headlines and body content, margins on text, etc. Just like going back to a photograph to think about the cropping and space around a subject, you can go back to a book a couple of weeks later and see things that should have been obvious but you were too close to to see properly. Little tweaks were made such as nook numbers were only added to the right-hand pages because that was enough to find things when flipping through the book. The page numbers were also skipped when the caption or photo would have been too close.

There is often a big thing made about the CMYK conversion for photographs but in the vast majority of cases, an automated 'perceptual' conversion to CMYK works very well. There are a few exceptions, mainly in large areas of highly saturated colours where tonality may be lost without manually going in and adjusting things. In our case, there were only two or three images that needed manual interventions. One with very saturated blue/magenta marsh oil and a couple with areas of saturated greens that lost some detail. Yes, quite a few of the rest looked less saturated but seen on their own (never compare conversions side by side!) they looked fine.

To give you an idea of what the final book looks like, I've created a flipbook preview and installed it on the book page which is now live on the Natural Landscape Photography Awards website. The book is currently on pre-sale and comes with a 25% discount which will be available until the 1st of February.

Matt Payne

By Matt Payne & Michéla Griffith | January 6, 2022

For this issue, we’re turning the tables on Matt Payne, who writes our ‘Portrait of a Photographer’ series. Looking back over these as part of my preparation for this interview, I can see some common threads - what we in the UK tend to call intimate landscapes, a personal approach, an open minded or relaxed outlook, and concern for nature. These can be found too in Matt’s own photography; just as with our images, our words and work inevitably reflect who we are. Matt’s own website contains a breadth of photography, but I was most drawn to the less ‘epic’. This is in no way a judgement of relative quality but like many Matt’s photography has evolved and with time he is increasingly drawn to the smaller views that perhaps speak better of our interactions with nature. Respect for nature has been fundamental to Matt’s experience of the outdoors from the very beginning.

Autumn Nights

Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, your early interests and education, and what that led you to do?

Sure! My name is Matt Payne – I grew up in a city on the front range of Colorado called Colorado Springs. My great-great-grandmother came there in a covered wagon back in the late 1800s and so I’m a 5th generation native of Colorado. I’m very proud of my Coloradoan heritage and this place is very important to me.

The Body Keeps the Score

By David Lintern | January 4, 2022

These images were made in the space of a few days as I cleared my mother's house after her funeral. The location is an old tree nursery marked for development on the edge of a town on the south coast of England. I slipped away from clearing out the flotsam of a lifetime at dawn or dusk for some air. It was somewhere I visited with my mum, then walked her dog when she was unable, and so while these pictures were made in a week or less, they gestated over about three years beforehand.

They show an in-between place, a (so-called) liminal landscape, somewhere between states, a place that mirrored my own state of numbness. It felt very much like the waiting room of grief. As anyone who has lost a loved one will know, you don't really know how to react. There's no road map.

Mark Pickup

By Mark Pickup & Charlotte Parkin | December 31, 2021

Susan Rowe, one of our subscribers, suggested we interview photographer Mark Pickup. He recently gained his distinction from the Associateship in the Disabled Photography Society. We talk to Mark about his photography and how he has adjusted his workflow around his Macular Dystrophy.

Before Sunrise at Arnside

Can you tell us a little background about yourself and how you became interested in photography?

My passion for photography began when I was 15 whilst studying art in school, enhanced by a family holiday to the island of Malta. Whilst there, I fell in love with the landscape, buildings & architecture instantly, which prompted me to use my camera almost everywhere I visited on that trip.

After leaving school I had various short-term jobs whilst progressing my photography skills & increasing my confidence behind the lens. I now consider photography my lifetime job.

Tell us about why you love the landscape genre in particular?

Being outdoors, free to roam & being at one with the surrounding nature. I love visiting locations where any two days are never the same and sometimes experiencing four seasons in one day, particularly in the Lake District!

Frosty Morning on Hampsfell Near Grange Over Sands

When you started photography, which photographers inspired you? And as you progressed, did you find any new inspirations?

My overall photography inspiration was Ansel Adams, as the years progressed, I discovered the works of Joe Cornish & Charlie Waite. Both photographers’ books stimulated my interest further over the years.

A photographer local to my area called Jon Sparks also inspired me to shoot images in and around my home town, he too is a landscape photographer.

During the last ten years, you have become visually impaired due to developing Macular Dystrophy. How has his impacted your photography and how have you adapted your processes and techniques so you can still work with a camera?

This has massively impacted my craft. I now have to use various magnifiers to aid me, and I work much slower than previously to capture the image to ensure everything is correct.

I also have to use magnifiers on my digital monitors whilst editing my work.

This has massively impacted my craft. I now have to use various magnifiers to aid me, and I work much slower than previously to capture the image to ensure everything is correct.

On the beach at Morecambe

You say on your website “I have been strong-willed and positive that this would not destroy my ability or attitude towards my photography” How have you kept your mental resilience strong and such a positive attitude over time?

Having a great team of support from my family & friends! They have kept me positive throughout all my trials and tribulations from the start of my disability. I used my photography as a crutch to help me maintain my mental health and physical wellbeing especially during the early ‘dark days’.

You have a love of the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales. Can you tell us about some of your favourite images from these areas?

I have taken many images over the years across the two counties & have also captured many images of my home town Lancaster & surrounding areas of Morecambe Bay & its stunning coastline.

Rydal Water

My favourite place to photograph in the Lake District is around Rydal Water, I enjoy this area as it’s a lovely low-level walk with some stunning views of the surrounding fells. My favourite image of Rydal was taken looking towards the Old Boat House.

Norber Erratics Stones

Lone Tree At Nober Erratics

My favourite place to photograph in the Yorkshire Dales is The Norber Erratics, close to the village of Austwick. I love the glacial erratic boulders & surrounding limestone pavement, a geographical marvel! Also, the trees which appear to be actually splitting the rocks!

Sunset On The Beach At Morecambe

Finally, my overall favourites place to photograph are right on my doorstep, Lancaster & Morecambe.

I love nothing more than hopping on a bus to Morecambe to capture the glorious sunsets. Some of my best work has been captured here!

I notice that you photograph waterfalls, does the sound play a part in your experience and interpretation of them?

The sound does help somewhat but for me, it’s the actual vision of the waterfalls. The ebb & flow of the cascading water fascinates me totally!

You published a photography walking guide to Ingleton Falls. Tell us more about this project, how it came about, how you decided what locations and images to include, the highs and lows of the project.

This project was born from a conversation between myself & close friend Andrew McQueen. Andrew being a publisher & myself the photographer, seemed to be a perfect collaboration to create a guidebook!

We both had a passion for the waterfalls at Ingleton, myself through my photography trips there & Andrew taking his children there on family days out. Choosing the images was an easy task due to my photo stock of the area being very large.

Combining Andrew’s knowledge of the area & my images the book was created & rolled into publication.

Last Light on The Ashton Memorial

You have also published a photography guidebook on your home town Lancaster with Andrew McQueen. The photographs are more urban and architectural than landscape. How did you find photographing a different style? How did this collaboration come about with Andrew?

This project came very naturally to me, being my home town, there was always going to be a familiarity when shooting the images. I felt totally at ease whilst capturing each subject & knowing the subjects’ history helped me even more.

In all honesty, I felt this project was a positive challenge knowing I had to get it spot on as being my home town.

Again, as with the Ingleton book, this idea was born over a cup of coffee with Andrew. We both knew it was something that we needed to do!

In 2013 you gained your distinction in ADPS, (Associateship in the Disabled Photography Society). You submitted 15 pieces of work to be judged. Can you tell us about the images that you submitted and how you chose these images?

The subject I chose was Blackpool, captured over a number of visits. The images ranged from landscape to everyday life. Such views captured on the promenade included a family sitting with their luggage having a chat, donkeys on the sand and also some abstract images from everyday life including a seagull perched near some street lighting.

My decision for choosing the images came with help from a lady called Margaret Salisbury, she was my mentor for the ADPS process.

You are an Ambassador for British Photography Awards. Tell us more about this role and how you got involved.

At present, the role is low key with very little involvement in honesty. It came about from me helping other visually impaired people learn photography.

Which cameras and lenses do you like to use, and how do you approach post-processing, editing and sequencing?

I currently use Fujifilm cameras, the X100F with a fixed 35mm equivalent 23mm F2 lens being my favourite amongst other Fuji models.

I use Capture One editing software and have done for the last four years. Once all images are loaded up, I choose the images I want to keep/use & process them accordingly, this usually only being small tweaks.

Sunsetting in Morecambe Bay

Are you working on your next project or do you have any future project ideas that you’re thinking about?

In completion is my annual ‘Lancaster Calendar’ which is compiled of images from the last 12 months capturing my home town.

I’m currently in the final stages of organising my Photography Exhibition being shown at The Storey Gallery in Lancaster. The theme of my exhibition is ‘Images of The Morecambe Bay Coastline’ I will be exhibiting 10 images taken over a period of the last 18 months.

: Sunsetting in Morecambe Bay

: Shipwreck at Roe Island

: On the coast at Silverdale

: On the beach at Morecambe

: Looking towards the promenade at Morecambe

: Looking back at Morecambe At Sunset

: Just after sunset at Morecambe

: Frosty Morning on Hampsfell Near Grange Over Sands

: Boat in Morecambe Bay

: Before Sunrise at Arnside

: Sunset on the beach at Morecambe

: Rydal Water

: Norber Erratics Stones

: Lone Tree at Nober Erratics

Issue 246

By Tim Parkin | December 25, 2021

Click here to download issue 246 (high quality, 144Mb)

Click here to download issue 246 (smaller download, 77Mb)

Subscribers 4×4 Portfolios

By Dipak Chowdhury, Tim Pearson, Yola de Lusenet & Joao Ferrao | December 24, 2021

Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted from our subscribers. Each portfolio consists of four images related in some way.

Submit Your 4x4 Portfolio

Interested in submitting your work? We're on the lookout for new portfolios for the next few issues, so please do get in touch!

Dipak Chowdhury

Lines on Snow

João Ferrão

Sanatorium

Tim Pearson

Coastal Curves

Yola de Lusenet

Water Meadow

By Yola de Lusenet | December 24, 2021

The photographs were made more or less around the corner from where I live, in Batenburg (NL) on the river Meuse. In this area agricultural land has been 'returned to nature', to allow controlled flooding of the river when the Meuse rises in winter.

However, this year the water rose in the middle of summer - with dramatic consequences upriver. Here, much further down, the water came quietly, turning the river and its flood plains into a large lake, covering most of the vegetation. It was a fascinating sight, trees full of leaves standing in the midst of the expanse of water, ducks and an inquisitive beaver swimming past where the cycle path used to be, and especially the tallest flowers and grasses struggling to keep their heads above water. On calm summer evenings, with little wind and the sun setting over the water, I made a great many pictures of these curious sights, with the water acting as a mirror.

As a photographer, I explore the landscape around me for images that make ordinary things look different. Light, reflections, abstraction may turn a clump of grass or a puddle into an intriguing image. There is much more to see and experience in the everyday landscape around us if you learn t o look better.

Coastal Curves

By Tim Pearson | December 24, 2021

The images in my portfolio have two things in common: each features the Yorkshire coast, and each shows coastal curves, either manmade or natural. You could say that the third thing they have in common is long exposure, which I love to use for the vast majority of my coastal work.

Living in East Yorkshire, I'm a long way from the UK's more dramatic locations. However, the Yorkshire coast has great variety which more than makes up. From the austere beauty of Spurn Point in the south, which I visit regularly and never fails to deliver, to the photogenic views of Whitby, Robin Hood's Bay and Staithes in the north, all bases are covered.

Many photographers comment on the meditative power of the landscape, and there's no doubting that for me, the coast is the place where I can lose myself. Time melts away, and whether I take a dozen images or a hundred, the time never drags; indeed, I'm not even aware that it is passing.

Spurn

Sanatorium

By Joao Ferrao | December 24, 2021

The pandemic has led everyone to explore the "backyards" of our lives, whether physical or metaphorical.

During this period I got to know better a small forest south of the Bom Jesus sanctuary in Braga. I wasn't attracted by its religious character but it turned out to be a spiritual sanctuary for me, a zone of relaxation and introspection whose beauty showed itself when I was most entangled in its intricacies.

This series of images is a sample of a set of several images of a more intimate and abstract character, captured in this wood that has become for me a true sanctuary.

Lines on Snow

By Dipak Chowdhury | December 24, 2021

On a January morning, waking up I saw the ground around my home covered with 30cm of pristine white snow. Nothing unusual about the January scene in front of me, given I live in Northern US. The day was gloomy and no sun to be seen. However, as I was looking out the window, I could not help but notice the strange and beautiful lines on snow made by bare shrub branches of small Green Ash and Queen Anne's lace which were peeking out of the snow.

Woodland around my home is mostly Hemlock and various pines. In between, there are some Maple, Oak, and Ash. In Fall Maple and Oaks play a key role in painting the landscape in orange, yellow, and, if you are lucky, bright red. In January none of that is to be seen. But on this January morning, the subdued light with bright white background of fresh snow, the bare and fractal like branches echoed the calm and contemplative atmosphere perfectly.