For the past six and half years, I have made the majority of my income from photography, and the majority of this income has been from print sales.

I live in west Wales, right at the point where the three counties of Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire meet; the “old” Dyfed. It’s a beautiful area, and I have never felt the need to drive more than an hour for my landscape photography, save for the odd trip to Blaenau Ffestiniog (which I love) and London.

Aberystwyth

I sell my landscape prints through a couple of art and craft cooperatives which have permanent galleries, sale or return in a large number of seasonal and permanent outlets, and with four craft groups of which I am a member where, from Easter to October, we rent suitable premises from a few days to 5 months and divide the stewarding duties.

To be perfectly honest, I have come not to like many of the images that sell the best, and they’d certainly end up nowhere near my wall, and conversely, the images that I do really like, sell modestly or, in some cases, not at all!

I have, though, really enjoyed the process of building up a portfolio of these saleable images, of learning about the landscape where I live, learning to understand how weather, tide and light can combine in different places to produce pleasing results. I have enjoyed (re)learning how to use a camera in a variety of situations and to take control of the controllables to get the images that I want. I have enjoyed learning how to use software to process the RAW files to give a finished photo that looks the way that I want it to but retains an integrity to what I witnessed. The whole thing has been fun!

Cenarth

Henllan

The thing is, though, after more than six years of doing this, it is no longer a challenge. It has got to the stage that if I feel the need to add another pretty picture to my portfolio of images that tourists are willing to buy, I can have a look at a few apps, choose my location appropriately, and be reasonably confident that I can pop along, and get the outcome that I want. It’s not that I hate or resent doing this. To a point, I still enjoy it, it’s just that it no longer really satisfies me: it isn’t enough.

Over the last year or so, whenever I have gone out with a camera, it has increasingly been for me; to do what I want to do, to learn new stuff, rather than to add another photo of an obvious location to my portfolio (although commercially, I do have to do a bit of this). I have become much more interested in the details of a place rather than the wider view. The small things that would often have gone unnoticed are increasingly fascinating to me, and I have a strong desire to record them but do so in a way that is very visually appealing. I suppose that, conventionally, a landscape photographer photographs a view or a scene with the intent of showing the viewer what he or she would have seen had they been stood next to the photographer. I am becoming much more interested in showing the viewer stuff that they probably wouldn’t have seen had they been stood next to the photographer, but stuff which can be really interesting and/or beautiful. For me, it’s about going beyond the obvious and really trying to get under the skin of a place.

Llansteffan

What I didn’t expect is just how hard this is! To be perfectly honest, in the past, I’d looked at the work of photographers like David Ward and not really got it. I couldn’t see the point, and anyway, the photographs just looked a bit like snaps of random objects to me that pretty much anyone who knows how to use a camera could do (sorry David!). I am very happy to say, here and now, I could not have been more wrong, and by actually becoming firstly interested in it, and then by trying to actually do it, I have come to realise it is very, very difficult to do, even vaguely competently, let alone superbly well. It is much, much, much harder, in my opinion than photographing the wider scene. And, I don’t think that it is just because I am relatively new to it, either. I do think that it is, inherently, a harder or more challenging approach to get “right”.

There are a couple of reasons for this, I think. Firstly, the approach to looking at the details of a place is completely different to the photographing of the wider view, for me at least. When I do go out to get an image of a wider view to put out for sale, I usually have a very clear idea in my head of what it is I want to photograph. Not just the place, but more or less the exact composition. I will check the tide apps, the weather apps and The Photographer’s Ephemeris and go to the right place at the right time. I am successful more often than not, and failure is usually down to the weather not doing what it was supposed to do.

When I go out to take the sort of photographs for me that I’ve described, I pay little or no attention to weather, tide or light. I pick a day and a place, I take a camera, two lenses and a tripod, and I go for a wander. I do everything I can to absolutely not try to preconceive any kind of image or prejudge what I might find. This is difficult because you not only have to look really hard, but you also have to learn to see in very new and exciting ways. So, I’ll be wandering along, and usually, I see nothing at all. After a while, I usually see something that might be a photograph. I think it just takes a bit of time to get in to the mindset of looking hard and seeing differently.

Marloes

Once I’ve found something that might be a photograph, the real work starts. And it’s here I think that the second reason for this being such a challenge rears its head. It’s a truism that photography is the opposite of painting: the painter starts with a blank canvas and paints in what s/he wants or sees. The photographer starts with all of reality in front of him or her and has to edit this down until there is a photograph that says what he or she wants it to say. When photographing the wider scene, I just think that this is, by definition, a less complicated process. When looking at the intimate, millimetres matter!

So, having found something that might be a photograph, I usually spend quite some time just looking at it, walking round it and really studying it hard, with the camera still in the bag. This can very easily take half an hour.

The concentration and attention to detail that this takes is way beyond what, I at least, use when photographing a wider view. The thing is that it doesn't seem like an hour; it’s only if I look at my watch afterwards that I realise. There have been occasions when I’ve spent the whole day in an area no bigger, and often a lot smaller, than a football pitch and made maybe 3 or 4 images if I’m lucky. I may have walked far less than a mile, but I am exhausted (but sometimes exhilarated) too! It’s the mental rather than the physical exertion that is the hard part.

In a former life, I knew a hypnotherapist very well. I was extremely sceptical about the whole process. That was until I said, “Go on then, Tim, put me under!”. Without going into unnecessary detail here, it was a profound experience that, 16 years on, I still remember vividly. What Tim also taught me was some self hypnosis techniques, and it is these that I employ when I’m out with a camera. One of the things that he used to say to me frequently was, “It’s when you focus your attention on your intention that you can achieve great things”. My intention is to make an interesting and hopefully appealing photograph, and all of my attention becomes focused on this to the point where hours pass and seem like minutes. Although I am not claiming that my photographs are great!

Mwnt

Tresaith

One thing has been bugging me, though: what to “do” with this new (to me) approach. A conversation with Rachael Talibart gave me the answer. Using Blurb, I have turned them into a project and a book, just for me, really.

I visited nine locations that I know intimately well, within an hours drive of home. For each of the locations, I photographed an obvious, wider view that went on the left hand page of the two pages in the book allocated to that location. Then, within that view the challenge was to find four more intimate photographs of the “unseen” that would be both interesting and hopefully appealing, to go on the right hand page opposite the wider view. And, believe me, it was a real challenge, but one that I loved and consumed me for months. The idea is to use the more obvious wider view as the hook to hopefully attract the viewer’s attention and then more or less force them to consider photographs that otherwise they would possibly have only glanced at or not even looked at at all.

Porthgain

I don’t know if I have succeeded or not, but it has given my love of this approach to photography a purpose, and it has helped me to focus my attention on my intention. It has also led me to really think about what it is that I want to achieve with my photography, beyond taking pretty pictures for the tourist market.

I don’t know exactly how these will evolve, or even if they will all come to fruition, but what I do know is that this approach is, at the same time, both hugely liberating and exciting for me and really forcing me to continually question why I am doing what I am doing. The why of photography is so much more important than the how or the what!

Have you got a project that you would like to write an article about? Or perhaps a photography trip that you have been on and would like to share an article about the images? Get in touch as we are always looking for submissions.

The coastline of South Wales has a concealed history.

A history of tragedy and death.

A history of lives lost at sea.

The treacherous waters of the Bristol Channel have long been navigated by waterborne vessels and on many a gale driven night or fog laden morning, many of these vessels have foundered on rocks unseen. This photographic work investigates the history of these shipwrecks. The work also inspects the landscape that caused these catastrophes, in particular, Tusker Rock and the coastline of South Wales. Tusker Rock is a submerged reef that sits in the middle of the Bristol Channel. The 500m rock is only visible at low tide and is a notorious hazard for ships and as such it is scattered with maritime skeletal remains.

Ghost Ships and Tides is undoubtedly the most rewarding photographic project I have undertaken. For me, it is the culmination of my personal transfer from commercial/general photographer to art based/project photographer. The shoots that made up the content of the project were the most demanding photo shoots I have ever undertaken.

Unsure as to how best to present the work, the early shoots saw me photographing via large format, DSLR, drone and pinhole camera. The shipwreck locations across South Wales are fairly inaccessible, encompassing miles of walking over beaches, soft sand and dunes to reach them. An eight mile round trip, off road, carrying all the equipment, with a multi-format photoshoot in the middle, is an exhausting thing. In addition to the large format imagery that forms the main body of work, I also created four installation pieces for exhibition purposes. Comprised of drone photography of the surface of the sea, and shipwrecks on the sand, these two images are layered on purpose built stands. Printed via the duratrans method (the shipwreck) and suspended under the sea (glass gelatine cyanotypes), these cyanotrans pieces represent the tumultuous force of our sea in a new way.

The idea for Ghost Ships and Tides came about whilst watching a BBC programme called ‘Hidden Wales’. The presenter, Will Millard was taken to the rock by Ross Martin (a resident of my hometown, Porthcawl) and whilst standing on the rock, Millard said “I think something should be done to remember those lives lost”. I decided to create a project as a legacy to those lost by Tusker Rock.

My projects centre heavily around landscape, place and memory. These three constants are undeniably interweaved within this work, especially within the starting place, Tusker Rock. I feel enormously privileged to have stood on that rock with my large format camera. The emotions and feelings that I had as I traversed the treacherous rock were overwhelming in their contrasting calm and unsettlement. To be stood in that environment, that is only fully accessible twice a year, but that can be seen from the shore every day (and that I have been fascinated by from a young age) is a memory that I will hold forever.

Whilst landscape is the driving force and the main visual factor behind this project, in reality, the work centres around people. The people who lost their lives. The people who saved the lives of those shipwrecked. People are the most important things that we have in life. Connections that we make in life and an understanding of when something is good is an underlying driving force behind our decisions.

Therefore, this work looks at the people who have lost their lives at sea, in particular in the treacherous waters of the Bristol Channel. These people sailed on ships, on boats, and had an enormous impact upon the industry and economic make up of our land. This work pays homage to the people who on black, stormy nights floated to their salty doom.

This is a visual story of a treacherous history. A story of foundered ships. A story of submerged doom. A story of pirates. A story of pillars of rock that smashed wood and bent metal.

This is a legacy for the stuttering candles extinguished by the sea.

Fictional Narrative

Imagine standing on Tusker Rock in the dead of night, as the waves wash all around you, your clothes are heavy and soaked. Rain and gale force winds pummel you from every direction. You are freezing to death and the water rises… Imagine…

It was 1882.

It was the year that I died.

I was killed by a rock.

I was killed by a reef.

I was killed by the sea.

I was swamped by waves and water and under I went into the flow and pull of the great tide.

I left behind two beautiful souls.

I left behind another soul, in whose presence I rejoice.

The night I died, the wind was high and the waves were wild. A storm blew in from the south. We lost our way. I couldn’t see the bow of the boat. Waves lashed at my face, rain soaked my skin and drenched my clothes. The sea roiled in a seething mass of foamy spume. And the boat struck the reef. We hit Tusker Rock.

The boat groaned I was thrown forward, and my chest hit hard a cleat. And I fell from the boat. I landed hard on something sharp and dark. The rock. It was beneath me. Blood poured from my arms, my legs, my hands; the rock was so razor sharp. The boat boomed against the black rock. It creaked and tore as the waves pounded it against the reef. I got to my feet and I clambered away from its hulking bulk; I was afraid of being crushed. The wind and the waves were everywhere. They became my world. The wind howled around my ears and I could not hear. The waves roared around my body and I was so cold that I could not feel. I slipped, tripped, slithered and slid across the razor rocks beneath me. With every fall the rock opened my skin and I bled red, red, red. I heard the boat groan again as it was wrenched from the rock and swept away. I knew not what to do. I heard the screams of my crewmates. The dark and wind and the waves were my world.

And the waters rose.

I stood upon the rock only to be knocked over, over, over and over again. The waves tried to wash me into the sea. I clung on with wrecked hands to the rocks, all the while the sea tried to drag me out. My knees tore, I felt bone meet rock. Two hard surfaces competing with one another for grip. All was heavy. Heavy clothes. Heavy waves. Heavy wind. My heart was so heavy, so heavy with the weight of doom that loomed overhead. So I pulled myself up, I pulled up my collar and I faced the cold, on my own. The rock mocked me beneath my heavy feet. And around me, my crewmates, my friends, were dead and drowning.

And the waters rose.

And again a wave knocked me from my feet. The rock vanished from beneath me. There was nothing on which I could stand. In the water, I was thrown around the ocean like a piece of driftwood. The saltwater burned my eyes. The sea filled my mouth. I couldn’t breathe. No breath. The rock that had killed me was nowhere to be found. I had nothing on which to stand. I was engulfed by waves. Torn by the wind. I struggled to stay afloat. My salty tears mixed with the salty sea; a tiny part of me merged with the fury of the ocean. And under I went.

And the waters rose.

I reached up with my hands and they breached the surface. I felt air on my fingertips. The cold brine seethed around my body. I breathed, I inhaled, but it was not aired that I breathed. I breathed water, but fish I was not. I was a man alone in the sea and I breathed water. Submerged, I coughed; the water expelled from my lungs. And I breathed again. Saltwater ravaged my lungs, my body, my mind, my brain. I was taken by the waves. In my mind, I saw…

His face; my boy.

Her face; my girl.

And her face; her face.

And all I wanted was to be out of the sea. The rain fell like a sad song and in that moment, the future did not exist. The only souls I saw were underwater ghosts. Stuttering candles are extinguished by the sea. Memories of old crashed like waves on the shore of my mind.

Life was a memory, and then it was nothing.

Read more at:

https://www.peter-britton.com/ghost-ships-and-tides

'From the seahouse' is a collection of images and words that have formed over five successive winters of living, writing, and photographing from a remote Scottish beach.

Although primarily a photographic book, 'from the seahouse' also holds a story. A story that begins when, exhausted by travel and depleted by loss, I rent a neglected croft-house at the edge of the sea. Stilled by the act of photographing,

My thoughts of the seahouse will always be dominated by an impression of containment: a quiet wrapping of moor around the house, truncating sightlines and forcing me to look seawards, out towards the Summer Isles and the distant hills of Coigach and An Teallach.

Immediately beneath the house, a dip of warrened machair seeps into an arc of wind-planed beach, where the first, and the most powerful, of three winter burns slices across the sand. It carries uncertainty: changing course daily, moving stones, opening fissures. Then, after 800m or so, the sweep of sand breaks against a spine of shallow rocks. A rise of dune and marram grass leads into a second, shell-rich bay where the herons fish. Here, a tidal lagoon, bottomed by filigreed slabs of coloured rock, pulses to a mirror back. A third rise and the landscape changes once again, into a run of brick-red cliffs and a rough, scarified foreshore that holds more pools of floating weed and richly marked stones.

Unable to drive, I am bounded by the distance I can walk, and so this short stretch of coast becomes the landscape of my imagination.

Stilled by the act of photographing and unfettered from time, images surface quietly. Banishing thoughts of 'too bright', 'too dull', I let myself wander, adjusting myself to the height of the tide and the strength of the wind.

As night draws in, I write, drawing words from the same physical and emotional landscape as the images. Whilst the photographs have a stillness that belies the tumult of the winter shoreline, my thoughts and words explore that turmoil: the raw physical power and fugacity of the winter environment and my internal world, where unsettling memories and unresolved grief are unlocked by a sudden scent or a turn of a stone. These are the hardest hours of the project - confronting the issues that brought me to the beach and probing the connections between the life I have lived and the images I make.

My father was a keeper of stones. He kept them in a drawer and on special days would take them out and name them. An incantation that conjured worlds where devils lost their toenails and snakes were turned to stone. Where insects began as woodlice and featherless birds skimmed the skies.

On perfect days he would let me choose one. My hand would hover between the glistening pull of mica schist and the delicate fronds of a crinoid fan. And, although the mica was buttery and shone with the softest mercurial light, I loved the life within the crinoid. The star like segments of its fractured stem. Tracing their outline, I would imagine it whole and living, its tentacles moving with the brush of passing prey'. - extract from 'A Memory of Stones.

My father and I had met over stones.

The impulse to draw the words and images into a book came in waves. At first, driven by the idea to create one beautiful object and with a passion for printing, I saw 'from the seahouse' as an 'artist's book': a single book, printed by me and bound in collaboration with an artisan bookbinder. An invitation to exhibit made me think that such a book could become a focus, turning an exhibition into an installation, comprising a book, prints and a soundscape of the beach. But, as I explored the options, I ran into difficulty finding paper of the right size and grain direction that would allow me to realise the drum leaf folded, lay-flat structure I was looking for. And so, as I reluctantly moved towards accepting the idea of outsourcing the printing, I began to re-think the value of the book.

Asking 'artistic' friends and fellow photographers to review the spreads, I came to see that, by tying together my emotional response to the beach and the images that arose from it, the collection had gone beyond a simple portrait of a place and was reflecting my personal creative journey. And so, I settled on printing 100 copies to accompany a mid-summer installation and having designed the layout, I put myself in the hands of exacting bookmaker and friend, Eddie Ephraums (Envisage books), to make the final tweaks and supervise the printing. The plan is to print 'from the seahouse' on high quality Mohawk Eggshell paper and, because of the weight of the paper, to make two volumes, hand-glued and finished. Which is all very well, but as many of you will have experienced, comes at a cost.

This brings me to my experience of launching a crowdfunding campaign to help manage the printing costs. I chose Kickstarter rather than some of the other crowdfunding platforms because of its arts focus, and I could see that it had plenty of photography projects attempting to raise funds. I wasn't especially daunted by Kickstarter's condition that you must reach your full funding goal or receive nothing.

In preparation for the campaign, I created lists of potential backers: friends, family, my photography network, and people who live locally and who might be interested in having a book about their place. For months before, I posted regularly on social media, targeting and building up a substantial following within the LinkedIn photography groups. I thought hard about a hierarchy of rewards, essentially incentives to encourage backers to pledge. These included prints which could reward small pledges and higher value rewards, including the book itself – which, of course, becomes a way of pre-selling the book. What I didn't think hard enough about was the value of a 'marketing' video. Kickstarter advises that 80% of successful projects have a video, and with insufficient pre-thought, the making of the video became the toughest challenge of the pre-launch phase. If I had my time over again, I would have made a better plan.

As of today (23rd May), I am 12 days into a 60-day campaign and the project is 66% funded {77% as of 2nd June - Ed}, which is brilliant news. Most of the pledges have come from my friends and from my photographic network, the majority of whom are choosing to pre-order a book. Of course, it's not rocket science that my closest social network has responded early and that, as time goes on, I can expect support to dwindle, unless I can recruit new backers.

I am still trying to think creatively about where they might come from and the best time and ways to reach them. Could they come from the larger Kickstarter community? The platform certainly has a large philanthropic following which is eager to engage with projects. One of the most consistently successful photographic projects is the "Remembering wildlife" series by Margot Raggett. She brings together images from some of the world's top wildlife photographers and makes beautiful coffee table books. It's easy to see a wide appeal, especially as profits on sales go to wildlife charities. Her most recent 'Remembering bears' made almost £150,000. However, most of us, including me, have less globally compelling projects! So far, I have seen 20% of the funds raised coming from the Kickstarter community.

Would I do it again? Possibly. It's certainly a lot of work, but if I can reach the funding target and bring the book to print, it will all have been worthwhile! And should I exceed the target, then not only will it help fund the framing costs for the exhibition, but maybe I could think about the commissioning of a bookbinder to create that one 'beautiful object'.

If you are curious to learn more, the link below will take you to the 'from the seahouse' campaign page where there is a second link from where you will be able to see all the images as a flipbook.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mike Langford

Mike Langford

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

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.

Mike Langford

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.

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.

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.

Mike Langford

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

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.