Join the conversation
Subcribe to comment rss feedListening to Your Inner Self
Matt Lethbridge
I have been making landscape photographs for around 8 years now and I am very passionate about what I do.I really enjoy the creative challenges brought on by working with natural light, especially in variable weather conditions. I have just started to dip my toe in the water with 35mm film photography and I an looking forward to the many challenges ahead.Flickr
As a landscape photographer, I have often been advised that there is no substitute for "being there" with "the right light", preferably during the "golden hour" to make wonderful pictures. I have often wondered about this universal advice, is it strictly true? Is it just a case of "being there"? Is it really that simple, or is there more to it than that? The more I thought about it over time; I found that just being there is not enough to produce that really special photograph.
It all started with a question about my own work, one that I'm sure many of you have asked yourselves at one point or another. I started to wonder why some of my images really hit the spot, so to speak, while others with the same potential, usually made at the same time at the same location, missed the mark widely..............
To me, it seems after a lot of though that the images that failed did so because although I was at the right place at the right time, my mind and soul was subconsciously elsewhere, not "in" that specific moment. The more I considered this, the more I came to realise the need to concentrate more on the moment itself, to immerse myself more in the atmosphere of my immediate surroundings. I learned that I needed to tune into the landscape, feel it's very presence within my soul and drink in some of that very atmosphere that I'm trying to present within my photographs.
A recent example of this was a recent trip to Saltwick Bay. I had envisioned photographing the wreck of the Admiral Von Tromp trawler, at sunrise, with the sky ablaze above it. I arrived and everything was perfect, right time, right place, right weather, (although a few more clouds would have been nice - never truly happy are we?).
I got the pictures I felt that I wanted and returned home to eagerly view them on the big screen for editing. It was only then that I noticed that after the glitzy sunrise images of the wreck, the beautiful light, the compositional masterpieces (only joking), the one picture that stood head and shoulders above the rest was a simple composition consisting of The Black Nab outcrop, a couple of rocks and some reflected light, made after I'd got the main "shots" in the bag and had relaxed totally into the atmosphere of the location and just chilled out. I did not even remember taking it until it popped up on the screen. Of all the photographs made that day, this is the one that will be printed and hung on my wall.
This one revelation alone has no doubt improved my photography, it has led to me making time to relax when arriving at a location and really observing my surroundings, not just hunting down those preconceived ideas but going with the flow, not just looking with my eyes but also with my inner self, trying to absorb some of that atmosphere into the pictures I make.
All we have to do is to "listen" to our inner self, hear what our surroundings are telling us, open our minds as well as our eyes to the possibilities in front of us, not just those we may have constructed in our own head.
Do I still make glitzy sunrise images? Well yes, occasionally, but now when I leave home for a location I always make sure I also pack my soul in the bag along with my filters......
