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Graeme Green
Graeme Green is a photographer and journalist for international publications including the BBC, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, Wanderlust, USA Today, South China Morning Post and more. He has photographed landscapes, people and wildlife around the world, including Tanzania, Japan, Haiti and Antarctica.
Tim Parkin
Amateur Photographer who plays with big cameras and film when in between digital photographs.
Can you tell me a little about your education, childhood passions, early exposure to photography etc?
I used to draw a lot as a kid, but generally, I was interested in writing more than imagery. I wrote my first novel when I was nine or ten years old, though I doubt it’d be much of a read now.
My dad filmed weddings on weekends to make extra money, and there was gear around the house, including video and stills cameras. He also occasionally painted landscapes and a few of his paintings were on the walls, so maybe that was a start point.
I started experimenting with cameras in my teens and got more into photography when I moved to Glasgow. I walked around the city and headed out to places like Loch Lomond, using a basic Canon camera with black and white film.
The appeal of photography then was much the same as it is now: a chance to walk around, to explore, to be creative, and to spend time really looking at a place and soaking it up, from big scenes to small details. It’s good to get away from the mental white noise of modern life, to slow down and find things that interest you or give you a feeling of stillness and calm.
What are you most proud of in your photography?
It’s difficult for me to say. I think the qualities of your work are probably for other people to decide and point out. But what I try to do is have a sense of ‘life’ in my photos. With people or wildlife, that’s often about capturing authentic moments or a sense of character. With landscapes, it’s about giving a powerful sense of being in a place; light breaking through cracks in the clouds, the stillness of the water, the movement of wind, the crashing of waves. I like a sense of wildness in landscape photos.
A great landscape photo should have some kind of emotional power and get a response from the person looking at it, rather than just being a representation of a location.
Creativity’s important - the photos I’ve taken that I find most satisfying are ones where I feel the composition is original and personal. Some landscapes are simply beautiful and many people could produce a decent representation of that in a photo. But I really want to feel I created the photo, rather than just took a picture of a landscape.