We commonly see lichen growing on rocks, tree limbs, rotting stumps and on old wooden fences. Let’s not forget glass, metal, plastic, textiles, animal bones, rusty metal, concrete and living bark too. It should be noted that lichen grows on already old or stressed vegetation such as trees and plants, they do not actually originate the stress or a disease causing the trees etc. to die. Lichens have amazing photographic potential; they are fascinating ... and weird ... and beautiful … and rather complicated to study!

Despite their looks, lichens are neither plants nor fungi. They are unique, the result of a symbiotic relationship of organisms from up to three kingdoms, with the main partner being fungus. As Lichens of North America put it, "The lichen fungi (kingdom Fungi) cultivate partners that manufacture food by photosynthesis. Sometimes the partners are algae (kingdom Protista), other times cyanobacteria (kingdom Monera), formerly called blue-green algae. Some enterprising fungi exploit both at once."

In 2016, a new study published in Science revealed that in addition to compositing fungus and algae, at least some lichens include yeast. This yeast appears in the lichen cortex and itself contains two unrelated fungi. Lichens are definitely in a class unique to themselves, but this is not the forum to go into a lot of detail. By symbiotically bringing together two or more living organism types, more abundant life appears where normally one wouldn’t expect any. For example, I was amazed to see beautiful colourful lichens at 4000m in Colorado, where nothing else seems to grow. Despite dry summers with harsh UV-rich sunlight and bitterly cold winters with a thick layer of snow and ice, the lichens have colonised large areas of rock. Interestingly, they produce their own food through photosynthesis by their partner algae and don’t exhibit any parasitic behaviour such as feeding off the substrate on which they live. Nevertheless, lichens may absorb nutrients from their substrate and some release corrosive chemicals that slowly degrade rock into new soils.

Lichens are found everywhere from lush temperate forests to often frozen tundra, from the balmy and wet tropics to dry deserts where temperatures range from extreme heat to freezing cold.

Lichens grow only very slowly, sometimes only a few millimetres in a year. Slow growth often implies longevity and lichens are among the oldest living things on the planet. Rachel Sussman, author of "The Oldest Living Things," documents map lichens in Greenland that are estimated as being 3,000 to 5,000 years old.

Lichens have developed many different defences; as Lichens of North America write "an arsenal of more than 500 unique biochemical compounds that serve to control light exposure, repel herbivores, kill attacking microbes, and discourage competition from plants" and "Among these [biochemical compounds] are many pigments and antibiotics that have made lichens very useful to people in traditional societies." Not bad for something that is almost stationary and living in often very harsh conditions! Although lichen produces fungal spores, for lichen to reproduce the fungus and the alga must disperse together.

According to UC Berkeley however, "The most serious threat to the continued health of lichens is not predation, but the increased pollution of this century. Several studies have shown serious impacts on the growth and health of lichens resulting from factory and urban air pollution. Because some lichens are so sensitive, they are now being used to quickly and cheaply assess levels of air toxins in Europe and North America. Lichens are clearly a valuable element of the wider eco-system and many are under study for their medicinal properties. According to Ohio State University, "Research with lichens around the world is suggesting these organisms hold promise in the fight against certain cancers and viral infections, including HIV."

My interest in lichen really took off during my first visit to Iceland where I saw a fantastic variety of colours and shapes, primarily of so-called crusty but also jewel lichen. Since then, whenever I spotted lichen on a trip, I always took the opportunity to make an image, or a series of images, sometimes consciously looking for possible triptychs whenever possible.

For my close-up work I now mostly use an Olympus micro 4/3 camera with the Olympus 60mm macro lens. The fully articulated screen makes low-level close-up work far easier than lying prone trying to peer through a viewfinder or even using a right-angle attachment.

The following photos show how varied the lichen world is, yet also how the different species have similar traits across the world. The “cartographic” crusty lichens in particular exhibit quite astonishing colours and shapes. I’ve included a few photos showing the lichen in its wider habitat – after all, this magazine is about Landscape Photography!

Below I describe in a few lines about each mini-set of images I made in the different locations.

Colorado

I wasn’t looking for lichen and it didn’t occur to me that I might find some, which is a bit silly as there is plenty of substrate material for them to grow on. I suppose I was in autumn-foliage mode so when I did spot lichen on rocks this was quite a bonus. I’ve selected two very different images of crusty lichen: while photographing aspen in the Maroon Bells valley I noticed something red at the edge of a field. On closer inspection, this turned out to be maroon-red rock with mostly neutral grey-white lichen, but some ochre too. It took a while to find the right arrangement of shapes and colour, but at one point there was something reminiscent of inter-stellar clouds and I decided to make the image. The second photo is one at the top of Imogene Pass at 4000 metres above sea level. Here it was the riotous colour that attracted me and the almost chaotic abstract was an attraction in itself. The sun was shining brightly so I shaded the rock with my own shadow to soften the contrast; then in Lightroom, I slightly warmed the overall tone and further warmed specifically the bright yellow-greens to bring out their wonderful colour. This approach emphasised the colour separation, retaining a good level of blues and cyans in the shadow areas.

Dingle – Ireland

A week on the Dingle peninsula with a group of friends gave me several successful images, including lichen-covered rocks. The first image here is from Brandon Creek, a somewhat unprepossessing location at first glance, but hidden from sight at the seaward end there is a small tunnel-hole in the rock face with seawater coming through from the other side and brilliant lichens on the rocks above. The colour contrast and indeed the colours were too good to resist, so I didn’t! I tried 6 different exposures with 3-stop and 6-stop ND filters to capture movement in the sea, but as it rushed through at different speeds getting a satisfactory look proved to be a very challenging exercise.

The second image is a detail from a promontory above Clogher Beach. This area is covered with fractured rock, some sharply angled upwards and making walking across the area very difficult – a twisted ankle is a real risk. However, the photographic potential of the shapes and variety of lichen patterns is almost never-ending and with care and patience, the results made it worthwhile. I achieved several images there that I am sufficiently pleased with to print.

Faroe Islands

During a week in the Faroes with a group of photography friends, one day I had about 2 hours to explore the valley slopes at the foot of the highest mountain Slættaratindur (flat summit). After shooting a few landscapes in mono, I chanced upon some rocks with crusty lichen in glorious neon yellows and ochres, oranges and blues. Time stopped and I was totally lost in this miniature world. The shapes and patterns were rather random and I couldn’t arrive at a well-ordered composition, but the sheer colour was worth recording.

Greenland

As might be expected, the tundra and barren rocky landscapes are home to many types of lichen, some showing saturated colours spreading over large areas. Both photos I show here are from the Bear Islands in Scoresby Sound, the largest fjord system with some 300km of waterways around islands and inlets leading to glacier fronts on the mainland. The orange jewel lichen on a rock with what looks like quartz intrusion is right by the sea and must surely get submerged occasionally. The wider view is of the Rypefjord, a tributary to the main Scoresby Sound, showing how lichen has colonised quite a wide stretch of rocky outcrops.

Iceland

On an autumn trip, we visited Haifoss, one of Iceland’s iconic waterfalls not far from the famous Golden Triangle. After first photographing the waterfall and the valley it flows into, I still had over an hour left and decided to explore the rocks for details. Chancing on some crusty lichens, I couldn’t resist the veritable cocktail of shapes, textures and colours there, often reminiscent of aerial landscapes or cartography. Finding flat rock surfaces was quite difficult but worth the effort to try and achieve maximum depth of field.

A few days later we were in the north-east near the popular Myvatn area, where I spotted some delicate Reindeer Moss which despite its name is, in fact, a lichen. The pale pastel tendril-like form contrasts nicely with black rock and brightly coloured vegetation.

Lake District, Cumbria

With a few hours to while away before a workshop was due to start, I went walking along a path above the Little Langdale valley where I found beautiful lichen patterns on the dry stone walls. Again crusty lichen was predominant in a variety of blues, browns and bright greens. As usual, finding a series of coherent shapes was difficult and all too soon time ran out, nevertheless, I am quite pleased with what I got.

Norway, Kvaloya

The island of Kvaloya is close to Tromso, well above the Arctic Circle. Quite apart from the dramatically beautiful landscapes, there is a rich variety of flora and trees, while among the trees you can find strange mosses, fungi and of course lichens. The two photos here show some of the variety there, with crusty, foliate, and shrubby lichens and the misnamed reindeer moss, all nestling amongst grasses, real mosses and bunchberries in their brilliant red autumnal colour.

Svalbard

This orange jewel lichen was one of a larger colony on a small island in the Liefdefjorden. Situated on top of a low mound and exposed to wind, it really is astonishing that anything survived there at all. The shape reminded me of an atomic explosion, with the warm orange glow contrasting with the cold blue rock substrate.

Lack of opportunities to travel for landscape photography has caused me (as well as many others) to look closer to home for subjects to photograph.  I’ve been inspired by seeing the daily social media posts by Valerie Dalling of the cloudscapes from her window every morning since lockdown began in March.  I had the idea of capturing evening cloudscapes as being complementary to Valerie’s project, but unfortunately, I was never organised enough to do it systematically.  Nevertheless, I have been irregularly collecting cloud photos since late March. Those included here were, with the exception of the first photo, taken outside the front door of my home.

Living under the flight path of Luton airport means that my usual sky is a mass of aircraft contrails, both from Luton and from Heathrow.  The huge fall in air travel since late March seems to have brought out cloudscapes which I’d either never noticed before or were hidden by the crisscrossing contrails.  Perhaps both.

Why are clouds interesting as photographic subjects?  Their ephemeral nature, constantly changing and never repeating, an unending series of ‘decisive moments’ which are sometimes difficult to catch, forcing the use of manual focus by someone who usually lazily relies on autofocus.  Wistfulness, threat and other emotions seem to be expressed by different cloudscapes.

Something that was in my mind as I took these shots was their lack of scale, conferring an abstract nature.  In contrast, I looked back at a shot I had taken a few months ago where a sunset cloudscape was firmly anchored against the trees in the foreground (the first photo).– very ‘safe’ and its scale can be easily judged.

The more recent examples are a mixture taken with a long telephoto or a mid-range lens – but lack of inclusion of any terrestrial fixtures means it’s impossible to know whether they were close-ups.  Lacking a knowledge of photography history, I’m grateful to have been pointed by Tim Parkin to the work of Alfred Stieglitz, who published a series of cloudscapes he called ‘Equivalents’ in the 1920s and 1930s (read more here).

It seems that these were recognised as among the earliest intentionally abstract photographs, in that they (mostly) excluded any reference points that would give them scale.  He aimed that the viewer would take from them not so much that they are photos of clouds, but draw on the feelings that the cloud formations evoked.

The British Romantic artists also employed clouds to project sentiment.  Constable’s ‘Cloud Study’ of 1821 has a degree of overlap with some of the images I’ve presented here (says he, modestly!) although it’s probably the other way around.

p.s.  in the last few days air travel seems to be opening up again, and the skies over Herts are returning to the familiar pattern of crisscrossing contrails.

‘The Hill’ will not be found in any guidebooks or lists of ‘must-visit’ places. It will remain unknown, unvisited, even by most of the people who live nearby. It is of modest height – barely topping 1,000 feet – and from afar has no distinguishing features to separate it from other rounded forms in the West Pennine Moors. A housing estate encroaches upon its south-western slopes, a golf course to the south. It is usually a wet, soggy place of wind and rain. And yet, it is a remarkable unremarkable place that plays an important part in my photography, though not necessarily in terms of actual photographs.

‘The Hill’ is Cheetham Close, a hill that lies at the northern edge of Bolton,

the southern fringe of the West Pennine Moors, and within a 30 minute walk from my front door I can be at the summit trig point enjoying a view that ranges from the Clwydian Hills of North Wales, across the Cheshire Plain and Manchester towards the Peak District, over the nearby moors and on to the Bowland Fells and even Ingleborough & Whernside in the far distance. It is where I go if I need to stretch my legs, get some fresh air, go for a wander. It is where I go to remind myself of the natural world when everyday life has made me forget. It is where I go to think and explore ideas.

A stroll up the hill acts as a seasonal reminder of the constant, subtle changes in nature that can often pass unnoticed. As I write this in early March three lapwings have just returned to the horse field to begin their acrobatic courtships while higher up on the moor the skylarks are tuning up, ready to make a mockery of Vaughan Williams. The plaintive call of the curlew occasionally haunts one’s passing along the summit moor and very rarely I may be lucky enough to hear the bizarre sound of a snipe drumming.

The moor itself can frequently appear bleak, empty, unchanging until you observe the transition of the moorland grasses from the vibrant, urgent growth of spring, through the dull established green of summer followed by a few weeks of intense orange before settling into the pale straw of the long winter. And then there is the glory of cotton grass. For a few weeks in May and June the bobbing white heads of swathes of cotton grass are a sheer delight. Every year I await the display with anxious anticipation, wondering if there will be much of a show or even wondering where the best displays will pop up as the cotton grass appears to travel along the moor.

Wandering through the rough pasture below the hill one can observe the growth of the trees planted 15 years ago – the birch, hazel and hawthorn growing slowly, slowly; the empty green tree guards marking where the struggle was too much. The sudden burst of hawthorn blossom will remind me to explore the fells of south Cumbria and the Dales while the succession of wildflowers – lady’s smock, bilberry, bluebells, tormentil, batchelor’s buttons, and spearwort – hint at the potential displays elsewhere. In July I wait in anticipation of the foxglove stand that grows near the bench – some years extraordinary, others a sad disappointment. Of an evening you can startle a deer, spot a fox skulking through the long grass or, most magical of all, follow the silent quartering of the pasture by the elusive barn owl. The only constant on my walk is that there will be something different, something to observe, some reason to say, ‘Hey, look at that!’

The Hill played an important role in the development of my photography. My first ever magazine competition win was with a photo of an old wooden gate on the shoulder of the hill under snow on a gorgeous winter evening; my first cover photo for Lancashire Life was a view towards Winter Hill from the summit and my first Viewpoints article for Outdoor Photography was of Cheetham Close. Ideas for photo projects or articles (including this one, of course) are often born while enjoying the freedom of thought on the walk.

These days I rarely take my full kit out on the hill but my Sony compact sometimes accompanies me and I enjoy the spontaneous freedom it provides. Ultimately, though, the influence of the hill is the exposure on the walk to the constant changes in nature that help to reignite my curiosity and rekindle my desire to explore, even if that may be elsewhere.

Postscript

And then there was lockdown.

No more jaunts to the Dales or Silverdale. I am restricted to ‘The Hill’. How lucky I am!

I composed the article in early March and now a lot more people are familiar with ‘The Hill’. Initially, I was very proprietorial, objecting to all these ‘Johnny-come-latelys’ spoiling my sense of exclusivity but now I realise that it has become an important part in the daily lives of many people in the area along with the reservoirs and strips of woodland currently bursting into life. So many more people are now enjoying the beauty on their doorstep and I’m sure this is being repeated all over the country – small pockets of nature providing essential contact with the natural world. Remarkable unremarkable places.

This can only be a good thing. People are becoming more connected to the natural world and feeling the benefits of a simple walk in the countryside. Furthermore, the regularity of that contact means that they are observing the variety and daily changes of spring that they would most likely miss in more busy times. One can but hope that there will remain a sense of the importance of nature and a desire to look after it a little better when things get back to normal.

In the meantime, I myself am exploring paths I’ve not walked for over 15 years (or at all in some cases) and reacquainting myself with some of the natural delights of the West Pennine Moors, compact camera in my pocket and enjoying the freedom of taking a few snaps on the way.

The star of this story is a rock – schist – a hard, sometimes beautiful, rock that has greatly influenced the lives of the people who live on it and who exploit it to create fascinating buildings.

It has always been my belief that the landscape is not just something beautiful and fascinating to look at; it is also a major shaper of human activity at multiple levels, and is in its turn moulded by the decisions and actions of people. In fact, the landscape we see today in much of the world, certainly in most of Europe, is the outcome of the interwoven stories of nature and the human exploitation of the environment. In this sense, our appreciation of a landscape is enhanced by some awareness of how it got to look this way. Landscape photography and environmental awareness are natural companions.

This article and the accompanying portfolio try to examine some of these connections for just one place – a small village, a hamlet we’d call it in Britain, in Central Portugal called Cerdeira that was completely abandoned before restoration efforts began about 30 years ago.

Visitors to the village today find beautiful renovated stone houses (used as tourist accommodation) and other restored buildings (including a thriving centre for the arts, especially ceramics). Cheek-by-jowl with the restored buildings is the remains of houses in all stages of disintegration and reconstruction. It is a striking juxtaposition, allowing visitors to gaze out from a stylish and comfortable house onto ruins that would delight the heart of the 18th-century creators of follies in English country estates. On Landscape is not the place for an extended dissertation on geology or social history, but understanding how the village comes to look like this provides a context that throws light on how people interact with the landscape. But first, a few words about the images themselves.

The images

The photographs here can be thought of as my tribute to the schist. The character of the rock defines the region and I made three brief visits (2 to 5 days each) in 2018 – January, May and December. I had chance to see the buildings and ruins of Cerdeira in many moods, from the almost absurdly golden light just before a winter sunset to a summer thunderstorm. What kept attracting me was the rock itself. There is an irregular, almost mosaic, character to the walls of the buildings. The highly diverse beauty of the stonework contrasts with the more regular geometry of the tile roofs, though even up there, slabs of schist are left on top of the tiles, as the traditional methods of roofing are flimsy and the blocks provide extra stability.

I would describe the resulting images as highly detailed semi-abstracts. Like millions before me, I feel that the essence of each photograph goes back to Ansel Adams’s concept of “visualisation”. As he put it, this involves seeing a photograph “in your mind’s eye”, knowing the finished image you wish to create, and then taking the steps needed to make the photograph that corresponds to this internal image. In an interview late in his life, he was very clear: “The picture has to be there, clearly and decisively.”

The “external” experience of seeing a landscape is accompanied by an “internal event”, and what is recorded is both what I saw and how I felt. Among modern authors, I have been greatly influenced in my thinking about photography by the writing and images of Guy Tal. His interpretation of “expressive photography” feels exactly right to me. I am not trying to portray a scene but rather to record the impact the scene had on me. Like any landscape photographer, I aspire to capture something of the genius loci, the spirit of a place, but there is no universal reality - we each recall a scene in subtly different ways. So these are images of what I remember - photographs of memories.

In practical terms, I also follow Guy Tal’s advice, as expressed in his book The Landscape Photographer’s Guide to Photoshop, i.e. I do not try to create the image that corresponds to my visualisation in the field, but rather I take a photograph that will enable me to reproduce that inner vision once I work on it on my laptop. I use Photoshop, but in fact, I find that my visualisations can be found using just a few of its features. Most of the editing goes no further than the tools available in Camera Raw, along with selected dodging and burning. Of course, processing was also a feature of Adams’s methods, so the approach goes back almost a century, even if today we use software when Adams relied on chemicals and length of exposure. The key element for me in the field is the composition; that is the essence of my visualisation. I should also note that these photographs, like all I make, are handheld. I have never been able to work comfortably with a tripod. In the past, this meant accepting that much of landscape photography was beyond my grasp. However, with modern sensors and stabilized lenses, the extra stability of a tripod is no longer needed for a much wider range of images.

The idea that an artist is someone who looks at the same world but sees it differently is a cliché of such long-standing that I have never been able to identify an initial author, and there is at least tentative evidence from cognitive science to support the contention.

I am not sure I can claim to be an artist, but a couple of anecdotes from Cerdeira stay in my mind. I showed some of my images to one of the team who run the village. Looking at the first photograph of this portfolio, she said, “I know where that is: I walk past there 20 or 30 times a day. But I never looked at it like that.” The next day one of her colleagues asked me where I had taken the image of the crumbling wall, and was surprised to learn that I made the photograph standing just outside the café in which we were chatting. It is perhaps revealing of the transitional nature of the village that both those scenes were no longer visible a few months later as the slow process of rebuilding and upgrading goes on.

The rock and its impact

In traditional, pre-industrial societies locally available resources are critical; the nature of the bedrock determines what building material is available. Schist is hard, created when softer sedimentary rocks were squeezed and baked, deep in the earth hundreds of millions of years ago when continents collided. Hard and impermeable, schist splits easily along the grain of the rock, but it cannot readily be cut into regular blocks. So, buildings traditionally were assembled from irregular-shaped pieces. With the ingredients needed for mortar hard to come by locally, the walls were largely made of solid uncemented stone, pieced together like a three-dimensional jigsaw or mosaic and mortar limited to filling in holes. Schist also varies greatly in colour, both from quarry to quarry and over time as it weathers. Freshly cut, it is often blue or purple, but can also be yellow or orange, and it weathers to a great variety of shades and textures. In the humid climate of Portugal, the stone also acquires a patina of lichens, further enriching the palette of colours. The result, to my eyes, is one of the most diverse and beautiful building materials to be found anywhere, and the specialist builders who now reconstruct the old houses have an eye for this beauty that leads me to think of them as artists rather than artisans. But the rock has an impact that goes far beyond house-building.

Obdurate schist resists erosion and makes hills and mountains with poor soil and steep slopes. In Portugal people have lived in these regions for thousands of years – they were already long-established when the Romans arrived over 2,000 years ago. But these hills have always been tough, marginal places to live in compared with the more fertile lowlands. When opportunity arose to move to towns and cities, or even abroad, people did so, especially after World War Two. Gradually the schist hills began to empty and by the 1970s Cerdeira was a ghost village, its houses abandoned and crumbling, its farm terraces, created with so much effort on the rugged slopes, returning to nature. Rural depopulation of this kind is a widespread phenomenon; across whole swathes of Southern and Eastern Europe farms, villages, even small towns are emptying.

Visiting these abandoned villages, or ones where a handful of residents still linger, is a poignant experience. These are places where people have struggled to make a living for hundreds, even thousands, of years, often in unforgiving conditions. Now they are neglected and decaying. Centuries of effort left to fall into ruins - especially saddening in places where the traditional buildings are often so beautiful. Walking through Cerdeira on the single, carefully graded, schist footpath that connects the rebuilt houses reveals scene after scene that speaks of decay. A doorway that once was the way into someone’s home, now just leads to a tangle of brambles and weeds. A wall, with a niche in the stonework that once might have held an oil lamp or a candle, is falling apart on an almost daily basis. A door ajar, facing one of the reconstructed houses, only opens to reveal heaps of rubble and a roofless, collapsing interior. In many deserted villages it feels impossible to imagine anything other than gradual decay and disappearance. But the schist has one final, and optimistic, role to play.

After so long making life difficult, in the era of ecotourism and sustainable development, the rock has given the communities that live on it a new identity – the Schist Villages. Some two dozen communities have come together to work collectively to establish themselves as a destination for “green tourism” with an emphasis on traditional design, access to nature, and high-quality local produce. In Cerdeira, after decades totally abandoned, it is not fanciful to speak of resurrection. Guided by the creative instincts of ceramicist Kerstin Thomas, the village has become a lively focus for the arts as well as a tourist centre. The photographs here try to give some hint of this transformation.

Autumn. An explosion of colour and a season that many wait patiently for, so that they can try to capture it in all its splendour. For the last few years, I have done the same, but my vision and desires have changed a lot recently. I am drawn more and more towards working in black and white, driven in part by using film and printing in the darkroom, but also through enjoying the challenge of being a landscape photographer, who surrounded by colour, choose to piece together the landscape photography puzzle through a limited pallet of tones.

Autumn seemed as good a time as any to try and see whether I could capture the essence of Autumn in the Woodland without the presence of colour. Working almost exclusively in two areas that I have easy access to, I shot consistently over the months of October and November with the aspiration of creating a final gallery of images that captured Autumn in Monochrome.

The project became a good lesson and exercise in using limitations and constraints to produce a final series of images that felt cohesive, and with a unity of vision.

The series was predominantly shot at two locations; Rushmere country park and Aldenham woods, which are near to home and work respectively. Rushmere country park is my home from home, and somewhere I could happily walk around every day, and still feel like there are new images to be made. Aldenham Woods provided me with a place to go on the rare occasions I had time to shoot before work. Shooting locally not only allowed me to get out regularly, and be flexible depending on what the weather was doing, but I could also revisit compositions with ease if I needed to. I did manage a trip to Bolehill Quarry in the Peak District, which allowed me to add a few images that contained a different type of geography, but that was still within the brief of the project.

Black and white work has been a staple part of my photography ever since I picked it up five years ago, and I wanted to complete a project that was solely black and white. I’ve been using medium format film cameras and using Ilford black and white films, for a few years now, but I decided to shoot this project in digital. Predominantly, this came down to wanting to work quite quickly and I hadn’t yet decided on subject matter and style of shooting. Therefore, I decided to shoot the series on a Digital Monochromatic camera, which ended up being the Leica M Monochrome. Using a monochromatic camera helped create a limitation by forcing me to consider my compositions differently to how I would if shooting in colour. The camera doesn’t capture any colour data at all, only luminance values. You can also use colour filters (yellow, orange etc..) to boost the contrast. I have become very familiar with using filters in this way since starting to shoot black and white film again a few years ago.

I only used 3 lenses throughout the project – a Voigtlander 35mm 1.4, Voigtlander 50mm 1.2 and a Zeiss 100mm F2 Makro. The Zeiss was connected via an adaptor and the majority of the close-up images were taken with this superb lens. I like using fast lenses, shooting with a shallow depth of field where possible, and all 3 lenses were ideal for this project.

Where possible, shooting in conditions that were slightly flat in light, was preferred. This gave me more flexibility in post processing because I wasn’t dealing with high contrast files.

I eventually settled on an aesthetic for the final images, which was a result of both post processing and choices made in the field. A yellow filter was used the majority of the time, because of the effect it would have on helping pick out the bright yellows of the changing leaves, as well as give the overall image a boost in contrast.

Every session spent on the project was approached with an open mind, starting off with just walking and seeing what the weather was doing, and trying to feel what compositions I was being drawn to. Inevitably there were a number of shots that focussed on the wider landscape, but I also wanted to capture a broad range of images. This resulted in a number of close up and detailed shots, as well as using triptychs, being included in the final project.

There were a few compositions which I’ve shot in the past that I ended up re-visiting. This did result in one of my favourite images of the project, of the one brightly coloured tree on the other side of the lake, illuminated against the dark of the pine trees behind.

The woodland and forest floor offer a whole world of opportunities for those wishing to explore it. Working with a Macro lens, I would often be found pointing my camera at the ground, trying to capture the details of the leaves which had already fallen, or the textures of the pine needles and lichen.

On a particularly flat morning when I just couldn’t seem to make sense of the wider landscape, I was drawn towards the bark of a tree. Exploring the different patterns and possible compositions consumed me for the next hour or so. My favourite of these was of some bark that resembled a tribal tattoo on top of the stripped wood.

Triptychs run throughout the final set of images and it’s a technique I find myself using frequently, in particular when dealing with smaller details or slightly abstract viewpoints. The triptych allows me to examine a subject from different viewpoints or to show separate, but related elements that complement each other. Displaying images in such a way also asks the viewer to consider the relationship between each ‘panel’.

From the outset of the project, I applied limitations and constraints on myself; Shooting in Black and White, limited lens choice, two locations etc... Many of the limitations were applied right from the beginning, but some were also set when I started to select the images that would make up the final gallery. Over the course of a couple of months, I built up a catalogue of c.200 images that I thought had potential and I printed all individually on 6x4 paper. Seeing all the images laid out really helped with the shot selection process, and I found it much easier working with mini-prints away from the computer screen. Relationships between images and themes started to emerge as I moved the prints around on the desk. I would often think of a theme and work through the images to see if it ‘worked’. More often than not it didn’t, but a new idea would form by completing this process a number of times.

The final limitation presented itself during this stage of image review, when I decided that the images would only be of the woodland interior. Any images that included the sky were excluded, with the only sky that’s visible being in the reflections of puddles or bodies of water.

Working in a project mindset, complete with self-imposed constraints, really helped me focus in a way which I’d been lacking over recent months, and I am now on the lookout for what my next project will be. I have a sneaking suspicion it may be in black and white...

We all get excited when an opportunity arises for a trip to somewhere special for photography. The chance to photograph something new and fresh excites the mind. Let’s face it however unless you are able to afford the costs and time for these trips, they are not a regular opportunity. Most often we settle for what is within a short distance of our home. How do you stay “fresh” and enthusiastic, at the same time making imagery that is of a high personal standard that others will appreciate and find meaningful as well?

Most of us have a specific location that we choose to visit and photograph over and over. For some that location may be a destination such as a national park or a city. Others like myself may be fortunate enough to have such a location near to us. Having local access to a location allows us to photograph in a variety of seasons, light and weather conditions. But how do you take advantage of this, getting more than the standard “iconic” shots and personalising your portfolio of work? This is what I call “Capturing The Essence” of a location, taking images that represent the feeling of the place through detail and action shots.

I am fortunate to live within ten minutes of Niagara Falls, in western New York State. This is truly one of the natural wonders of the world. It is also one of the most visited and photographed natural parks, being located on the border between the United States and Canada, an hour and a half from Toronto, Canada and a half hour from Buffalo, NY. This makes it a year round tourist attraction and sometimes difficult to photograph without jostling with tourists. With all of my gear, I am frequently stopped and asked to take family photos with various phones and cameras, making it a wonder I get any photography of my own accomplished. Niagara Falls changes with the seasons as well as a time of day and weather conditions.

When I mention Niagara Falls I am sure that a picture instantly springs to mind. We have all seen the standard iconic images of Niagara Falls a thousand times. If not, just Google the park and you will see a screen full of nearly identical images. I have a number of these in my portfolio as well because they sell, but I strive as well to capture images of the park that are original and representative of how the park makes me feel in the moment. If these shots are meaningful to me then they hopefully will have a similar effect of others. When you have the luck of being able to see a location in many different conditions you begin to see things like autumn leaves on the ground in Zion, rock formations, animals, etc. that are specific to that location and have just as much emotional value as the iconic shots. Grand sweeping vistas are wonderful but sometimes the more intimate images convey as much emotion as the wide angle shots. Having a body of work that is singular and representative of your vision will set you apart from others, demonstrating your compositional and story-telling skills.

Niagara Falls is so much more than a huge waterfall. The Niagara River is a very large river connecting two of the Great Lakes. The upper river is wide and flat as it flows from Lake Erie, and the lower river is narrow, powerfully rapid, and passes through a gorge before emptying into Lake Ontario. The water at the Falls is a beautiful blue-green, due to minerals picked up off the rocks below. There are wondrous rapids that dance with the power of so much water moving through the narrow lead up to the falls. Below the majestic waterfalls, begins an entirely different world. The deep and narrow nature of the river below the falls makes for rapids and whirlpools that race through the first half of the deep Niagara gorge, before slowing as the river once again widens.

In the spring and summer, everything is surrounded by lush green plant life and the sun glints off of the moving waters. Autumn brings variable skies and changing colours as the oaks and maples lose their leaves for the coming winter. Niagara Falls in the winter is like a crystal fairyland as snow and ice coat everything around falls. The rising mist from the waterfalls coats everything, both natural and man made. The longer the freezing cold lasts, the thicker the ice builds up. Additionally, because the river doesn’t freeze, we are blessed with migrating ducks, geese, Tundra Swans and a variety of gulls that winter here. This makes the area a hot spot for birders, year round.

With such a variety of changing conditions, I never lack compositional opportunities. Additionally, seeing a spot that might offer possibilities under different conditions is easily noted for future visits. Travelling to other national parks around the country means accepting the conditions found during that window of travel. Lady luck combined with advance prep work will get you great images, but you get what you get.

I try to make at least two trips during the year to other areas so I know how it is to come away with just average images. I am both a landscape and wildlife photographer, so my chances of finding interesting subjects are better. I always take notes and iPhone images to keep track of interesting spots for future trips. In the end, though, nothing beats having the source in your “backyard”. Keep an open mind and finding fresh images that keep you from losing sight of the changing beauty and impact of your local spot will always be there for you.