With its remote glens, unforgiving rocky peaks and legends of beings who live in the wild and empty corries that lead deep into the heart of the Cuillin mountains, the Isle of Skye has been a refuge from the world this past year. As the people have retreated so the mountains have seemed to grow, not only in size and presence but also in silence. A silence that opens the mind to the landscape and a world beyond the reach of chaos.
A world where the imagination rules. Where the gabbro boulder in the darkening corrie is a sleeping witch, waiting to wake and travel the starry skies, greeting the uraisg on her journey to the coven on Raasay. The corrie where eyes blink and the soft sounds of luinneagan drift down from the heights.
These photographs portray found moments of hope and inspiration among bursts of unexpected light which broke the clouds and cascaded over the empty landscapes on the Isle of Skye. Unplanned, no time for tripod, filters or technique, just pure delight in passing moments that, like a meditation bell, ring in the soul for a long time after.
Well… clearly no camera is ever perfect but the compromises that had to be made in choices in features that suit the requirements of the dedicated landscape photographer seem to have reduced significantly with the introduction of the Fujifilm GFX 100S.
For my own journey after Large Format 5x4 film I predominantly used Nikon DSLR cameras with diversions to explore the benefits of mirrorless with the original Sony A7R I and II and medium format with the Pentax 645Z. Each of these were exciting cameras in their own right and capable of fantastic output but all had issues that ultimately had not been solved as well as the Nikon D850. Nikon’s mirrorless introduction with the Z7 was the best mirrorless I had used and coupled with the 24-70mm was more capable than the D850 equivalent and so very packable too.
Roll forward to December 2019 and several friends had picked up either the Fujifilm 50S or 50R and after some exhaustive side by side tests, I concluded that the Fuji medium format system would better suit my needs. Firstly, coming from 5x4 I nearly always crop to this format and take a lot of portrait oriented landscapes, the 3:2 format is so poor for this and the 4:3 format of the Fuji is a much better starting place. Secondly, the Fuji 50 files are so crisp giving apparent high levels of detail and sharpness principally due to the microlens design on the sensor, they print beautifully especially on matt papers. Fuji glass is universally excellent typically resolving well corner to corner. It was a tough decision moving away from Nikon which I have been using for 40 years but the Z system was just going to be too slow to fill out. In use, I have found the 50R to be excellent but it is not perfect.
Nidderdale, 1/320th sec at F5.6, GF100-200mm at 200mm
I enjoyed quite a long spell with the Pentax 645Z which produced beautiful files but was a large and unnecessarily bulky option. The 50MP chip was very good at shadow detail but struggled with bright highlights especially in yellow and green (e.g. backlit Spring leaves or Autumn colour) where even underexposing and careful processing left little room to manipulate the files before breaking down. Shadow contrast and integrity is also a big difference. This has not been a problem with files from the Nikon or Sony in my experience. This difficulty is inherited to some extent by the 50S/R and is perhaps unsurprising for a relatively old design, it is not Back Side Illuminated and does not have gapless microlenses which bring benefits seen in cameras from the other manufacturers and what I was used to seeing from the Nikons.
Prior to the introduction of the 100S you had the option of excellent 50R/S which met the format and size criteria but needing careful management of certain highlights and artefacts from the sensor design OR modern sensors in right sized bodies but without the size and format advantage of the Fuji. The Fujifilm 100 had addressed many of these things but was not on the radar for most Landscape photographers because of its size (and cost). Many of us have been waiting for the 100S with eager anticipation as a marriage of modern FF sensor technology and physical camera size with the Fuji ‘sauce’ and delicious MF sensor.
March 2021….
I was fortunate and very grateful to get one of the first batches of 100S cameras from Alister at FFordes and have had enough time to form my own initial views of whether it indeed meets the headline.
I was fortunate and very grateful to get one of the first batches of 100S cameras from Alister at FFordes and have had enough time to form my own initial views of whether it indeed meets the headline.
Before I give my thoughts it is important to give the context that my usage of the technology available in the camera is very limited. I only shoot in ‘manual’, typically at base ISO but do use AF (single point AF-S) both for landscape work and personal family projects. I have one ‘Custom’ mode set up to Auto ISO in Manual for handheld work. I toggle OIS on/off as required. I have separated AF On from Shutter release so they can be operated independently (Back Button Focus). This is a very small subset of the capabilities of the camera (or any modern camera in fact!) so my observations reflect that. I implement this identical simple set-up for all the cameras I use. The pictures used are what I have been able to take locally perhaps rather than what I would hang on my wall.
Nidderdale. GFX 100S, 45mm 1/320th at F5.0
Size and handling
No surprises by now but this is a small camera and handles like one so is absolutely in the right space to pack easily. I have moved back to the same sized bags and ICU as I was using with the D850/Z series cameras. Buttons are intuitive to set up and use if you have handled any previous Fuji and not so alien if coming from Nikon so as to be an impediment. All in all, there are no size or handling compromises with the body over the 35mm choices available. Perhaps an alternative to the large 45-100mm would make sense if pack weight and size was an issue or at least a tripod collar.
The 100S comes with a boost mode which improves the quality at the expense of refresh rate. It is good for static subjects but I have noticed that it is subject to lag and the jitters taking pictures of lively subjects (like our new puppy).
The EVF has been a big area of discussion because it has not been upgraded from the original cameras and has a lower resolution than competitive Full Frame cameras. The Nikon Z EVF was a joy to use, the 50S/R felt a little dated by comparison but perfectly usable. The 100S comes with a boost mode which improves the quality at the expense of refresh rate. It is good for static subjects but I have noticed that it is subject to lag and the jitters taking pictures of lively subjects (like our new puppy). It also shimmers on specular highlights from water making composition difficult. Shimmering was equally troublesome with both boost on and off. I need to do more work with this to find the best options.
From the usage of AF that I have had, it is accurate and excellent and operates beyond the level that I can see in the dark to focus manually. Face and Eye detect do work well when I use the camera for family snaps (although it does not detect dogs!). I was pleased to see a dedicated ‘AF On’ button better sized and labelled on the 100S compared to the 50R as it is easier to find.
‘Peggy Sue’, 1/50th sec at F8.0. GF45-100mm at 100mm
Image Quality
One line summary is that the files, as expected, are richly detailed (amazingly so) and give very good colour and contrast in post processing. They are malleable taking quite big changes in contrast, exposure and colour well. They feel and behave like scaled up Nikon/Sony files rather than upgraded 50R/S files which is largely a good thing.
Comparing the post processing requirements – or ease of manipulation and how far you can push the manipulations whilst keeping a natural and realistic output is not something that is often discussed but this is really important. Most talk is about Dynamic Range and how much you can pull out of a single image but there is more to the IQ of a file than that. One of the areas that the modern sensors have really improved is in the quality of the shadow detail when you lift these areas in the file. The Nikon D850 and Z7 are very good at this, maintaining good contrast and colour fidelity in the detail in the shadows even with quite a big adjustment. The Pentax 645Z was poor and the Fuji 50s better but still not as good as the Nikon. The good news is that the 100S sensor behaves as you would hope and expect and now the shadows/blacks behave very well giving great scope for lifting to balance high contrast scenes. Noise appears linearly as you lift and the colour does not degrade. This was one of the difficult compromises in using a 50R/S compared to the Nikon D850/Z7. Attached are 2 pairs of test files where I was pushing the highlight/shadow processing from a single unfiltered file.
Heyshaw Moor, RAW 1/400th F10, 100-200mm Processed to taste and crop to 5x4
Highlights are similarly well controlled once you have worked out how to get the best exposure with a combination of Natural View, histogram and ‘blinkies’ at the taking stage vs histogram and ‘blinkies’ with the JPG settings applied at the review stage. For tripod work, I am experimenting with spot metering off a highlight and adding an adjustment because you can separate the meter and focus functions easily with the Fujis. The highlight colour is better controlled in files from the 100S especially in the yellows and oranges (e.g. of dawn) where it appears does not block up so quickly. No Spring greens yet so I have not been able to test the response to luminous lime greens that the old sensor sometimes struggled with. Pretty happy so far and a better base to work with than the 50R/S and on par with the Nikons.
Highlights are similarly well controlled once you have worked out how to get the best exposure with a combination of Natural View, histogram and ‘blinkies’ at the taking stage vs histogram and ‘blinkies’ with the JPG settings applied at the review stage.
Back Garden Sunset, GFX 100S, 1/100th at F5.6 GF 45mm F2.8 RAW and Processed to taste
One area that I have noticed a very big difference between the 50R/S and the 100S is in the perceived sharpness levels of the RAW files. Initially, I was disappointed with the file quality in this area as I had ported across my Lightroom settings from the 50R to the 100s. After some discussion and file sharing with knowledgeable friends it has become clear that the approach to sharpening has to be quite different with the 100S with very different values and also some tweaking of the clarity. No problems but just different and actually much more like the FF equivalents and perhaps unsurprisingly the Sony A7R iv (compared via one of The Knowledgeable friends!).
GFX 100S. Milvus 135mm 1/80th sec at F11, ISO 800 (handheld)
I have not got to grips with White Balance on the 100S, this is an area of difference that I had not expected between the 50R/S and the 100S. Fuji’s Auto White Balance (AWB) has always been very reliable although giving daylight values cooler than the standards. The 100S in AWB is much closer to 5500k for daylight scenes but the files seem too warm. I have to do more work in this area to get consistency across the 50R and the 100S and to get what I want colour wise as a starting point. Typically I had got used to WB being consistent across products in a range – certainly was with Nikon.
In Conclusion
After 3 weeks of usage and hundreds of files I am very happy so far, the 100S is a better base to work with than the 50R/S and technically on par with the Nikons if you set aside the different format (and anecdotally the Sony A7Riv). The camera handles and feels like it has some DNA from the FF world and seems to have more in common with the Z7 I owned than the 50R/S in buttons and dials.
GFX 100S, 1/50th at F14, ISO 400 GF 45mm
I have no regrets in parting with my Nikons (although there is that Z9….) and am confident that the Fujifilm ecosystem of tools and professional support will enhance my output for the foreseeable future. I have kept the 50R as a back-up camera and for specific use on an Arca Swiss Universalis where the lack of grip is important. In all other respects the 100S is great news, a smaller packable camera backed up with a good well fleshed out lens system and with a modern and malleable sensor. I hate to say it but this camera does appear to tick all the boxes to be my ‘Perfect Landscape Camera’.
I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, ‘This is real, too.’ ~Wynn Bullock
Of the many uses for photography, art is to me the most interesting and rewarding—both to view and to create. Considering works of art in terms of aesthetics alone, or expression alone, I admittedly can think of many more paintings and musical scores I would rank higher than even my favourite photographs. I am enamoured with artistic photographs—photographs expressing concepts beyond just representing (literally re-presenting) appearances—not because they are more beautiful or more expressive than works in other media, but because they are more challenging to make. The reason is that, unlike artists working in other media, photographic artists must first reconcile the paradoxical—in some ways antithetical—relationship between photography and art.
Photographs are assumed by many to be literal representations, whereas art often conveys meaning by way of symbols, metaphors, and abstractions that require transcending or even repudiating realistic appearances.
Photography is a medium designed to replicate objective, realistic, appearances, while art—at least of the last couple of centuries—is concerned with giving subjective expression to human creativity and imagination. Photographs are assumed by many to be literal representations, whereas art often conveys meaning by way of symbols, metaphors, and abstractions that require transcending or even repudiating realistic appearances. Photographers often are preoccupied with “rules,” while the nature of artistic temperament is to defy, to resist, and to oppose rules. For many photographers, the “how”—allegiance to the mechanics of making photographs—is of primary importance, sometimes to the detriment of the “what”—the concept and intent underlying the work, whereas for most artists in other media processes and materials generally are just means to expressive ends, their usefulness and importance being their plasticity and malleability: how well they lend themselves to manipulation rather than impose restrictions.
As a result of these contentions, photographic artists must always strike some balance among competing allegiances—to the medium, to creative expression, to common expectations and prejudices, to artistic freedom, to objective representation, to subjective intent.
It was probably over a decade ago, more like 15 years I imagine when I first saw Dan's photographs. I think it may have been on Fred Miranda or possibly via a blog circle. Dan's blog has been regularly kept up to date with photographs and writing since 2006 and he has always produced solid landscape photography that I have always had time for. So it's a little late to ask him to appear in On Landscape but hopefully he'll forgive me!
Can you tell me a little about your education, childhood passions, early exposure to photography etc.?
My photography interest began very early. My father was a talented amateur photographer. He introduced all four of his kids to photography early on, and I recall first visiting his home darkroom when I was a preteen. He started us with basic box cameras, and eventually let us borrow his older cameras. (No doubt a fine excuse to buy himself a new one!) I don’t remember the exact date, but I’m pretty certain that I had made prints before I started middle school.
He also had a collection of books featuring beautiful photography, and spending time with those books shaped my interest in landscape photography. He even took me to a local lecture by some guy named Ansel.
Like a surprising number of photographers, I have a serious background in music. When I entered college I followed that academic fork, and I earned degrees in music theory and composition, specialising in the then-new field of electronic music, the focus of my college teaching career.
Aspen Grove, Bishop Canyon Twisted and leaning aspen trunks in a large grove in the Bishop Creek drainage, Sierra Nevada, California.
What are you most proud of in your photography?
That is a tough question! I think it may be that people find in my work a particular “way of seeing” that they identify with me. To be honest, it is hard to understand what that particular vision is comprised of, and it is through their eyes and discussions with them that I began to recognise it and understand it.
For the ninth iteration of this column, I decided to focus on the artwork of a photographer who has long inspired me, not only because her photographs are powerful, evocative, and unique, but because she is one heck of an amazing person and a fabulous steward of the natural places we all cherish. In fact, Jennifer is a co-founder of the Nature First Photography Alliance along with me and eight other photographers from Colorado. Her passion and commitment to nature are quite evident as seen in her actions and the way she creates her photographs. Jennifer’s photographic style and creative processes are quite fascinating to examine, and I am hopeful that this article does her work justice. To begin, let me say that I think Jennifer’s photography unfairly flies under the radar of what is often considered to be popular or mainstream and I am hopeful that this column provides her work the opportunity it deserves to be seen and appreciated.
Jennifer’s approach to photography is heavily influenced by her interesting educational and vocational upbringing and experiences, having a degree in geology and a background in veterinary medicine. As you can imagine, both sciences rely on the power of observing, as rocks cannot tell you how they were created, and animals cannot tell you what is wrong.
Jennifer’s approach to photography is heavily influenced by her interesting educational and vocational upbringing and experiences, having a degree in geology and a background in veterinary medicine. As you can imagine, both sciences rely on the power of observing, as rocks cannot tell you how they were created, and animals cannot tell you what is wrong.
Her honing of these scientific skills has benefitted her artistic side greatly and it seems apparent to me that it has aided her photographs in a profound way. She relies on and leverages the power of observation of the landscape, and it has positively shaped and informed her creative process and image-making. Jennifer has masterfully combined her curiosity and observation of nature with an approach formalised as the slow photography movement to explore and connect with the landscapes and subjects around her. This combination shines through in Jennifer’s photography, as it transports viewers to magical moments and smaller scenes within nature that could only be experienced by the trained and patient eye of someone with Jennifer’s unique background and approach.
The debate about pre-visualising images when going out on a shoot seems to be never-ending and we can probably accept that there are advantages to both sides: pre-visualisation can help to achieve images that the photographer wants, but having an open mind does leave us receptive to “suggestion”; let the subjects come to us as we wander without pre-conceived ideas.
When visiting a new location, some photographers like to conduct internet searches of what others have already done there. The choices then are (i) to emulate an appealing image made by someone else, either shooting the same scene or getting the same “look” albeit of another subject; this implies having similar if not identical light and going through similar steps in post-processing; (ii) deliberately eschewing what others have done and looking for something different, but still with an idea already in mind. Most probably that would have been stimulated by the earlier research.
Taking a different approach, we could just go there and react to what we find. This latter approach could end up frustrating as we scout for subjects and possibly struggle to make something meaningful in a limited timeframe. On the other hand, not having a specific image in mind does free us to serendipitously explore subjects we might otherwise have passed by. Additionally, the more experienced we are, the more likely it is that we can transfer much of the learning we’ve gained to the new location and make a satisfactory image. And with that experience, we are more likely to be more confident, relaxed and thus more receptive to inspiration.
Back in January one of our readers, Anna McNay, got in touch to see if we'd be interested in an interview with Toby Deveson. He uses his old Nikkormat and the same 24mm lens that he ‘borrowed’ from his father more than 20 years ago. He finalises each frame in-camera and doesn't crop images in the darkroom. It got me thinking about how Toby worked around these constraints in his photography and how it influenced his approach. ~ Charlotte Parkin.
Anna McNay (AM): What sparked your passion for photography?
Toby Deveson (TD): We start with the million-dollar question… Straight in there, no punches pulled!
The truth is, I don’t know. There wasn’t one single thing.
My father used to take lots of photographs, and we used to sit through the usual slide shows that so many families of my generation had to. Although I do remember there was an element of family and friends admiring his skills as a photographer, rather than the actual memories of the holidays.
The house was also filled with coffee-table books – on artists, photographers, architecture, and travel. A very eclectic selection. And, on top of that, we used to watch many films, from musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, to “Star Wars”, “Citizen Kane” and “The Deer Hunter”. All the classics. And while they may have been unfashionable films in the 80s, they were classics for a reason, and all very photographic. Essentially, I grew up appreciating all things visual.
Within those coffee-table books were collections of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Don McCullin, Bill Brandt and Ansel Adams, to name but a few. I adored them. I spent hours getting sucked into the images, seeing not only the small granular details but also the larger brushstrokes of their composition and tonal balance, as well as the narratives behind the images. It was the images, which punched me in the guts, that I loved the most.
I guess that with such a strong visual foundation to my life, from such an early age, I was able to keep building on that foundation, finding the limits of what I liked, and pushing those limits. A simple example: I loved the Beatles from a very early age – all their early tracks. It wasn’t long before I discovered their later, more psychedelic stuff, and from there, the more avant-garde, lesser-known tracks, bootlegs, jams, outtakes, and then John and Yoko’s tracks, the screaming, atonal soundscapes…
I remember clearly going into a darkroom for the first time. The father of one of my best friends at the time had a friend who had a professional darkroom, and he let us use it. We spent days taking photographs around Milan (where we lived), printing them into postcards (one at a time) and piling up about 10 different images, each printed 30 or so times, ready to set them out on a blanket on a street corner to sell.
The harder it was to understand or listen to, the more I loved it. If I didn’t like it (as was often the case with Yoko’s singing), I asked myself why I didn’t like it, because they had recorded it for a reason, and I wanted to discover what that was. I taught myself to, at the very least, appreciate it artistically. The same applied to my visual vocabulary. Not on a conceptual level, I was less interested in that, but on a visual, compositional level.
I remember clearly going into a darkroom for the first time. The father of one of my best friends at the time had a friend who had a professional darkroom, and he let us use it. We spent days taking photographs around Milan (where we lived), printing them into postcards (one at a time) and piling up about 10 different images, each printed 30 or so times, ready to set them out on a blanket on a street corner to sell. We didn’t sell many, but we had a huge amount of fun. Within weeks, I had built my first darkroom.
So, photography has always been within me and was born out of laziness and luck, passion and hard work. It came to life thanks to my parents, friends and surroundings. But without that fertile ground within me, it would have withered and died.
AM: What is it you love about landscape photography in particular?
TD: I think this question can be answered more by exploring what I didn’t like about documentary and reportage. My heroes, by the time I was a ‘fully-fledged, self-proclaimed photographer’, were Josef Koudelka, Sebastião Salgado and Mario Giacomelli. High contrast, from the soul, and loose. I knew of no landscape photographer who spoke to my soul in the same way. I liked that. I wanted to create work that was new and unique and spoke to my soul in the same that way so many powerful reportage photographers spoke to so many people around the world.
My heroes, by the time I was a ‘fully-fledged, self-proclaimed photographer’, were Josef Koudelka, Sebastião Salgado and Mario Giacomelli. High contrast, from the soul, and loose. I knew of no landscape photographer who spoke to my soul in the same way. I liked that.
I was learning to tell photographic stories in the Romanian orphanages in the early 90s, and I felt I had to take ‘filler’ photographs, too. Empty rooms, details of discarded toys, blood smears on walls, and also the landscapes which surrounded the orphanages. Photo essays. Looking back, the landscapes were where I found peace and refuge from taking the other images.
And yet the landscapes were the images I always struggled with. I would return with scores of powerful images of people, which I loved printing and were well received by tutors (I was still at college at the time), and I quickly and easily found my voice. But my landscape images never had the same impact – that frustrated me and challenged me.
On top of that, as I faced graduating and having to start my ‘career’ as a photojournalist, I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of chasing hardship and suffering, and the psychological justifications of photographing people and their private lives. I found myself longing for the solitude of Mother Nature and her wilderness, being drawn more and more to the challenge of finding the same voice I had found in reportage, but in landscape photography. I wanted people to be left speechless, drained and exhausted from my landscapes, not my reportage. I was feeling increasingly disillusioned with people reacting more to the stories behind documentary photography than the images themselves. Landscape photography, for me, meant having no story to hide behind, simply a good photograph. And black-and-white landscapes meant you couldn’t hide your mediocre photograph behind a glorious sunset or location. You had to produce the goods with your composition and your artistic skill. That is what I loved, and that is what I was drawn to. I recently compared the challenge to ‘winning the Booker Prize for literature with a Mills and Boons novel’ – i.e. moving from ‘serious’ documentary photography to ‘chocolate-box, cliché, shallow’ landscape photography, yet succeeding in continuing to produce work with the same power, punch and soul as before.
I wanted to be a painter, but never quite found the passion or ability to focus on a canvas for more than a few days. Photography, for me, comes in short, sharp bursts. Taking the photos, developing the film, contact sheets, printing, framing and exhibiting.
AM: Can you give a little background on what your first artistic passions were?
TD: I wanted to be a painter, but never quite found the passion or ability to focus on a canvas for more than a few days. Photography, for me, comes in short, sharp bursts. Taking the photos, developing the film, contact sheets, printing, framing and exhibiting. It is much easier to cope with for lazy, easily distracted people!
Thinking about the passions that shaped me before photography though, I always come back to more abstract things. Solitude. Nature. Daydreaming. Travelling. I think they qualify as artistic passions – and they certainly influenced me and have stayed with me throughout my life.
AM: You studied photography at Brighton. Did this shape your use of film and your love of the darkroom?
TD: Yes and no. I was there in the pre-digital era, or, at least, before it became a serious ‘threat’ to the status quo. So, it was only ever film. I was there the year before the photography degree started, though. I was doing a course called Visual & Performing Arts. I chose it because it incorporated music in the course. I had done my Grade 8 theory of music when I was 14 and A-Level music alongside my art. I didn’t realise that the course was essentially for the ‘Kids from Fame’ and way outside my abilities and comfort zone. But I was the only person using photography as a medium, so the small darkroom in the attic of the building was pretty much mine. And the photography tutor, John Holloway, was incredibly supportive, knowledgeable and helpful. But I was also left to my own devices, and I developed as a photographer so much thanks to the freedom this offered me.
As I said above, I went to Romania while doing my degree. There was an organisation called Creative Aid for Romania, which I joined – having cycled to Eastern Europe from Milan when I was 17 or 18, weeks after the Iron Curtain fell, I felt an affinity with Eastern Europe. Creative Aid had started in response to the Romanian Orphanages being in the news and, essentially, they travelled out twice a year, overland, to paint murals and offer what was, looking back, a basic form of art therapy in the orphanages. I went out about four times and took the opportunity to be the self-appointed photographer. Being able to return to the country and the orphanages, at this stage of my development, so many times, was such a privilege. To be able to study my photographs each time and figure out how to improve them was a crucial part of my learning curve, morally and photographically.
For my course tutors to allow me to be absent for a couple of months at a time, especially in my final year, was very generous indeed. The trust and freedom they gave me shaped me immensely, too.
AM: Your day job is as a television cameraman. How has this influenced your photography or given you access to different locations?
TD: The only real influence is in the occasional opportunity presented to me for trips. I have been lucky enough to have had jobs around the world, and occasionally it works out that I have time off after a job, so I ask for a delayed return flight. I then hire a car and go and ‘play’.
AM: Were there any key moments in your life which shaped the way in which you developed as a photographer?
TD: After my first trip to Romania, I returned with what I thought were extremely powerful images. My memories were (to put it bluntly) of dying babies with big eyes looking up from their cots, and those were the images I returned with. They were what I had seen in the papers before I left, and they were what I took. I printed them and exhibited them, thinking I was the new Salgado. But the feedback I got said otherwise. They were slated. They were called lazy clichés. I was given abuse for turning my lens on dying children. I learned an important lesson in those months. I learned that you can’t hide behind your memories, and you can’t hide behind the story and suffering of the people you are photographing. I learned that if you are going to essentially rape a person by photographing their soul and their suffering, then the very least you can do is pour your own heart and soul into what you are doing and produce work that is earth shattering. Work that is beyond what you thought you were capable of. Anything less is morally unacceptable. So I returned, again and again, and pushed myself compositionally and photographically. I made sure I photographed my real experiences, not what I thought people expected to see. I found laughter and joy and fun, and I photographed that.
AM: Who has specifically helped you in realising your photographic ambitions over the past few years?
TD: The who is easy; Carla, my partner, is my inspiration and muse. She is a journalist, writer and TV presenter, and together we have started a podcast and YouTube channel called “Metralla Rosa”, for which we interview artists, musicians, writers, dancers, creators, and thinkers in general. Interesting and inspirational (and, yes, avant-garde and alternative) people. Carla is Venezuelan (with Italian roots – so the channel is multilingual), and when she moved to the UK, more than 10 years ago, she gave up an incredibly successful TV and radio career, and eventually ended up working as an artists’ model. So not only does she inspire me on a personal and artistic level, but she adores me photographing her.
The arrival of the iPhone, however, has had a huge, yet indirect, influence on my photography. Probably more so than any individual person. My ‘photography’ will always be analogue and black and white. But, over the years, it had become oh so serious. The iPhone, like the Box Brownie in the early 20th century, has brought photography to the masses. It made it fun for me again; it made it easy. Like with my 24mm lens, I couldn’t zoom, I framed at the time of taking, but I didn’t have to worry about printing or exhibiting. I took a photograph and moved on, no pressure, no drama. I had fun with colour, I had fun with composition. The iPhone has really helped me rediscover the fun in photography – it has helped me remember why I take photographs, why I fell in love with it in the first place.
AM: Before photography, you wrote music, which you have described as ‘avant-garde, atonal and arrhythmic,’ as well as ‘jarring and jolting’1. What synergies are there between your music and photography?
Many. They share the need I have always had to push the boundaries and make things uncomfortable, but not unpleasant. I still want people to fall into and lose themselves in my photographs, but I want to challenge them as they do so. I stopped writing music at about the same time I discovered my photographic voice, but, I think, if I had continued, I would have ended up doing the same thing. Making challenging but accessible music.
We are bombarded continuously with visuals. Powerful imagery is drowned daily in seas of mediocrity. Aspiring photographers are learning in the public, social-media eye, and it has become harder and harder for the truly talented and ground-breaking to rise above the noise.
It is all too easy now to gloss over art. We are bombarded continuously with visuals. Powerful imagery is drowned daily in seas of mediocrity. Aspiring photographers are learning in the public, social-media eye, and it has become harder and harder for the truly talented and ground-breaking to rise above the noise. For imagery to catch the eye and remain with someone, it needs to be different, powerful and challenging, yet welcoming and familiar at the same time. That is what I hope I do with my landscapes.
AM: How differently do you approach photographing a landscape from photographing people?
TD: The process is identical. I use an old Nikkormat and a 24mm lens. I always felt I needed to be mobile and quick as people move and surroundings change, so definitely no tripod. I didn’t crop, so I needed to frame quickly but accurately. The lens was a prime and always the same, so I knew what to expect when I looked through the viewfinder. I wanted to work within strict and familiar parameters: just me, my eye, and my feet. That hasn’t changed at all now that I photograph Mother Nature instead of people. I move quickly and document my surroundings in as many different ways and from as many different positions as possible.
AM: As you have just said, you use your old Nikkormat and the same 24mm lens you ‘borrowed’ from your father more than 20 years ago. Do you enjoy working within these constraints, and do you think it has influenced how you approach your photography?
TD: Yes, I love it! By simplifying absolutely everything about the process leading up to and after the release of the shutter, I can give everything to that single moment. I can fully immerse myself in my surroundings. My raison d’être is to create the perfect, perfectly framed image. I live for that moment where it all comes together; that split second before you release the shutter, where you have created something by the seat of your pants, instinctively. All the rest is just noise and inconvenience. I have a love-hate relationship with it. To have the familiarity – and constraints – of my lens, camera body, film and paper gives me the freedom to let myself go and have fun when it matters most.
AM: You say in the video above that the image-making process is a two-way journey: there is what is coming into the camera, but you have to have something going the other way and put yourself into the film as well (the US idea of mirrors and windows). How do you personally balance these two aspects?
TD: I have no idea! It just is. The process is something that has happened naturally and organically.
AM: ‘To not be engulfed by her [Mother Nature], and to not rely on her to provide you with a stunning image, but to work with her and create something unique from something so universal’1. How does this express itself in your work?
TD: My mantra, and my process when I work, is to try and create an image from a location that no other photographer would think to create. I strive to come away with something that is unique and can only be mine.
This manifests itself in my process, I guess, in the way I arrive at a location and take the obvious photographs first. The safety shots. Especially in a fast-changing situation. Disappearing mist (which disappears far faster than most people realise) or fast-moving clouds. I make sure I have these obvious, slightly more cliché images in the can first (they are cliché for a reason – more often than not, they end up being the best). Then I start pushing: going for alternative framing, experimenting, changing the balance within the frame, playing with the possibilities. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. More often than not, it doesn’t. I fail a lot more often than I succeed!
AM: Do you feel you are the sole creator of your photographs, or does the landscape, or something else, play a role?
TD: I work incredibly hard to be the creator of my photographs.
I work incredibly hard to be the creator of my photographs. I want a voice, and I want a style. I want my images to be unique and recognisably mine. But, of course, I would be a fool to ignore my subject, whatever or whomever it may be. And what a subject Mother Nature is. She is huge, powerful and capricious. But also generous and passionate.
I want a voice, and I want a style. I want my images to be unique and recognisably mine. But, of course, I would be a fool to ignore my subject, whatever or whomever it may be. And what a subject Mother Nature is. She is huge, powerful and capricious. But also generous and passionate. For a small, insignificant photographer to impose himself on something so huge requires a lot of work. I want to create something absolutely unique from something so universal to all of us, and that is hard work. After an hour or so of photographing in a location, I am absolutely exhausted – physically and mentally.
AM: Does using an analogue rather than a digital camera change the way you interact with the landscape?
TD: No. I have never known any different. If a location is particularly stunning, once I have exhausted every possibility with the film camera, I will snap some photos on my iPhone – as memories, to send to Carla, or to friends, or maybe to post on Instagram. But I am there for the moment, for myself, and for my photography. Nothing will distract from that.
AM: Your images are never cropped but are framed when you are making the image. Is this a creative or technical decision?
TD: A bit of both. The original decision was one of laziness. Cropping was such a hassle. Getting the crops in the right place and making each print identical (crop-wise) was too much work. Plus, when I found it was encroaching on the taking of the photograph when I found myself thinking: ‘This framing isn’t quite right, but I can fix it later,’ I knew I had to nip that in the bud. I haven’t cropped (an analogue) image since perhaps 1990. It has since, of course, become a creative decision!
AM: You collectively refer to your landscape photographs as “West of the Sun”. Tell us more about where this title came from.
TD: It was taken from the title of a book by one of my favourite authors: “West of the Sun, South of the Border” by Haruki Murakami2. In it, he talks of never being able to get to the west of the sun. You can never overtake the sun as it travels ever westward. The origin of this train of thought in the book came from the Siberian prisoner camps and a mental illness and breakdown, whereby prisoners would drop their tools and, overwhelmed by the endless horizons and snow, just start walking towards the sun in a daze. But, to me, it also speaks of the need to always climb the next mountain, to chase your dreams, to find that other world somewhere over the rainbow. The endless search (for me) for that perfect, elusive image.
AM: How do you go about finding locations for your images? Do you work in a project style, focusing on a specific theme, or is it more location based?
TD: Assuming I am not limited by time or money, I, first of all, choose the country (no limitations, perhaps New Zealand or Japan; if time or money are a factor, perhaps Morocco or France). I buy as many maps as possible and do a quick search for national parks in the relevant Lonely Planet guidebooks or online. Then I roughly work out how many miles I think I can travel in the time I have before my return flight, try and connect as many national parks or interesting locations as possible on the maps, and then jump in a hire car at the airport and just drive!
I stop off in a supermarket, fill the backseat with water and food that won’t go off, and then I sleep in the car. A couple of hours before dusk, I start looking for a car park or a small road I can pull over on, ideally near to somewhere I want to photograph in the morning. I really do just follow my nose and instinct. I try to let the landscape guide me, as mystic as that sounds.
AM: Tell us a bit about two or three of your favourite photographs from your book, “West of the Sun”.
TD: The book is still not finished, but so far, as much as I try to detach my memories of the images from the actual images (to ensure I don’t confuse how good the photograph is with how good my memories are), some of my favourite images are the ones that have powerful memories and emotions attached to them. But there is no real consistency as to why an image becomes a favourite. Some, I fall in love with at the time of taking; some, I discover in the darkroom; and some, I print and put to one side, only to find them taking root in my psyche and becoming firm favourites in a ninja, sneaky way.
Þórisjökull, Suðurland, Iceland. August 2015
I always dreamed of going to Iceland to photograph, so to finally be there was thrilling. It took me a while to take a photograph I was pleased with, though – enough time for the worries and doubts about myself and my abilities to creep in. But then this one came along. It wasn’t the most striking location, but I found this shape and composition, which is abstract and inconclusive as far as scale goes, and I love that. I love that there is very little about it that says ‘Iceland’, with its majestic, sweeping landscapes.
Parque Nacional Queulat, Chile. February 2018
This one was early in what was a grey, misty and dull morning. It was taken by the side of a road which was still very quiet. I was still stiff and cold from sleeping in the car, and I had been bitten to death by midges the day before. I had to stand on a small rock to get as high as possible, and I couldn’t tilt down any further because the lower bank of the river-cum-marsh would have crept into frame, so I knew the composition was going to be top heavy, yet something was telling me it would work. And it did. It is my favourite combination – an uncomfortable, weird composition, which still works perfectly. The grey drabness meant I knew I’d have to push the negative and make the mist as white as possible. The remaining land and water are so magical – I have spent hours getting lost in those shapes.
River Soča, Slovenia. August 2013
This one was taken on the side of a very busy dual carriageway. I had slammed on the brakes during the long trip back to where we were staying for our summer holidays, after a long day walking in the mountains, and left my tired and hungry kids in the car while I sprinted 50 or so metres to the end of the lay-by, to try and find a gap in the trees. I had to balance on the guard rails, feet jammed between the metal strips. I could feel the wind from passing cars blowing me off balance. I struggled to lose all the foreground (very difficult with a wide-angle lens), so had to feature one small tree bottom left. But I managed to make it work. Because the moment of taking the photograph was less than ideal, and I was by the side of a busy road, my expectations were low and my memories tainted. I almost didn’t want to like this one. I tentatively exhibited it and always felt apologetic about it. But it has slowly and consistently grown on me purely as an image.
AM: You obviously love working in the darkroom. Tell us more about your processes and how you go about printing your images.
TD: I hate working in the darkroom… I mean… I love it… Yes!
It really is a love-hate relationship. I love bringing the prints to life, but sometimes it is a struggle. I hate the slog of doing the contact sheets, especially when I return from a trip with 90-odd films. Developing the film is also a long process, as I only do two at a time (after watching someone in college use a tank with six films, getting it wrong, and ruining them all), but I also love it.
I love bringing the prints to life, but sometimes it is a struggle. I hate the slog of doing the contact sheets, especially when I return from a trip with 90-odd films. Developing the film is also a long process, as I only do two at a time.
The cliché of seeing your negatives for the first time really is true. I will always run them through the enlarger, before putting them away, to get an idea of what they look like – my impatience and excitement thick in the air.
As for the actual prints, I usually knock off a few 8x10 of all the images I think I want to see. I get them about 80-90% right and move on. These are the prints I scan and use for my website. I fix what I didn’t quite get right in the darkroom, maybe darken the sky a bit or lighten something slightly in Photoshop. I usually give them a touch more contrast than the physical prints have, as there is nothing worse than a dull, grey print on the screen. I really don’t think a computer screen, no matter how good the scan, can show the subtleties of a darkroom print in the flesh, so I find I have to compensate by giving my ‘screen’ prints a bit more oomph.
Then, I eventually move on to my exhibition or portfolio prints. I tend to live with my 8x10s for a few months and make sure I still think they are good enough over time. To get a print 95-100% right, or as close to perfect as possible, can take anything between two to 10 attempts. But it usually averages out to about three. I tend to do about two to four prints a day. Then I touch them up and frame them or put them in the folio. I print to order, as far as sales go. I rarely print more than I need.
AM: You have a consistent contrasty ‘look’ to your prints. Do you have a good idea of how your images will appear in print while making them?
TD: I tend to use very heavy negatives, and that typically leads to high contrast. I generally have no idea how or why I have achieved the results I have, but I like it like that…
AM: What is next for you? Where do you see your photography going in terms of subject and style?
Right now, I see no imminent changes. I will still photograph people when the opportunities arise, but I will put all my heart and soul into adding to my landscapes, exhibiting, selling, and working towards a book which, at the moment, I intend to self-publish. I would like to find a gallery to represent me so I can increase my sales, abroad as well as in the UK, but I am also very happy with the way things are at the moment.
Many of you will already know or will have heard of The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce which is often cited as one of the greatest satirical works of American literature. Bierce was an American writer and soldier and his satirical dictionary started life as a newspaper column, with the first definition appearing in 1867. The first column with The Devil’s Dictionary as title appeared in The Wasp in 18811. The first entry in that column has a particular resonance today (ACCURACY, n. A certain uninteresting quality carefully excluded from human statements).
Ambrose Bierce around 18662
The Dictionary first appeared in book form as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906, with 521 definitions but only for the letters A to L. The full work was published as volume 7 in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce with his original title of The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911. Many of the definitions are enriched by citations and poems credited to different authors with wonderfully exotic names, all of them made up by Bierce. There have been numerous editions of the dictionary as a stand-alone volume since (including a fine Folio Editions volume with illustrations by Peter Forster)3. There have also been numerous translations and imitations4.
Just a few of my favourite Bierce definitions are
ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
ADMIRAL, n. That part of a war-ship which does the talking while the figure-head does the thinking.
APPETITE, n. An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labour question.
BIGOT, n. One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
CANNON, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.
DAY, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent. This period is divided into two parts, the day proper and the night, or day improper—the former devoted to sins of business, the latter consecrated to the other sort. These two kinds of social activity overlap.
DEJEUNER, n. The breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.
DISTANCE, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs, and keep.
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
And so on all the way to Z and (remembering that this was written at the end of the 19th Century) …
ZEUS, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have penetrated a considerable distance to the interior, have thought that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists, each having no other god than himself, whom he worships under many sacred names.
As is readily evident and by way of warning, Bierce was in no way politically correct and some of his definitions have not worn that well with time, including that for the photograph.
PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite as good as that of a Cheyenne.
That is the only mention of photography in The Devil’s Dictionary but clearly this is a subject area ripe for some clarifying definitions. I offer the following as a starting point5.
3-D pop [n]: The sickening noise made as the lens you were changing hits the ground.
45 [n]: Denotation used for some large format cameras and film. ALMOST the answer to life, the universe and everything for some photographers, but a little too big as not all the lenses they would like to use have sufficient coverage.
AA [n]: Help for monochrome photographers addicted to large format cameras, dark red filters and the smell of fixer.
Aberration [n]: What’s left of an image after the removal of distracting elements and sky replacement in Luminar or Photoshop.
APSC [n]: Acute Personality Split Camera; cannot decide whether to look down on all smaller formats of sensor or feel inferior to those with full frame sensors (see Full Frame)
Back-up [n]: An activity that you always intended to do before your PC failed (see Second Back-up).
Big Stopper [n]: A form of arrested development in photographic technique involving elimination of most detail.
Blue hour [n]: The period of swearing after finding that some essential element of gear has been left in the car several kilometres away.
Bokeh [n]: A result of using expensive lenses wide open to distract from an uninteresting main subject in an image (see also Swirly Bokeh).
Park bench with bokeh reflections, Dalton Square, Lancaster
Border [n]: The black lines added to a print to suggest that the image has not been cropped to cut out the unwanted elements included by poor framing (see Crop).
B-roll [n]: Video photographers’ name for a bacon butty.
Bulb setting [n]: mostly about 10cm deep and 10 cm apart.
Camera Club [n]: An embarrassment of judges very willing to criticise your latest work and give extensive and conflicting advice (see Judge).
Camera Collector [n]: A means of rapidly increasing prices on EBay after spreading rumours about the special character of a lens or the shutter sound of a vintage film camera (see Vintage, Rumours, Swirly Bokeh).
Camera shake [n]: Condition causing blurred images particularly common amongst the very young and very old (see ICM).
Chimping [n]: The sounds of disappointment made by photographers when reviewing their shots in camera.
Chromatic Aberration [n]: An aberration with additional drastic changes to white balance and colour wheels (see Aberration and Haze).
Circle of confusion [n]: Not really a circle (see Exposure Triangle).
Cloud [n]: (a) More than a cloud (see Equivalents); (b) A grey smear on an image taken with a Big Stopper; (c) (as in “The Cloud”) digital storage accounting for 2.5% of global carbon emissions and globally equivalent to 1.5 times total UK electricity consumption. Mostly used for storing selfies and images of cats, meals, and coffee mousse.
More than a cloud: view north from La Berra, Switzerland
Coffee [n]: The ultimate film developer for hipsters, but requiring remarkable will-power to waste good coffee in such a way.
Composite image [n]: Technique of combining images dating back to the 19th Century and STILL not made illegal.
Covid [n]: A global pandemic disaster resulting in the sad loss of some excellent photographers, cancellation of nearly all workshops, postponement of the On Landscape Meeting of Minds, and far fewer airplane contrails to remove in Photoshop.
Crop [n]: The plentiful harvest of wasted paper after a print session.
Cyanotype [n]: Digital print made before realising that the other print cartridges were empty.
Dark Room [n]: A place of torture where photographers are sent to spend hours trying to produce the print they envisaged in taking the picture (see Digital Darkroom, Print).
Decisive Moment [n]: The best image selected from a contact sheet or (more recently) from a series of images taken in burst mode.
Daguerreotype [n]: an alternative photographic process of producing almost invisible images on metal plates; not to be confused with …
Deguerreotype [n]: A type of war of words between the English and French as to who invented proper photography.
Depth of Field [n]: The number of comments after a camera review in DPReviews.
Diffraction [n]: An on-line argument between supporters of 2 camera brands that becomes more intense as the differences between the cameras become smaller.
Digital Darkroom [n]: A form of torture resulting from software that has far too many controls and options producing prints that still do not match what is on screen even after buying expensive calibration tools (see Print).
Drone [n]: A really REALLY annoying noise coming from above, increasingly found in the most peaceful landscape locations.
Electronic shutter [n]: (pre-2005 cameras) a disaster waiting to happen to your outrageously expensive film camera (see Xpan); (post-2015 cameras) a way of introducing uncontrolled blur into images of moving subjects.
Equivalents [n]: Concept introduced by Alfred Stieglitz to justify taking 350 ambiguous images of clouds. More recently applied to stacks of bricks in the Tate Gallery and the emotions conveyed by images of mousse on cups of coffee (see Redundant).
Cloud as Equivalent – Flühli, Switzerland
Essence [n]: A characteristic of Edward Weston’s photographs of rocks. Analogous to Schrödinger’s Cat in that it provides an excellent excuse for endless discussions about whether it is there or not.6
To be a rock
or more than a rock
that is the question:
Whether it is nobler to
attract the photographer’s gaze
or suffer the indignity of
being overlooked as
just a rock; left to sleep
but perchance to dream of
fame on a gallery wall.
Or, is it enough
to just exist and
be left in peace to lie.
Essence of a rock: perchance to dream or just to lie? Långholmen Sweden
Exc+++++ [a]: Camera on EBay with just a few patches of leatherette missing and a few points of corrosion on the body (see Minty).
Exposure compensation [n]: Model fees depending on degree of undress.
Exposure to the Right [n]: Street photography to preserve the highlights of the American Presidential Election. May leave some murky shadow areas.
Exposure triangle [n]: A concept designed to create a circle of confusion when a photographer is brave enough to switch from Auto mode.
F64 Group [n]: A group of early 20th Century American photographers who succeeded in elevating cabbage into Art.
Film [n]: A support for images for which the colours were always a bit disappointing when the prints came back from Boots.
Colours from Film: Wild Boar Fell, Mallerstang, Cumbria
Film Simulations [n]: A digital means of reproducing the disappointing colours of various types of film.
Filter [n]: A means of adding defects to a perfectly good lens.
Flektogon [n]: An old Zeiss lens design that has recently become much more expensive because of its pretty zebra camouflage. Mostly used for collecting dust (see Camera Collector).
Fn Button [n]: Unlabelled camera function control. Impossible to remember what function it controls and often seems to produce a different result each time it is pressed.
Focus stacking [n]: A technique for spending even more time in front of a computer that could be spent taking images (see HDR).
Full Frame [n]: A sensor with an inflated self-perception of superiority that is hardly justified when still 4 times smaller than 6x6 and 60 times smaller than 10x8.
Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) [n]: A condition common among photographers which results in spending all available hours reading reviews of cameras, lenses and all possible types of accessories on the internet. Appears to have been particularly contagious during 2020 lockdown (see Gear Head, Rumours).
There once was a gear head from York
Who was really a bit of a dork.
His GAS was so bad
He felt that he had
To declare himself NSFW.
Gear head [n]: A photographer infected with GAS; not to be confused with …
Geared Head [n]: My tripod supports something MUCH more expensive than yours.
Genesis [n]: The origins of the world and landscape photography. Somewhat after let there be really nice light and before the arrival of any colour.
Golden hour [n]: The period before sunset during which 95% of landscape photos entered into competitions are taken.
Golden Hour: Pendragon Castle, Mallerstang, Cumbria
Graffiti [n]: A subject for monochrome images made famous by Brassai. More recently used to add elements of colour to street photography (but the painting takes much longer than the photo and may be illegal).
Grandagon [n]: Rodenstock lens for the more mature photographer.
When I grow old,
I will wear a photographer’s vest
and a fisherman’s hat,
and grow a beard,
and go large format.
With tripod and dark cloth,
and black and white film,
with standing development,
without agitation,
for the tone and textures,
of classic prints.
Though the pack is so heavy
to lift from the floor
and the tripod weighs something
like lead,
And scanning the negs is
a real pain in the A.
Perhaps I’ll go Leica
instead.
Hasselblad [n]: 哈苏
Haze [n]: The result of a global disaster of drought and fires in California, Oregon, Washington, Siberia, Paraguay and Brazil in 2020. No longer easily removed using the Clarity slider, but easily turned orange to impress.
Haze near Flühli, Switzerland after arrival of smoke from California, September 2020 (after post-processing, see also Pre-Visualisation and Chromatic Aberration)
HDR [n]: Another technique for spending even more time in front of a computer that could be spent taking images (see Focus Stacking, ND Grad).
Histogram [n]: An option for obscuring the composition of an image in an electronic viewfinder.
Horizon [n]: As far as the eye can see during lockdown. Should not be placed right in the centre of the frame unless you are already famous. Probably best not placed vertically unless you are really very famous.
Hyperfocal distance [n]: Manic use of manual focus to check social distancing in post-Covid workshop groups.
Insurance [n]: That which you had the intention of buying before watching your tripod, camera and favourite lens topple slowly into a river (yes, it does happen).
Intentional camera movement (ICM) [n]: Post-hoc justification of a blurred image (see Camera Shake).
Image stabilisation [n]: A method of using extremely sophisticated mechanics and electronics to replace a simple camera support with 3 legs (see Tripod).
Jökulsárlón [n]: An unusual effect of the earth’s magnetic field in Iceland causing a particularly strong attractor of photographic workshop groups.
Judge [n]: (photographic) A person who has no idea what they are talking about.
Large Format [a]: Photographer with body mass index greater than 30.
Lens hoodie [n]: Required dress for street photography.
Long Exposure [n]: Sunburn consequent to having to wait for the Golden Hour.
Manual [n]: A guide to camera controls that has become increasingly incomprehensible with time. A small pamphlet of 8 pages in the age of film, now a book of hundreds of pages that requires buying an additional book of explanation (see Menu Option).
Megapixies [n pl.]: Source of the magic hidden in digital sensors, continually increased as a marketing ploy by camera companies. Can sometimes be detected as pixie dust at higher ISOs.
Menu Option [n]: A camera control that is impossible to find when you need it.
Metaphor [n]: A means by which photographers can encourage the viewer to take a closer look at an image by pretending there is a deeper meaning.7
Remains of ancient melèze above Prarions, Switzerland – There must be a metaphor in there somewhere
Minimalism [n]: A fall-back when you really cannot find anything interesting to photograph.
Minimalism;
Already five syllables
Used in a haiku
Minimalism: Lac de Joux, Switzerland
Minty [a]: Camera on EBay with leatherette just starting to curl at the edges and a cloudy viewfinder.
Moi-ré [a]: A photographer who thinks it is all about him and his gear.
ND Grad [n]: A way to avoid spending too much time in front of the computer (see Filter, HDR).
Noise reduction [n]: Expensive high-tech headphones for use while waiting for some better light (see Golden Hour, Long Exposure).
Nude [n]: (a) A technique for ruining a perfectly good landscape photograph by adding an incongruous element (as in images by Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, Jean-Loup Sieff); (b) landscape photography for studio photographers (see Exposure Compensation).
Original [a]: Art speak, as in “deeply original”; meaningless when applied to photographs.
Over-exposed [a]: Completely unclothed (see Exposure Compensation, Nude)
Petzval [n]: A 19th Century lens of simple design; revived in the 21st Century as an expensive way of getting blurry photos (or “velvety watercolour bokeh”) [see Bokeh].
Photography blogs [n]: On-line discussions of expensive hi-fi equipment, diet books, dogs, and existentialism.
Photoshop [n]: Digital dark room, complete with sink (of funds from a large number of photographers on a monthly basis) (see Digital Darkroom).
Physics [n]: (as in constrained by the laws of physics). Marketing ploy to justify the production of lenses that are ridiculously large and more and more expensive. Often cited in reviews of said lenses (see also Render).
Pictorialism [n]: Creating photographic Art by introducing blur and deep shadows. Now available as 2576 style files for less than $308.
Pinhole [n]: (a) a really annoying source of light leakage (but see Vintage); (b) an effective practical demonstration of the blurring effect of the physics of diffraction
Platinum Print [n]: A photograph that has sold a million copies (does not apply to single Andreas Gursky or Peter Lik photographs selling for more than a million pounds/euros/dollars).
Portfolio [n]: A collection of prints put together for other photographers to laugh at.
Powered by AI [a]: Changes decided by a computer that understands only 0s and 1s.
Pre-visualisation [n]: A justification of the use of extreme post-processing to rescue a poor image into something more acceptable.
Print [n]: A hard copy image, 99.5% of which are not quite right.
RAW [a]: files that are ripe for post-processing; should preferably not be over-cooked.
Reality [n]: philosophical concept; meaningless when applied to photographs
Redundant [a]: Another photograph of storm clouds clearing over Yosemite Falls from New Inspiration Point (or midday sun beams in Antelope Canyon, or sun rise at Mesa Arch, or sunset at Horsetail Falls, or the Wave at Coyote Buttes, or…. [add to personal taste])9.
Another redundant photograph: The Wave at Coyote Buttes, Arizona
Render [v]: (as in renders beautifully, 3D render) A marketing quality of a lens used to justify a very high price. Often cited in reviews of said lenses.
Resolution [n]: A marketing quality of a sensor that allows the photographer to produce prints that are far larger than they can ever afford to print and which is destroyed when the image is posted to Instagram.
Rule of Thirds [n]: A classification of images taken with a vintage rangefinder – one third out of focus (rangefinder alignment); one third over exposed (shutter running a bit slow); and one third taken with the lens cap inadvertently left on (see Vintage).
Rumours [n pl.]: (as in Canonrumours, Sonyrumours, Fujirumours, Nikonrumours, Leicarumours) an effective way of keeping gear heads occupied in between purchases of new cameras and lenses (see Gear Head).
Safe Light [n]: Safe light (see Golden Hour)
Saturation [n]: (as in over-saturation) A surfeit of Instagram sunsets.
Selfie [n]: A technique for ruining a perfectly good landscape photograph by putting a face (or faces) in front of it.
Second back-up [n]: An activity that you always intended to do before your networked hard disk failed.
Slow photography [n]: A project limited to one camera, one lens, one image per year and lots of Zen.
Pause a while and observe
The landscape and the light.
Pause a while and memorise
The play of wind and clouds.
Return again and pause to reflect
On the changes from before.
Finally, mount the camera,
Focus, tilt and shift,
Choose aperture and shutter speed,
Ready for the decisive moment.
Apart from the damn film holders,
Which were somehow left at home.
Pause a while and experience
The wondrous joy of Zen
In the Art of Slow Photography
Special edition [n]: It costs HOW MUCH???????
Sublime [a]: A way of increasing the appreciation of beauty in the landscape by looking through thousands of images on Flickr very very rapidly.
Subsidy [n]: List price contribution made by retired dentists and lawyers in support of Leica10.
Sunny 16 [n]: Method of perversely estimating exposure based on symbols printed inside an old Kodak film box rather than using a phone app.
Swirly Bokeh [n]: A result of using cheap Eastern European lenses wide open to distract from an uninteresting main subject in an image (see Bokeh, Petzval).
Tethered [a]: as in images by Nobuyoshi Araki; (see Zone System, extended)
Tilt/shift lens [n]: A very large lens for making people and cars look very very small.
Time Capsule [n]: A back-up that you always intended to do before your Mac failed (yes, it does happen) (see Second back-up).
Time Lapse [n]: The delay between exposing a film and getting it developed some months later (or not at all in the case of Garry Winogrand).
Tonal Gradation [n]: Fifty shades of grey. A much-valued property of monochrome film in nude photography (apparently) (see Over-exposed, Zone System).
Tripod [n]: A device used for manual image stabilisation, most likely to fail when close to water (see Insurance; Warranty).
Vignette [n]: That part of the animal remaining in the frame in a wildlife photo.
Red Squirrel Vignette; Mallerstang, Cumbria
Vintage [a]: Camera or lens for hipster photographers embracing lens flare and light leaks as a way of being Arty.
Vintage Zeiss Super Ikonta 531/16: Glacial Erratic, Mallerstang, Cumbria
Vlog [n]: Overlong video, mostly of opening boxes of new gear and photos of brick walls (see Gear Head).
Warranty [n]: A guarantee from the manufacturer that any benefits will expire from 1 to 10 days before the photographer has a malfunction or breakage.
Watermarked [n]: Inside of a lens after being retrieved from the river (see Insurance and Tripod).
Weather resistant [a]: Marketing speak for really REALLY not waterproof (see also Warranty and Watermarked).
White Balance [n]: An index of integration as the inverse percentage of white male ambassadors for each camera brand.
Workshop [n]: (photographic) (a) until recently, one of the few remaining ways to make some money for professional photographers (see Covid); (b) a successful way of dispersing original ideas to other photographers to ensure that all originality disappears.
Xpan [n]: A 35mm film Hasselblad made by Fuji that now costs more than when it was new (see Camera Collector); bought for future use as a paperweight (see Electronic Shutter).
Xtrans [n]: An alternative digital sensor; popular among gender fluid photographers.
Zeiss [n]: The god of optics in ancient mythology.
Zeiss, the God of Optics, represented in the form of a stereo camera (optics lost to ravages of time, unfortunately).
Zero-D [a]: An ultra-wide lens that only really rarely travels any distance from the shelf.
Zone System [n]: Concept for controlling monochrome exposures: originally 10 shades of grey (but which can be expanded to 50 for some improper purposes – see Tonal Gradation, Tethered, Over-exposed).
To finish with one last definition from Ambrose Bierce himself:
NONSENSE, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.11
References
1 For a more complete history see the article on the Devil’s Dictionary in Wikipedia 2 From Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Bierce 3 A full text of the Devil’s Dictionary can be found on-line as part of the Gutenberg Project 4 For a list see the Wikipedia article in footnote 1. 5 But after writing the list of definitions presented here I thought I had better check if it had been done before for photography. Indeed it has, by Roger Cicala the founder of Lens Rentals and by Jffield. Both have some really good definitions, but thankfully without too much overlap with the list above. 6 With apologies to Guy Tal, More than a Rock, Rocky Nook, 2013 7 With apologies to Joe Cornish in On Landscape Issue 216 8 With apologies to Andrew Sanderson in On Landscape Issue 218 9 See On Landscape "Landscape and the Philosophers of Photography" 10 With apologies to all retired dentists and lawyers who might have invested in Leica gear. 11 And apologies to anyone else who might have been offended at my wilful misuse of photographic terms.
As a Yorkshireman, it slightly grieves me to admit that one of my photographic idols was born in Lancashire! I shall forgive him for that because the elegant simplicity of Michael Kenna’s compositions had a profound impact on how I saw the landscape in my early days of photography. Even now, I can still see influences from his work in some of mine - particularly that of minimalism.
Born in 1953 and from a poor working-class family, Kenna learned about photography for a year at the Banbury School of Art before attending the London College of Printing where he graduated in 1976. He then moved to San Francisco for the opportunity to show and sell his work in galleries. As can be seen from his website, Kenna is well travelled, and I particularly like his project-based mind-set creating a cohesive set of images from each location he visits - something I place a lot of importance to in my work.
This photography project began as a piece of work to document a year in the life of Hollesley Marshes. It is an area I have been fascinated with for a while and one I walk to every morning with my dog. It is somewhere I have learnt so much about simply by observing the landscape and its wildlife on a daily basis.
In March 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic overtook all our lives and my project turned from a straight documentary to one which detailed my connection with the landscape through the constraints of my permitted daily exercise. The images portray fleeting moments captured during a morning walk. They were not pre planned, were mostly shot without a tripod or filters and represent my reaction to a scene at a particular moment in time. They are accompanied by text and are intended to be viewed as a visual sketchbook of a special place.
My project was initially inspired by my love of the Suffolk Coast. I often see this part of England portrayed in magazines and it is always the same locations that get featured. I have always wanted to redress the balance and show off what I consider to be the real Suffolk in my images. I chose Hollesley Marshes because it is on my doorstep and I have come to know the area really well. I wanted to explore the idea that familiarity, instead of breeding contempt, can actually enhance your photography. I believe that knowing a landscape intimately can really help capture the essence of a place.
I had always planned to produce a book of the project but in the beginning, it was going to be full colour (because that is what I love) and a seasonal guide.
Once lockdown was in place I walked to the marsh every day with my dog as my permitted daily exercise and very soon this became my only reason to leave the house.
I had a list of pre-planned images that I wanted to make and a series of shots already under my belt when the Covid -19 lockdown came into place at the end of March 2020.
This changed the focus of my project and the thinking behind it.
Once lockdown was in place I walked to the marsh every day with my dog as my permitted daily exercise and very soon this became my only reason to leave the house. I did not feel I could go with all my photography equipment and set up a tripod for long exposures or spend any length of time out with the camera because that seemed to be outside of the rules. So initially I felt that I would have to abandon my photography project for 2020.
However, the more I thought about it the more the constraints appealed to me and I decided to take my camera with me on my morning dog walk and capture what I saw.
There is something freeing about being out with just the camera, without the tripod and filters and just being able to react to a scene in front of you. I also found I was using photography as a way to escape what was going on in the news. When I was out with the camera, observing the wildlife and the light on the landscape I was completely absorbed and happy and so immersed that I forgot what was happening in the wider world.
This has always been my way of staying grounded. Anytime I have a bad day or am struggling with a problem I will take my camera and go out for a walk. An hour is usually enough to reset my thoughts and it was this ethos that I now felt I wanted to explore in my project.
I am not a nature photographer but I love nature. I wanted my project to portray this by focusing on my observations. I used a 70-200mm lens for most of the shots but this wasn’t really big enough for some of the things I wanted to shoot such as the barn owl that accompanied my walks most mornings or the marsh harrier that soared over the reeds. So I began to write down my observations in addition to taking the images. Together I wanted the words and pictures to build a sketchbook of the landscape I was walking through. I wanted readers to feel they were there with me walking in my footsteps.
The process of recording my walk in words and pictures was completely immersive and I felt such a strong connection with the landscape while I was out there.
When I came to put the book together I initially split the work into habitats. The marshes join the coast and are backed by farmland so I split the first part of the book into sections which followed the path through the landscape, the marsh itself, the fields, the river and the creek. The sections after that became about how the world changed as the pandemic evolved and how this impacted on the landscape.
My interaction with Hollesley Marshes helped me stay positive and grounded throughout the pandemic. I wanted to incorporate this into my story but I also wanted to show how the landscape changed during the year as a result of human activity.
My interaction with Hollesley Marshes helped me stay positive and grounded throughout the pandemic. I wanted to incorporate this into my story but I also wanted to show how the landscape changed during the year as a result of human activity.
In the spring the area was so quiet and full of wildlife, but by summer this had changed and the coast was full of tourists making the most of their freedom after lockdown. As autumn approached and the pandemic took off once again peace returned to the landscape particularly as the second lockdown took effect.
The images that I took for this project are not my usual landscape images. I love colour and most of my images are colour shots. With the time constraints on this project and the story that I wanted to tell I felt that the images were best shot in black and white. This portrayed the sketchbook feel I wanted for the book and was the most appropriate choice to accompany the text I had written. Although it is not my usual way of taking pictures I felt it was good to come out of my comfort zone and produce something different.
I hope that my project captures a special place on the Suffolk Coast - one that I feel is overlooked in favour of more iconic locations. To me this is the real Suffolk landscape; an amalgamation of grazing marsh, salt marsh, river and creek which has provided me with some of my most immersive times out in the landscape. I treasure my daily connection with nature in this small corner of Suffolk. It is something that I feel is vital for my wellbeing, it makes me feel alive and helps put everything else into perspective. In a turbulent world this is the place that keeps me grounded and I can’t imagine my life without it.
It’s easy to think of abstracts as something small, a landscape within, but really it’s a question of scale. All that is needed is to remove the reference, the visual clues that help us to decipher that which we look at. For the ultimate in abstracts, take to the air. From the glacial rivers in Iceland that we have become familiar with to the landscapes of Australia, Kevin Krautgartner’s images show that there is plenty to find and enjoy at a larger scale. Some we can easily recognise, some are less obvious. The forces of nature and of man mix and beguile the viewer, even when the subject is the use and despoliation of our planet.
Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, your education and early interests, and what that led you to do as a career?
I grew up in a small town near Wuppertal in the western part of Germany. Already during my school years, I photographed with old cameras from my grandparents in the forest (at that time still analogue) and discovered my passion for photography. Photography was quickly joined by an interest in graphic design. So I focused more on these two areas in my professional career. After school, I started studying communication design with a focus on photography. During this time I created my first professional works and at the same time, I started my own business. Throughout my education, I still developed my analogue work in the darkroom. I miss that a little bit because I always found it super exciting to do the whole process by myself and to learn some background knowledge. I was fascinated by everything that has to do with photography, so in the beginning, I worked both in the studio and outdoors.
When you first became interested in photography, what kind of images did you want to make and what ambitions did you have?
On March 23rd last year I was due to hang an exhibition at the National Trust visitor centre, Brimham Rocks, in Nidderdale. On Sunday 22nd we digested the news of impending lockdown; I could scarcely believe that if I was to obey the letter of the law, I must cancel the whole enterprise. The exhibition was to be the fulfilment of my most personal creative work during the previous year.
My National Trust colleagues were expecting me and framer Andy Richardson of Wensleydale Galleries at 7.30am, on Monday the 23rd March.
Having slept on it I rose at 5.30 am on the 23rd, and called Andy at 6.15 am. He was already packing his van. I cancelled the whole endeavour; there was really no other choice.
A three month postponement was my assumption at the time… how wrong can you get? Now, with luck, I hope it might happen this summer, 2021. But so many dates, workshops, talks, tours have been postponed so many times, I’ll believe it’s going to happen only when I see the pictures hanging on the wall.
And so began the Year when Time itself – it seemed – stood still.
Constrained, deprived of work, limited to local movement… creatively-speaking it has been the strangest of all blessings-in-disguise.
Last Autumn, Neil from Beyond Words dropped me an email to say that he'd stocked a new book The Plain by Melanie Friend and suggested that it could be of interest to the readers of our magazine. I ordered a copy of the book and, over a cup of tea one afternoon, I took a read. The images drew me in and left me asking so many questions and the essays in the book drew me even deeper into the history of Salisbury Plain.
On the publisher's website, it states "The Plain is both the UK’s largest military training ground and also a conservation area shared with archaeologists and dog walkers, larks and corn buntings, wildflowers and rare forms of wildlife." How do these two worlds co-exists or do they?
We are delighted to publish our in-depth interview with Melanie, covering her love of photography, her earlier photojournalist career, her previous books and how the project The Plain started and evolved into the book. We hope you enjoy reading this as much as I have researching and publishing it.
Tell me about where your passion for photography came from and why the landscape is important to you?
Recently I’ve been digging around in my cupboards and unearthed a stash of negatives I didn’t know I had. It seems that in the mid-1970s, when I was a teenager, I’d photographed much more than I thought. Judging by the size of the negatives, I must have borrowed my Dad’s Box Brownie or my Mum’s Instamatic 126 to photograph my friends and family, just larking about, recording moments. Then I began to get more interested in compositions, graduating to owning an Olympus Trip, and eventually moving to SLRs in my early 20s, when I began to see photography in a different way.
In 1980/81, part of my editorial assistant job at African Business magazine was to organise the picture library, and I was intrigued by both the historic and contemporary photographs in the collection. Occasionally photographers came into the office and meeting them got me thinking; perhaps I could do that too? I saw photography as a way of escaping a lifetime behind a desk. I started teaching myself, and found regular commissioned work for a building magazine, before moving to newspaper work (the Times Education Supplement & The Independent, among others). As I became more politically involved, it was about documenting protest and injustice, seeing photography (at times too idealistically) as a tool for change, and as a way to communicate. The 1980s was the time of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and there was a huge amount to protest about here in the UK – so I photographed numerous demonstrations. And in my 30s I travelled widely because of my work as a photojournalist (after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I focused on eastern Europe: Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and what is now called North Macedonia), and I met amazing people I wouldn’t otherwise have met. So, in the beginning, my love of photography was bound up with the many adventures and friendships it brought me. Along the way, I also took inspiration from photography exhibitions and photographers’ monographs.
The weather is a continual topic of conversation for many living in the British Isles, and for landscape photographers, it becomes something of an obsession. Trying to predict the perfect combination of factors that will give a cloud inversion or a misty woodland or a stunning sunset can be utterly frustrating. In this issues instalment of our lockdown podcast, we talk to Joe and David about their approaches to the dark arts of the weather whisperer.
I will never forget the first time I saw the Dolomites. It was during the summer of 1996 when I was at our family home in northern Italy with my then young twin boys on our summer holidays from South Africa.
I remember driving up through the Val Gardena valley, where the road in some areas goes through deep valleys. After a certain point, the famous rocky peaks seemed to play hide and seek through the pine forests along the winding road and I could only wonder what lay beyond.
“The Dolomites are widely regarded as being among the most attractive mountain landscapes in the world,” states UNESCO, and on June 26, 2009, they were inscribed into the UNESCO World Heritage List. These mighty mountains hold a wide appeal for hikers, climbers, skiers, cyclists, historians, and naturally photographers not only here in Italy but throughout the world. They are a mountain range situated in the northern Italian Alps and have over 18 peaks which rise to above 3,000 metres in altitude. They feature some of the most beautiful mountain landscapes anywhere, with vertical walls, sheer cliffs and a high density of narrow, deep and long valleys.
The range and its characteristic rock take their name from the 18th-century French geologist Dieudonné de Dolomieu, who made the first scientific study of the region and its geology. These dramatic mountains are famous for their unique colours. In the Dolomites, the two moments of transition between light and darkness becomes even more special due to a distinctive trait that these mountains have, which make the rock formations take on a particular pink colour, a phenomenon called Enrosadira.
The source of the term Enrosadira comes from Ladin (a dialect spoken in this area of Italy) and means "to become pink". It is a range of colours that follow the light during sunrise and sunset, creating a spectacle that both fascinates and takes one’s breath away.
This splendid phenomenon has scientific origins; the Dolomites are composed of Dolomite rock, a compound of calcium carbonate and magnesium, elements that accentuate the reflectivity of the sun's rays. For this reason, when illuminated by the light, at dawn or at dusk, they develop many intense hues. This is a phenomenon that contrasts with their appearance during daytime when they take on cool tones and faded colours which then gives the Dolomites their name, the "Pale Mountains".
Words have power, and it is language that makes complex thought and precise awareness possible. But sometimes there are concepts and ideas swirling through our minds that we cannot name.
It is very satisfying to find a new word for a feeling that is so very familiar, but which I could never explain with the languages known to me. I was accordingly pleased when I stumbled upon the word 'Hiraeth' in Sally Mann's 'Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs' [Read Joe Cornish's article on the book here: https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2018/07/sally-mann]
Welsh is spoken by barely 20 percent of the population, so we can only hope that the evocative Welsh word hiraeth will somehow be preserved. It means “distance pain,” and I know all about it: a yearning for the lost places of our past, accompanied in extreme cases by tuneful lamentation (mine never got quite that bad).
Welsh is spoken by barely 20 percent of the population, so we can only hope that the evocative Welsh word hiraeth will somehow be preserved. It means “distance pain,” and I know all about it: a yearning for the lost places of our past, accompanied in extreme cases by tuneful lamentation (mine never got quite that bad)
But, and this is important, it always refers to a near-umbilical attachment to a place, not just free-floating nostalgia or a droopy hound like wistfulness or the longing we associate with romantic love. No, this is a word about the pain of loving a place.
Just like us southerners, the Welsh are often depicted as nostalgic and melancholic, their heads stuck in the past while pining for hopelessly lost causes. This attribution was conceived in the eighteenth century, and right from the beginning it was tied to a representation of landscapes: the blind bards of eighteenth-century fables are inseparable from the misty mountains in which they were imagined to strum their harps while giving voice to their hiraeth. Contemporary Welsh-speakers have continued that expression, linking memory and landscape most vividly in R. W. Parry’s sonnet in which the longed-for landscape communicates to the human heart, “the echo of an echo… the memory of a memory past.”
Distance pain is a real thing; hiraeth is not just a made-up neurasthenic disorder to which the Welsh and oversensitive, displaced southerners are susceptible. Looking through my long photographic and literary relationship with my own native soil I can perceive a definite kinship with those fokelorish bards wailing away about their place-pain. And similarly, after months of research in my mother’s archive, I am reasonably sure that some aspects of that sentimental Welshman, my mother’s father, are woven through my psyche and have emerged in my own landscapes as “the memory of a memory past.”
In the German language we have the words 'Heimweh' and 'Fernweh'. The English language has 'Wanderlust', which interestingly is also derived from German, but is not used in the same way anymore. In German, it is literally just the desire for walking/hiking, if at all used these days. There is 'Homesickness', which, as far as I understand, is used in a very specific way to describe the longing for the literal place of home while travelling.
In the German language we have the words 'Heimweh' and 'Fernweh'. The English language has 'Wanderlust', which interestingly is also derived from German, but is not used in the same way anymore.
There is also 'Nostalgia', but to me personally this word has a slightly negative touch, describing the feeling of people who are unable or unwilling to let go of the past, which supposedly was so much better than the present. Others may have different associations to it.
So it seems that in either language, there is no word like the Welsh 'Hiraeth', which is 'Heimweh' and 'Fernweh' combined in one word, as well as the mournful longing for places that don't exist anymore, that maybe never existed, a place to belong, to call home. It's a beautiful word that in itself almost tells a story of loss and seeking.
I have known this feeling since my teenage years and the places I long for most and miss are not the same as the actual home areas where I was born and raised, even though I moved away from there almost 20 years ago.
The British Isles are one place that I have felt a special connection to since before I even travelled there for the first time. The feeling I had, when I first journeyed through the Kentish hills on a bus to London at the age of 14 is well remembered and still hard to describe. I have since often wondered where it’s coming from. Is it rooted somewhere deep in my DNA? I don't know… the earliest ancestors I can trace are from regions that are now Poland.
One answer is likely culture. The music I listened to and the books I read as a teenager originated mostly from Britain. I have always liked literature in which the landscape plays a major part, almost like a character itself… like the Moors in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Even Tolkien's Middle Earth is deeply rooted in British landscapes.
On the contrary, they always feed the longing to return which only grows with time and is accompanied by a certain unspecific ache - that is what Hiraeth means, I think.
It is likely that this landscape that I now think of is largely idealised in my imagination, but nonetheless my actual journeys to Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales haven't disappointed so far. On the contrary, they always feed the longing to return which only grows with time and is accompanied by a certain unspecific ache - that is what Hiraeth means, I think.
I have been to many areas which look similar to some places of the British Isles like Brittany (Cornwall) and other areas in Central France. I liked them well enough, but the emotional connection is not the same, even though Brittany came quite close.
There are some other places for me that cannot be limited to a specific location on a map, which evoke similar emotions of longing. These are certain coastal regions, mountain areas (1000-3000 m altitude) and green valleys, rivers and forests. There seem to be certain types of landscapes, where I feel most at home. When I think of coastal areas, I see those of Central to Northern Europe in my mind's eye, whereas an exotic beach with palm trees doesn't do much for me. Even the Mediterranean coasts don't tickle me in the same way as the view of a rough rocky shoreline in Scotland.
I guess these kinds of landscapes are the ones that resonate most with my internal, spiritual landscape. It's where I feel most at ease and therefore at home. The question of why that is and why I have that strange attraction to the British Isles in particular, is likely one that will accompany me for the rest of my life.
I guess these kinds of landscapes are the ones that resonate most with my internal, spiritual landscape. It's where I feel most at ease and therefore at home.
Interestingly, when I am in one of these places it is still possible to feel that same longing while actually being there and looking at it. Sometimes it seems such an intense sense of place that it actually hurts.
So the emotion I feel when I look at images of mountains, the sea and deep forests is not only a longing to travel, but also longing for home - Hiraeth.
The photos I've chosen are those that express this concept most clearly for me and which cause this particular kind of ache most strongly. While looking through my photos I found that ‘Hiraeth’ is definitely one important reason why I am interested in landscape photography at all.
When I looked up the word I also found this wonderful poem which the author kindly allowed me to quote in this article. It also inspired me to write about this at all, because it made me see that I am not alone with these feelings that don’t seem to make much sense intellectually.
Hiraeth
The most beautiful word I had ever heard
I hold it close to my chest like it is mine to keep
It is not, but still it feels as if it is a word just for me
To heal an aching heart
Its definition swirls in my mind and leaves me dumbfounded
Mouth ajar as the words echo in my memory
Hiraeth, a Welsh word
“Untranslatable deep nostalgia for a place or time that will never be again”
Or a place and time that never really was
A longing for home
There is a word for everything but who knew
There would even be a word floating to the precipice
Catching me before I fall
It whispers “you are not alone”
There is a word for this
A way to explain how I am feeling
And the word that means longing for home
Feels like home to me
Yes, this is it, the word I have been searching for
The word that rolls off of the tongue
And makes me feel like I am normal
Finally, there are words to describe how I am feeling
One word, I treasure it so
And as you hear its meaning maybe you too will feel held
In the space where you know something should be
From a time long forgotten
A time that never was
Ours to keep, ours to hold
Hiraeth
Hold me
You are home
Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted from our subscribers. Each portfolios consisting of four images related in some way.
Submit Your 4x4 Portfolio
Interested in submitting your work? We're on the lookout for new portfolios for the next few issues, so please do get in touch!
These four images are connected in diverse ways. First of all, they represent my main focus of interest in nature photography, namely trees and forests. Furthermore, they belong to a series of images taken in square format, which offers me an interesting variety of possible compositions in my opinion. Then I chose black and white processing for them in order to concentrate on the diverse structures found in woodlands. And finally, they all arose in the familiar surroundings close to my home in Austria on the outskirts of Vienna during the lockdown following the pandemic in 2020. My wife and I took up the opportunity to scout out the Biosphere Park Wienerwald (Vienna Woods), an extended forest area. We are familiar with this region since our childhood, yet slowing down and raising awareness in this period made it possible for us to see long-known places with different eyes.
I am drawn to grey, damp low light conditions. It might be correlated with that I am born in November and those conditions are appearing fairly often here in Sweden at that time period.
Visiting the island of Ikaria, I admired the combination of dense vegetation, gorges and forests with breathtaking seacoasts. Since the beginning of my exploration, I got the feeling that Ikaria is a place forgotten by time. It consists of vast mountainous areas with alternations in the natural habitat varying between green plains and bare rocks which have impressive formations, sculptured by the strong winds. This contrast caught my attention from the first moment and I really wanted to capture them.
The routes that cross the central part of the island, give a relaxing-panoramic view. Having crossed the central mountainous part and returning back to the hotel where I was staying, the trip had a surprise in store for me. At some point, my eyes were captivated by a river that crossed the underground part of the road. Leaving the car aside, I started searching for access to this hidden paradise.
The first thing I noticed when I went down, was the heavy winter landslides. Despite the river had dried up due to the summer conditions, it had created a small lake. The sunset light spread gently under the dense vegetation of the area, thus creating soft lighting. The rocks as well as the fallen leaves from the old plane trees covered by the dust of the landslides created a sense of a forgotten landscape in time which simultaneously gave me the feeling that despite the chaotic scenery, everything looked harmonious with each other.
With restricted travel this last year I set myself the challenge of finding interesting subjects in rural Cambridgeshire in the UK. I settled on intimate landscapes in three local woodlands Monk’s Wood, Woodwalton Fen, and Holme Fen. I ‘discovered’ them serendipitously in that I was not looking for them at the times I became aware of them. In some ways this seems to be a metaphor for finding intimate landscape subjects. You may be out in the field but not at all aware of what you will discover. Intimate landscape is all about discovering and revealing both the subject and one’s self.
Each of these woodlands has its own character and history despite being so close to one and other. The lesson here is to be curious and take time to explore the world around you. It is more diverse and interesting than a first impression might impart. Here are some of my notes on the subject at the time.
“It seems I am making regular rounds to my three local woodlands now. Each has a unique character and rather than being repetitive, I find new areas to explore afresh in some and comfort in the familiar places of ones I know better. Of course, these woodlands change all the time, with the seasons and the weather. If one looks carefully enough and is sensitive to subtleties, there is change all around.
This morning I visit Monk’s Wood. Growing up a hillside on determinedly clay soil it is markedly different from the two fen woodlands of Holme and Woodwalton. These latter two are pancake flat being in the drained marshes of the fens. They are also comparatively new.
The silver birches of Holme would not have turned up until after the draining of the fens as they prefer well drained soil. The nearby area of Whittlesey is the last of the fenlands to be drained so the forest is perhaps 150 years old.
Woodwalton Fen was purchased by Charles Rothschild in 1910 as a nature reserve. I am not sure the state of it then but a map from the 1860’s shows it to be a section of drained fenland much like the surrounding area. It is still laced with the drainage canals which are maintained as part of the reserve.
Monk’s Wood by contrast is what one might properly call ancient woodland though that term probably implies more than is true about the place. It is shown in medieval maps and so has been known for some time. It must be said that few of the trees seem that old, but woodlands were for centuries places where locals took resources like game and timber.”
Over the year I spent on this project I feel this focus has allowed me to improve my ability to find and capture intimate landscape images. Researching the history of these places has deepened my understanding of them as well. For instance, there is a curious lack of large old trees at Monk’s Wood despite being mentioned in the Domesday Book. It turns out that after World War I some Canadian lumbermen harvested all the big trees.
For now, I work exclusively with film as a means of connecting with my brother who was a talented photographer. I use a combination of medium format (Mamiya 645 Pro) and Large Format 4x5 (Intrepid 4x5). In medium format I favour a 150mm lens to get a tighter crop of small subjects. I am sometimes asked ‘why film?’ For me it has improved my photography by making me think more about the process. I also find film photography is like my other interests of fly fishing and woodworking. Flyfishing because of its contemplative outdoors nature. Woodworking because it is a challenging creative craft with a connection to the past.
I first saw this photograph when judging Outdoor Photographer of the Year back in 2017. The photographs were judged anonymously. Sometimes you can hazard a guess about the author but I’m not sure Lizzie would have been in most of the judges’ minds at the time because she is mostly known for her colour work. All of the judges liked this photograph and it was among those selected for inclusion in the book. I liked it so much that I am now the very happy owner of a beautiful print.
Lizzie has often talked about her preference for scenes that do not reference a specific place. This little view could be anywhere and that universality gives it relevance; we can all relate to it, imagine ourselves in a similar place, without having to go to extraordinary lengths to get there. In this strange age of limited travel, there’s comfort in that.
Although the subject is a snowy scene, this is not a cold photograph. The fringe of branches that gracefully dangle over the top of the frame create a sense of haven. We are almost cradled within the scene. I can imagine myself pausing under the branches of the tree, perhaps to enjoy a hot chocolate from my thermos as I admire the far tree line, before heading out into the cold again.
Most creative geniuses most of the time will display an eccentricity that strays noticeably away from normalcy while stopping just short of the utterly crazy. ~Dean Keith Simonton
Despite so many challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the requirement for social distancing also created opportunities for me to spend more time doing virtual presentations for camera clubs and other photography groups, answering photographers’ questions on a variety of topics. To my surprise, topics related to psychology seem to have been a recurring theme.
Much writing about creativity highlights the beneficial effects of artistic expression, which are many, but the psychology of highly creative people (especially those predisposed to what researchers refer to as “major,” or “Big-C” creativity) is not all positive, or even benign. As creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton put it, “Creative geniuses may not be the kinds of folks you normally would want as lovers, friends, in-laws, coworkers, or neighbours.”
Despite so many challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the requirement for social distancing also created opportunities for me to spend more time doing virtual presentations for camera clubs and other photography groups, answering photographers’ questions on a variety of topics. To my surprise, topics related to psychology seem to have been a recurring theme.
A common definition for creativity is the production of novel and useful products.
For the eighth iteration of this column, I decided to focus on the artwork of a photographer who I discovered through a stroke of luck. One of my friends and former podcast guests, and a truly wonderful black and white photographer in his own right, Chuck Kimmerle, emailed me to tell me about a photographer in Minnesota that neither of us had heard of before who has incredible work. Of course, I was very interested because I have found that finding high quality photography artists in the landscape and nature medium that I have never heard of before is quite a challenge in this digital age we find ourselves in. Upon examining Joel Truckenbrod’s work, I was immediately gobsmacked and impressed by his control of light, his use of composition, and the uniquely creative qualities found within it. Joel’s work oozes with personal expression, subtle yet wonderful nuance, and has an aethereal quality. Joel works exclusively within the black and white genre, which, admittedly, is not one that I find myself admiring very often; however, there is just something unique and interesting about Joel’s photography that pulls me in and gives me a glimpse into his soul. Perhaps these qualities are what we should all aspire to reach for in our own work as artists in this medium.
Joel is a native resident in the State of Minnesota along the northern boundary of the United States and the majority of his photographic work has been created there, especially the northeastern region near the Canadian border.
Editors Note: I should mention that this article wasn't solicited by us in relation to our recent announcement about the Natural Landscape Photography Awards and was actually submitted in draft form prior to the competition even being considered (Nov 2020). However, although the topic of realist vs creative photography is one that has been around since the dawn of photography itself, it does seem that the topic is once again rising to prominence. I'm sure there is no fundamental answer to this but as the debate goes on, we're very interested in different points of view. Take it away, Timothy...
Tell the truth and honour the place. ~ Jack Dykinga
Photoshop – transitive verb. To alter (a digital image) with Photoshop software or other image-editing software especially in a way that distorts reality (as for deliberately deceptive purposes) ~Merriam-Webster Dictionary
The subject of Guy Tal’s recent article, On Photographic Technology, (Vol. 213), may represent a sea change in landscape photography, yet it appears to have slipped by largely unchallenged. It is an important topic for us, especially with the recent introduction of artificial intelligence algorithms by Adobe and Luminar.
To summarise his position, Guy believes that the viewing public should – indeed, has – come to expect that landscape photographs are digitally manipulated by the photographer into an interpretation of a scene that did not actually exist. He said, “representation of realistic appearances is no longer the default, and may soon no longer even be the primary, use for photography.”
Referring to realistic photography, he asserts, “those who choose to practice this kind of photography will have to distinguish their work as such” and to “cease relying on common ignorance of the creative potential of the medium that is unlikely to persist.”
If traditional, reality-based photography has been pushed aside by creative digital photographers in pursuit of their artistic expression, the door is open to allow machines to further assist the artist-photographer in creating an entirely new level of abstraction.
This is an important event in the history of landscape photography because it provides justification for the use of artificial intelligence. If traditional, reality-based photography has been pushed aside by creative digital photographers in pursuit of their artistic expression, the door is open to allow machines to further assist the artist-photographer in creating an entirely new level of abstraction.
Guy’s reference to GPS for navigation is a perfect analogy for AI. Just as pushing a button produces a pleasant female voice that guides us unthinking to our destination, soon all we will have to do is push a button to create a fantastic landscape image. AI will learn our creative tendencies, anticipate what we would create on our own and create an artistic expression for us through the miracle of mathematics.
According to recent push-emails from Luminar, AI will alter your image to “create breath-taking results” based on analysis of “thousands of shots from pro photographers.” This program will transform “any photo into a stunning masterpiece in the blink of an eye,” the purpose of which is to “bring you artistic success.”
The natural extension of Guy’s thesis is that landscape photography will have moved from in-camera work based on reality to creative post-processing based on imagination to machine-created art based on algorithms.
In other words, soon you won’t have to take a great picture or learn all that Photoshop stuff or luminosity masks in order to garner Likes, win big competitions, teach workshops and represent brands. Just one click and you will leave Alex Noriega in the dust.
There you have it. The machine is going to do the work to make you an artist.
The natural extension of Guy’s thesis is that landscape photography will have moved from in-camera work based on reality to creative post-processing based on imagination to machine-created art based on algorithms. People who embrace this new technology will argue that the resulting masterpiece is based on their machine-learned creative history and, therefore, really is their creation. They just didn’t have to actually do anything to create it.
Several photographers with well-subscribed social media outlets, have openly lamented the arrival of AI and have expressed scepticism about its use in landscape photography. But isn’t this the same as, say, film-based photographers lamenting the use of Photoshop to alter images? AI is just one more step in the progression of technology to assist photographer-artists in self-expression. The silly part is that it creates rifts among us.
There is a way we can all pursue our passions without animosity towards each other or towards each other’s creative paths. Guy suggested that the realist photographers need to identify their images as such. Take that one step further. We all should identify our work as a process genre within landscape. Stupid idea, you say? Painters do it. They don’t just have paintings, they have genres within genres. They have oils, acrylics, watercolours, sketches, etc. They have photorealism, cubism, dadaism, impressionism, romanticism, etc., within portraiture, landscape, abstract, etc.
Now is the time to establish different genres within the field. Photographic technology is forcing us to make these declarations..
Realist photographers could proclaim their work as, well, photographs. Digital creatives could identify their work as photo-illustrations. And AI artists will find a word to identify their art.
This should be supported, possibly even required, by venues such as contests, exhibitions, publications and social media. The images would not have to be watermarked as such, but rather mentioned in the accompanying text. “Fred’s work brings a realistic view of the natural world.” “Ginger uses images captured in nature as a basis for her creative expression.” Images could be identified in metadata as a keyword. “Landscape, Portugal, sunset, photo-illustration.”
We should not throw this on the public to figure out or expect that they will assume all landscape photographs are a product of whatever the latest technology allows. Soon, landscape “photographs” will include everything from a well-executed picture of reality to a substantially fabricated creation. Now is the time to establish different genres within the field. Photographic technology is forcing us to make these declarations.
There’s something about the sea that bewitches, even for those of us who spend our lives largely anchored to the land. With a slow shutter something elemental, raw and at times overwhelming in power, becomes a quieter beast that we may contemplate at our leisure.
There seems an inevitability that Margaret Soraya has ended up making images of the sea, having swapped courses at college so that she could study close to it (in between swimming and surfing). Margaret describes her own values as being based around quiet, solitude and nature. She started leading landscape workshops two years ago and in developing her landscape offer has found a new purpose in helping others.
Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, your education and early interests, and what that led you to do?
I grew up in Manchester and spent most of my childhood happily drawing and painting by myself. The rest of my spare time I spent swimming! Nothing much has changed, apart from that drawing became photography. I was a very shy, sensitive child who was content to be alone, absorbed in my creativity. The one thing that was pivotal in my life was that my mother always encouraged my creative side. I have no idea where I would be today if this hadn't been the case.
I studied foundation art at Manchester and went on to a Fine Art painting degree in Coventry, which I soon switched for a degree in Photography in the Arts, mostly driven by location. I was unhappy in Coventry and yearned for the coast. So when the opportunity came to go to study at Swansea, I grabbed it. I began surfing within the first few weeks of being in Swansea and felt true alignment with where I was living and creating by the coast. I was often seen running into lectures with wet hair and a surfboard on my car outside the building. My tutors were less than impressed and further had reason to dislike me due to my quietness, lack of confidence, and inability to articulate what the work that I felt so passionate doing was actually about.
Photography came into your life fairly early on, with the sea providing inspiration even then, but the structure of college didn't suit you and you left it behind for a while. When and in what form did it return?
I left my degree in Photography a year early after receiving continuing heavy criticism and a general lack of support and encouragement. I put my cameras down completely for many years after that and started a family and got drawn into the humdrum of life and supporting the family. It was not until 10 years later that I bought a digital camera with the intention of starting a business with it. Quite specifically, a social photography business, which I had identified as being the fastest way to income through Photography.
I have supported my family solely for 16 years now with wedding photography. I have always known that it wasn't my passion, but I did get good at it. It causes me a lot of stress - the sort of pressure when we work in a line of field that is so far out of line with our true passion; it wears us down. I began to shoot landscapes for myself ten years ago after making a conscious decision to start shooting in the landscape again. As my children grew up and life became slightly more stable, I was able to spend more time in the landscape.
But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. ~ Tim Wu
The ferns spread out before me in shades of burnt orange, gold, and brown. Framing the scene through my viewfinder I realised I would not be able to capture the desired depth of field with one exposure; focus stacking would be required. No problem. I shot three exposures, varying only the focus point. Later, I imported the exposures into Lightroom, opened them as layers in Photoshop and completed the focus stack. Easy. Simple. Clean. If I owned one of the new-fangled mirrorless cameras I could have done the focus stacking completely in-camera. Even easier.
While recently reading a monograph on a Harry Callahan exhibit the writer mentioned the process of making an image with an 8 x 10 view camera. I thought of how much photography has changed over the decades and began to wonder how those changes have impacted the photographs we make today, for better or for worse.
While recently reading a monograph on a Harry Callahan exhibit the writer mentioned the process of making an image with an 8 x 10 view camera. I thought of how much photography has changed over the decades and began to wonder how those changes have impacted the photographs we make today, for better or for worse.
On more than one occasion I have read the stated belief that we are in the golden age of photography. From the standpoint of technology that may well be true. The technology available to us today has opened up possibilities that we could barely fathom thirty years ago. Now with a little luck even the most casual photographer can easily capture magnificent scenes. Camera technology has made the process of capturing a photo much easier and convenient while advances in software have allowed for greater freedom of expression. But, like every seemingly good thing in life, that convenience comes with a price. Has the convenience enslaved our creative and expressive abilities?
“Landscape Photography and the Meaning of Life”. It’s a bold title, to be sure. And it runs the risk of sounding wildly pretentious. Still, I chose it to catch your attention (it worked, didn’t it?) and inspire you to think more deeply about the relationship between what you photograph and who you are.
Ultimately the title pokes a stick at the pesky question that is – or should be – at the heart of all our image-making: Why?
Why do we choose to make landscape photographs rather than other types of photographs? Why do we prefer some kinds of landscapes over others? Why do certain seasons or weather conditions inspire us to take our camera out, while at other times we prefer to stay home and work at our computer? And, as we’re scrolling through the seemingly endless stream of images on that computer, why do some images make us pause, and an occasional one even stops us, spellbound, in our tracks?
Subscribers to On Landscape are an introspective bunch, so I know I am not alone in pondering these questions. Regular contributors (notably Guy Tal, Alister Benn, Rafael Rojas, David Ward and Joe Cornish) have written extensively and eloquently about the Why of what we do. Yet, each of us brings our own perspective and style to this weighty question, so I hope mine may contribute something of value to our collective search for an answer.
Shattered is characteristic of the Atlantic Coastal Barrens in autumn and gives a sense of the harsh conditions its inhabitants face.
Why landscape photographs?
Given the variety of potential subject matter in the world, why do some of us choose almost exclusively to photograph the landscape? The explanation lies, I think, in the interplay between motivation and inspiration.
When, instead, we allow our personal thoughts and feelings about the landscape to guide our image-making, our motivation becomes internal.
Motivation can be thought of as the reason or practical purpose for our image-making – what we hope to achieve when we take our camera out into the countryside, what we plan to do with the images we bring home, and who their intended audience is.
Sometimes the source of our motivation is external. For example, we may make landscape images to win a competition, satisfy a commercial client, expand our website portfolio, or gain approval from our photographic peers. While these may seem important goals in the context of our daily social and economic lives, the resulting images are unlikely to be especially meaningful to us because their creation is shaped by other people’s preferences rather than our own.
When, instead, we allow our personal thoughts and feelings about the landscape to guide our image-making, our motivation becomes internal.
Internal motivation often has more to do with the experience of making the photographs than with the photographs themselves. People who become landscape photographers commonly pick up a camera for the first time to record, remember and share these experiences. Perhaps a wilderness adventure or a journey to some exotic location, or, for those with scientific interests, their interactions with the landscape’s flora, fauna or geology. Over time, as we become proficient enough with the technical tools of our craft that we can start looking beyond them, this initial, outward-looking approach to image-making often evolves into one that is more introspective and artistic.
Increasingly in these stressful times, however, our internal motivation for heading out into nature with a camera is for therapeutic purpose; to escape, to cogitate, to restore our sense of perspective.
First Snow came at the end of a nasty, wet, October day when the temperature fell just enough to turn the rain into big flakes of snow – and my gloomy mood into a gleeful one.
The Bog’s Last Fling as the autumn colour fades to winter monochrome, a time of wistfulness for some people, and delight for others.
Landscape photographers are usually – although not universally – introverts, at odds with the unrelenting connectivity and busyness of modern society. The wild outdoors is our refuge. Even without a camera, our ramblings in the countryside help to revive our physical and mental well-being. Here we can exercise our muscles, breathe fresh air, raise our eyeballs up from our navels towards the distant horizon, and feel awed by the natural world. When we add a camera to our ramblings, together with a dash of inspiration, we may become so absorbed in the image-making process that all else is forgotten.
The all-important “dash of inspiration” is the spark we experience in response to something in the landscape. An obvious example is the wow of a fiery sunset that inspires so many people to grab their cameras.
The all-important “dash of inspiration” is the spark we experience in response to something in the landscape. An obvious example is the wow of a fiery sunset that inspires so many people to grab their cameras. Others with more seasoned visual antennae will likely skip the sunset, but maybe fascinated by patterns in a freshly ploughed field, or feel intensely moved by a windblown tree, or amused by quirky road sign juxtaposed against a wilderness vista.
Whatever the external stimulus – the sunset, the field, the tree, the road sign – the important thing about inspiration is the internal response it triggers. It engages not only our senses but also our emotions, our intellect, our imagination, our aesthetic sensibilities. It focuses our attention and it creates – or, more accurately, it reveals – a meaningful connection between ourselves and whatever it was in the landscape that inspired us.
Why particular landscapes, seasons, weather?
But why does each of us respond differently to different landscapes and to different environmental conditions in those landscapes?
I have a friend who loves the forest. She can walk happily all day on a woodland trail. She feels comforted by the cradling canopy of trees. She stops to admire spring wildflowers, dappled summer sunlight or autumn leaves on the forest floor, birds flitting in the branches, a brook burbling through the ferns. And she makes beautiful photographs of these things; lush, gentle, sometimes dreamily impressionistic portraits of intimate forest scenes. When January comes, she laments the bleakness and settles into her studio for a winter of image processing.
Winter Birch trees shimmer with the colourful promise of spring and bring to mind the cycle of life, death and re-birth.
Whenever my friend and I hike together with our cameras, I enjoy the challenge of mentally disentangling her forest and finding compositions in it that work for me. For about half an hour. Then I hear myself screaming (quietly to myself) for the trail to emerge at a hilltop lookout. I want to see the sky. I long for a sweeping view. I need to escape the forest’s claustrophobic green. Later in the year, as autumn turns the green to brown and my friend wistfully winds down her image-making season, I am busy cleaning my kit, digging out my woolly socks and feeling the stirrings of real photographic enthusiasm again.
I have another friend who, several years ago, traded in his ultra-wide-angle lens, first for a telephoto, then for a macro lens. Within a few months, all the expansive landscapes had disappeared from his portfolio, replaced by exquisitely crafted images of landscape details; bands of colour in rocks, patterns in ice puddles, miniature forests in patches of lichen.
My friend attributed this transformation to photographic maturity. He became dismissive of classic, wide-angle images and scornful of the photographers who make them.
I believe it is possible to make expansive landscape photographs that are compelling, distinctive, and meaningful. But only by crafting them with our hearts, and in the right landscapes, not with a formula at some iconic location.
He has a point. The world is awash in this kind of photograph. After all, they’re relatively easy to replicate. All you need are the GPS coordinates for a scenic site, a few standard compositional elements, some flattering light, the right gear and a modicum of technique. It is also true that with photographic maturity we become better able to focus our attention (and lenses) on specific attributes of the landscape that inspire us, which certainly can result in tighter compositions.
But I am reluctant to throw the baby (the wide perspective) out with the bathwater (the over-photographed scene), because I believe it is possible to make expansive landscape photographs that are compelling, distinctive, and meaningful. But only by crafting them with our hearts, and in the right landscapes, not with a formula at some iconic location.
So, what is the “right” landscape? For my forest friend, the answer is obvious and makes sense for her personality, which is embracing and comfortable. For my macro friend, it is the miniature landscapes he comes across almost everywhere, which suits his meticulous character to a tee.
And the right landscape for me?
Where I live (in Nova Scotia, Canada) we call it the Atlantic Coastal Barrens. More generically it will be familiar to many as tundra, heath or moorland that is close to, and dominated by, the sea. The terrain is characterised by exposed bedrock, boggy soil, and stunted trees. The weather is moody, windy, cool and wet. The landscape offers broad views, framed by dramatic skies as storms roll off the ocean, and it comes ablaze every autumn as wild blueberry and other native bushes turn scarlet. At other times the views are obscured by fog, blizzards, or clouds of biting insects. It is a harsh environment, yet paradoxically fragile too, a place where only the toughest plants and creatures can survive, and yet are so easily destroyed.
Entanglement is my answer to a visual puzzle in the forest that challenged me – an organised person – to make order from the chaos of sticks.
Few people live on the barrens or even venture there, except to pick berries. Most see it as a dreary landscape. And often it is. But I have made my home beside Nova Scotia’s largest coastal barrens, and whenever I am away from it for more than a few days, I begin to pine.
It’s not that I refuse to travel. Like most people, I enjoy the excitement of exploring new places, and like most photographers, I find fresh scenery visually stimulating. However, unlike most, I rarely travel more than a day’s drive from home, usually to out-of-the-way places, always in the off-season, and never anywhere hot. The “green and pleasant land” is more appealing to me when it is frozen and snowy. Trees are more interesting when stripped of their leaves; beaches more alluring in the fog, without footprints. And my heart beats faster when the winter’s first snowflakes begin to fall.
So, the right landscape for me, both personally and photographically, is a so-called barren one. However, this still begs the question, why?
The answer seems so simple now. But it took me years (decades, if I am honest) to figure it out, or at least to say it aloud:
I am a loner.
This explains everything! My choice of home (rural, remote), my career (self-employed landscape photographer), my living arrangements (solo, albeit always with a dog and/or cat), where and when I travel (off-season, off the beaten track), my favourite seasons (winter, fall), my preferred photographic process (solitary, slow), and ultimately the photographs I make (moody, spacious, structured, minimalistic).
The details of my story are relevant only to me. You will have your own right landscape and your own story that explains it. My story boils down to a profound need for solitude, space and silence that I’ve learned are as essential to me as air, water and food. Out-of-the-way places, especially in wintertime, are my best hope of finding these things. I have also learned that – contrary to the prevailing opinion in our extrovert-dominated society – being a loner is not an affliction to be cured or a misdemeanour to be apologised for, but rather, a way of life to be lived. Enjoyed! How I wish I had known this all those decades ago.
The details of my story are relevant only to me. You will have your own right landscape and your own story that explains it. My story boils down to a profound need for solitude, space and silence that I’ve learned are as essential to me as air, water and food.
The Long View encourages us to look farther and be curious about what lies hidden beyond the horizon.
Just Passing Through is all that any of us is doing in this life, and the raven is often seen as an omen of death, so this image is an exhortation to make the most of it before we fly out of the frame.
The meaning of life?
In popular parlance, the “meaning” of life is synonymous with its “significance” or “value”, but scholars have been squabbling about the details for millennia. Countless volumes have been written on the topic, and still there is no consensus. Only a continuum of answers ranging from absolutist (life is intrinsically meaningful, courtesy of a god or Mother Nature) to relativist (life’s meaning varies with culture and individual experience) to nihilist (life is meaningless).
Certainly, as a lowly landscape photographer, I do not claim to have the answer. (You weren’t actually expecting one, were you?) However, my experience in making landscape photographs has led me to some conclusions about meaning in my own life. Days spent alone with my camera exploring wild places, responding (or not) to the scenery around me, feeling invigorated (or not) by the weather and excited (or not) about the subject matter I was photographing, and then, back at home at my computer, reviewing and evaluating how well (or not) my images express my experiences in the landscape. And, at every step, gnawing away at the question, why?
My conclusions are comforting. To me. For now.
I suppose I might describe myself as a usually-optimistic relativist-borderline-nihilist with respect to the meaning of life (what a wonderful business card that would make!). In plain English; I don’t see my life as inherently either meaningful or meaningless, and I am grateful for this ambiguity because it allows me to organise my daily life productively around projects that are important to me, cheered by the awareness that my life and its projects are, at best, of only minuscule and fleeting significance in the broader scheme of things.
So, in my photographs and writings, I work towards promoting environmental, physical and mental health and creating thoughtful images, at the same time confident that a heart attack or diabetes, an earthquake, climate change or, ahem, a global pandemic, will sooner or later wipe me – and the rest of the human species – from the Earth. And the Earth will breathe a huge sigh of relief.
The Ends of the Earth is where I live, at the remote eastern tip of Nova Scotia, and this is the view from my studio window as shafts of sunlight spar with storm clouds for dominance over the sea. The ever-changing skyscape here is a constant source of inspiration for my work.
Finding meaning through landscape photography
Whether my meaning-of-life conclusions leave you nodding your head in agreement, shaking it in opposition or scratching it in bewilderment, is not important. My conclusions don’t matter (except to me). What matters more widely is the process of finding them through photographing landscapes – experiencing, contemplating and visually celebrating scenery that is meaningful to us, and baring our souls, if only to ourselves, as we do so.
This process may be commonplace to more experienced members of our On Landscape community. But for those who are new to landscape photography, or just drifting along without much impetus or direction, it’s helpful to begin with a less daunting objective than “discover and express the meaning of life in my landscape photographs!” Instead, ask yourself some smaller questions – about images, about landscapes, and about yourself – and tease the answers from your subconscious with some simple(ish) exercises.
My conclusions don’t matter (except to me). What matters more widely is the process of finding them through photographing landscapes – experiencing, contemplating and visually celebrating scenery that is meaningful to us, and baring our souls, if only to ourselves, as we do so.
Exercise #1 – Looking at images
Look back through issues of On Landscape, or any other landscape photography magazine or book with quality images from multiple contributors, and collect (with scissors or screen captures) 25-50 images that “speak to you.” Try to pretend you are not a photographer as you do this. Just respond to the images personally and intuitively without over-thinking your selections.
Spread the images out in front of you, shuffle them around, and take a closer look. Are your selections mostly expansive landscapes or intimate ones? Is their mood generally bright, ethereal, sunny, or dark, contrasty, brooding? Are they sharply detailed, orderly and realistic, or dreamy, chaotic, impressionistic, abstract? Do any special favourites or trends emerge from the collection? If so, can you explain why (answering as a human, not as a photographer)? What is it about these images that resonates with your personality or your present circumstances and mental state?
Now repeat the exercise, but this time using your own photographs. You will find this more difficult because it’s impossible to avoid becoming side-tracked by the memories and emotions that are attached to your own images. Ask yourself the same questions as before, looking for trends in your images – and in your answers – that hint at their underlying meaning.
Exercise #2 – Looking at landscapes
Imagine the day (soon, we hope!) when we are all vaccinated against COVID-19 and free to roam the world again with our cameras. Open an atlas or Google Maps and pinpoint a few places you’d like to visit. And, since we are daydreaming, let’s assume an unlimited budget, lots of time, hassle-free logistics, and no purpose for your image-making apart from pleasing yourself.
Now, having plotted a holiday (or two or three), look at your list of destinations. Are they close to home, or far away and exotic? Have you been there before, or are they new to you? Are they tropical, temperate, polar, desert, forest, coastal, mountainous, tundra, grassland, wetland, farmland, urban, rural, pristine wilderness, or a variety of the above? What time of year would you visit? Would you spend the entire time at one destination, or try to see as many places as possible during your holiday? How would you travel: by aeroplane, a cruise ship, your car, a canoe, or backpacking?
This list of questions could go on, and of course, there are no “correct” answers. The point is to unleash your imagination and see where on the planet it takes you – and how and when, and most importantly why. What is it about these particular landscapes and style of travel through them that suits your character?
Exercise #3 – Looking at ourselves
Take your camera to one of your favourite landscapes (or, if you can’t visit a favourite landscape right now, mine your image archives instead) and create a photograph titled “Self Portrait” – without including yourself (or any other person) in the image. This means you must use features of the landscape itself to represent you.
The most obvious self-portrait for me would be a lone tree in a snowy field. However, at a deeper level, with all my human complexity, any of the images that accompany this essay could be a portrait of me. Taken together, they give a well-rounded picture of who I am, moody blues and all.
The same complexity is true of you, so it will be challenging to create a single image that adequately sums you up. Still, the process is worthwhile because it encourages you to point your camera very deliberately in both directions, outward to the landscape and inward into your soul.
This process of looking both ways is at the heart of expressive image-making. All landscape photographs, by definition, portray features of the external, geophysical world, but only meaningful ones enable glimpses into the topography and scenery of our inner worlds as well.
A Dark Horse was my companion during a picnic lunch on a remote hiking trail as a storm rolled in, reminding me of the value of friendship (even for loners) in times of trouble.
Self Portrait, Uprooted is a landscape I created in my studio from the upturned root of a wild rose, positioned on a piece of satin cloth – one of several such manufactured landscapes that reminded me of the wild outdoors and kept me sane during the COVID-19 lockdown. “Uprooted” was especially relevant as I was also moving house during the pandemic.
Meaningful landscape photographs?
So, how do we create meaningful landscape photographs? It is as simple – and as difficult – as adapting the process described in Exercise #3 above for every image we make.
Step 1 – Shut out distractions
When you set out to explore the landscape, turn off all your devices. No car radio, no podcasts on headphones, no cell phone. This frees you from the tempting distractions and notifications that bombard your life, and allows you to pay attention to the world around you.
When you set out to explore the landscape, turn off all your devices. No car radio, no podcasts on headphones, no cell phone. This frees you from the tempting distractions and notifications that bombard your life, and allows you to pay attention to the world around you.
In fact, don’t just turn your phone off; leave it behind. After all, countless generations of explorers managed successfully without one, discovering whole new worlds in the process. The lack of emergency backup – most people’s professed reason for carrying a phone – makes you even more attentive to your pathway through the wilderness, if only for self-preservation.
A significant distraction for most people is other people. So, ideally, explore the landscape on your own, or, if solitude is too stressful for you, be sure to go with a kindred spirit who shares your approach and appreciates the benefits of companionable silence.
Also leave your camera in your bag – at the bottom of your bag – at least for now. Resist the pull of photographic expectations and practical motivations (getting a winning shot), and banish hyperfocal distance calculations from your head. If it helps, practice mindfulness meditation, focus on breathing, count your footsteps, whatever method you find most comfortable to silence your “chattering monkeys” so you can focus on the here and now, in readiness for Step 2.
Step 2 – Experience the landscape
Immerse yourself in the landscape wholeheartedly, paying attention to everything around you, not just with your eyes but with all your senses. Spend time, go for a walk, sit on a rock, have a picnic lunch, listen to bird song, feel the wind, taste the salty spray, smell the roses (literally as well as metaphorically), allow yourself to be mesmerised by the colours of periwinkle shells in a tide pool.
Once you have relaxed in the environment and taken it all in, make a (mental or paper) list of the elements you see – a “visual inventory” of the landscape.
Step 3 – Examine your responses
At the same time pay attention to your thoughts and feelings about these elements. Perhaps you find yourself brooding on your mortality under the weight of a stormy sky. Or dancing with delight as the snow begins to fall. You might feel kinship with a straggly old tree or a croaking raven. You may be overwhelmed with vertigo as you peer over a cliff edge. Delve into your responses and the connection they reveal between yourself and the landscape by asking the perennial question, why?
Step 4 – Translate your responses into images
Now, at last, pick up your camera and use your craft – working with light, colour and visual design – to translate your responses into photographs that are truly worthy of the experience you had in the landscape. That is, meaningful photographs. (Keeping in mind that if you show your photographs to me, they may mean something completely different, or nothing at all, unless my response to “your” landscape is similar – something to be wary of when releasing your images into the world!)
On the Way OutIt is my memorial to a beautiful old hay barn that, a year after I made this photograph, toppled over during a winter storm.
In a nutshell…
How effective we are at making meaningful landscape photographs is determined by our ability to forge, recognise and express meaningful connections between our lives and the landscapes we travel through. And this depends less on how well we know the landscape or the buttons and dials on our cameras, and more on how well we know ourselves. Enjoy the exploration!
I would recommend everyone to go through the process of choosing a single 'end frame' image. It turns out to be an excellent, almost cathartic, exercise of reflection. If you are not sure of your photographic direction before you start, then this should help.
Now I love a good grand landscape image, especially the mountains, somewhere wild, preferably Bierstadt moody (a throwback to growing up in the Highlands of Scotland no doubt). I am also very fond of smaller, quieter scenes. The woodland perhaps, where the photographer has to work really hard to make sense of the chaos. A difficult art to achieve, but when done well, it is oh so fine. I am likewise inspired by the unique work that is created by those who have mastered ICM and multiple exposure.
After my journey of reflection, however, I ended up with intimate detail as the genre I wanted to choose from. Devoid of any location reference, instead these images rely on texture, balance, pattern, light and colour, even ambiguity. Often there is an initial wonder, or perhaps puzzlement, followed by a revealing process as the image unfolds its layers. Add in an emotional connection and you have a winning formula. These are not images of the obvious. These are images born of acute observation, carefully considered and delicately produced.
Anything from 'The journey of the autumn leaves', or 'Shaped by the sea', would have been very welcome. I have even resisted the 'limpets', and instead, I have chosen an image that has seen less of the limelight.
So, I had my genre, that was the easy part....
…At this point I'm reminded of my Latin teacher, Mr McArdle, 'O me miserum est'.1
I made a shortlist of photographers and images, rediscovering some of their portfolios. I wish I could illustrate them all here. Each one very deserved. In the end, I decided upon a true master of observation, Theo Bosboom. I would expect he would find something interesting to photograph in 'dishwater'.2
Now my choice of photographer will not surprise many. Theo Bosboom has quietly built himself a strong reputation with his project-based originality. The choice of image may be more unlikely. Clearly, there were many of his images that I could have chosen as the end frame.
Anything from 'The journey of the autumn leaves', or 'Shaped by the sea', would have been very welcome. I have even resisted the 'limpets', and instead, I have chosen an image that has seen less of the limelight. It made a brief appearance on IG in August 2019 and was taken on Schiermonnikoog, a National Park and one of the West Frisian Islands (NL). I have been making a conscious effort to slow down and really study the images that catch my eye on the magic roundabout that is my IG carousel. This image seemed to deserve its chance to shine.
I’d be the first to admit that writing about a (very) recent picture is fraught with danger. I suffer from the fool’s assumption that my latest work is my best…except I know from bitter experience that it isn’t.
Yet in this instance I am willing to risk it, while the memory remains fresh. The story is simply of a local outing, in a location familiar to me. The conditions, however, were anything but.
This winter has been a rare treat. Until the temperature soared about 20ºC a few days back, it had been bitterly cold for a week. Jenny and I have both suffered chilblains, and inside the house it hovered around 4-5º C. We had meals on our knees beside the log burner, used hot water bottles and two duvets on the bed, and it was still barely warm enough.
But outside the photographic days were memorable.
Last Monday was the hardest of the hard core ‘Beast from the East’ days. I had enjoyed some time up on the Moor tops near home four weeks previously with snow, so had an idea of what to expect. But conditions are never the same twice. In January snow had settled politely everywhere, including on trees. There was even some fog to enhance the atmosphere.
This time the wind was powerful. The woods looked stark and brittle while the Moor tops were quite scoured. But where there was shelter from the brutal breeze, great drifts of snow had started to form.
Although I was on the hill before sunrise this was little help photographically because of blanket cloud to the east holding back the sun. However, it gave me time to walk, search, think. All day as it happened. In a pattern quite common on all-day outings I ended up working on around seven or eight picture ideas in total. Last Monday, the best moment came right at the end.
If anybody has been reading On Landscape on and off over the last decade, you’ll know I’ve written about competitions a few times. I have been a little dismissive of the idea of competitions in general, even the good ones (of which there are a few). The idea of competitive art seems anathema somehow but I think we can all understand the desire to see how your work would be judged by your peers, after all this is mostly what social media does, albeit in a very distorted way!
Despite repeatedly thinking about starting a competition, mostly triggered by seeing what was winning other competitions out there, I decided it wasn’t something I wanted to get involved in. I did notice that the Wildlife Photographer of the Year had dropped their main categories for landscape photography and I must admit that this got me thinking. There were really very few if any international competitions left that were rigorous in checking raw files for ‘over editing’ on a par with what the Wildlife Photographer of the Year did.
However, one day I was chatting with Alex Nail about this and he mentioned that Matt Payne and his friend Rajesh Jyothiswaran had been thinking about competitions and so I thought we could have a chat. It turns out that we all shared pretty much the same general opinion on what a competition could be and we all had a very annoying itch that wasn’t going to be satisfied until we ‘did something’ about it. And hence the idea for the Natural Landscape Photography Awards was hatched.
But why another competition? Aren’t there enough? Well, yes - there are loads out there and if you’re amongst the many people who are happy without limits when editing your images and who are primarily interested in the end product then your needs can be well satisfied.
If, however, you’re a photographer who values the effort of capturing the decisive moment, who values the intrinsic connection between the subject matter and the final processed image, who wants to celebrate the landscape and show people what they have seen and experienced it is difficult to find a level playing field for landscape photography.
I’d like to include what we’ve written on our “Why” page here...\
Why?
One of photography’s unique features is its ability to clearly represent the visual experience of the world. The deep connection between the photograph and the scene it conveys has shown the world the beauty of nature, helped convince politicians to create our national parks, shown people their effect on natural habitats and broadened the horizons of nearly every human on earth. There are few who have not marvelled at a National Geographic feature about some far-flung habitat or browsed a Sierra Club or National Trust book and had revealed to them their own treasured landscapes.
Historically, there have also been many celebrated artists who have used the camera to create works that diverge from representation in ways that no longer portray the landscape but interpret it. The Pictorialists used all the tools they had available to show just what photography was capable of as an art form.
But we now live in a world where there are blurred lines between these two aspects of photographic art. Our social media feeds show both approaches side by side with little to differentiate them. This current status quo is somewhat inevitable and understandable. However, when competitions do not make any distinction between the two, we are faced with a conundrum; Photographers who try to work within the boundaries of the landscape they actually experienced find it difficult to compete with photographs that depart from these constraints. The competitions we see online sometimes reward the technical skills of post-processing, compositing and graphic design over the challenges of working within the limits of the real world. How rarely can a portrayal of a real scene compete with the deluge of extraordinary juxtapositions of perfected moments?
The founders of this competition want to create a place where the field skills of the photographer are celebrated, where the post-processing and interpretation of images respect the inherent truth of the scene experienced, and photography aware viewers would not feel deceived by the end result if they were to see that original scene themselves.
How are we going to achieve this?
We realise that there is nothing gained by banning all aspects of image processing, which is after all an integral part of our art. We will be allowing all techniques that respect the visual integrity of the image and subject. As long as that proposed imaginary viewer, who understands how photography works, would not feel deceived if they were able to experience the moment of capture themselves, then the photographer has connected them with the landscape.
To ensure that this is the case, any photographs that get past the first stages of the competition will need to provide RAW files in support of each entry. We will check each image to make sure it does not break any of the post-processing rules we have put forward.
The judges will make the final subjective decisions on whether the post-processing is too much or just right. Undoubtedly there will be grey areas and we look forward to some robust debate!
We have also given considerable thought to the process of judging itself, which can be prone to various problems. It is inevitable that when zipping through so many images, a ‘WOW!’ photo with vibrant colours or a photo from an unusual angle will stand out. This is why so many photographs from iconic locations in extreme conditions, unusual aerial perspectives, astro images, and inventive composites do disproportionately well in competitions. We hope to eliminate these judging problems by doing the following:
Creating separate categories for astrophotography and aerial images, subjects which often catch judges eyes and possibly distract from other genres.
Creating a separate category for intimate landscapes - a genre that is often overlooked when seen against a stream of epic views.
Preparing and briefing judges on what to expect and developing a process to help selection.
Having a scoring system that guides the judges into assessing composition, light and subject and not just the instant visual impact of an image.
Letting judges promote their favourite selections in an open discussion in the final rounds.
Prominently showing the judges individual choices in the results as well as the collective final choices
We believe that all these steps will help give each image a strong chance, whether it be a spectacular aurora over a glacier or a softly lit willow tree.
We’ll be developing and expanding the rules over the coming weeks so feel free to let us know if you have any ideas.
Environmental Consideration
It’s difficult to separate the consideration of landscape photography from consideration for the land itself. If we say we engage in our craft out of love for the land, we really should consider its future in these changing times. As mentioned above, photographers have played a major part in many environmental movements, from the creation of National Parks like Ansel Adams’ work on the "Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail" book which helped save King’s Canyon to the campaigns against industrial developments like Eliott Porter’s work in Glen Canyon or Peter Dombrovskis’ beautiful work that helped save the Gordon River from the Franklin Dam development. We have to ask ourselves whether these images would have been that successful if the opposition could have said “that’s just photoshopped to look beautiful”. For many areas of relative wilderness, we are the eyewitnesses who are bringing back the message “look what you would see and experience if you came to look!”.
Sadly, landscape photography also has the potential to be part of the problem. With little consideration for where we travel and stand, ‘honeypot’ locations can be permanently damaged. Excessive international travel can no longer be seen as impact-free either and we all have to consider how we find a balance between the two extremes of never leaving the house by powered transport and multiple international expeditions every year. There is no perfect answer and each person needs to find their own solution.
We feel our competition should address this in some way and we’d like to have some submissions of work that reflects these personal solutions. This might be from a project taken within walking distance from your home, an important visual story that you found whilst travelling around the country where you live or by using your international travel to show a new way of seeing the world that could inspire people to protect it.
In that light, we are planning an environmental award for both the single image section and the project section. Just as there are is no right answer for how each person should adapt themselves to changing environmental conditions, we don’t profess to know what an inspiring environmental winner would be so we’re looking for you to enter and let us know.
More Information Soon!
We're only at the start of our journey creating this competition and we're still fine-tuning a few things so please let us know if you have any ideas. Once things have settled down, I'll write another article looking at some of the categories, fees, prizes and processing rules which should give you some idea of what and how you can enter if you wish to. To see where our ideas are at the moment, please visit https://naturallandscapeawards.com and have a look around.
On Landscape found Luke through a shared love of Wild Swimming. We were especially intrigued by his Time and Tide series. The tidal pools that these images depict hark back to an era of home holidays and great confidence towards land and sea. At the limits of the land and at the mercy of the sea, lack of maintenance and health and safety rules now combine to limit their prospects. Luke tells us how they first caught his eye, what he has learned about them, and whether they may have a future.
What came first for you – your love of outdoor activities, Scotland, or photography? What kind of images did you initially want to make?
I have always loved being in nature. Realising this could be combined with photography when borrowing a large format camera from university, I was able to discover a new way of seeing and experiencing the landscape.
Whilst making the tidal pool series I was influenced by the work of the New Topographic movement and The Dusseldorf School of Photography. Much of my inspiration has also been taken from the work of Thomas Joshua Cooper, travelling to all ends of the earth to obtain a single image.
Scotland became a destination to explore through the series ‘Time and Tide’, finding the different pools along the East and North Coast. The series ‘Wooded Heights’ is where I really started to immerse myself in the mountains and pine forests of the Cairngorms.
Landscape photography, particularly in the US, has often focused on magnitude, size, drama. The epic-ness of the American terrain lends itself to this. The Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, there are so many places in the US that fit quintessentially into our notion of the sublime. No wonder so many photographers, from Carlton E Watkins through Ansel Adams to Peter Lik want to reflect the climactic enormity of such landscapes.
The great tradition of classical US landscape photography is enveloped in cultural associations with America: frontier myths and a sense of destiny. There is almost a sense of domination in these images. The framing of the land is like a taming of the land. Photographic technique emphasises this approach: ‘straight/pure’ photography, pin sharp detail, immense clarity, the f/64 club etc, these images are designed to say ‘this is what is out there, I saw this’. I do not mean this as a criticism – not in the slightest! I love this sort of photography, both viewing it and taking it; the adrenalin rush of being in a place of great drama has no equal.
There is another peculiarly American landscape tradition which is wrapped up in the growth of the automobile and the freeways. Photographers like Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld approached the wide-open plains of the US by exploring them through the car – shooting from the dashboard or rear-view mirror, a frame within a frame. This approach intertwined with the more documentary approach of the New Topographics who focused attention on the intermingling of urban with the natural landscape as witnessed in the seminal exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York) in 1975, curated by William Jenkins.
Paria 6, 2018
However, Cody Cobbs’ gorgeous images of the American South West work in a very different way to both these traditions. Take the image above, Paria 6, 2018. This is not the ‘beauty of the banal’ often associated with the New Topographics, but nor is it the grandiose statements of the straight photographers. Instead of metaphorically pointing dramatically at what is being seen, Cody’s images reflect on what the photographer has felt in the landscape. The link to this quieter emotional resonance is, to my mind, quite exquisite.
Personally, I get a sense of silence, of gentleness mixed with a slightly unsettling tinge of austerity. It feels very pure, a sort of harmonious simplicity. I think this comes from two basic elements: the colour palette, and the compositional tool that the artist has used: reflection.
So, what do we feel when we look at an image like Paria 6, 2018? Personally, I get a sense of silence, of gentleness mixed with a slightly unsettling tinge of austerity. It feels very pure, a sort of harmonious simplicity. I think this comes from two basic elements: the colour palette, and the compositional tool that the artist has used: reflection.
The colours don’t feel realistic. The interpretation is pushed into a high key register. The pinky orangeness of the rocks – almost like salmon flesh - has a pastel softness to it which is lovely. The sky is blank – almost white. Certainly, no hint of clouds. (There are echoes here of very early landscape images in which photographers had to choose between a correct exposure for the foreground or for the background, normally the sky, with the result that the sky often bleached out). No deep shadows, definitely no intense blacks. There is very little contrast in the image, no acuity, hard rock becomes soft. The swirl of orange reminds me, quite ridiculously, of ice cream…
Coven, 2018
The composition is even more fascinating. At first glance, this seems to be a simple reflection, but reflections are never quite that simple. For example, it is not symmetrical. This isn’t an ink blot Rorschach image with a mirrored top and bottom. Objects reflected on water can never be quite symmetrical because the object is being seen from two different perspectives simultaneously. So, the small tree and reddish bush on the rock itself have disappeared in the reflection on the surface of the pool. They have disappeared and the eye searches in vain. Similarly, the main sweep of orange does not appear on the glassy water. The result is a form (object plus reflection) that intrigues because of the spatial ambiguity it creates.
Even though I don’t feel the explosive adrenalin rush of the A. Adams’ style grand vista, nor does my eye/mind search for meaning as with the New Topographics, I find great pleasure from such images of the American South West. Composition, form, reflection, tonality, colour. All combine to create a subtle, quiet, intriguing, lovely image.
This is a little overworked version of a posting I made on Facebook this past November. It grew kinda long, I confess, for a relatively simple concern I had and still have. A tiny simple thing, which currently worries me, maybe even scares me a bit. And it had to be fairly long – not only because I needed to practice my English – but because on Social Media everything tends to be ripped apart and turned upside down until the initial point is completely lost. Plus, let’s face it, it was lockdown in Austria – everyone had a lot of time to worry about a lot of things but had a little extra time to checkpoints off the list, that usually get lost in the daily merciless hamster wheel. I was stuck in between working on my Cypress Swamp book, thinking about things, things I need to write in the book, thoughts I wanted to express, stories I would like to tell. Instead, I decided to write this text.
Where to start…maybe here: When in 2015 I managed to win a category in the world’s most prestigious nature photography awards, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, with one of my cypress swamps images, it did ring a bell in the head of a number of photographers, who run photo tours. In 2016 the first commercial photography tour, purely dedicated to nature photography was taking place in the swamps. Not long after that, there were more.
The cypress swamps are such a fairy-tale forest, yet they were fairly unknown to the wider nature photography community. At the time of revealing the WPY winning images, in autumn 2015, it was just one of many images I had taken during a time span of roughly five years of exploring the swamps on a regular basis. Every year in autumn I would fly over and spend several weeks, paddling in the swamps from before dusk until way past dawn, trying to get some good imagery. By no means an easy task, as I was strictly shooting 4x5” large format in the first few years. Only with the arrival of the Nikon D 800, did I start to mix digital with analogue. Mostly because there were so many great views to be seen but were in such deep water, that setting up a tripod was not an option.
Back in September 2020, I saw on Facebook that Neil had launched his book 'Mystical' and was taking pre-orders. I remembered some of the images of the woods from working on Neil's Featured Photographer interview. back in August 2019. I contacted Neil once the book had arrived and was delighted that he agreed to talk to us about his project at Wistman’s Wood, one of three high altitude oak woods on Dartmoor.
When we interviewed you for our Featured Photographer interview back in August 2019 there are some images that are from Wistman’s Wood. Were you already working on the book at that point in time or was it more in the concept stage?
At this stage, I had already created a series of images from Wistman’s Wood which had had a really good reception and been featured across the web globally. Having said that I was still only really happy with a few of the images and I was still fine-tuning the whole process of shooting Wistman’s. It wasn’t until January 2020 that I started to feel happy with a larger number of images from this unique location. It was always in my mind to create a set of images that could be exhibited, but I honestly didn’t think I’d get to the stage where I felt comfortable releasing a project book.
I started work on the book in the first lockdown this year, I suppose we were all looking for things to do, so I set about laying out a book for Mystical. I was pretty much spending each day choosing and eliminating images and printing them out as I progressed. It took several months of going back and forth until I had a layout I was happy with, I then showed the layout to several photographers that I admire and they suggested a few alterations.
The book was coming together nicely now but there was a long way to go. Having worked in the design & print industry for 20 years I had a good idea of papers I wanted to use and what I wanted the final product to look like.
It’s a strange feeling when you come across a photograph that really echoes your own personal vision as a photographer. Especially so when the picture in question was made before you were even born....
It is only in the last year or two that I have become aware of Josef Sudek and his work. Although he is well known for his works in such books as “The Window of my Studio” and “St Vitus’s Cathedral” along with his still life works, I had never considered him as a Landscape Photographer until a friend suggested I took a look at his work in the book Mionsi Forest.
Before continuing on to the picture, a little about the man himself. Born in 1896 in Bohemia, he trained as a bookbinder, a career that was interrupted by the outbreak of The First World War. While serving he took up amateur photography. In 1917, while serving at the front he was hit by shrapnel in what we would now call a “friendly fire incident”. As a result of his injury, he had to have his right arm amputated.
After recovering from his injuries, he went on to study photography and in 1924, having graduated from the College of Graphic Arts began to photograph the completion of St Vitus’s Cathedral in Prague, where he said “That’s where it began....”
Sudek then went on to produce many fine works throughout his life, along with quite a few books, Mionsi Forest being but one. Mionsi Forest is a collection of photographs made in the forest around the Beskid Mountains in Northeast Moravia between 1950 and 1970, usually in the company of his best friend and assistant Petr Helbich. Even with an assistant to give help, it must have been incredibly difficult to use a large format camera in such a remote location as this, with only one arm. When Sudek died in 1976, Mionsi Forest and Vanished Statues became definitive works as part of his retrospectives.
The picture that I have chosen completely stopped me in my tracks when I first saw it. I was totally transfixed. It has everything that I had been striving for in my own work and looked ever so slightly familiar, perhaps the ghost of Sudek had been in my photographic vision all the time without me knowing it?
Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted from our subscribers. Each portfolios consisting of four images related in some way.
Submit Your 4x4 Portfolio
Interested in submitting your work? We're on the lookout for new portfolios for the next few issues, so please do get in touch!
Arizona boasts several picturesque valleys, mountains, and jagged cliffs that are well worth capturing. However, one of the most beautiful vistas I have seen has to be Canyon Lake, just one hour's drive from Phoenix. Although not as well known as some other major landmarks in Arizona, Canyon Lake undoubtedly one of the most beautiful sites in the area.
Besides the clear water and the beams of sunlight that beam through the cracks in the jagged cliffs, there's no shortage of remarkable wildlife on display. From eagles swooping down into the water to grab fish to Big Horn sheep scaling the steep, near-vertical cliffs, my trip to Canyon Lake was filled with plenty of interesting photo opportunities.
Taking an evening barge tour of the lake, I ended up focusing on the Canyon's jagged peaks in the hours leading up to the sunset. As the sunlight beamed on top of the peaks, many of my photos ended up taking on a painting-like quality to them as the light bounced off the red and yellow cliffs.
The camera movement mimics that of a moving subject to keep the subject sharp and the background blurred.
I come from a photography background and I believe this type of photography brings out the expressionist painter in all of us.
I used a Canon 7D Mark2 for this image and as long as I captured this image at a very slow shutter speed in 1/6 seconds. It all depends on How you prepare the composition of the images and framing the shot you are after.
I have had great results using lenses from 16mm.
The important thing is you need to focus on getting the shutter speed that you are after. I always shoot in the manual exposure mode as this gives me complete control over my camera.
Since my return to the north of the Netherlands, I have started to wonder what home actually means to me and how that manifests itself in my photography. I found myself starting to see "home" in a different context. The abundance of water and the open and wide character of Friesland make it a place for me, a landscape in which I feel at home. At the same time, I also see 'home' in the sense of being at home with myself. When I am home with myself I live more in harmony with my environment.
In a broader context, I believe that when we are more at home with ourselves, there will be less fear and aggression in the world, and the world can live more in harmony. We currently live in hectic, troubled and uncertain times. It is precisely this time that is the source of inspiration for me to depict the theme 'home' as a counterpart to these troubled and uncertain times.
'Home' evokes all kinds of images and words in me: emotion, awakening, intuition, dreams, intimacy, life, your own voice. I take those words with me when I go out with my camera, because when I connect with the words and emotions that evoke "home", the images follow automatically. Soon I saw landscapes of the soul appear in my first images.
And with those images, I then 'paint' a landscape of the soul and I give it the colours that in my experience belong to that specific image, colours in which I feel at home.
Coming home to myself, in the landscape of my soul. That is not easy and remains a constant challenge to look for it and to step out of there into the world.
These images are all drawn from within 20 minutes of my home. I am slightly amazed by the number of people who walk through woodland looking around, ahead or downwards (presumably to avoid cracking their heads or falling over) and yet so rarely upwards into the glorious canopies.
I have always found them magical, and even in relatively mundane photographic conditions can yield such beauty and mystery. Consequently, I spend a great deal of my time lying on my back gazing up at and photographing the wonders above. Aside from having a soggy back much of the time, I also number many of the images generated, often handheld, as amongst my personal favourites.
TP: We have been trying to get together for some time and after a few things getting in the way, we are now, finally, going to have our chat about your lovely handmade books. Hello and welcome Judy!
JS: Hello Tim and thank you.
TP: I have in front of me a range of 5 of your handmade books and I wanted to chat with you about how you got into making books. Also, the techniques involved and what has inspired you for the content of these books.
Firstly, over what time period were these books produced?
JS: These books have all been produced post “lockdown”. It was something I got inspired to do during lockdown. So they have all been produced since June I believe.
TP: Oh wow, so quite a short period of time. Have you been a landscape photographer for long?
JS: No, I took up landscape photography in 2013 after I had been retired from work for a few years. Though two or three different things came together at the same time to make it happen. Firstly I had been taking a lot of photographs of horses and happened to see an advert in our local post office advertising evening classes in A level photography. I thought it would be a fun thing to do, and it was. At the same time, we were building a house in northwest Scotland, which happened to be next door to Adrian Hollister’s Perfume and Open Studio where he was running a series of workshops. Adrian and I became friends and he gave me a huge amount of help to get started. We did a workshop with Adrian, Eddy Ephraums, Joe Cornish and Paul Sanders. That was life changing for me, that is what kickstarted me into landscape photography.
TP: Quite a useful start there! Also, the beautiful highland landscape to work with as well.
JS: Definitely a good starting point. At home, I live in the new forest so that is not too shabby. However, I find the new forest quite hard to photograph in. Very little of what I have done is down here. Which is something I plan to change, however, I have not done, yet.
TP: So in terms of bookmaking, I know that Mr Hollister has run a few workshops where handmade books have been involved. Have you been on any of those?
JS: I have done one a couple of weeks ago. However, I have not done any before then. I did get involved with Eddy making a book, a very different sort of book. I got very intrigued in the bookmaking process at that time and I planned to, but never got round to doing it. Come lockdown, I saw that Alex Hare and Lizzy Shepherd were running some online bookmaking workshops. At the same time, I had started to try and make the first of the books that you have in front of you. So, I signed up for that which was really helpful and got me going. From there I bought all the kit required and put it into practice.
Come lockdown, I saw that Alex Hare and Lizzy Shepherd were running some online bookmaking workshops. At the same time, I had started to try and make the first of the books that you have in front of you.
TP: Tell me which book was your first book out of the five I have. Also, tell me what intrigued you about the bookmaking process and what you learnt on the course?
JS My first one is called “Leaf”. What intrigued me about the process, was the idea of putting images together. Someone on the first course I took said, “One image on its own no longer satisfies”. It’s a new dimension of putting them all together. What I learnt with Alex and Lizzy was the techniques of making “Hard” covers for books. Then the different ways and styles of putting them together; in my time with Eddy I had never put hardcovers on them before.
TP: This is one thing I found quite intriguing and visually compelling about the books is the beautifully wrapped images and the hardcovers. Let’s talk about your first book, “Leaf”. Tell me about the photographs within and then the technique you used to make the book.
JS: This was very much a lockdown book. We had all been plunged into this lockdown and everyone reacted to it in different ways. I didn’t really feel like doing any photography - however, one day I had to get my camera out and just get on with it. I am very lucky that I live in a place with some nice land and a lovely garden. I took a few images and then went to play with some of them. It was in summer, so it was hot with blue skies. I thought that high key images might be fun. I did one image that I really liked and a few others. I went away and thought maybe it was something I could turn into a book. I created this high-key image of cherry blossom, so went round the garden and took images of different trees in the garden. Then I produced the book from that. So this book is composed just of different trees in my garden.
TP: Since you started with a “double page spread”. It is effectively a 3:1, or a 6:17 aspect ratio, did you have the idea of the book and took the photographs to match or did it happen the other way around?
JS: No, it happened the other way around. I had seen a book of Lizzy Shephard’s that she had done with Tulips, which had no frames to them and it ran to the edges of the book. I really liked that idea and I thought it worked quite well with these images. I like the idea of the “slices of the trees”, the fact you can recognise each type of tree from a fairly small section of it.
Anyone can do it. Once you understand how the process works and the techniques involved, it is down to how you want to construct it. My first attempt at constructing “Leaf” I did before the workshop with Alex and Lizzy. With guidance from them, I refined the techniques.
TP: Down to the bookmaking itself, what is involved in producing these? Is it quite involved or is it something that anyone could do?
JS: Anyone can do it. Once you understand how the process works and the techniques involved, it is down to how you want to construct it. My first attempt at constructing “Leaf” I did before the workshop with Alex and Lizzy. With guidance from them, I refined the techniques. Better paper, constructing the hardcover, sizing and framing. Then you work out how you stick all the pages together and the different types of book you can make.
I like the idea of using an image on the cover as it pulls you into the book. You can buy some beautiful papers to cover the card with if you like, however, I like the cover to become part of the book as well as the pages within the book itself.
TP: With the sequencing, what was the thought behind the order of the pages and the prints within?
JS: There is probably less thought behind this one, however, there is much more thought behind the other such as “Ice Blue”. The sequencing in this book to me is what makes it. There was a lot of cropping involved to make this one work. They were not all just as they were. It is the sequencing and the way the images flow from one to another works for me. How the lines all carry on throughout the book.
TP: This (Ice Blue) is very much about line and form. These striking clear sections through icebergs carrying on from page to page. I am intrigued about this book, most people who think about books of any sort think “how am I going to get so many pictures together to fill a whole book” and yet this is almost a mini portfolio of 5 or 6 images brought together. Most people would have enough of these sort of images in their collection already to try this with.
JS: This is a perfect lockdown project. You can go back through all your images and find sets like this that lend them to bookmaking. As you say it doesn’t have to be a massive book. Somebody referred to little books like this as a “mini and individual works of art” rather than books. They are a different way of displaying your images. This book, “Ice Blue” is a concertina style book. You can pull it out and put it on a table and it is a very nice way of displaying them
TP: They are individual artefacts. They are not mass produced, they are handcrafted and brought together. It would be difficult to mass produce them. I know people who have done a series of them, a series of 4 or 5 rather than a series of 1000s.
Let’s look at another book. I loved some of the images in the Tundra book. It is a different way of producing them. This one is stitched, so tell us how the book is made.
JS: This is called JSB – Japanese Stab Binding. In essence, when you size up each page you could just print them out of lightroom. You could create a blank book this way and then stick them in the book rather than constructing the book by printing all the pages and then binding them together. There are many things you can do using this technique. So in creating this book you have to make sure that all your sizing works. You have to make sure that you have the strip down the edge where you will bind the book. You have to crease it as well to make sure that the pages turn. The actual sewing is very simple and straight forward once you know how to do it. This makes a book that most people are familiar with. It has pages you can turn where other styles don’t. I experimented with the cover with this one. It is two types of paper stuck together but not convinced that this style works for me, but I was willing to give it a try.
This is called JSB – Japanese Stab Binding. In essence, when you size up each page you could just print them out of lightroom. You could create a blank book this way and then stick them in the book rather than constructing the book by printing all the pages and then binding them together.
TP: Please tell me more about the project surrounding the images in this book. There are some beautiful images in here.
JS: I was very lucky last year to go on a trip to East Greenland organised by Anthony Spencer and Joe Cornish. They took 12 of us on a small ice breaker up to the northeast area of Greenland. This is a very unvisited part of the world. All the ships follow designated shipping routes and the ships crew showed us that we were going back to the old days away from these routes. It was a proper adventure as well, as the crew of the ship had not been to these places before as it is only ice free for a few weeks of the year. We were very lucky to have amazing weather in September that year. At that time, it can be wiped out by the snow and ice. What fascinated me the most, we were there in autumn and you could see this in the ground. The colours were absolutely amazing, in a totally different way compared to back here, I thought it would be a fun way to show Greenland not in the ice and snow. Show off some amazing colours.
TP: We would like to feature some of these images in the article as I think they are very strong images. Was it easy to pick out the images to use for this book from the photographs from this trip?
JS: It was easier than it might have been for other things. It was fun, you could put images in that had polar bears in them! However, the book was about the Tundra. It is about what Greenland looks like in autumn, not only about the astonishing big landscapes, also what is going on at your feet as well. The other folks joked that I spent more of my time with my camera facing the ground than the landscape.
TP: Although I can imagine the most interesting part is what is going on at ground level.
JS: The Tundra is like mini forests that are only a couple of inches high and they grow very little. They are tiny, but the colours and the intricacy of them were amazing.
TP: This is another one of your books that I found interesting, it is very tall and thin. It is a book in a sleeve, it looks like it is from the west coast of Scotland with amazing geology, Eigg or Arran. Lots of folded iron rich ridges and cool blue sands. Whereabouts is the project from and can you describe to me what was involved in making this book?
JS: It was taken on the Isle of Eigg. I made this book on a recent workshop with Eddy and Adrian up at the perfume studio. I like the idea that the images are very similar, and you can put them together with no borders, so they all run into each other. At times it can be difficult to tell if it is one big image or several smaller ones.
TP: I like this one as it is another concertina book so you can hold it out almost into a long strip and it creates a textural, rhythmic image.
JS: It is a good example of what fun you can have with bookmaking. You can almost make it up as you go along. It doesn’t have to conform to a “Standard book”, the sky is the limit in respect to what you can make out of a book.
The piece of rock that they are portraying is only 4 or 5 m2 and the tide was coming over it, washing sand on and off them creating different images in the same piece of rock.
TP: The fascinating thing about this, is being able to make crops or aspect ratios that you would rarely use or see in a portfolio.
JS: The piece of rock that they are portraying is only 4 or 5 m2 and the tide was coming over it, washing sand on and off them creating different images in the same piece of rock.
TP: Now we will look at an aptly named book called “End of the Summer”. This is a simpler book without the hardback covers. Please tell me about the book.
JS: This is another one that I did at the workshop, it is called a “Layout book”. It’s a type of concertina book. However the pages are stuck together differently so you can open each page out flat, Eddy used the same technique to make Paul Sanders’ book Solace. It’s a nice structure for a more traditional book, very simply made.
TP: I like this technique and the concertina technique as you can open the book fully at an image and see it in its entirety without bending the book. With the JSB you have to almost bend the images to open the book up. Tell me more about the book and project, End of summer.
JS: This was shot in the new forest, I shot it all in one afternoon. I have a love hate relationship with ICM. I did some, one summer’s afternoon, again a hot summer’s day. I have been interested in horses, one of my passions. So I went to see what the ponies were up to, it just came from an afternoon out seeing them and being in the forest. The feel of it for me, captures how it felt that afternoon. Very hot, tired and dusty, very simple.
I went to see what the ponies were up to, it just came from an afternoon out seeing them and being in the forest. The feel of it for me, captures how it felt that afternoon. Very hot, tired and dusty, very simple.
TP: I went on a workshop with Lizzy Shepherd, but it was a John Blakemore bookmaking workshop a while back. At the time I didn’t have any images that I thought would work together in a book. So I went out and took pictures in an afternoon and it was brilliant, maybe none of them would work on their own, however in a book together they did. The ability to use editing and context in a project to make something coherent is a different way of looking at photography rather than the individual picture.
JS: Definitely totally agree. I have it in the back of my mind now when I go out. I will occasionally look at a picture and think, will this make a sequence, its like having a totally new dimension to photography. Thinking, “can these pictures go together or not?”
TP: Has bookmaking made you think differently about your photography outside?
JS: I think it makes me look at things differently when I start processing them. I might see something that had potential, then go and take more images of it. I am currently working on a book on Lilys. I took maybe more images of that pond as I did think that there could be a book there. It probably translates to more images rather than different images.
TP: Thank you. We will look forward to seeing the Lily book in due course I’m sure.
Photography’s potential as a great image-maker and communicator is really no different from the same potential in the best poetry where familiar, everyday words, placed within a special context, can soar above the intellect and touch subtle reality in a unique way. ~ Paul Caponigro
It’s interesting how often artists, including photographers, refer to poetry when describing their work and philosophy. The correlation is easy to understand when considering that the word “poetry” derives from a Greek word meaning to create or to bring something into being. This definition is close to that of the word “art,” derived from a Latin word referring also to items brought into being by human skill.
The distinction between prose and poetry in writing is analogous to the distinction between representation and artistic expression in photography.
The distinction between prose and poetry in writing is analogous to the distinction between representation and artistic expression in photography. In both cases, the difference comes down to how one expresses meaning: literally or metaphorically, objectively or subjectively, decisively or ambiguously, descriptively or implicitly.
One glaring difference between writing and photography, however, is this: in writing, neither poets nor journalists try to assert their own style as the only valid form of writing or to demonise others. In photography, expressing meaning poetically, departing from objective representation when it serves no useful purpose or even distracts, is still often met with ire. In writing, no journalist is concerned that the existence of poetry may diminish the importance or credulity of reportage, and no poet worries about readers feeling deceived if they realise that poetic verses are often not meant as statements of fact. In this sense, the analogy also makes it plain how far photography still has to go as an art form, if only just to catch up to where other media already are.
Pondering the challenge facing photographers aspiring to creative expression, W. Eugene Smith wrote, “I am constantly torn between the attitude of the conscientious journalist who is a recorder and interpreter of the facts and of the creative artist who often is necessarily at poetic odds with the literal facts.”
Despite such historical figures acknowledging the artistic potential of photography, many photographers today still wish to clip photography’s expressive wings: to renounce its ability to serve as a medium for visual poetry, distinct from but equal in importance to its ability to serve as a medium for factual representation.
I find it unfortunate that any photographer would feel torn between these two intents as both are squarely within the capacities of photography and only in contention because of misinformed assumptions about non-existent limitations inherent in the medium. There is no practical reason—not even in terms of photographic purity, however one chooses to define it—why photographs can’t serve both purposes without diminishing either.
Among other photographers who pondered photography as it relates to poetry, Minor White (who was a poet as well as a photographer) wrote: “My pity for the pure photographer / My pity for the pure poet / Is tempered by the responsibility / I have to three media / Whereas they to only one.” Ernst Haas, former president of Magnum Photos, wrote, “we are on the way to speaking our very own language. With it we will have to create our own literature. You will have to decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create. Reports of facts, essays, poems—do you want to speak or to sing?”. Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote, “I’m not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.”
Despite such historical figures acknowledging the artistic potential of photography, many photographers today still wish to clip photography’s expressive wings: to renounce its ability to serve as a medium for visual poetry, distinct from but equal in importance to its ability to serve as a medium for factual representation. This is not to say that a photograph can’t be both factually representational and poetic in meaning, only that there is no tenable argument why the former should be a requirement for the latter.
Perhaps a stronger argument in favour of acceptance of photography as a means for (metaphorical, non-representational) creative expression is that, regardless of opinion, poetic photographs—many decidedly not representational—already make a great proportion of photographs one is likely to see in public media. This accords with the general trend in art—away from literal representation and toward greater abstraction, subjectivity, symbolism, and ambiguity.
Much of today’s art, loosely referred to as “post-modern,” is no longer about any adherence to recognisable styles or purity of process, and more about the expression of ideas, by whatever means the artist sees fit.
In considering artistic movements of the past, it takes little knowledge of art history to distinguish based on appearance alone between a realistic painting and an impressionistic one. But art has long moved past impressionism, too. Much of today’s art, loosely referred to as “post-modern,” is no longer about any adherence to recognisable styles or purity of process, and more about the expression of ideas, by whatever means the artist sees fit. It’s inevitable that photography practised as art will follow the same trajectory. (If anything, it’s about time photography stopped playing catch-up with other arts.) Those who tried to derail such progression in other media have often found themselves on what we now consider “the wrong side of history.”
On a recent On Landscape podcast discussing truth to nature David Ward commented, “nobody gives any objection at all to the fact that paintings aren’t real.” This may seem obvious to us today, but it was not always the case. Until the late 19th century, fidelity to nature was considered in many venues (notably in France, which was the hub of western art at the time) as the highest aspiration for art. Works that departed from realistic appearances, such as those by the early impressionists, were shunned, sometimes even ridiculed, and excluded from the most prestigious exhibitions, such as the Paris Salon.
The invention of photography, portending a future in which the photographic medium could surpass painting in its ability to portray natural, realistic appearances, was seen by some critics as potentially ruinous to art. Charles Baudelaire, a distinguished poet and art critic, wrote a scathing rebuke of photography in an essay about the Paris Salon of 1859—just three decades after the invention of photography. In his critique, Baudelaire wrote this:
The invention of photography, portending a future in which the photographic medium could surpass painting in its ability to portray natural, realistic appearances, was seen by some critics as potentially ruinous to art.
“In matters of painting and sculpture, the present-day Credo of the sophisticated, above all in France (and I do not think that anyone at all would dare to state the contrary), is this: ‘I believe in Nature, and I believe only in Nature (there are good reasons for that). I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature […] Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of Art.’ A revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the faithful says to himself: ‘Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools!), then photography and Art are the same thing’ […] this industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy.”
The infamous satirical critic Louis Leroy, upon seeing Claude Monet’s painting, “Impression, soleil levant” (Impression, Sunrise), commented, “I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it ... and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.” Prompted by this critique, the early impressionists adopted the term “impressionism” for their movement, rendering Leroy a historic laughingstock. France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts attempted to squelch impressionism by excluding impressionist work from its Salon. In response, the early impressionists started a salon of their own, and prompted a revolution in the arts. As painter Robert Henri put it, “History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong.”
I mention the impressionists not only as an example of art evolving by revolutionary leaps (rather than gradual transitions)—toward subjective expression and away from objective realism. Impressionism holds another important (if not as widely acknowledged) lesson that is eminently relevant to photographers who care about fidelity to real experiences (which, in the case of poetic expression, does not necessarily imply fidelity to real appearances).
Of those concerned with truthfulness in photography, I ask this: if you inspire in your viewers an experience you did not actually have, is the fact that your images are not “manipulated” sufficient to make them “true”? Conversely, is a photograph that is “manipulated” as to expresses true qualities of experience any less “truthful” just because it is at “poetic odds” with objective representation?
The lesson is this: impressionism has lost its connection with real experience (read: subjective impressions) and came to be regarded primarily as an aesthetic style. This trend also is evident in photography, where many are content copying the styles (if not the exact compositions) of others, giving no mind to the fact that what such photographs express often is incongruous with their own real experience.
Monet famously credited the success of his works to the emotions he felt when working while out in nature, rather than to his distinctive style. Many other impressionists, despite lumping their work into the same category as Monet’s, produced works of similar effect but without the experience of working in, and from, nature. As Monet himself put it, “My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects, and I still very much regret having caused the naming of a group whose majority had nothing impressionist about it.” This should serve as a warning to those interested in poetic expression in photography. Stylistic departures from realistic appearances are not enough (indeed, it’s not even required) for an image to be poetic, but fidelity to true experience is required if one aspires to live a poetic life.
Of those concerned with truthfulness in photography, I ask this: if you inspire in your viewers an experience you did not actually have, is the fact that your images are not “manipulated” sufficient to make them “true”? Conversely, is a photograph that is “manipulated” as to expresses true qualities of experience any less “truthful” just because it is at “poetic odds” with objective representation?
I first became aware of Hokkaido when I saw an article by Paul Gallagher saying how much he had enjoyed his visit and how different the landscape was to what he was used to. I loved the simplicity of the images in the article, so when some months later I saw that he was arranging a workshop in Hokkaido I jumped at the chance to visit.
I do very little planning for a trip like this beyond arranging flights, clothing etc, partly because with a workshop I expect to be taken to interesting places, but equally because I like to arrive at a location with an open mind and react to the landscape in my own way. If I were to study photographs by other people, I might go with preconceived ideas of what to expect and I don’t like that, I want to make my own images in my own way. If I miss classic views (which I often do) that is fine as I will have found my own interpretation of the place which will mean much more to me.
The workshop
The workshop was in early February 2019 and I decided to add on a few days in Tokyo first, partly to recover from any jetlag but also to explore a city and country I had not previously visited. This was a good decision and I enjoyed the days wandering around various areas of the city and the bustle of this great city proved to be a huge contrast to the silence of Hokkaido.
Hokkaido is the most Northern island of Japan and is full of flowers in summer and a popular place for Japanese tourists, but in February it is in the grip of winter and usually with deep snow.
The flight from Tokyo to Asahikawa airport in Hokkaido took about 95 minutes and there were warnings that we might not be able to land there due to heavy snow. We landed OK and I was delighted to see lots of snow, quite a change from mild Tokyo. At lunchtime next day I met the rest of the small group plus our guides Paul Gallagher and Michael Pilkington and our local guide Tsuyoshi Kato.
We started our trip in the Biei area and we stopped at the Seven Star Tree. This lone Oak tree became an overnight sensation for its use on a package of Seven Star cigarettes in 1976 and I was very surprised to find several coaches of Japanese tourists there. Fortunately, they alighted from the coaches, took selfies with the tree and left again soon afterwards. I hadn’t expected to see lots of other people on this trip and fortunately, this was a rare exception.
This stop gave me a taste of the weather to come, overcast with regular snowstorms. I loved the snow as it gave a great texture to the trees and landscape, although it made photography difficult when it was blowing straight into the lens.
Having photographed the Oak tree and the adjacent line of trees, I looked around to find something which interested me more and I discovered lots of snow poles and signs in the deep snow which I really enjoyed exploring. Look closely and you will see a lone tripod and camera, but no sign of a photographer! I didn’t spot that until I got home.
This lone Oak tree became an overnight sensation for its use on a package of Seven Star cigarettes in 1976 and I was very surprised to find several coaches of Japanese tourists there.
Trees were undoubtedly the principal subject of the trip; they were everywhere and the deep snow gave them a simplicity which rendered them very beautiful and special. Although I enjoyed the shots I took of the tree copse, I felt that the foreground grasses added a lot to the composition. The almost horizontal snow in this photograph added to the separation between the foreground and trees.
We stopped at a frozen lake where I was particularly attracted to the view across the lake to trees covered in frost and snow. A long lens made some very abstract images. I particularly liked this elegant tree with the white background and the snow on the branches adding to the image.
On several occasions, we saw Coca-Cola dispensers, deep in the snow. They seemed to be full of cans which was surprising as I would have thought that the cans would all be frozen. The juxtaposition of the dispenser and the sign made the image work.
We travelled to the North West coast and as the sun was going down, we photographed a Torii Gate in the sea near our hotel. The snow was deep by the shore and there was not much room at the water’s edge.
The first photograph was taken just before the big wave and the other exposed as the camera sank in the water A ‘UCM’ - unintentional camera movement.
Everyone else had their tripods up at full height, but I wanted something different so I squatted down for a low-level view with my 12mm lens and just above the sea. I got some nice shots as each wave went out. But then a big wave came in and I tried to move back a bit, then realised that the wave had undermined my front tripod leg. I made a grab for the tripod and then the camera and tripod were in the water, me too. No worry for me as the water was very shallow, but of course the camera didn’t like it and was dead the next day. The lens had salt inside, but continued to work until I got home. One of my friends had offered me his Sony A7r3 to take as a spare and naturally his camera was the one which went in the water. Oops! Luckily, we are still friends!
The first photograph was taken just before the big wave and the other exposed as the camera sank in the water A ‘UCM’ - unintentional camera movement.
We travelled to the North East coast, stopping a few times, including some greenhouses with just the structures visible. These were great for picking out patterns and details. We had very little sunshine during the trip, which suited me very well as I like overcast conditions, but here the sun did come out which was fortuitous as the shadows enhanced the patterns.
The snow was immaculate most of the time and I enjoyed making very simple compositions with shadows.
Details of simple plants in the snow kept me occupied in many places, looking for compositions which pleased me.
A 400mm lens was used for these details, I use Sony cameras and took two A7r3 bodies, a 12-24mm, 24-105mm and 100-400mm, all Sony lenses. Lightroom shows that the 100-400mm was my most used lens (56%) followed by the 24-105mm. I also used a Gitzo tripod with a geared head for all the images.
This stop by one of the many frozen lakes was memorable for the rich colours of the grasses which contrasted well with the colours in the sky. The snow was very deep here and I remember struggling across this field in snow which was waist high in order to make the most of the grasses. The trip was very tiring as everything was hard work, from getting dressed in all the layers in the morning to being outside in the cold. Fortunately, we were not out for long periods of time and could relax when back in the minibus.
This stop by one of the many frozen lakes was memorable for the rich colours of the grasses which contrasted well with the colours in the sky. The snow was very deep here and I remember struggling across this field in snow which was waist high in order to make the most of the grasses.
Photographing on the East coast of Hokkaido we encountered wet snow for the first and only time on the trip. The temperature had obviously risen above freezing and the snow was more like we normally get in the UK and we had to protect our cameras to keep them from getting very wet. The rest of the time we could just brush off the snow with no problem.
In the photograph bottom right, the sea was freezing and had created a slowly moving slush. This was a bitterly cold morning as the wind was very strong and the wind-chill factor made it feel much colder.
As the sea freezes over the fishing boats in this area are raised out of the water onto land for the winter providing a good subject both for a wide-angle lens and also for close up details.
I was fascinated by the wooden blocks which supported the boats, I am sure that they were very secure, but I felt that one push would collapse the whole line of them. I was very careful!
Returning to trees again the distant hills provided the perfect background for this elegant tree. For me, this image encapsulates the feelings I had for Hokkaido, clean lines, elegant trees and simplicity.
Returning to trees again the distant hills provided the perfect background for this elegant tree. For me, this image encapsulates the feelings I had for Hokkaido, clean lines, elegant trees and simplicity. There were many trees here and many opportunities for different compositions with two, three or more trees in the foreground and that delicate blue line of the hills in the background.
One of my very favourite locations was a hillside with lots of interesting trees; this was a delight. We had many short snowstorms which kept everything fresh and we spent several hours here exploring different compositions of trees, snow and the bamboo which grew close to the ground.
I found the bamboo leaves peeking through the snow quite irresistible. A long lens is a real help here to avoid walking through the snow too much. When the snow covers everything, it is hard to tell where you are walking and most of Hokkaido is private farmland so we were careful not to trespass, well not too much anyway.
These lovely trees were in the shade of a hillside and they looked almost like negatives against the dark background and I loved the colours in this image. Most of the photographs I created in Hokkaido were very simple designs and this is one of the few more complex compositions.
These lovely trees were in the shade of a hillside and they looked almost like negatives against the dark background and I loved the colours in this image. Most of the photographs I created in Hokkaido were very simple designs and this is one of the few more complex compositions.
I am very much a colour photographer and rarely create black and white images and throughout my trip to Hokkaido I appreciated the limited colour palette in the landscape.
We visited several frozen lakes where I loved the rich colours of the leaves and grasses which contrasted beautifully with the frozen white background of the lake. There were many subjects to photograph here; the patterns in the lake were lovely as were the distant hills which quite often looked like pencil drawings.
We spent an early morning here to try and capture the sun and mist rising across the lake, but had only cloud, which suited me as I usually prefer the subtle colours of dull weather to a spectacular sunrise.
Looking over another frozen lake the white trunk and branches of these Birch trees were beautiful and quite startling against the darker background. It was snowing when I took this photograph and this added a white layer on the branches and a subtle texture to the background.
There are many Whooper swans that live on this lake throughout the winter and they return to Siberia in Spring to breed. I am not a wildlife photographer, but I took a few shots here and enjoyed the empty lake and the birds in the snow.
Later we also visited the famous Hokkaido Cranes, but I was put off by the large crowd of Japanese photographers who were pushing to get shots of the birds; not my sort of photography.
This is a typical view of Hokkaido, fences and lines of trees which make such great compositions. The beautiful blue hills in the background partially covered with trees together with a plain sky and areas of white snow complete the scene.
My abiding impression of Hokkaido was of simplicity and beauty of line and form, which of course are important elements of Japanese art and this picture perhaps illustrates this very well; nothing special, just farmland with fences and a tree. There is no need for a spectacular view, no need for special lighting, I am happy to create photographs from very simple elements.
This was a memorable trip and I am delighted with the photographs I was able to make there.
You can view more photographs from Hokkaido on my website; there is also an audio-visual sequence from Hokkaido.
Sometimes it’s good to swap sides of the desk and for this issue, we are interviewing Peter Eastway, who among many other things is Editor and Publisher of Better Photography Magazine. When I got in touch with Peter he initially wondered if it was payback for sending Tim some work, but I had quite coincidentally been enjoying Peter’s images. Of the many on his website, we’ve largely narrowed our image selection down to the Polar Regions, a particular passion of Peter’s, and of course his homeland, Australia. While the diversity of locations he has visited might prompt you to think that travel is the key to a successful image you’ll find out that, for Peter, image capture is only the beginning of the story and his ethos can be applied wherever you chose to photograph.
Thunderstorm opposite Neko Harbour, Antarctica
Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, your education and early interests, and what that led you to do?
I’m told I was conceived in England and born in Melbourne, but I’ve lived all my knowing life in Sydney, Australia. Most of the time I’ve worked as a professional photographer, including editing and publishing photography magazines, plus a number of other business interests.
When did you first pick up a camera? What prompted this and what kind of images did you want to make?
In school, my first camera was a Ricoh compact in a circular water housing. As a keen surfer, I wanted to photograph my friends from the water. I was infatuated with surfing and couldn’t really understand why people would want to take photos of anything other than surfing! Later in life, I changed this view.
Who (photographers, artists or individuals) or what has most inspired you, or driven you forward in your own development as a photographer?
As a photo magazine editor for over 40 years, it’s hard to pinpoint one or two photographers who have inspired me because there are so many. What’s the difference between plagiarism and inspiration? Plagiarists copy one photographer, but when you’re inspired, you’re copying the work of thousands. Editing a photography magazine has given me an appreciation of every genre of photography (except maybe passport portraits) and I have met and interviewed many of my heroes as well.
However, since we have a polar bent to this article,
Plagiarists copy one photographer, but when you’re inspired, you’re copying the work of thousands. Editing a photography magazine has given me an appreciation of every genre of photography (except maybe passport portraits) and I have met and interviewed many of my heroes as well.
I’ll suggest Australian photographer Frank Hurley who travelled with Shackleton to Antarctica in the early 1900s, photographing and filming an epic journey across the Weddell Sea and up to Elephant Island. Hurley was a showman, which I think is still necessary if you’re going to be a successful professional photographer. Hurley would return from his trips with a slide show and give presentations in town halls around Australia, enthralling his audiences. Today most of us do something similar on Instagram, but what I love about Hurley is the way he would interpret his photos, pushing the technology available to him as far as possible. Although working over 100 years ago with plate glass negatives, he would drop in skies and ‘adjust’ the reality of the image in the darkroom to better tell his story. What he did would not be allowed by documentary or nature photographers today, yet back then, no one really knew what happened inside the darkroom – although he certainly had his critics.
After featuring two articles on tripods recently, a review of travel tripods and a short overview of tripod spikes, I thought a general chat with Joe and David about their own experiences with tripods would make interesting listening. We cover a reasonable amount of ground and, once again, we hope you enjoying listening to them as much as we do recording them.
For the seventh iteration of this column, I decided to focus on the artwork of a photographer that recently popped onto my radar as a guest suggestion for my podcast. While Marco and I had already had many interactions on Instagram, I had foolishly not taken the time to look at his body of wonderful artwork. Upon deeper examination, I came to fully appreciate what Marco was trying to communicate through his landscape photography – the idea that if we take the time to slow down in nature and appreciate the small details right under our noses that we can more fully appreciate a place and find a deep connection to it. This connection then facilitates wonder, curiosity, and can instil peace within us to help us recharge our batteries.
Upon deeper examination, I came to fully appreciate what Marco was trying to communicate through his landscape photography – the idea that if we take the time to slow down in nature and appreciate the small details right under our noses that we can more fully appreciate a place and find a deep connection to it.
For some photographers, discovering these powerful moments in nature comes quite naturally and immediately. For others, including myself, it can take many years and involves countless experiences of feeling let down by preconceived expectations of what the final photographs from a trip should look like. What I admire about Marco’s work is that it is a fresh reminder that expectations can pigeon-hole us as artists to only look for what we had pre-envisioned, whereas an approach like Marco’s can lead to discovering a whole new world of photography that can enrich us and occupy us for a lifetime. Additionally, this approach to landscape photography yields more unique imagery that has the potential to give way to more meaningful and personally expressive artwork.
Normally the early autumn months would find me in France where we’ve long had a little house. It’s been a unique chance to lead a separate life, absorb a different lifestyle and photograph a different landscape. However, in view of the current uncertainties of life, we decided not to go this year. This offered the chance to realise a long-held ambition to visit some of the Western Isles of Scotland.
So, September 2020 found my non-photographer wife and I heading north on our two-day trek from our home in Wiltshire for a 16-day trip through the Hebrides. After an overnight stop in Dumfries our journey took us to Skye, then on to North Uist and Harris before returning to Skye.
I’ve wanted to visit Skye for around 35 years having visited Mull in my 20s. I had a bucket list of places I wanted to see and photograph on Skye, but having seen the queues at the Fairy Pools, The Old Man of Storr, and Quiraing my initial reaction was one of dejection and a feeling I had left it too long. But I had no right to feel like that. The people I saw were simply doing what I was doing. Who am I to expect to have these places to myself? After having a good word with myself I studied my maps more carefully and realised there was an endless list of quieter places to visit where we did indeed find solitude and calm. It was simply a question of making a little effort.
During our first foray on Skye, the weather was simply atrocious. Had I been alone I would have toughed it out and taken to the hills, waiting for those elusive breaks in the sky that would reveal mountain tops and hidden valleys illuminated by shafts of sunlight. But I had to consider the wishes of someone else and grab opportunities where I could. It certainly focused my mind as a photographer and made me work with what I had.
Old Man of Storr – Skye The classic view of the rock from Loch Fada. With my ever-patient wife handing up pieces of kit as I positioned my tripod, we had to wait a while to get the right patches of sunlight. We were right next to the A855 and as I stood trying to capture the right moment, I became aware that a number of cars had pulled up (one blocking the road) and that there was a little huddle of photographers behind me trying to see the back of my camera. The guys in the little boat fishing on the loch were an added bonus! Nikon D850, 80-200mm lens.
From Skye, we took the ferry to Lochmaddy on North Uist. This wonderful island proved to be exactly what I’d hoped Skye would be. It is remote and some would say bleak.
Sound of Raasay - Skye We were driving up the A855 having passed the car park for the Old Man of Storr, which was jammed to overflowing both with cars and rain! My wife was driving and suddenly screeched to a halt, shouting – “look at that”! This is the image she saw. Nikon D850, 80-200mm lens.
From Skye, we took the ferry to Lochmaddy on North Uist. This wonderful island proved to be exactly what I’d hoped Skye would be. It is remote and some would say bleak. There are few places to stay and even fewer things to do. Unless of course, you love the landscape. If that it is all you need then you could spend a lifetime there. North Uist is an other-worldly place. One of the mountains and countless lochs, the few roads weave in and out of this watery world on their way to stunning beaches and mountains the shape of small volcanoes.
Lochmaddy Harbour – North Uist Lochmaddy is the main “town” on North Uist, where you will find the ferry terminal, a clutch of hotels and B&Bs, a shop/petrol station, a bank…. and an arts’ centre! The old harbour had a sad, neglected feel about it on a day like this. Fuji X-Pro2, 23mm lens.
North Lee and South Lee Mountains – North Uist The mountains of North Lee and South Lee dominate the landscape in this watery world. Nikon D850, 50mm lens.
North Uist is connected to the islands of Benbecula to the south and South Uist to the south of that by causeways. The archipelago is completed by Berneray to the north. Each island has its own unique character despite the relatively short distance between them. Benbecula is flat with few hills and seems more water than land. South Uist is more mountainous and has the largest population.
North Uist is connected to the islands of Benbecula to the south and South Uist to the south of that by causeways. The archipelago is completed by Berneray to the north.
Howmore Chapels – South Uist We had but one day travelling through South Uist. A day of relentless rain. The perfect day for gritty black and white images. Chapels have occupied this site since AD 300. Fuji X-Pro2, 23mm lens.
Meanwhile back on wonderful North Uist, this is the perfect blend of the two and is sparsely populated, each house a lonely outpost against the elements. The mile upon mile of machair dunes provide a unique backdrop to the spectacular beaches of the west coast.
Tràigh Iar – North Uist
Known by some as the Thai beach. Photographs of this beach were allegedly used by the Thai Tourist Board to advertise holidays in Thailand, although I found no Thai weather during my stay. Nikon D850, 16-35mm lens.
After a few days exploring the Uists and Benbecula, we caught the ferry to Harris for a five day stay in Tarbert. An opportunity to also visit Lewis, the largest of the Outer Hebrides islands. I’d long had this picture in my mind of Harris as a remote and wild place, ringed with some of the most fabulous beaches in the world. Whilst that is true, it was still a lot busier with other tourists than I’d imagined.
Luskentyre has become something of an iconic location for photographers. Without doubt, the seemingly endless white sands are simply stunning. But, on the day we chose to visit, the weather had improved slightly and the single-track road to the little village at the headland was busy with motor homes and cars, so we were forced to abandon and try elsewhere. But not before capturing one image.
Seilebost from Luskentyre – Harris Caption - The endlessly changing shapes in the sand made up for the fact the tide was a long way out. Nikon D850, 16-35mm lens.
Heading further south we stopped to investigate Scarista but decided to park by the golf course at Sgeir Liath for a more distant view. I watched for a while as a golden eagle circled above Sgarasta Mhόr then headed across the fairway to the beach. A photographer was on the beach photographing a girl throwing poses. Too many footprints. So, I doubled back to the sanctity of the machair where I found a far more pleasing perspective.
Ceapabhal from Sgeir Liath, Scarista– Harris Caption - What little light there was this late afternoon caught the grasses of the machair with Ceapabhal brooding in the shadows across the water. Nikon D850, 16-35mm lens.
Without doubt, the most spectacular location I found on Harris was a beach about which someone had sworn me to secrecy. An hour’s scramble along an at times ill-defined path across the face of a mountain that dropped steeply to the sea; it’s not for the faint-hearted. But was it worth it! The beach was simply breath-taking. And since my wife doesn’t do heights, I was alone. A place I will never forget and whose location I will never reveal.
Without doubt, the most spectacular location I found on Harris was a beach about which someone had sworn me to secrecy. An hour’s scramble along an at times ill-defined path across the face of a mountain that dropped steeply to the sea.
Our visit to Harris and a day spent driving through Lewis to Callanish, were far too brief. We only saw Lewis on a Sunday in torrential rain. We never even scratched the surface. I will return.
Finally, we returned to Skye for a couple of days before heading south again, staying in a bed and breakfast in a stunning location on the single-track road between Broadford and Elgol. On our last day in the Hebrides before heading south we walked across the hills to the abandoned village of Boreraig, its inhabitants the victims of the clearances in the 19th century. Its lonely location overlooking Loch Eishort seemed idyllic but life there for the crofters would have been harsh. This was our one rain free, warm and pleasant day so on the return journey, the peaks of the Blà Bheinn ridge just a few miles from our bed and breakfast were finally revealed.
A View of Blà Bheinn – Skye
This view of Blà Bheinn was taken from below the track bed of what was once the Marble Line, a railway taking marble to the harbour at Broadford. Nikon D850, 80-200mm lens.
This brief excursion to the Hebrides simply whetted my appetite. I have unfinished business there and will return, perhaps when it’s a little quieter and when it’s not quite as wet!
When asked to write for On Landscapes’ end frame feature, I jumped at the chance, a fantastic opportunity to share and talk about a favourite image and photographer of mine! Then the reality of the challenge set in, actually narrowing down the choice to one image, hugely difficult.
As I have explored photographers’ work over the years, obvious choices stood out.
Joe Cornish's images have always inspired me. My bookshelf is littered with his amazing work, along with Bruce Percy, David Ward, and Hans Strand.
More recently Neil Burnell and Dylan Nardini have been regular views in my browser. Both of these photographers have a real fresh and original take on photography with images taken in dramatic light, in unique and creative ways.
Viewing and becoming absorbed in other photographers’ work has definitely helped me improve my creative journey. I feel it’s a must to learn and be inspired. Watching others follow their path has eventually led to me finding my own.
In the process of thinking about the article it reminded me of the earlier days of taking landscape pictures.
Back then, the online gallery Flickr was a popular resource. There was a group of photographers that all ventured out into the Peak District who used this platform and it became quite a community sharing and commenting across each other’s pictures.
One of these photographers is called Jeremy Barrett. I had admired his work for a while, his pictures often muted in colour and packed full of brooding moodiness. His woodland images always stood out, organising the chaos into constructive and beautiful ways, capturing fantastic scenes in stunning light.
The image of Jeremy's I've chosen is from a popular spot for walkers and photographers alike. An ancient woodland, full of history. Trees that have stood probably for hundreds of years, intertwined, creating relationships of shapes, patterns and textures.
It's an amazing location but is notoriously difficult to produce balanced and coherent pictures.
Jeremy cleverly captures photographs of this area using a wide field of view whilst maintaining a compressed depth of field. This gives a wonderful perspective to the pictures. You are pulled into the image, giving your eye a magical journey through the photograph
Jeremy cleverly captures photographs of this area using a wide field of view whilst maintaining a compressed depth of field. This gives a wonderful perspective to the pictures. You are pulled into the image, giving your eye a magical journey through the photograph.
This image called "Dance off" is a great example. It is a photograph that immediately caught my eye. The composition is very dynamic; the wonderful branches on the left lead the eye to the centre of the image, along to the twisted bark of the opposing tree, tying both sides of the view together perfectly. Using the bank of the ravine beyond offers more textures to view and explore. The more you look the more the image reveals itself. You begin to see the mossy boulders and the old stonewall, the history of the place, it is a picture you really want to take time to view.
I admire the way Jeremy uses the contrast and luminosity, such an important element, often overlooked. The picture packs a punch of deep blacks, but still retains subtle tones through the grasses and leaves, it gives the image a real depth from front to back. The toning and subtle hues are very familiar to Jeremy's work and sit perfectly with this photograph giving it a wonderful mood and atmosphere.
Finally, the use of panoramic crop on this picture makes you feel as if you were stood in that exact spot, sharing the view; you can almost hear the woodland sounds and smell the crisp air. It surely is the next best thing to actually being there, and for me that's a sign of a great picture.
Have you ever tried looking for a weather forecast until you found the one you liked the look of and decided to believe in that? If so, you are not alone; I would definitely plead guilty. ’Forecast surfing’ may not be restricted to landscape photographers, but I guess we are more prone to it than most. Especially in the winter, when conditions are at their most critical, I often check the predictions three times a day on the internet, even listening when the (hopelessly vague) radio forecast is on.
But is it useful to indulge in this obsession? No doubt there is some justification for saying that looking out of the window is a more reliable guide to the forecast than those supplied by the experts with their billion-dollar computing infrastructure.
My son Sam, an atmospheric and oceanic earth scientist, tells me that in scientific modelling, all models are (more or less) inaccurate…but that some models are useful.
My son Sam, an atmospheric and oceanic earth scientist, tells me that in scientific modelling, all models are (more or less) inaccurate…but that some models are useful
This quite nicely sums up weather forecasting. And occasionally the forecast can appear to be, more or less, spot on. Now all of us know that the weather system itself is chaotic, so inevitably forecasting is a form of educated guesswork.
During the testing and research for the recent tripods review article, the subject of tripod spikes came up a few times. I’ve taken it for granted for quite some time that spikes are essential tripod accessories but it seems there are quite a few people who don’t use them or, if they do, are happy to use the small spike tips that often come with professional tripods. Hence I thought it would be good to do a little research on the topic.
Paul Strand's Camera and Tripod at the V&A
What are tripod spikes supposed to do?
In order for a tripod to hold a camera steady, it’s important that the ground it’s standing on doesn’t move. This can be taken for granted if the ground is solid rock but unlike urban photography where tarmac and concrete can be relied on pretty much everywhere, our natural landscape has all types of ground cover, from grass to peat, bog and heather, sand, leaf litter etc. If your tripod is resting on these types of ground cover and only has rounded, hard rubber feet then there are a few possibilities for camera movement. Here are a few examples of situations that may cause issues.
Slow Sinking
You know the feeling when you’re standing on what you thought was solid ground but slowly the mud or sand and water is rising up the sides of your shoes. Well your tripod only has to let you camera sink by a fraction of a millimeter and your photograph may end up blurred. You’re unlikely to sink more than a couple of inches as in most cases the lower layers beneath the ground are more compacted. This can be even more of a factor during long exposures.
Slipping
A few slippery leaves and your tripod foot can slip outward slowly. This can be mitigated with extra stiff legs and spider (the bit that connects your legs to your tripod head) and could be worse if you’re working between leg angle stops. Some tripods can be tightened so the leg angle movement is very stiff which can help.
Floating Mats of Hell
If you’ve stood on floating bog mats in Scotland (or elsewhere), you’ll recognise this one! Imagine setting up your tripod and camera on a mattress. If you’re also standing on that mattress next to the tripod, your movement will get transferred to the tripod. Instead of a mattress, think of a surface of peat/loam soil floating above a boggy quagmire and the same effect will happen, even if it is not quite as pronounced. This is a good reason not to move around near your tripod while taking photographs, especially long exposures.
In my last article (Huibo Hou & how a Witch’s Finger becomes Fine Art, On Landscape 216) we looked at how a hugely contrasty, chiaroscuro, emotionally drenched landscape image from the Faroe Isles exemplified the awesome Burkian sense of the Sublime. A fantastical, grab you by the eyeballs and squeeze image, that just exuded black & white drama. So, as a complete contrast, I thought it would be interesting to look at something from the other end of the spectrum – the equally beautiful, but quiet, meditative and minimalistic images by Anthony Lamb of the trees in the Dubai desert, from his Desert Portraits series.
There is a stillness to these images which is quite bewitching. A feeling of tranquillity and harmony, of peacefulness and austere simplicity. The lighting is very delicate and evanescent - there is a sort of fragility to the mood of the images. I must admit, this is not how I envisage the desert, and here is perhaps the first key to understanding the beauty of these pictures: They represent a very personal and unique interpretation of how the desert can look. Anthony describes his minimalist style in this portfolio as “pastel expressionism – the opportunity of escape into solitude”.
It’s fascinating to think for a moment about exactly how and why these images create this mood. I suggest there are four key elements to a minimalist image: simplicity, colour, strong composition and the powerful use of negative space. The first – simplicity – is perhaps the most obvious. We all know that for a minimalist image the author has to decide on the subject and strip away all non-essentials to that point beyond which it would start to lose impact. Here, Anthony is asking the viewer to look at the tree in Sandblasted and the tiny distant bush/tree in Captivation, underscored by two tiny patches of different coloured sand. All other potential focal points have been stripped away, there is nothing to tug the eye, and the other elements within the image play a secondary supporting role to those subjects.
Alexandre describes his photographic beginnings as coming from within as much as without, a means of expression which complements his passion for music and shares its improvisation.
Six years after beginning photo workshops on a dreamlike and evocative vision of nature in the French Alps in 2008, his work expanded worldwide to include Patagonia, Iceland and the Italian Dolomites, as well as conferences and exhibitions. Landmarks along the way have included the 2012 movie “The Quest for Inspiration” by Mathieu Le Lay & Alexandre Deschaumes and his 2016 self-published book “Voyage Éthéré”. Over the last year, Alexandre has been developing new website collections and we’ve been fortunate to have a preview of these at the time of our interview.
Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, your early interests and education, and what that led you to do?
Yes, I grew up in France close to the Swiss border: Lake Geneva, Annecy, Chamonix, Mont Blanc...
I never really managed to feel comfortable at school and I was always struggling to understand where my place was. Also, I wasn’t aware of the surrounding great landscape and mountains around me until my 20s. I spent lots of time in my inner worlds with books and computers, and I became a musician (guitar composition and improvisation, drums, atmospheres) around 1997.
When did you first become interested in photography and what kind of images did you want to make?
I started in the garden and forests around my home in the year 2002; I was fascinated by the autumn mists, with the sun piercing through the forest. I had no specific ambitions and projects except sharing this kind of romantic feeling in nature, looking for something emotional and atmospheric.
Due to my interest in the technicalities, I started to explore large format photography a few years ago. In contrast to my previous subjects, where I mainly photographed people I met while travelling or in my everyday surroundings, I was now more drawn to quiet scenes where I was particularly interested in nature and landscape.
Despite my technical advances, many of my photos were average at best, making me increasingly doubtful of successful progress. I asked myself the question of why and came to the following insight:
It was mainly due to the way I conducted my photographic excursions.
In the preparation phase at home, I planned motives in great detail with the aim of finding and photographing them outdoors.
For example, when the weather forecast announced strong winds and thunderstorms for the next few days, I prepared myself accordingly to capture dramatic weather situations with my camera, ignoring all other possible subjects I might encounter.
Or I had the idea of searching the forest for rotten wood on which new plants were already growing, then I went off to realise this idea and nothing else.
This worked fairly well from time to time, but in the long run, it did not satisfy me.
Looking back, it is clear to me today that I had voluntarily put-on blinkers by this meticulous preparation and preliminary fixing to certain motives!
This insight is supported by the fact that the majority of the better pictures were not the result of advance planning, but were more or less accidental or spontaneous.
For example, the section of the dirt road near the Kochhartgraben,
Whose prominent stone caught my eye in passing on the way to a conscientiously planned motive, and which I then photographed on the way back.
One of the similarities I see between these pictures and my earlier photos of people is that they were also taken not after anonymous preparation but after personal acquaintance, so that they are within the viewer's grasp, so to speak, and they can perhaps feel the spirit of the situation.
In concrete terms, for me this means giving my surroundings the unrestricted chance to be noticed by me with relaxed attention and, if appropriate, to be photographed or not.
The planning and preparation consist of dressing appropriately for the weather and getting the camera equipment ready for use, that's really all.
Of course, this change did not happen overnight. I went for walks and extended hikes, leaving my camera equipment at home from time to time, to unconstricted experience impressions without any filter and photographic considerations.
This approach has helped me to free myself from the limitations described above and to continue my photographic activity with renewed enthusiasm.
Thus, the respective momentary perception is in the foreground and my decision to photograph or not to photograph results from the concrete situation and not from a previously detailed planning.
This approach has helped me to free myself from the limitations described above and to continue my photographic activity with renewed enthusiasm.
It would be a great pleasure for me to have given the one or other reader an equally helpful push through this report.
Last year, Peter Jones from the Photo Space got in touch and suggested we talked to Peter Cattrell about his photography project 'Echoes of the Great War'.
In April 2016, Peter's exhibition "Echos of the Great War " opened at Weston Park in Sheffield and marked 100 years since the Battle of the Somme. Peter’s Great Uncle William Wyatt Bagshawe fought and died in the Somme and through retracing the footsteps of his great uncle, he took black and white photographs of the land as it is now, suggesting the terrain of the frontline through details and abstractions.
Can you tell me a little about your background (e.g., education, childhood passions, early exposure to photography, vocation)?
I went to a private boys' school in Edinburgh and was hugely into sport. I was best at subjects like History, English, and Art. I did photography as a hobby at the school's camera club, and they had a darkroom attached to the chemistry department, so did my first processing of films and printing there. I would go to exhibitions in Edinburgh, and with the annual festival, there were always important shows of art and photography such as August Sander, Lewis Hine, Karl Blossfeldt, and Cartier Bresson. I remember seeing the Becher's show of photographs of colliery pit heads in Glasgow in about 1975 and thinking it such a strange idea for an exhibition, whereas now their influence and ideas on 'Typologies' are so well known. The Stills Gallery in Edinburgh was important to me and I saw many good shows there, from Tony Ray Jones, to Paul Strand's Hebridean photographs.
I then took a year out and got a job in the department of the National Museum of Scotland. I worked under a good studio photographer, learnt a great deal, used medium and large format cameras every day, and also did much printing and darkroom work. It was very precise and technically high-quality work. He encouraged me to apply to the London College of Printing and do a degree in Photography.
My mother had been to Edinburgh Art College and did still life and landscape painting. I grew up meeting many Scottish artists and was aware of the landscape tradition in Scottish art. My father was a scientist, taught at Edinburgh University and he was very interested in art and took it up in his retirement doing painting classes. A friend of his who was a medical photographer gave me a developing tank and I started processing films and then printing at home with a basic Paterson enlarger. He was supportive of my career although it seemed an unusual choice to him, but I'm pleased he saw some of my early exhibitions. My two sisters are both artists, Louise doing painting and Annie sculpture, who went through Art Colleges in Scotland and in London at the RCA, and they have influenced me in many positive ways.
When I left school, I didn't know what direction to take as a career and went to St Andrews University to study an Arts degree doing English, Modern History, and Art History. This was a pivotal year as I realised, I wanted to do something more practical and creative - much of the creativity there was in music and theatre. I used the darkrooms in the student union and was part of the photographic society. I then took a year out and got a job in the department of the National Museum of Scotland. I worked under a good studio photographer, learnt a great deal, used medium and large format cameras every day, and also did much printing and darkroom work. It was very precise and technically high-quality work. He encouraged me to apply to the London College of Printing and do a degree in Photography.
Tell me about the photographers or artists that inspire you most. What books stimulated your interest in photography and who drove you forward, directly or indirectly, as you developed?
In the early days, I liked Bill Brandt very much and wrote to him when I was a student at LCP. Sadly, he died soon after and I didn't meet him. The 'Shadow of Light' influenced me a lot due to the intensity of the printing and rich moody tonalities. I was given a book on Paul Strand's work which I liked and have been a lifelong fan of his. The TV series 'Exploring Photography' presented by Bryn Campbell was an important influence and introduced me to the work of Faye Godwin, John Blakemore and other well-known contemporaries. I liked Richard Avedon very much and saw a TV documentary on his portraits of his dying father which had a strong effect on me. In 1980 I went to Salford 80 which was a big Photo Festival and enjoyed seeing all the exhibitions. I saw the show 'Mirrors and Windows' of American Photography at the Edinburgh Festival in 1981 and wrote about this in my end of course thesis. The model of American photography being either a window on the world like Robert Frank or a mirror of the photographer's own self such as in Minor White's introspective work was I thought very useful. I remember seeing a big show of Richard Misrach's work at the Photographers' Gallery and being hugely impressed by his large colour prints of jungles at night with flash. I was taught at LCP by Jorge Lewinski who did workshops in portrait photography, and inspired by this I did a series of portraits of artists. As a student, I bought a copy of Robert Frank's Americans for £1 in a street market and this is a prized possession.
Some of the Scottish painters like Sir William Gillies and Joan Eardley are important to me, and the German artists Anselm Keifer and Joseph Beuys fascinate me. In the 1980's I started teaching on workshops at the Photographers' Place in Derbyshire and Paul Hill's ideas influenced me as he used to encourage students to work on areas of landscape that were important or significant to them, and not necessarily dramatic and scenic places. I also went on workshops such as Hamish Fulton, and Platinum Printing with Pradip Malde and Mike Ware. I taught a 'Zone System' workshop with Peter Goldfield many times there, and all of these connections have had a lasting significance. Michael Schmidt's 'Waffenrue' is a favourite book of photographs of Berlin before the wall came down. The Japanese photographer Fukase's book on Ravens is very powerful and a favourite.
In the 1980's I started teaching on workshops at the Photographers' Place in Derbyshire and Paul Hill's ideas influenced me as he used to encourage students to work on areas of landscape that were important or significant to them, and not necessarily dramatic and scenic places.
Tell me about why you love landscape photography? A little background on what your first artistic passions were.
I spent much time as a child in the country and used to go fishing with my father - I sometimes think that landscape photography is a bit like angling - you can spend a lot of time waiting for a bite and getting to know small stretches of river and coast. After my father died in 1991, I went to a river we had fished in Ayrshire and took some photographs of where he had caught a salmon when I was six years old. I used to watch my mother drawing and painting and she encouraged us to do the same. Living in Glasgow, and then Edinburgh, you were only a short journey to the country and we holidayed in the Scottish countryside, which was very formative. I did a lot of hillwalking and started taking a camera along. My portfolio to get into LCP had many landscape photographs in it and I went through a phase of pushing 400 ISO film to 1600ISO to get grain and mood. I did many portraits also when I started and my degree show had a portfolio of portraits, and abstract urban landscapes shot on 6x6cm. At LCP I was taught by many good visiting tutors such as Homer Sykes, Martin Parr, Brian Griffin, Paul Hill, and more. I did all kinds of projects from reportage, still life, fashion, portraits, and screen-printing. We had a brilliant technician Heino Johansson who ran the darkrooms.
I think landscape work is in your blood or DNA, and it became my main area of work from about 1984. I had a small show of my urban pictures at Lacock Abbey in 1983, then drove around the area and went back to do some more photography which started it off. Simply owning my first car in 1984 helped hugely as I had the freedom to go off and travel more easily and do creative work. I have been researching about the German concept of 'Heimat' or homeland which is nostalgic for rural life and sense of place, but which was distorted by the Nazis for their own extreme ideology. Many people in Europe have a fragmented sense of identity as they live in different locations, and you can trace your ancestry from different countries. Some of the choices of location that I have done have been to do with family history and personal connections.
In an interview with ffoton.wales it states “Highly regarded for his landscape photography made in Britain and Europe, Peter works primarily with film and fine printing techniques - and these skills as a master printer brought him to the attention of the renowned photographer Faye Godwin who worked with Peter to print her black and white landscapes of the British countryside.” Can you tell us about your background in film and printing and more about how you came to print Faye Godwin’s work?
In my second year at LCP, I was taught by Helen McQuillan who ran advanced fine printing workshops. She had worked with Faye Godwin and it was through Helen that I was introduced to Fay when I left college.
I printed for Fay from 1982 to 1990, did more when she showed at the Barbican in about 2002, her big retrospective, and was printing for her when she died. I have recently done some printing for her archive which is held at the British Library.
I was working for magazines doing portraits at the time and found it hard to juggle doing that and working with her - magazines wanted you to be available when it suited them, and it was before mobile phones - even answering machines were new! My degree show was large B/W archival prints of urban abstractions shot on 6x6 so I had done some fine printing at LCP. I had not planned to become a printer and I just fell into that role. Initially, I did proof prints for books and then moved quickly on to exhibition printing. She used a cold cathode head to a DeVere 504 enlarger and we mostly used Agfa Record Rapid graded chlorobromide paper. It was an interesting time as Fay kept doing new books, exhibitions and her career was building a momentum. Sometimes a famous writer would come to lunch, and she made me feel that there was a photographic community in Britain and London.
She became politically very active and was keen on environmental issues. I started doing rural landscape work as my main creative area, having previously done much urban imagery, and this aligned me more with what Fay was doing. Her retrospective 'Land’ at the Serpentine gallery and the book, in 1986 was a high point, brought her to a much wider audience, and was a big achievement. My generation worked with film because we had no choice, whereas now the emphasis is on digital, and maybe exploring film as a change, or to be alternative. I printed for Fay from 1982 to 1990, did more when she showed at the Barbican in about 2002, her big retrospective, and was printing for her when she died. I have recently done some printing for her archive which is held at the British Library. Occasionally I print for museums which is always interesting when they are old or unusual negatives, and one project I did was printing glass negatives at the IWM darkrooms of women in Scotland working in WW1 doing what had previously been men's jobs. It was Fay who got me involved with teaching as I assisted her on workshops, which led on to Central St Martins asking me in to teach.
Your work is held in numerous collections around the world, including the V&A, London; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; National Galleries of Scotland; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Goldman Sachs, London and National Trust for Scotland. Can you tell us how these collections have come about and how you worked with the various museums?
I had a show at the Edinburgh Festival in 1987 and the curator Sarah Stevenson bought a set of prints for the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. She was starting to build a collection for the National Galleries of Scotland. Later they would buy other prints and I would also donate work to them. My Scottish roots are very important to me and it is where I have done much of my best work. In 1988 I showed my portfolio to Mark Haworth Booth at the V&A and he bought some prints for the collection. In 1989 I did a trip to the Photography Festival in Arles, showed my portfolio to many people including Jean Claude Lemangy, who gave me a show at the Bibliotheque Nationale in 1993 and bought a set of prints. It is very useful to have work in important collections as curators put on group exhibitions or publish books and include your work. How you publicise yourself in the art world of photography is an issue and people want to know if your work is held in important collections. Meeting curators and keeping them in touch with what you do is important. Going to Photography festivals, and showing your portfolio is something you have to do. I was commissioned by the Scottish National Trust through a design group in Glasgow, I also did a project for the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow, and a favourite project was for the new Scottish Parliament in Holyrood photographing Scotland to make a set of prints for display and their collection. I like it when curators know my work and commission me to do a project, trusting me to do my own interpretation.
You’ve lectured since 1986 at Central St Martins, Camberwell and London College of Communication, has teaching influenced your style and approach to photography?
Teaching has given me less time to do my own work, and it does take up a lot of your energy. I like working with people, so teaching fulfils that side of me as landscape and darkroom work is more solitary. I think when you teach you have to really know your subject. Initially, I taught fine printing and then started teaching other areas such as the 'zone system', studio lighting, medium and large format, colour printing, architectural, portrait photography, and nowadays I have to teach digital and Photoshop. I was taught some critical theory at LCP, and am aware of the balance between teaching technique, and the ideas that underpin what you do in creative practice. There have been many students who have good ideas but need help putting them into practice by understanding technique. Some people have technical ability but their work lacks research and is weak. I think there have been times when too much theory has been taught at the detriment of technique at colleges. Teaching has kept me in touch with contemporary theory and ideas. I think understanding technique or the process of photography, needs to go hand in hand with concepts, theory and ideas and is as important.
When you talk to groups about your own creative work you clarify what you have done and also get feedback on your approach and ideas and placing these into a cultural context is essential in modern practice. At CSM I have worked with degree students who are majoring in painting, sculpture or film, and they approach using photography in a different way to perhaps a photography degree student at LCC. Many students do projects which are issue based or a piece of theory that a tutor has proposed, so you must be open to working with anyone on a variety of projects. I had to do a Post Grad course in reflective teaching for Higher Education which was very interesting as it put an emphasis on how students learn and turned on its head many of the preconceptions you might have about teaching or your own experience of being taught at university in past years. Meeting other tutors who are practising artists in other areas has inspired me. I currently teach a portfolio short course at CSM which covers a wide range of work and projects which I like, and portrait courses. In some ways, I think I keep my creative work separate from my teaching persona, but in some areas, they cross over very much.
In an interview with Museums Sheffield, you say “When I did my degree in Photography at London College of Printing the Falklands War happened, and we discussed that, including how different newspapers used photographs. As a child I remember seeing images of the Vietnam war regularly, and also the troubles in Northern Ireland were very prominent. As a tutor at St Martins, I watched the Gulf, and Afghan wars on TV “How do you think this influenced your focus on the project “Echoes of The Great War?”
Any cultural references influence your thinking and I was impressionable as a child when the Vietnam War images were on the TV news every day and in the newspapers. I remember reading Michael Herr's book 'Dispatches' while at St Andrews. The troubles in Northern Ireland were also in the news each week and felt very close to home. Coverage of war has changed so much. It is interesting to look at Goya's etchings of Disasters of War from the C18th, or Otto Dix's etchings of WW1. I have often visited the Imperial War Museum in London and looked at the painting collection, and have always liked Paul Nash's paintings of conflict, but other artists like Eric Ravilious appeal very much also, and Brandt did much work of bombed London in WW2, and Cecil Beaton did much imagery also.
Memorials are in every village, town and city in Britain so you are reminded of past events everywhere you go. My grandfathers were both in the Great War, one in the Navy in Orkney, and the other in France and Belgium working with artillery. I have several great uncles who fought also in different theatres in WW1 including Italy, and one in the naval Battle of Jutland.
My intention with the Great War project was to approach the specific story of my Great Uncle, rather than comment on war as a whole, and I think of it as a loss of a very talented generation on both sides.
My mother was in the WRNS in WW2, and my father was a research scientist based in Surrey, so I am the first generation not to have to engage in such a large conflict, although warfare in different forms has taken place throughout my life. As someone who has studied history and had to write essays about the European wars of different eras, it is a subject that I have an interest in, but particularly the Great War mainly because of my great uncle and his story. There is a collective memory across continents with a World War, as every family in Europe was affected, but individual stories and personal memory is what interests me most.
Roger Fenton's photographs of the Crimean War have always struck me due to the empty images of battlefields after the conflict has happened, and Timothy O'Sullivan's work on the American Civil War I have found haunting, as images of strewn bodies lying dead on the field after the battle is over. In Britain, there are traces of military history everywhere, not least the many concrete blocks and empty pillboxes that are still around the coast to prevent invasion, which I have photographed, and some which I played on as a child in East Lothian. I have a fascination with history and Britain is so rich as a subject for study, that can inform creative projects in any medium. As a student, I saw a big show of Don McCullin's work at the V&A and much of that show was striking reportage of conflict and suffering. A theory tutor at LCP brought all the different newspapers one day during the Falklands conflict in 1982 to show how one image of the exploding ship was presented in different papers, to discuss that the context in which an image is used influences its meaning. The live video images of missiles being directed on targets in recent wars in the Middle East is so different to how earlier wars were represented, and we are told of, or shown images of violence and its effects every week in news coverage such as terrorism. My intention with the Great War project was to approach the specific story of my Great Uncle, rather than comment on war as a whole, and I think of it as a loss of a very talented generation on both sides.
You say in an interview "The project Echoes of the Great War is in homage to my great uncle William Wyatt Bagshawe and his friends in the Sheffield Pals. I started by photographing the frontline of the Somme at Serre where they died. Uncle Willie’ was an artist who did mostly landscape subjects, and we have some of his work, including watercolours and etchings". Tell us a bit about the project 'Echoes of the Great War’. Where did it all start and more about your personal interest in this subject?
The research has played a big part in my enjoyment and fascination with the subject. My grandmother had kept an archive of family photographs and letters and she would show them to me as a child. When she died, I took over this archive, and have added to it. There were letters by Willie to his parents from boarding school at Framlingham College in Suffolk, back to Sheffield. He used to draw and doodle on these letters and envelopes which endeared me to him. He studied in Sheffield and then went to the Slade School in London, which became famous afterwards with people like Paul Nash and Stanley Spenser students there, and Henry Tonks teaching. Willie was part of the New English Art Group which was a breakaway group from the Royal Academy school and he did mostly landscape paintings and etchings, as well as funny sketches and cartoons. He will have done many cartoons of friends in army life which must exist somewhere.
My grandmother had several photographs of him with friends at training camps in England, and one in particular of him with three friends is very poignant, sitting on the grass smoking at Cannock Chase. All but one died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, and those three are on the big arch at Thiepval as part of the 'Missing of the Somme': William Wyatt Bagshawe, Edward Stanley Curwen a classics master at Rotherham Grammar school, and the poet Alexander Robertson from Edinburgh who was a history lecturer at Sheffield University. The survivor 'Mr Bailey' went back to Sheffield University, and I think became a school teacher, and I will look at the census returns from 1921 next year to try and trace his family.
In 1989 I drove down to Arles in the south of France to visit the annual photography festival. After that, I did a three-week trip driving north and visiting places of interest to photograph the landscape. In the last few days, I visited Verdun where the French held back the German advance in WW1 defending a huge fortress which protected Paris. I took some photographs there of shell holes in the forest and was very moved by signs showing where a village had been. This was completely destroyed by shellfire and tape and name tags show where the Marie, the schoolhouse, and the bakery had been.
In the last few days, I visited Verdun where the French held back the German advance in WW1 defending a huge fortress which protected Paris. I took some photographs there of shell holes in the forest and was very moved by signs showing where a village had been. This was completely destroyed by shellfire and tape and name tags show where the Marie, the schoolhouse, and the bakery had been.
Next day I went to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission office in Arras to trace my great uncle. It was before records had been digitised so I had to wait 2 hours, but they were very helpful and showed me that his name was on the memorial at Thiepval for the 'Missing of the Somme'. I drove there next and photographed his name on the pillar, and then took some landscapes near Albert. Lastly, I drove to the Newfoundland Park which is a famous memorial to that regiment who were hammered on 1st July 1916 - the French Government gave the land to the Newfoundland people as a memorial and is kept as it was with trenches intact. That night I got the ferry back to England and did not realise how close I had been to where 'Uncle Willie' had died at Serre. In London, I did some research at the Imperial War Museum library on the Sheffield City Battalion and found him mentioned in a book by Sparling written in about 1929. I then read avidly about the Somme and found specific books on the Sheffield Pals, and one had a photograph of Willie in a tweed suit learning drill at Bramall Lane, Sheffield Utd's football ground.
How did the project evolve? Did you have to refine the vision of what you wanted to achieve when you progressed in researching the project?
Initially, I went to the 80th anniversary commemorations in July 1996 and took some photographs of the frontline where he died. I was there at dawn on the 1st July 1996 - 80 years to the minute and someone blew a whistle at 7.30 am when the main attack started. I spent several days there taking different images and doing some portraits of visitors and reenactors. I was hooked on the area and the feelings I had about the place were very strong. The frontline areas have a presence that is very special. They are now just farmland with a rotation of crops such as sugar beet, corn, and maize, and each time I visit the place looks different. There are several woods on the Somme which if you enter are very atmospheric, but also dangerous with unexploded ordnance - 'Passage Interdit'.
To start with I thought I would probably do one visit just to see the place, but on returning to London and processing the films it became clear that I was getting good images, and made me want to develop the project further. There were other connections to follow such as my father's uncle who had fought through the whole war and won a medal near Ypres; the war poets Sassoon and Owen intrigued me as they had met in South Edinburgh not far from where I had lived, and I had studied their writing. I have taken images of where Owen died, which is also near where Matisse grew up. Other areas of the Somme and Ypres front interested me and I included them in the project. The image of the four men sitting smoking has made me research about them and their backgrounds, as well as where the Sheffield Pals trained and the story of the battalion. I traced and met up with Alexander Robertson's relation in Scotland who talked of him as 'Uncle Alex'. I also discovered that I am related to Charles Hamilton Sorley, another well known poet who died at Loos in 1915, as a relation married his twin brother. He was an influential poet admired by Sassoon, Owen and Graves. I hope to do work at Loos in the future.
In 2019 I visited my old school in Edinburgh and researched in their archive as over 200 former pupils were killed in WW1. Many died at Gallipoli but some were at the Somme and are on the Thiepval memorial for the 'Missing'. I may do some work to include this connection into the project. Similarly, I became fascinated by Colonel McRae’s battalion from Edinburgh based on the Hearts football club and their supporters. I was involved in a charity auction to build a memorial cairn at Contalmaison, where the battalion reached their objectives on the 1st day of the battle. The potential to expand the project is obvious, especially when there is a personal interest, but it is a question of funding and time, as I have done the project self-funded.
Did you plan the images that you wanted to capture or were they more spontaneous when you visited specific locations?
The images were a spontaneous response to the locations, and the hardest part is reading up about each place, and knowing that you are actually at the correct place when you are there as it is all farmland now. Occasionally you come across the remains of concrete bunkers and if you go into the woods you can see the zig-zag of trenches. If you walk the fields you come across lead shrapnel balls that were fired by the British - lethal if the opposition soldiers were out in the open, but not if they were hidden in underground bunkers as at the Somme. For years I photographed at Serre and on the frontline, there were four copses named after Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Matthew doesn't exist anymore, and the others are now one wood. I read that the Sheffield Pals came out of John Copse, and the Accrington Pals came out of Luke Copse, but recently I read that Willie's 'A' company also came out of Luke Copse. He had volunteered to be in the first wave at 7.20 am which was very brave as they had little chance of survival. His group lay down in front of the uncut German wire at 7.20 am and he was shot by a sniper. The main attack started at 7.30 am with the blowing of several large mines under the German front line. So many guidebooks have been written for people walking the frontlines, and there is much tourism with people visiting cemeteries, and coach tours with guides. I have met many people on their own pilgrimage to the sites and doing their own research.
The contemporary images you’ve taken of the location of battlefields which are of the tranquil countryside are a stark contrast to the horrors of the war. What narrative did you want to convey to the viewer when you were making the images?
In a way I wanted to show the ordinariness of the places, and how strange two huge armies could meet in these bits of farmland, and that they should have such huge significance. Some small villages in the Department de La Somme became such famous names in military history such as Serre, Beaumont Hamel, and Thiepval in the same way that people talk of Crecy and Agincourt.
In a way I wanted to show the ordinariness of the places, and how strange two huge armies could meet in these bits of farmland, and that they should have such huge significance.
The countryside of the Somme is very similar to parts of Britain and the soldiers could identify with this countryside as it was like home, whereas Gallipoli was quite different.
The way I have composed the photographs is often details, and abstractions of parts of the places and this is probably how the foot soldier saw the field ahead. I have not gone for grand views or sunsets with poppies. I have visited many cemeteries and often photographed them but have not included these images when I have exhibited the project.
The memorialisation of the war in stone and sculpture is a separate issue to me and I have read about this including Geoff Dyer's 'Missing of the Somme'. He also did a trip with John Berger which was a BBC radio programme where they discuss the places and the way the war is thought of and remembered. The whole concept of the 'Missing' is fascinating - how do you live with the knowledge that your son or relative is reported as missing, not killed or wounded, and has no known grave. Many waited in hope of news of someone reported 'Missing' only to get confirmation later that they were dead. Willie's mother put an ad in the Sheffield Telegraph asking if anyone knew of what had happened to Willie, and she had a reply in a letter describing his death by someone who was with him. Sadly, many like him lay there in no man's land for months and his body may have been hit by a shell, or deteriorated and unrecognisable, buried as a 'Soldier Known unto God', or 'A Soldier of the Great War'. I may have seen his grave but not known it was him.
I have been involved in the visitor centre at Thiepval and they have been trying to place faces to the names on the memorial to the missing. I sent in the images of Curwen, Robertson and Bagshawe and they used these in a lightbox collage of many faces as you enter the centre, and on a poster that you can buy. I did a talk at CSM on the project and one tutor was critical of the work saying why was there mostly trees and agriculture and not more evidence of the industrialisation of the war. If you go there, there are traces of shell holes and trenches but very little else. There are a very few concrete structures - the places are tranquil but I think I have tried to capture an edge in the imagery, and also the sense of mystery that I feel there. In a way the absence of traces is the point of the work, hence the title 'Echoes of the Great War', as the work is not a record of the battle, nor an architectural project on memorials and gravestones, but more that there is a regeneration of the places, and the overall terrain is much the same as it always was. To me the land itself is a memorial, as it is where the men fell, many of them particularly the 'Missing' are part of that soil. The architecture of remembrance of the cemeteries and memorials is important too but it is not what I have chosen to present. I collected some shrapnel fragments, bullets, wire, and other debris while walking the frontline, and then did extreme close ups of these pieces which I include in the exhibitions. I was struck by how small these pieces are but how lethal they were in the heat of battle.
“The colour prints taken at Redmires are of the area where the Sheffield Pals camped and trained, and are a new departure working digitally, but in the same contemplative way with a tripod and long exposures, pursuing the highest quality. The winter of 1914 at Redmires was bitterly cold with much snow, and the first casualty in the Pals was someone dying of pneumonia...” Tell us more about the images you took at Redmires Training Camp.
The Sheffield Pals were the 12th Battalion of the Yorks and Lancs Regiment. They recruited many men from the university students and were thought of as a rather middle-class battalion.
They were billeted above Sheffield in the hills near Redmires reservoir where they were trained in shooting and did many route marches to become fit for service, such as to Stanage Edge which I have photographed, and around Stanage Pole, there are carvings of names on rocks by the soldiers.
They were billeted above Sheffield in the hills near Redmires reservoir where they were trained in shooting and did many route marches to become fit for service, such as to Stanage Edge which I have photographed, and around Stanage Pole, there are carvings of names on rocks by the soldiers. I found one by a Sheffield Pal - 'Alflat' - and I know his grandson who I met at the Weston Park Museum in 2016. There is a forest at Redmires where you can see the concrete bases of huts which were there in 1914, but in WW2 this was a prison camp for German POW's. I have visited several times and photographed in different seasons, once in early 2015 in heavy snow as I wanted to be there at the same time that there had been bad weather in 1915. I like photographing in snow for the graphic qualities you get in black and white but took colour pictures on a digital camera as a change. I have used colour on the Somme to a certain extent but have not exhibited these. I see the series in black and white in my mind's eye, and I like the format of 6x7cm with mostly horizontal pictures. There is a gravity with working in black and white and I think this suits the project, and I am always drawn to the sense of abstraction that B/W has rather than colour.
There was trench digging at Redmires, and I have been to those sites with a historian. A good friend of mine in London has a brother who lives in the same house in Sheffield that my grandfather Benjamin and Willie grew up in on Fulwood Road. This is not far from the gallery and is in an attractive part of the city, a short drive from Redmires. I have stayed with them in the house that my family lived in before WW1 and they have been very supportive to me during this project, and I have photographed the house, although I have not exhibited these pictures. Just before WW1 they moved to Wolstenholme Road not far away, and Willie's older brother lived there until 1956, but this house is now flats. There is a novel 'Covenant of Death' by John Harris about the Sheffield Pals, which is based on interviews he did with survivors at the reunion dinners in the 1920s. He calls the camp 'Blackmires' in the novel and goes into details of the training and life there and follows the story of their journey through different training camps at Ripon, Cannock Chase, Salisbury Plain, then to defend the Suez Canal against the Turks, and finally across to France for the 'Big Push'. He described them as 'two years in the making and one day in the destroying'. A recent book 'The Meakin Diaries' of another Sheffield Pal describes how he was in a later wave at Serre, and ran past Uncle Willie lying dead there in the first wave, and jumped into a shell hole for cover, after which he crawled back to the British line under cover of darkness. The attack was a failure and didn't reach its objectives as the German trenches and wire had not been destroyed by the 5 days of shelling leading up to 1st July, and they came out of their deep shelters to set up machine guns at a terrible cost to these Pals battalions. The 'Somme' is often used as a metaphor for disaster and the loss of life in a short time - the first hour of the attack was dreadful, with wave after wave leaving the trenches and walking uphill into the machine gun fire, as the generals had expected there to be no opposition as the German front line had been shelled so much.
You had an exhibition in April 2016 to mark the 100 years since the Battle of the Somme at Weston Park, Sheffield. How did this come about? How did you go about planning the exhibition and alongside archival materials including artwork, letters and maps?
I first showed the project in 2000 in Dublin, and then Belfast in a group show 'For Evermore', then in Edinburgh at the National Portrait Gallery in 2005, followed by the Durham Light Infantry museum, and the IWM in London. I didn't show it for a while after that as I was doing other projects, but kept doing bits of work when I could, often on family holidays with children. The 100th anniversary inspired me to show the work again and I showed it in London in 2014 at the Robert Fleming Gallery, and in a group show at the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh in 2015. I contacted the Sheffield Museums as I had always wanted to show the project there. They were keen on the idea and put it on at the Weston Park Museum in 2016 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. I was so pleased to show there and they included many artefacts from private collections and their own archives to add to the exhibition. I had my file of letters, and vintage photographs, and Willie's paintings and drawings, and this was added to by the museum but also the University which is nearby. Outside the museum is the sculpture of a WW1 soldier and is the city's memorial to the Pals. I have also seen the chapel of remembrance in Sheffield Cathedral and Willie's name in the book there, as are his friends Robertson and Curwen and the other fallen.
Tell me what your favourite two or three photographs from the series are and a little bit about them (please include these images in the ones you send over)
The Maize Cutting at Serre 1997
This is taken looking uphill towards the German front line, and the farmers were cutting the maize crop that day and I liked the angle and line of the maize. It is metaphorical of the cutting down of the crop which is symbolic of the scything of the men as they walked uphill, heavily laden with backpacks and tools, into the machine gun fire at short range that could tear them apart.
Avenue of Trees at Newfoundland Park 2000
This is taken on a very cold misty day in January, after a storm so one of the branches had fallen down. The Park is often visited by coaches of people during the summer months and students show visitors around. The trenches have been preserved and the Germans held a strong base called 'Y Ravine' which was captured by a Scottish regiment later, so there is a huge memorial of a kilted Scots soldier.
Could you tell us a little about the cameras and lenses you typically take on a trip and how they affect your photography?
For this project I have taken mostly a Mamya RZ67 with a series of lenses: 50mm, 65mm, 90mm, 127mm and 250mm. You get fantastic quality from these prime lenses and the camera on a tripod, with 100 iso film. I have taken a digital camera and taken colour pictures as well - a Nikon D810 with different lenses.
What sort of work do you undertake on your images? Give me an idea of the processes involved.
With film I use the zone system carefully and process the films at home in my darkroom, using different dilutions of developer and times than the norm. I do contact sheets, and proof prints at about 10x8, then do exhibition prints on silver gelatin paper. The whole process is quite slow and takes time to digest which I like. I have shot several colour negative films which get processed in C41 in a lab and may be scanned or printed in a darkroom, or digital as Giclee prints. With digital, I shoot RAW and put them in Lightroom, but edit in Photoshop. I don't do much post processing apart from small changes to get the colour balance, or exposure correct. I print on archival paper and use archival inks.
The moment the opportunity arose where I was able to visit Yosemite, I grabbed it with both hands and seized the chance. There was something about the place that had enticed me for decades, namely the work of Ansel Adams that had me transfixed to his books in a college library at the age of sixteen whilst working as a photography student. Every photograph Adams made in this National Park seemed to ooze the true essence of what an American wilderness should look like. Vast areas of forest, towering spires of granite, huge waterfalls cascading thousands of feet over cliffs into the valley below, in which wildlife ran free and drank from the crystal clear waters of the rivers. This, of course, was the vision Adams intended in the first place to ensure that the landscape was protected for future generations of Americans.
The other consideration for visiting Yosemite was being aware that my mind was saturated with mental images that had accumulated over many years of seeing photographs of the area. Many of these, and the most revered ones, were photographs made by Adams himself, but also many of the contemporary photographers that have worked in Yosemite National Park. In short, the place had a lot to live up to.
I arrived in San Francisco and began the four-hour drive to the valley and the initial journey took me through some areas that I would describe as huge urban sprawls straddling the constantly throbbing interstate highway. After about three hours of peering toward the horizon and not really seeing any rising mountain ranges, you begin to feel like you are never going to arrive. Because Yosemite is in the High Sierra you are unaware that you’re gradually climbing and slowly you begin to leave the conurbations behind, and slowly the road steepens and the forests begin.
By chance, my first arrival into Yosemite Valley was via Highway 120 and Big Oak Flat Road. This route hugs the steep granite walls of the western end of the valley and on one particular turn a view opens up looking the entire length of the valley towards Half Dome.
I did what I suspect every photographer would do during my first days in the valley which was to be out and photographing as many iconic locations as I could
I pulled up in the busy layby and just stood there with all the photographs and images I had seen over the years fizzing in my mind in amazement at what was in front of me.
Those who follow me are aware of my love for trees; subjects that have now become the trademark of my photographs and that have made my photographic style quite identifiable, less impactful and less commercial, but more meditative and reflective, subjective representation and intimate of my reality. I pay a lot of attention in the choice of subjects, I look for lines and shapes, colour and shades, elements that must metaphorically represent my state of mind and that basically translate into an inner search.
What binds me to trees is the memory of some emotional states belonging to parts of my life and the forest symbolises something very deep, metaphysical, psychic.
In 2014 bored by years of spectacular landscape photography and that I no longer felt mine, I set out on a personal search, free from any stereotype that influenced my images. I spontaneously approached a more personal and descriptive photograph of my Self rather than the landscape. So, I started to frequent the Calabrian mountains, especially the plateau of the Sila National Park and with its huge pine and beech forests I created a symbiotic and interpersonal bond. Thus, it was that from the depths of the unconscious some memories emerged, as from the abyss, which gave life to my photographic identity.
In 2008 I faced a dark period in my life, depression, as underrated as it is widespread, a mood disorder that affects 15 out of 100 people. This is a society that I consider suffocating, bombarding with information and injustices, generating discomfort and further fuelling suffering. Obviously, medicine and psychology have made enormous progress and with will you can face any malaise.
This image on the cover of the book The Unpainted South caught my eye in a book shop in South Carolina in April 2019. The book is sub-titled Carolina’s Vanishing World. Selden B Hill took the photographs and the poetry was written by William P Baldwin.
In the cover image, the barn stands alone, propped up in the morning mist by the columns that support its eaves, somewhere in the plains of South Carolina with just a single tree for company. To me, the photo has the feeling not just of emptiness and loss but also one of the building looking back at the visitor as if to say, “I am still here, still proud and still defiant even though I no longer work.”
The image kept coming back to me as I sat at home in the leafy suburbs of south west London. Who had built the barn? How could something so engaging have been abandoned? Where had the owners gone? These are reactions that many photographers will recognise and empathise with about other places that we are drawn to. Leaf through the book and “The Barn” is just one of many abandoned, derelict buildings photographed by Hill.
South Carolina does not seem to be the main destination for photographers but there is much to see: the city of Charleston, faithfully restored to her former self after the devastation of Hurricane Hugo in 1989 sits in what is known at the Lowcountry - a large area of land rising no more than a few feet above sea level; forests of Southern live oak with their long flowing tendrils of Spanish moss on the banks of the marshlands of the May River and a few miles further inland; the Old Sheldon Church ruined first by the British and again in the Civil War; plantation houses - some gated and some open to visitors. Everywhere the land is flat with barely a mound, let alone a hill to break the skyline. What the Lowcountry lacks in rolling landscape and mountains it makes up in atmosphere and history – a history that struck me as more alive and present than it is in Britain.
I wanted to return and six months later, in October 2019 I flew to Charleston on my own. Most of the passengers on the flight seemed to be going to play golf at the many famous courses along the coast to the south of Charleston but I wanted to explore and discover, perhaps even to find Selden’s barn.
Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted from our subscribers. Each portfolios consisting of four images related in some way.
Submit Your 4x4 Portfolio
Interested in submitting your work? We're on the lookout for new portfolios for the next few issues, so please do get in touch!
The notion of time, stilled within a photograph has been the foundation of my work. Ever since discovering Hiroshi Sugimoto, I realised there is an ability of a photograph to contain far more than is apparent, even when there is a narrative attached to the image. Time compressed and then printed on paper or viewed on a screen is compelling and a fascination.
Inspired by Paul Hill and Martin Parr, worked for NGOs in West Africa, now resident and teaching in New Zealand. Tortured and inspired by light and what the camera saw.
The gradual lifting of lockdown and the turbulence of the current political climate has allowed and driven me to wander about the old fields and woodlands of my neighbouring town of Concord, Massachusetts to visit some old friends. While too young to have experienced historic events nearby first hand, their stately grace suggests deep knowledge of what went before. If only I was wise enough to understand what advice they could share about going forward...
I’m a reformed large format camera user. Walking softly and carrying a large tripod, I explore the woods and waters of my native New England and beyond to experience and share the amazement of their subtle beauty.
Some wild places have the power to captivate all who visit them, not because they have unrivalled views or superior scenery but because they instil in the visitor a sense of wonder and awe. Staverton Thicks in Suffolk is one such place.
It’s ancient woodland is a landscape of fairytale qualities where vast oaks stand side by side with some of the tallest holly trees in Britain. Reminiscent of childhood stories, the ‘Thicks’ is a chaotic tangle of twisted branches where light is sparse and evergreen curtains of holly hang in the air. Dead and decaying boughs and trunks litter the floor and even on the brightest of days the air is cool and the forest dark.
This small area of woodland is a place I love to visit especially in the autumn and is the subject of an ongoing photography project.
Like so many people on this planet, the Corona virus pandemic has affected me in several ways, not least financially. My workplace has been in short-time work mode for months and despite having more time on my hands, I found myself with less of a mind for photography.
During the lockdown in May I had to do a professional trip to Amsterdam and I took the chance to spend a few days at the North Sea. It was surprisingly and thankfully quite deserted.
The images show a memorial to the small seaside village Petten which had to be evacuated, moved and rebuild multiple times due to its vicinity to the sea and to war destruction. The memorial is a marker for its historical location.
I have always loved the graphical nature of groynes, therefore these strange forms attracted me immediately. I was also fascinated by the symbolical value of the poles. The idea that something remains to brave the tides and storms long after it vanished. Their indifference towards weather, breaking waves and the people who are walking, playing and partying in between.
To me it also seemed like a symbol of loss: people lost at sea, the loss of homes and the loss of lives - like ghosts standing guard between the tangible and the ephemeral world.
We spoke to you last in 2018 about your Scotch Mist project can you give us an overview of what projects you have been working on and how your photography journey has continued since then?
Over the past few of years, I have been working on various photography projects. I have also been exploring other avenues and trying new things other than photography. I started Outsider an ongoing land art project. For me personally, I have always seen photography as more of a ride than a journey, without departures or destinations, I believe the meat is in the transitions in between the two.
During Scotch Mist, I was shooting "Body of light". It's a conceptual series made from old vintage postcards I had collected from bric a brac from market stalls. The light effect I shot in camera using a simple pinhole and direct sunlight. I used the series for my installation for the museum. "Station to Station" was a brief fascination I had for steam locomotives which I coupled together with railways at wartime, an event set in the 1940s. A trip back in time.
I shot "Mare Nostrum" at random from my phone as I strolled along the beach. I wanted to fracture the seascapes and shot that again in camera (so to speak), I'm not a lover of the photoshop. I visit the sea as often as I can it's not far from where I live, it has always held an attraction for me, the fish and chips there are really good too.
"Crows"; I prefer to photograph animals than portraits or people. Having someone stand there looking into the camera has never really done it for me, personally I find animals way more interesting and challenging. You just never know what's around the corner, I like the unpredictability of it all. Crows came about after spotting two crows way up high grappling and fighting with each other as they fell from the sky. For me it was a rare and powerful image, I had never seen anything like it before. There's conflict everywhere, it just opened things up to explore the birds further. I became interested in their ariel skills and the juxtapositions.
"Outsider" is an ongoing Land art project, as I mentioned above. I had the idea for quite some time, it started in the autumn of 2017 when I got a phone call from the local museum asking if I would be interested in putting on a photography exhibition in their art gallery. I declined that offer, but said what I would be interested in is showing some work in the grounds, so I made an installation with the "Body of light" series. I used the opportunity as an experiment really so I kept it pretty basic for future outdoor photography projects to see how the weatherised prints would stand up over the winter months.
Tell us about your current project ‘Looker watchers of the forest’ - How did the project start? What were your thoughts when you were first developing the idea?
It started for a number of reasons; I have always had an interest for the natural world and wildlife, it has always played a part in my work over many years in both as a filmmaker and photographer; secondly, over the past four to five years I had clocked up a lot of mileage on various projects and needed a change, and try something different. I set myself the challenge of hunting down a project locally in the nearby forests. I find them atmospheric; they have an air of mystery about them. Rendlesham forest comes to mind where the famous UFO incident took place in 1980, creatures, myths and legends etc, I have always thought they are a fantastic place, a sanctuary to spend time in and get away from it all. I also felt one shouldn't need to travel thousands of miles to find beauty either.
As the months passed, I must have looked at thousands of trees. In the endeavour to find the ones that gave me a tug. I remember one day getting a strange look from the odd dog walker when she saw me just stood there in the middle of the forest in pouring rain staring at the trees; I was watching the rain run down the trunks, I wanted to see if I could fuse the rain together with the eyes.
How did the project evolve? Did it change over time as you took the photographs?
I have a free-spirited approach to all the still photography work. I would say it's more intuitive, a gut feeling more than anything else, I will start with very loose ideas, I don’t lock anything down which enables me to explore alternative ways to approach things and experiment with ideas. But at the same time trying not to overdo it. I like to keep things authentic but interesting at the same time, without sucking the blood out of it. With Looker, I wanted to work with nature and use the different seasons to see what may or may not reveal itself. I shot over a period of 10 months and just took whatever it threw at me. The projects evolve by just getting into it and putting the graft in like anything else, accepting things, rejecting things. It all takes time and effort. As the months passed, I must have looked at thousands of trees. In the endeavour to find the ones that gave me a tug. I remember one day getting a strange look from the odd dog walker when she saw me just stood there in the middle of the forest in pouring rain staring at the trees; I was watching the rain run down the trunks, I wanted to see if I could fuse the rain together with the eyes. Alas, I wasn't really happy with the effect so I only used the one. You win some you lose some. I try as much as I can to push things, but also trying to avoid the crash and burn scenario. I've had my fair share of those as one does. I listen to a lot of music, mainly rock, that can sometimes help for a bit of inspiration or ideas, I find it’s the oil that gets things turning again when I hit the buffers.
Joe Cornish in his recent article talks about the Metaphoric Landscape “that landscape can be said to have characteristics that are similar to something completely different. In most cases that ‘completely different’ will be the human condition.” Was this something that you had in mind when you worked on this project?
I never set out with any preconceived ideas about the human condition or metaphor. But yeah, when I first came a cross the eyes, I was struck straight away by the resemblance; I thought how ironic the trees are mirroring the very cause of the destruction problem, Humans. There were times at the start of the project where I would just wander off into the heart of the forest like a lost dog trying to snatch some inspiration from somewhere or spark the imagination up, then one day it was one of those rare occasions I find with still photography where I felt I was just gifted the pictures, where the pictures are not taken. But given. I was off and running again more by luck than judgement.
It wasn't only the human connection that attracted me, there were eyes that took on the form of animals like the elephant and the whale.
It wasn't only the human connection that attracted me, there were eyes that took on the form of animals like the elephant and the whale. We are doing a good job on wiping those out too. I found the main driver was in the otherworldly ethereal feel they had, some had a melancholic and sad feel. They all had their own unique and individual characteristics.
You say you’ve walked the forests in Yorkshire for over 40 years - what changes have you seen in that time?
The main changes from where I stand is in the weather; as we all know over the years our summers have got hotter and winters milder, for instance, I was hoping for a bit of snow in the forest when shooting Looker, to give the images a bit of weight. In previous years I noticed how the wind would whip up the snow onto the tree trunks, there wasn't any snow again this year. The autumns are longer which you could say is a plus for the visual side of things, there is more flooding here now and it doesn't help when developers build houses on flood plains. Frackers came and went which could have been pretty devastating on so many levels. I think the native American Indians from the past had the right idea with their philosophies and cultures regarding the respect they had for nature and the planet. It’s a crazy world. I'm not sure where it's all going to end up. But there is lots of great work going on in nature reserves and wetlands here and many other parts of the UK and worldwide I should imagine where the land is being well managed and cared for so that nature can thrive. I believe it's all about balance. So maybe the replanting of millions of trees would be a step in the right direction.
What is next for you? Where do you see your photography going in terms of subject and style? Did the process of putting this project together give you any other ideas to go forward with?
Like I mentioned earlier with Outsider I'm getting involved in all sought of art, not just photography and film; I have a curious mind and want to keep moving on and try new things, I prefer living and working in the real world not a digital or virtual one. That’s the whole reason for Outsider. At the moment there are various projects some current and some for the next year. l am looking at putting on a show for the Looker series in a forest, I'm looking at Sherwood at the moment. I want to hang the prints in the trees, I made the frames out of foraged materials from the forest and converted large tinder fungus I found into downlighters so the images can be lit up at night. I have recently been given permission to use some land next to a local nature reserve to display some artwork in which will include some photography installations, so I look forward to that. At the moment I am currently experimenting with Cut ups, (photomontage). The idea came to me during a spot of research when I stumbled across a guy called Tristan Tzara, he was one of the founders of the anti-establishment Dada movement. What did it for me was, at a surrealist convention, Tzara proposed to create a poem by pulling out words from a hat, a riot ensued and the theatre got smashed up and he got kicked out of the movement! I have always been drawn to these kinds of crazy people. People that experiment and try different things in music art anything really, I find it all just keeps things interesting and alive. Ongoing forwards, I think it's all down to the inner zones and impulse that drives the need to create, and just the freedom to explore ideas. I set my own boundaries. No one else’s. It's a need, I'm not quite sure where that need is going to go if I'm honest.
People who set aside a special time and place in their lives for creative thinking and work—for instance, waking up with the sunrise each morning to write in the quiet of the early hours or meditating before a painting session—also tend to score higher on measures of creative potential. In contrast, those who are more motivated to develop a final product … tend to score lower in creative potential and intrinsic motivation and higher in stress and extrinsic (reward-oriented) motivation. Those who derive enjoyment from the act of creating and feel in control of their creative process tend to show greater creativity than those who are focused exclusively on the outcome of their work. ~ Scott Barry Kaufman & Carolyn Gregoire. Wired to Create
Edward Weston wrote in his Daybooks, “If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography.” In the literal sense, Weston was wrong. There are many shortcuts in photography—from the old Kodak slogan, “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” (coined in 1888, when Weston was just two years old, and perhaps even more apt today in the age of smartphones and sky replacement algorithms), to the plethora of present-day computerised effects making it easy to produce striking photographs instantly with little effort. Photographic shortcuts were common in Weston’s day, too, which is why I believe what he meant in fact was not that shortcuts in photography don’t exist, but that many of them are ultimately not worth taking.
Earlier this year I came across Dara McGrath’s ‘Project Cleansweep’. My line into it was the euphemistically titled ‘Blue Lagoon’ at Harpur Hill, a few miles up the road from me towards Buxton, Derbyshire. It was once again drawing visitors, for the wrong reasons, and it irritated the heck out of me when I heard BBC Radio 4 refer to the site as ‘a beauty spot’. Nothing could be further from the truth, and in searching online for its pH (the chemical truth) to correct them I came across Dara’s project. Maintenance Unit 28 at Harpur Hill was the largest UK reception and storage depot for chemical weapons during WWII and later was used for the disposal of captured chemical weapons until its closure in 1960. The unwise, and those swayed by Instagram, have been known to attempt swimming in a flooded quarry contaminated and turned blue by caustic chemicals; periodically it is dyed black as an added deterrent.
Gruinard Island rang bells too, as I knew a little of its history from our time in Scotland. In 1942, the Ministry of Defence conducted a series of experiments which tested Anthrax bombs against livestock on the island. The weapons were so successful that the island was declared out of bounds for decades.
Dara’s documentary series ‘Project Cleansweep’ takes its name from a 2011 Ministry of Defence report on the risk of residual contamination at 14 UK sites used in the manufacture, storage and disposal of chemical and biological weapons. A newspaper article led Dara to carry out his own research, and look at over 60 sites around the UK which were used by the MoD for the testing of biological and chemical weapons throughout the 20th century. It’s a revealing insight into landscapes that we think we know, and some that we don’t.
Site-21, Nancekuke, Cornwall In the 1950s, Nancekuke was the UK’s main site for the production of nerve agents. When it closed, remnants of many of the contaminated buildings and equipment were dumped in old quarries and mine shafts on and around the site, where they remain to this day. Today the site is an active military radar station. Some years ago, the Nancekuke Remediation Project was undertaken to assess the site to determine what was buried there.
Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself – where you grew up, your early interests and education, and what that led you to do?
I was born in the mid-west of Ireland. Now I’m living in the south of the country in Cork City. Between then I lived in Berlin, Zurich, Vienna, Luxembourg and Dublin. After school, I trained as an aircraft mechanic and subsequently got a degree in aeronautical engineering.
When I was around 16, I picked up a second-hand copy of a catalogue called American Images: Photography 1945-1980 edited by Peter Turner for the Barbican Art Gallery. To me, at this time, it was a revelation.
At that time unemployment was still high in Ireland in the early 1990s, so there wasn’t much of a choice then for a career. At 23 years old I quit being a mechanic, having realised I didn’t want to do that and with a little bit of savings I put myself through a year-long photography course to prepare my portfolio which helped me get into a formal art college. Since then, I have not regretted the change.
Mallerstang is the valley of headwaters of the Cumbrian River Eden and has been the subject of a previous article for On Landscape discussing the Essence of Place1.
Looking South to the Nab from Little Fell
It is a place where I have been fortunate to take photographs for more than 20 years, using both film and digital2. During the spring 2020 lockdown, I had the opportunity to explore some of the more remote parts of the watershed of the Eden, on Mallerstang Edge to the East and Swarth Fell, Wild Board Fell and Little Fell to the West. It is not an area that is very popular with walkers, but during the lockdown, there was no-one to be seen and no aeroplane contrails in the sky.
Mallerstang is now part of an enlarged Yorkshire Dales National Park. Although, of course, it had never been part of Yorkshire. Until the boundary reorganisation of 1974 it was part of Westmorland and then, after that, part of Cumbria. So, there was some strong local protest when, at the new boundary of the National Park in Mallerstang on approaching the village of Nateby, in Cumbria, a sign was erected saying welcome to the Yorkshire Dales. This has now been changed to the Westmorland Dales (with Yorkshire Dales National Park in a much smaller font).
Just before the New Year, Joe David and I recorded a podcast on the concept of "Truth to Nature". It's an idea that has its seeds in the romantic era of landscape painting when John Ruskin, a massively influential art critic and artist of the time, encouraged painters to closely observe the landscape and in doing so capture the natural world as truthfully as possible. The idea then has its echoes in an essay "A Plea for Straight Photography" in Stieglitz's Camera Work magazine. Sadakichi Hartmann's essay was critical of pictorial photography’s attempt at emulating other artforms, most notably painting. In our current era where photo editing has become easier than ever, are we seeing a return of the clash of straight vs pictorial photography? Prepare yourself for another podcast where non of your questions are answered but we have fun attempting...
For the sixth iteration of this column, I decided to focus on the artwork of a photographer that most people (including me until quite recently) have never heard of before – Dale King. Dale King’s photography was recommended to me by On Landscape reader Laura Zirino (thanks Laura).
Upon visiting his Flickr page where he features his work, I was immediately struck by the way he photographs the area he lives near in North Carolina in such an intimate and connective fashion. Each of his images feels like they were made by the same photographer, which may sound silly; however, I find that consistency in a photographer’s work is actually quite rare these days. I was also very impressed with the way in which Dale photographs his home throughout every single season of the year, highlighting both subtle and extreme differences throughout each season. I believe that his approach to photographing close to home has some incredible advantages as well.
Have you ever noticed that when you look at the work of some photographers, you instantly know that they have a connection to a place as an artist? I cannot totally put my finger on how or why this happens to me when viewing some photographers’ work – either your images have this quality, or they do not.
Have you ever noticed that when you look at the work of some photographers, you instantly know that they have a connection to a place as an artist? I cannot totally put my finger on how or why this happens to me when viewing some photographers’ work – either your images have this quality, or they do not. In the case of Dale’s artwork, I instantly knew that he was passionate and deeply connected to the places he photographs. Perhaps it is the way in which he frames up smaller scenes to include just enough subject matter to tell a story about the landscape, or to showcase intricate details of leaves, plants, and other foliage. Either way, I found his work to tell the story of North Carolina succinctly and effectively through his lenses in a way that instantly evokes comfort, solitude, and a sense of belonging. Even in his winter photography (which I am famously avoidant of as someone who dislikes being cold a great deal), I feel like looking at his photographs invites me to stroll into those scenes and experience them in an oddly familiar and comfortable way.
The Fröttmaninger Heide (the heath of Fröttmaning) is a nature reserve located north of Munich’s suburbia, right next to the famous Allianz Arena. It’s one of the largest grass-heaths of Europe. The area has a long history with the oldest archaeological date traced back to 4000 b.c.; Bronze age tumuli and roman sacrificial sites are still visible in the landscape to this date. In the middle ages the landscape was intensively used and with that, the forest that existed there beforehand had to make way for a heath. Between the 18th and 19th century the area was reforested with pine trees. It was also at that time that mineral fertiliser was introduced and most of the vast heath landscapes around the Fröttmaninger Heide (around 15.000 hectares) were transformed to farmlands.
The Fröttmaninger Heide continued to exist as a royal game reserve and as a military training site for the Bavarian army. During World War 2 ammunition was produced on this site and military aircrafts were launched there. The area was hence heavily bombarded. After the war the Fröttmaninger Heide was used again as a training site for the American and German army until the late 80s. In 2016 the Fröttmaninger Heide became a natural reserve.
The area piqued my interest for the first time while I was sitting in the metro on my way to work for a local photographer. Looking out of a train’s window I noticed a relatively vast tundra like landscape. To me it was puzzling how such a “wild” landscape could exist that close to a major city.
Weeks before that moment I had finished a little body of work called “natura naturata”, where I took photographs of manmade landscapes, mainly the parks of Munich, in order to explore the relationship of the locals with their artificial environments. Now I wanted to photograph something more authentic (or so I thought).
On a sunny summer day in 2011, I decided to explore the Fröttmaninger Heide. With my trusted Pentax 67 in my hands, I shot my first rolls of film of this new series. Quite happy with the results I asked some peers what they thought about the pictures. What I got was pretty standard German feedback of which the most memorable passages were: “It looks a bit like Robert Adams… in bad light!”, “The colours are way too harsh” plus “you should get up earlier so you can catch the morning light”. The last bit of advice turned out to be quite valuable. For an entire year I tried to be there every two weeks in the morning to catch the first light of the day.
What makes the Fröttmaninger Heide so fascinating is that it is very diverse in plants and trees. Roughly, you can divide the area by 4 types of landscapes: pine woods, mixed oak forests, gravel and grass heaths.
It was a very immersive experience as each step on the terrain decides with what kind of pictures you will take home. Already the decision to enter the area involved a complex and intuitive decision-making process. The metro station is right in-between the alliance arena and the heath. Once you exit the station, probably a bit sleepy as it is still early in the morning you first have to go down a steep hill to enter the area.
What makes the Fröttmaninger Heide so fascinating is that it is very diverse in plants and trees. Roughly, you can divide the area by 4 types of landscapes: pine woods, mixed oak forests, gravel and grass heaths.
When I set out to take pictures there, I didn’t have a distinct plan or project in mind. My aim was quite simple; to show somehow the diversity and richness of this landscape and how everything changes throughout the seasons.
After having visited the area around 3 or 4 times, thus gaining a fairly well overview, I split the area mentally in parts that I had found particularly interesting. The following trips to the heath were aimed each time directly at one of these sites. Mostly I would enter a location as early as possible and take pictures there for about two hours until the sun was too high and the light too harsh. Rarely the first and the last picture of such a trip were made more than 300 metres apart from each other. As a consequence of that procedure, I could create with each trip a very homogenous series of pictures, most often consisting of 2 exposed rolls of film.
Thinking about it now, I have to admit that I have probably divided the landscape in parts that were quite similar to the design of the creators of this military training ground in order to provide the soldiers with very different fighting experiences.
One time you would see on my contact prints pictures that seemed as if they were taken in the depth of an ancient forest. Next time there were pictures exclusively of a far and flat heath. Then of bushes, of military training facilities and so on. To me, the Fröttmaninger Heide resembles a bit of The Zone from Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. Each step you make, each direction you take will change the entire experience. Add to this the dreamy mood that the morning light can put you in and you can feel how the landscape around you changes drastically with each hour that the sun rises. Though my motives were still, there was never really a lot of time to set up the camera. Most often I had my camera already planted on my shouldered tripod as I wanted to be as ready as possible. As you all know one has to be quite alert to take landscape photographs.
To me, the Fröttmaninger Heide resembles a bit of The Zone from Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. Each step you make, each direction you take will change the entire experience.
The reason for the immersive experience and the sensation of crossing different landscapes (even countries or continents) at one time is in fact quite simple. The 334 hectares small area boasts a large variety of different plants (around 352 different species), trees and a multitude of terrains. It also boasts a diversity of different military terrains (bunkers, defensive walls and so). All of this leads to a very intense and particular feel.
At one moment you feel as if you were just deep in nature only to step onto an old military smog grenade.
And this is what fascinates me. There is a constant dialogue between nature and humanity, a constant shift between two worlds that are separated yet together in an odd way. This landscape permanently asks the question what an authentic landscape is on a philosophical level. As one has this sensation of authenticity the facts quite simply counter this intuition as this landscape has been shaped quite intensively over the course of the past six thousand years and the process is still going on; the organizations that helped the area to become a natural preserve changed the surface of the area to what they think an untouched landscape should look like. And to such an extent that there are areas that I do not recognise anymore today.
There is a constant dialogue between nature and humanity, a constant shift between two worlds that are separated yet together in an odd way. This landscape permanently asks the question what an authentic landscape is on a philosophical level.
The series was never officially finished. It came quite naturally to an end when I moved to England to study landscape photography under the tutelage of Jem Southam.
Over the past years I have taken some new pictures there. But not only has the Heide changed. My style of photography has changed too over the past years. Perhaps I will have to start a new series at some point.
The series was exhibited 2017 at the EMOP as part of a group exhibition called “Longing for Landscape. Photography in the time of Anthropocene”. The show revolves around the idea, that for the first time in history the surface of the earth is shaped more through the deeds of mankind than through geological activities. In all of the presented landscapes one can sense human activity (gardening, tourism, fracking etc.). It is as if nature has ceased to exist for its own, rather it is used or exploited as man wills it. My series resonates with the general theme of the show because it shows the dilemma of a nature reserve that wants to protect the diversity and authenticity of a landscape though in fact this landscape that they deem worth protecting still resembles what the military landscape architects intended it to be.
The show was a great opportunity to show my work with my colleagues from Plymouth University alongside well known established international photographers.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been testing out a range of travel tripods. As with most of the testing we’ve done, it all starts with a personal question and ends up with me getting carried away.
In this case, the personal ‘question’ came about because I wanted to go camping in the mountains and combine it with landscape photography. Typically the idea of lightweight camping is to get down to the minimum possible weight and still function safely and comfortably (ish). I’ve already made a bunch of these decisions for camping gear by looking at the many lightweight camping websites out there.
However, a major portion of the weight for a photographer going lightweight camping isn’t in the camping gear (generally) but instead it is the photography gear. The decisions on which system to use are often quite subjective ones as well - I can’t justify investing in an extra Micro Four Thirds system and I love the quality from my Sony A7R3 (or Chamonix 4x5 camera) and sticking with a single zoom lens works well for me. My gear questions arose because the only two tripods I own are a very heavyweight Gitzo 3541XLS with an Arca Cube and a levelling base and a very old Velbon Sherpa CF with an Acratech Ultimate ball head. The first is nearly 4kg in weight and the latter is still 1.6kg and a bit bulky (and old, and not compatible with spiked feet - more on spikes later).
So I started looking at travel tripods and wanted to know whether these very lightweight tripods are really worth the compromise and out of a small selection, which performs the best.
Criteria for Inclusion
First of all, I needed to work out my base criteria for inclusion in the test. Being as the Gitzo 1545t is pretty much the reference travel tripod for most people and it clocks in at a decent 1kg weight, substantially less than my current tripods, and is an almost comfortable 1.3m height, which is just tall enough for me to be able to use the viewfinder without bending over, I figured selecting tripods near this specification made sense.
The following tripods were the primary selection...
Gitzo 1545t
Manfrotto Befree Advanced Carbon
Three Legged Thing
Feisol CT-3441T
We also did a bunch of searching to try to find other tripods that might fit the bill. One tripod that was recommended by a few people was the Benro. Their marketing team recommend a new release, the Benro Rhino FRHN14CVX20. Another tripod manufacturer that was recommended was Leofoto, a brand I had not heard of before. They recommended the Leofoto LS-284C.
We asked for review loans for the Gitzo, Manfrotto and Feisol but as our deadline for starting testing approached we had not been able to source them (a block on marketing because of Covid or no response at all). So we ended up buying the Gitzo and Feisol. With typically annoying timing, we received a couple of phone calls on the day the two tripods arrived asking us if we’d still like to loan the Gitzo, Manfrotto and Feisol tripods. We decided it was worth asking for different versions of each to expand on our selections so we asked for a 0 series Gitzo and the Feisol without a centre column.
On top of these, K&F Concept somehow heard about our tests and sent us a sample of their tripod line. It wasn't carbon fibre but it matched the specifications so we included it as a sample of the base budget choice.
Finally, we really wanted to test the Really Right Stuff travel option and the Peak Design tripods but we received no response from either company. Fortunately, a good friend was willing to loan me his Peak Design tripod for these tests (Thank you David Knight. Sorry it took so long!). Nobody I knew had the RRS travel option so we’ll have to imagine that they were outside of our budget!
So the final list was
Gitzo 0545t
Gitzo 1545t
Leofoto LS-254C
Manfrotto Befree Advanced Carbon
Benro Rhino FRHN14C
Three Legged Thing Billy
Feisol CT-3441T
Feisol CT-3442T
K&F Concept TM2324
Peak Design
What Makes a Good Tripod
My first thoughts when I was looking at testing these tripods was to go into different aspects of leg stiffness, torsional rigidity etc i.e. completely geek out. Amazingly though, someone else has already gone the full geek and tested most of the tripods we’ve included. The Centre Column website has done an excellent job of looking at quite a few different aspects of tripod design and we’ll summarise a few of them as part of this test. Their main technical criteria was system stiffness and as much as this is one of the key features of a tripod, after all what use is a wobbly platform for your camera, I wondered if there wasn’t a stiffness point beyond which the system was “good enough” and when other aspects of the tripod became key differentiating factors.
So other than stiffness, what else can we assess? Let’s make a list.
Price
Weight
Stiffness (all parts)
Packability
Usability
Leg locking system
Leg sliding system
How easy the use and stow cycle is
Field Adjustment
Center column
Spikes/Feet
Ballhead mounting system
Ease of cleaning
Water tolerance (and salt water)
Stability, centre of mass, leg angle
Leg Joints
Spare part availability
Phew! That's quite the list! We can leave price and weight for the full summary so let’s start with stiffness.
Stiffness
The stiffness of the whole system - legs, leg joints, leg hinges, spider, ballhead mount - all adds up to create a tripod that doesn’t move when an external force is applied. It is totally true that any tripod can make sharp images if we have no external force (e.g. wind) or internal force if we have a big flappy mirror and shutter. It is also true that you cannot make sharp pictures if the forces applied to the system are too large, regardless of the tripod uses (an Icelandic storm perhaps). So what we’re after is a tripod that is just good enough for the majority of situations we might encounter. It’s all a trade-off with the variables being lightness, height and budget. Move one of these variables affects the other two.
Packability
This doesn’t just mean the collapsed length. It also includes the diameter of the collapsed system and whether it can attach to the side of a camera bag well. For instance, the Leofoto tripod has a very small ‘spider’ (the bit that connects the legs and that the head mounts on) and no centre column so the diameter of the collapsed system is very small whereas the Feisol 3442T has a giant spider to give better stability but because of this the system tapers and makes attaching to a camera bag harder.
Usability
There is no point having a supremely lightweight, stiff and cheap tripod if it’s an absolute pain to use. There’s nothing more frustrating than fighting with a tripod as the light disappears in front of you. Or adjusting a leg to recompose and then finding the whole system slipping as you look through the viewfinder. Finally, I have found that the process of stowing the tripod can sometimes be a pain i.e. having to raise the centre column, collapse the legs and then having to fiddle with the ballhead in order to get the legs to sit flat can be quite irritating. Obviously you can leave a tripod with this system uninverted whilst wandering around so it isn't a major issue.
Small things can make a big difference though and landscape photography at its best lets you enter a wonderful ‘flow state’ and anything that breaks that spell is a big negative in my opinion.
Leg Locking
The way that the legs lock on a tripod is critical. There are two physical systems, either flip locks or twist locks, and within the twist lock category, there are two variations - firstly a simple progressive tightening, wind it more and it gets tighter gradually, and secondly a ‘click’ stop where you reach a certain point and you get a final positive lock (the Gitzo is the reference here). There’s been a lot of discussion about which is better, levers or twist locks but the consensus seems to be that personal preference is the most important factor.
It seems that the differences between the Gitzo style twist lock and the normal ‘progressive’ style lock is also down to preference although I much prefer to have some physical feedback as to when the locks are tight enough. i.e. I think there are two advantages to the Gitzo style ‘positive lock’. The first is that you don’t need to turn it very far between locked and loose and secondly, the click does give you confidence that you’ve achieved full lock. Only the Leofoto has a similar positive lock like the Gitzo and the Leofoto has the smallest turn needed to go from fully locked to fully unlocked.
Leg Sliding System
Once you’ve got the legs unlocked, how easy is it to slide them in and out? In the best systems, the legs will be almost completely loose in a small turn (or flip) of the lock. In the worst system, the legs will be randomly stiff, even when fully unlocked. The Benro and Three legged thing tripod suffered from this random stiffness. On both tripods you had to turn the leg locks more on the sticky legs to get a smooth release.
Deploying and Stowing
If we look at the usability of deploying the tripod into a medium height stance and then closing and stowing the tripod onto your camera bag there are a few factors that can make a difference. The relatively new system of inverting the tripod legs around the centre column makes for a smaller package but it can be a pain to get the ballhead in the right position to close the legs up as tight as possible (the clamp and tension knobs can block the legs from closing completely). This also limits you to using slimline ballheads which have their own disadvantages.
Field Adjustment
Beyond setting up and stowing the tripod, the main usability issue can all be summarised by "field adjustment". How easy is it to make small to medium adjustments of tripod height and leg angle. Can you make the adjustments with gloves on? Can you be confident that a leg is locked with a quick twist? How easy is it to pull out the leg angle adjusters? Fortunately, all the tripods tested were usable with gloves on and the only real usability annoyances were having to turn the leg locks more on some tripods than others.
Whilst I'm talking about field adjustment, a colleague had a little rant at me about the lack of bubble levels on some tripods. For something hard to add after the fact, it would be great to see more tripods with bubbles built in.
Centre Column
The centre column is a necessary evil for travel tripods. In order to get the weight down, nearly every manufacturer opts to use a single centre column to increase height rather than adding length to every leg. Using the centre column degrades image quality more than having equivalent extra height bu extending the legs. This is because flex in the tripod tends to cause a rotating movement around the camera mount point. If the camera mount point is extended away from the vertex of the tripod though, this rotation is converted into lateral movement (see diagram below).
Centre Column Weight Hook
Most higher-end tripods include a hook on the centre column or base of the spider in order to weight down the tripod to stop it from tipping and also to increase its stiffness. The only tripods in our test to exclude this capability were the Manfrotto, which just had a rubber stopper pushed into the carbon fibre tube, and the Gitzo 0 series for which I could find no centre column hook.
Spikes/Feet
The use of longer spikes on tripods has gone from a rare option, only available on some of the larger and more expensive tripods, to being pretty much compulsory at all levels. There are few tripods that don’t have the option of changing the tripod feet in this test it was only the Manfrotto and K&F tripods.
Ballhead Mounting System
There’s not a great deal of importance in this but there are a few things that companies can get right or wrong. Most tripods in the test were adequate and only the Manfrotto and K&F didn't use a metal base.
Spider Size
The bit of metal that connects the legs to the ballhead is called the spider and there are a few different options for this. It can be large or small and there are advantages of both. A larger spider brings the apex point of the legs higher (see below) but it becomes a disadvantage in packing the tripod to a small volume. Likewise a small spider will allow packing down nicely but the apex of the legs will probably be below the camera. The two extremes here are the Feisol 3442L and Leofoto LS-284C as shown below.
Materials Used
The gold standard for the material a spider is made from is undoubtedly machined magnesium or even aluminium alloy. The old Gitzo tripod heads are cast and have had problems being brittle in some situations and with age. Some spiders have a plastic base that the ball head screws down onto which does affect stiffness in a very small way (imperceptible for hard plastics) but could be an advantage in that too much stiffness can cause vibration to persist and a plastic piece could help damp vibrations.
Ballhead Bolt attachment
Not much to cover here but it’s a real advantage if you can access the other side of the tripod spider to be able to unscrew a tripod head that has become stuck. I’ve had a few times when I’ve had to fight with tightening a panning base in order to put enough force through the tripod head to remove it. Obviously, with a centre column in place, this is more difficult. Perhaps tripod heads should come with a panning base locking screw to get around the issue.
Ease of Cleaning
We all know we should clean our tripods occasionally and we should definitely do so after exposure to salt water. Many people don’t like doing so because of the fear of being able to put everything back together again afterwards. The Gitzo tripods have to white plastic bushings that are notorious for flying off and a pain to try to align to get back on. They’ve since updated the bushings to help with this. We've had feedback from tripod returns that not dismantling your tripod after using in saltwater can leave areas of the carbon fibre tube in contact with concentrated salt water for a long time. Water will only evaporate normally when it is exposed to the open air. Trapped inside the legs of a tripod and it will stay damp for days if not longer. Constant exposure to this salt water can cause parts of the carbon fibre weave to expand and ruin a tripod. This is a feature of all carbon fibres, even ones supposedly design for salt water use. Hence, if a tripod can be dismantled and cleaned easily then it’s a definitely bonus.
Water Ingress/Rejection
We've mentioned the importance of cleaning your tripods when they’ve been near salt water and, if you're extra vigilant, cleaning the legs when they’ve been immersed in fine silt so prevent the leg locks from prematurely ageing. However, the tripod design can help reject water and particles. Gitzo even created a tripod specifically for salt water exposure which had stainless steel parts and extra seals in the leg sections. The crystals of salt that form when seawater evaporates can cause quite serious wear in the plastic components of the leg locking systems. The Gitzo tripods have introduced an 'O' ring into the leg locks which should help reduce ingress of water. Fully sealing the legs of a tripod, whilst sounding like a good idea, would create a piston effect and make it difficult to extend and collapse the legs.
Stability and Leg Angle
Tripod legs usually have two or three ‘stops’ that allow them to be fixed at set angles. These are adjusted by manipulating a tab at the top of each leg. The angles used for the two wider settings aren’t that important but the angle that makes the tripod as tall as it will go is a trade-off for manufacturers vs users. If the angle of the leg at maximum height is quite small, this will make the tripod taller but at the same time more liable to tip. A wider stance, created by making the angle bigger, makes the whole tripod more stable.
For instance, the Feisol has a leg angle of about 20 degrees which is perhaps a little too ‘tippy’, whereas RRS tripods use 27 degrees which isn’t a big difference but it does sacrifice height (a possible 4% reduction in peak height by using a sensible 27 degree angle instead of a ‘tippy’ 20 degree angle - or nearly 5cm on one of our travel tripods).
The difference isn’t huge, 21 vs 27 degrees, but it could make a 30-40% difference in stiffness. You can always just widen your tripod legs if it’s a worry or even file a bit off each leg stop for a more permanent solution. Something to be aware of though.
Only the Manfrotto, Leofoto and Feisol used angles around 21 degrees.
Leg Joints
The leg joints are a minor point. As long as they don’t flop around or get too ‘sticky’, they should be fine. The ability to adjust tension is important though as they can change in tension through wear or temperature etc. Most of the tripods allowed easy tensioning.
Spare Parts
It’s definitely better to pay more for a tripod and have access to reasonably priced spare parts than having to replace a whole tripod if you break or wear something out. I can still get spare parts for my Gitzo 3540XLS twelve years after I bought it. This is a good reason to get a reasonably new model as the spares will be available longer. We've asked for feedback from manufacturers for spare parts and will get back to you about this.
Individual Tripod Impressions
The following describes each tripod in the test with some of its advantages and disadvantages. You can view the measured data about each tripod by following this link to a Google spreadsheet. Feel free to make a copy or download it if you want to play with the sorting etc.
Gitzo Traveller 1545T
The Gitzo 1545T must be the standard to which other tripods are assessed. Since RRS have come to market, they may not be the best tripods anymore (but the RRS equivalent is well over twice the price!) but people know them well and know the quality you’ll get. And this quality shines when you’re handling the tripod. The locks are positive and smooth, legs travel freely, angle stops are nice to use, the finish is exemplary etc. etc. The only thing that really let it down as far as first impressions go is the crappy dust bag instead of a proper case.
The tripod folds down well although lining up the ball head protrusions properly to get a compact package is a bit of a pain, something you get used to probably.
The Gitzo leg locks are excellent and provide a short throw between fully locked and fully loose with a positive end stop. This means you rarely have to go back to a leg lock to open further or lock it down a bit more.
The centre column is implemented well, although it does lift the ball head up above the apex of the legs and hence transmits more movement to the camera.
It’s a bit disappointing that Gitzo chose to use a different thread for the feet on the smaller series tripods. These are a ¼”-20 instead of the normal ⅜” thread and so you need special spikes for them. The Three Legged Thing spikes fit nicely though.
The ballhead mounting plate is solid and although you can’t undo the head from underneath because it has a centre column, it does have a removable plate which may help give traction should a head get stuck.
The legs are easy to remove for cleaning and you can see the o-rings that Gitzo now include that will help prevent ingress of water. The old two part white bushings have gone and the new bushings are a single piece that is a lot easier to put back on reassembly. The leg hinges also appear easier to tighten than older Gitzo tripods (where the star allen key used to just strip as it cammed out too easily).
Gitzo Traveller 0545T
Not much to say about the 0545T as it really is just a baby version of the 1545T. The bottom leg section is quite tiny but is a thicker carbon fibre tube and hence is stronger. It should be noted just how small these tripods are compared with an extra tall tripod. Here's a comparison with my Gitzo 3540XLS and the two travel Gitzos.
Feisol 3441T
The Feisol tripods are a bit of an enigma, they’re not promoted well in the UK and I don’t think they have an agent at all now. They’re based in Germany and although I don’t know many people who use them, those that do are very pleased with them.
First impressions of the Feisol are generally a little disappointing. They’re lacking many of the fancy design features of the higher end tripods but you shouldn’t be deceived. When you start to use them you notice that attention has been paid to usability instead of fancy details. The legs lock smoothly, although not as positively as the Gitzo and the legs open and close with almost zero resistance. The spider is made of machined aluminium, as are the leg locks. The hinges are smooth but stiff and although the legs come with difficult to remove rubber ‘hats’, once pushed off (imagine popping a cork rather than twisting off) they have a decent threaded insert for spikes.
The centre column is as smooth in use as the legs are and at full reach, it’s the tallest tripod here and although it ends up the heaviest tripod in our tests, it’s only just heavier than the Benro. If you replace the centre column with a short column, you get Peak Design weight but it’s still at the heavy end. This weight is put to good use though as the tube dimensions of the legs and centre column are bigger than any other tripod listed.
Feisol 3442T
The 3442T is pretty much the same as the 3441T but with a bigger spider and no centre column. This enlarged spider does two important things. It not only adds significantly to the rigidity of the system but it also puts the place when the legs converge up toward where the camera is, which means if the tripod does twist, the movement of the camera is minimised.
Overall, both Feisols seem to be really basic but solid tripods.
Benro Rhino FRHN14C
Benro have been steadily releasing innovative products for the last few years. These have been a bit hit and miss, but fortunately for us, a lot more hit than miss. The Benro tripods have already created quite a few fans and the new Rhino range is, I’m sure, set to get some more. The Rhino represents the premium end of Benro’s tripods (a Tortoise range is set to come that skips the centre column - we’ve only just found out about these so more info later). As such they should be more of a match for the gold standard Gitzo’s.
First impressions are very good. The materials look high quality, almost to Gitzo standards, and the design is all clean lines if a little ‘flouncy’ (I prefer to have something a little more functional looking but that’s subjective). On using the tripod for the first few times I was disappointed in how much I had to open the twist locks in order to have the legs slide smoothly. Some of the legs were fine but a couple of them were ‘sticky’ and one was really bad. I found out that the plastic sleeve inside that leg had become folded and when I fixed it it was OK but still not smooth. In use, this improved but I still had to turn the twist lock more than I did on the Gitzo.
In use, if we ignore the slightly sticky legs, the tripod works very well. I like the use of a decent size hook at the bottom of the centre column but, from what I can see, the centre column can’t be removed and replaced with a short column.
Leofoto LS-254C
The Leofoto was a bit of a surprise. They’re not a manufacturer I had heard of before researching this test and so I didn’t know what to expect. What I actually got was a real treat though. At the price, I was thinking it would be a run of the mill Chinese white label but in actual fact, I received a really sturdy and well made compact tripod with a few innovative features.
Firstly, this thing is compact! The spider at the top is very small and yet still has enough space to mount a decent compact ballhead. Essentially the tripod legs run parallel to each other when closed. The big difference with this tripod to many of the others is that it doesn’t have an integrated centre column. Instead, it has an accessory column extension. This expanding column just screws into the main tripod instead of the tripod head and then you attach the tripod head on the top. Being as we only use the centre column occasionally, this appears to be a good compromise which allows the tripod to be more compact (and lighter in case you decide to leave the centre column at home). Not everyone will get on with this but I’m a fan!
The tripod appears to be very stiff and the legs have a very short and positive twist lock, the shortest in our test selection. Overall a very pleasant surprise with a clean and modern design. Leofoto may have a reputation as a rip off company (yes they have borrowed quite a lot from Gitzo, Arca Swiss and others) but they also add in some of their own innovations.
Manfrotto Befree Advanced Carbon
This particular Manfrotto is their choice for the advanced photographer and represents their top of the line travel tripod. Out of the box I have to admit to being a little underwhelmed. First impressions count and this tripod gave off plasticy vibes. In use, it was actually better than expected. The twist locks were OK but not great. The feet were just ribber inserts and so there would be no option for spikes or something more solid. The centre column was a bit sticky and took some undoing with, again, just a rubber plug in the end.
Overall, I was left feeling a little underwhelmed.
Peak Design Carbon Fibre Travel Tripod
When I heard that Peak Design, the company behind a few Kickstarter bags and camera straps, were making a tripod, I was initially sceptical; very sceptical. When they delivered, the product was so different from existing designs that I figured there must be a downside - innovation for innovation’s sake. However, when I received a package from my old school friend, I was quite surprised. Not only does it ooze quality, it actually felt like it might be a proper, functional tripod!
So, after taking it out a few times into the field my final assessment is that not only have Peak Design created something innovative but also that ticks most of the boxes for an excellent travel tripod.
So what are all of these innovations? Well, firstly the tripod legs aren’t cylindrical. They’re shaped more like a segment from an orange. This makes sense once you collapse the tripod legs as they make the most of the space available. The legs are in 5 sections and use lever locks (a little thought will explain why they don’t use twist locks). These locks are very secure and surprisingly usable, even with thick gloves on. The bottom legs section is very small and I was a little doubtful whether it would be stiff enough but it seems OK so far after a few days in the field.
Next, the tripod head is of the ‘inverted’ style where the ball is attached to a slim but stiff centre column and the head wraps around it. This allows the head to collapse down flush with the top of the legs.
The tripod head itself is part of the tripod and although is replaceable with a universal head adapter, you lose most of the advantages of the system so we were hoping it was good enough. Thankfully it is decent if not amazing. The clamp system wraps around the perimeter of the ‘base’ and works with Arca Swiss style plates (and the Peak Design plates obviously). The head lock control also works around the perimeter and locks the head adequately.
There are also a few hidden extras, such as the allen key device attached to one leg and the phone mount hidden inside the centre column.
All in all, a very competent tripod. If a little expensive.
Three Legged Thing
The brand that took the budget tripod industry by storm. Three Legged Thing are the brash and boistrous younger brother to the mature Gitzo’s and RRS’s of the world.
I hadn’t seen many of these tripods in the flesh but anecdotally I had more negative opinions than positive ones. “Make your own mind up”, I reminded myself. As it turns out, my photographer colleagues had it right in this case. The tripod looks snazzy enough in its metallic orange trim and subway graffiti logos but like the local lads with their ricer cars [https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-ricer-car], the performance doesn’t live up to the flashing undercarriage.
The locks aren’t that positive, the construction is pretty basic but sort of functional. Think Trabant not Tesla. That said - when the legs are locked down, the fact that the carbon fibre tubes it is made form are pretty burly means that it’s fairly stiff. It certainly seems stiffer than the Manfrotto but I hope to test this in a follow up to the article.
I remind myself that this is the budget brand and not to expect too much. But then I check and find out that the Benro is only £5 more expensive than the 3LT’s £210. If you want real budget you have to look at the …
K&F Concept TM2324
Proper budget! This isn’t carbon fibre. It has no bells and whistles apart from a bit of gold effect on the leg angle stops. We weren’t even going to include it in the test but the company got in touch with us and asked if they could send a tripod. I presumed it would be too heavy, or not tall enough or flimsy. In fact, it wasn’t the heaviest or the shortest and it certainly wasn’t the flimsiest. I reckon you could use this tripod quite happily in more benign conditions and as such sets a pretty good baseline for what a budget tripod should look like (£45 with the code KF10US). Not an embarrassing show at all!
Conclusions
Well, after testing these tripods over the last couple of months, what are my final opinions. Originally, I was thinking about making a lot of scientific tests of stiffness and torsion resistance and resonance and.. and.. and then I started using the tripods and realised that these aspects were mostly self-evident from the feel of the tripods and when they weren’t obvious, usability aspects played such a big role that for broadly similar stiffness, I’d choose a more usable tripod and one that matches my particular need over the one that was the stiffest.
Don't forget to check out the spreadsheet of specifications and measurements. We've created a shared Google Spreadsheet which you can access by clicking here
Gold Standard : Gitzo 1545T and 0545T
So, which of these tripods really stood out? Firstly I have to say that you can’t go wrong with a Gitzo. The relative price of Gitzo’s seems to have come down a bit recently and the price of mid range tripods has gone up, making the Gitzo choice less painful.
Compact: Peak Design Carbon Fibre Travel Tripod
Alongside the Gitzo, I was really impressed with the Peak Design Carbon Fibre Travel Tripod. It’s a hell of a lot stiffer than I expected and the only real downsides are a little bit of usability. The head is adequate and not being able to upgrade or choose a different head is annoying. However, as a true travel tripod (i.e. one to take on a proper holiday) it really does take some beating. It packs down beautifully and does everything you ask out of a tripod and is stiff enough to handle some inclement conditions.
Lightweight: Leofoto LS-254C
The tripod that really stood out to me, so much so that I bought one for myself, was the Leofoto LS-254C. I love the fact that it doesn’t have a centre column and yet has an accessory column if I really need the height. I really love the low weight and compact design that straps to the outside of a pack really well (and is small enough to go on the inside too!). Combined with a stiffness up there with the Gitzo and Peak design it’s a cracking option for a landscape photographer looking for the lightest reasonable solution.
Robust and Tall: Feisol 3441T and 3442T
The Feisol tripods ticked the stiffness boxes as well but are more suited to someone who needs a bit of extra reach as the centre column version, the 3441T, is the tallest in our test. Alternatively, the 3442T with its very large spider gives a reassuringly solid base, albeit with the downside of being quite bulky. If the packability isn’t an issue, then these are very functional solutions.
Budget All Rounder: Benro Rhino FRHN14C
The Benro was just not quite up there with these other options. It was neither the smallest, lightest, lowest volume but it was the cheapest that still gave a reassuringly solid feel and there is no doubt that as a package you get a lot of bang for your buck.
The Dissapointments
The two tripods that really disappointed me were the Manfrotto and the Three Legged Thing. The Manfrotto was a little surprising as coming from the same company as Gitzo you’d expect something capable but just with a budget feel. But I suppose they don’t want to cannibalise their Gitzo customers.
Proper Budget: K&F Concept TM2324
Finally, the K&F Concept was a real surprise. For what I thought was going to be a heavyweight pile of junk, it was actually a pretty decent first tripod for the real budget-minded (you can get this for a 10th of the price of the Gitzo and the Peak Design and, if you look hard, 20th the price of an RRS). They say with tripods, buy cheap, buy twice but in this case you really aren’t losing much by trying this out.
Coming Up
Thanks for bearing with me in what turned out to be a fairly epic look at the set of travel tripods we had for review. It should be no surprise that there isn't one 'winner' here, nearly all tripods trade off statistics against each other, height, weight, price, stiffness, etc. All the tripods tested will function adequately in the benign conditions that most photographers work in. However, if you're going to end up in Iceland battling a roaring storm wind, very few tripods will do the trick, the heavier the better though. I think most photographers have at least considered owning two or more tripods, a big heavy 'car' one and a lightweight 'I'm walking to Blea Tarn' one. I know I've ended up with three tripods* since this review and Charlotte might give me Paddington Bears if I consider another. (*Leofoto LS-254C for the small one, Gitzo 3541XLS for the large one and a Buddiesman for in between - more about that in a future issue)
I was going to end the article here but I couldn’t stop myself geeking out a little bit. I’m going to go and hide in the shed over Christmas and do a bit of MacGyver testing on the stiffness and wind resistance of these tripods. I don’t expect my conclusions to change too much but I’m going to have some fun with levers, cogs, beepy things and shiny lasers so who cares.
This End Frame features one photograph, from a 1996 book, Orbit, published by National Geographic and NASA. The majority of images within were shot from the Space Shuttle in the 1980s and ‘90s. There are some earlier ones from the Apollo programme as well. Most of the images are of the earth’s surface, with just a few concentrating on ionospheric meteorology, like auroras.
Seen from the perspective of space, the cartographic topography of earth is visually filtered by the weather, any pollution presence, and the prevailing lighting conditions in the atmosphere. Well-composed, these images can have all the colour and textural effervescence of abstract painting, while remaining grounded in the exquisite reality of what they are. This example showing Lake Baikal carries an additional jolt of significance when we read the accompanying caption that reminds us it contains one fifth of all the fresh water on our planet. But really, any number of the images within Orbit would justify inclusion here.
This one photograph is a reminder of the millions of scientific photographs which have not only informed and educated us, but also astounded us with their beauty. For ground-breaking science to continue to find funding, communications with those outside the science community are fundamental. Quite simply, the photographic output of NASA and related organisations do a lot of the heavy lifting in science outreach. And if these images were not beautiful, awesome or inspiring, would they work? At some deep level we recognise a beauty, power and wonder in these photographs that cannot be adequately described in words. This is where science depends on art.
I can remember lying in bed as a young child, waiting for sleep to come whilst the sun still shone strongly outside on a summer’s evening. As my parents pottered about in the garden, I watched elongated and blurry projections of them flowing across the white emulsion on my bedroom ceiling. A small gap between the curtains admitted a sliver of light, which fanned out and faded with distance. Near the origin the images were elongated but almost recognisable. As the distance increased so the focus decreased until both figure and light were lost. It never occurred to me then that what I was witnessing was an optical phenomenon that underpins photography. I wonder now, however, whether my lifelong fascination with projected images had its origin on those muggy evenings.
My formative years were dominated by two passions; science and art.
Neil Armstrong took his “one small step” when I was nine years old. I remember being woken by my parents in the early hours of the morning to watch the fuzzy monochrome images on TV. The first broadcast from another planet! It seemed very likely that the science fiction novels that I avidly consumed would soon become reality. (In my naivety I was completely unaware of the flip side of the Space Race; the Arms Race.) By the time I was sixteen, the first pocket calculators and then desktop computers ushered in the digital age. Before Three Mile Island and Chernobyl the future promised to be one of limitless ease, powered by nuclear forces. A new technology seemed to appear almost every day.
For my last two years at school, I was presented with a dilemma; I had to choose between art subjects and science subjects. No mixing would be allowed. Up until that point I had been a straight A’s student in both fields. This seemed an impossible choice. I didn’t want to give up either.
All children love drawing but many seem to lose interest by the time they are at secondary school. It has been suggested that the education system squashes their natural creativity, encouraging them to think in convergent ways. I was one of the lucky ones, perhaps, and never lost the joy of painting and drawing. Whilst always unhappy with my draughtsmanship, I took great pleasure from trying to transfer the pictures in my mind to paper. Hours were spent lost in the flow, engrossed in imagined worlds. Perhaps I was better than I thought as the school commissioned me to paint a mural – I say commissioned but of course I worked for the exposure dollars. My chosen subject was a life size painting of Neil Armstrong on the surface of the Moon, painted on the wall of the main corridor. Science and art together.
For my last two years at school, I was presented with a dilemma; I had to choose between art subjects and science subjects. No mixing would be allowed. Up until that point I had been a straight A’s student in both fields. This seemed an impossible choice. I didn’t want to give up either. It was quite forcefully impressed upon me by my teachers that art was not a serious subject, there were no prospects for a career in art, art was a hobby. After all, the education system is designed to prepare us for the world of work rather than make us better people. Art would have to become a spare time occupation. My future would be in a lab.
Sadly, my ambition to be a technocrat quickly turned to dust when I failed my maths exam. I lost my place at university and for a few months I lost my way. What to do now? Despite only having a passing interest in photography prior to my exam debacle I fairly quickly settled on it as my future career. Perhaps I was clutching at straws, but it seemed the perfect blend of art and science, a subject that would engage all my strengths.
At school, art and science were kept apart; literally kept apart in that sciences took place in “the laboratories”, a separate wing of the school. They were intellectually separated too. Science was serious, art frivolous. That separation continues in our wider society, with the two often seen as existing in opposition to each other. As a result, many people would draw a Venn diagram of them like this:
Art is characterised as concerned with the imagination, emotions and aesthetics. It is intent on making transformations of reality in order to provide new insights. There are no absolutes in art, only relative values. It is organic, disordered and slapdash. Art and artists revel in the unknown, the unknowable and fleeting, difficult to grasp, poetic connections. Above all art is subjective.
We return to the Lockdown Podcasts and in this instalment, Joe Cornish, David Ward and I discuss 'field practice'. By this I mean the way in which we go about finding images, what motivates us to go on a walk, what triggers our interest in a scene and how do we facilitate composing. It's fairly freeform, as usual, although I promise that none of us had been drinking (we're doing a New Year special for that one!) Without further ado...
For more than thirty years I have found inspiration in Paul Wakefield’s photography. Although our work has been published together in National Trust books, and we have met many times I remain in awe of Paul’s uniquely-seen images. Over the course of a long career, his style may have evolved somewhat, but even his earliest pictures still seem fresh and utterly authentic.
…and David and I have also written our own responses to the publication of his wonderful 2014 book, entitled (surprisingly unambiguously) The Landscape.
Paul has no need to seek out recognition or approval, for his success in the commercial world has fulfilled any such need long since. His personal work has genuinely been done for his own gratification and pleasure.
Paul has no need to seek out recognition or approval, for his success in the commercial world has fulfilled any such need long since. His personal work has genuinely been done for his own gratification and pleasure. And yet, intriguingly, he has as strong a sense of sharing his photography as any of us.
And yet, intriguingly, he has as strong a sense of sharing his photography as any of us. Indeed, one can almost say that the role played by the viewer is fundamental to him. He sees the back-turned figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, as a symbol of the viewer’s gaze.
If you were to take a guess at the topic of Colin Prior’s new book project you may be forgiven for thinking it would be documenting a part of the Alps, working on Scottish plateaus or perhaps portraying the sublimity of the Himalayas (actually, I think the Himalayas will be the next one). What you probably wouldn’t guess is that it’s a book on eggs.
Yes, you read that right, this review will be about a Colin Prior book on bird eggs of Scotland. And yet, as surprising as this sounds, it isn’t as random as it first appears. You see, Colin isn’t just passionate about the Scottish landscape, he’s also passionate about the wildlife that lives within it and it is this passion that sparked an idea. What makes the project particularly interesting, and relevant, for us is that for each of the exquisitely captured photographs of bird eggs, there is an associated landscape photograph that represents the habitat in which the egg would be found and has been paired to also give an aesthetic complement.
The result is a series of pairs of images that deliver much more than each would on their own. The book hits a very nice balance between just enough information in its preliminary essays to give scientific and environmental context but letting these pairs of photographs speak for themselves on their artistic merit. The patterns of camouflage on the eggs are constantly intriguing and the photographs of the landscape strike a good balance between representing location, portraying patterns and textures of the environment and bringing Colin’s sense of the aesthetic to each so that they may be enjoyed in isolation and in its pair, neither overwhelming the other.
On returning to this book repeatedly over the last weeks, I have been reminded that the sense of landscape photography producing individual ‘hero’ pictures is one that really only represents a single aspect of its utility. When used as part of a larger project, one that informs, intrigues and entertains the viewer at the same time, it brings a whole new perspective. This book is a great example of this and I would love to see more like it.
We got in touch with Colin to ask him a few questions about the project.
How did you come up with the idea for the project and what were your thoughts on how to present it?
The idea for Fragile began over twelve years ago and was a natural progression of my landscape work. I had spent the last 25 years shooting with the panoramic format and was ready to move on – I felt I had said what I wanted to say with that format and found that it had literally become a creative straitjacket. I wondered if there was a way in which I could fuse my passion for birds with that of the landscape without having to photograph birds themselves and was aware of the innate beauty of birds’ eggs. I was keen to create a body of work that was beyond views and was underpinned with an environmental message. Birds’ eggs offered something new and visually exciting which I felt people would be intrinsically drawn to and which would act as a metaphor to highlight the demise of wild bird populations throughout the UK.
How many of the images in the book were taken specifically for the project rather than accessing your extensive back catalogue?
there are not more than a couple of images used from my archive - they have all been photographed specifically for the book
I was under no illusion as to what it would take to photograph the eggs in the way I envisaged, and initially, I couldn’t see a way of achieving this as it would mean investing around 30K, into a studio stand, a stacking unit and a studio flash set up, which from a business perspective was untenable. However, I wasn’t deterred and for many years before I began photographing the eggs, I concentrated on searching out and photographing birds’ habitats and had generated a collection of these images long before I began the photography of the eggs at the Museums of Scotland.
Previously, when I was predominantly photographing from elevated mountain viewpoints, I had built up a list of undisturbed locations that I had either walked or driven through, en route and it had been my intention to return to these when the time was right – it was in these locations where most of the new images were created. Accordingly, there are not more than a couple of images used from my archive - they have all been photographed specifically for the book. With some locations, I needed to return at a different time of the year to achieve the colours I needed to match a specific egg – the dominant colour of the egg was ultimately my starting point and it wasn’t without challenges to create both a synergy between egg and habitat and diversity at the same time.
What makes eggs so visually fascinating is their shape, their colour and their patterns. In our early design concepts, my designer had chosen to present the eggs in a grey (80% white) box as she felt that the white page made the egg feel like a cut-out, which is not the case. I wasn’t convinced and wanted white space between the egg and the habitat, but it took me some time to realise why I didn’t like the grey box. One evening, I was looking at the PDF and became aware that, instead of my eye exploring the enigmatic shape of the egg, it was following the edges of the grey box, something, I concluded, that was not an attribute, so we lost the grey background and went with pure white.
I liaised with many experts in their fields, often via my contacts at the RSPB and NatureScot and with various stalkers and gillies that I have befriended over the years.
I know you’re very familiar with many of the birds included but did you have to do much extra research into habitat and behaviour in order to complete the project? Did this research change your mind about what images to include?
Research was crucial to the project – it was important that I was photographing habitats that were, in fact, areas where each specific bird bred and to this end I liaised with many experts in their fields, often via my contacts at the RSPB and NatureScot and with various stalkers and gillies that I have befriended over the years. Often their advice refocussed my efforts in a different area – I recall struggling with the greenshank’s habitat at Forsinard in the Flow Country – it’s a largely flat and featureless blanket bog and not easy to create a landscape image that has sufficient interest. Professor Des Thomson, who wrote the opening essay of the book, confirmed that greenshank nest in the Flowerdale Forest in the heart of Torridon which gave me a little bit more to work with. Another species, the nightjar, which nests in Scotland in tiny numbers is found only within a very specific range, so I had to concentrate my efforts in a geographically small area which proved to be very challenging – in the end, it was a change of approach that finally led to success.
The process of photographing the eggs is a strange mix of technical/scientific and aesthetic. What choices were involved in how to portray the eggs beyond mere technical accuracy of colour and focus?
Once the eggs were on the table, the stacking unit would be activated, and we would be shooting anything between 40-80 images depending on the egg size
Photographing the eggs was a fantastic experience and was all carried out, in situ, at the Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh. One of the most time-consuming activities was selecting the eggs to be photographed – there is such choice and with some of the smaller species, such as corn buntings there are typically 36 clutches, each containing 4-5 eggs, within each case – a total of 180 eggs. Corn bunting eggs are exquisite and trying to choose the best examples is frankly impossible – there are so many really beautiful eggs that, with this species in particular, I ended up photographing an entire clutch of 5 plus two others – a couple of hours for one species. With other species I was typically shooting 2 examples and with others, such as eagles and guillemots, as many as 10 eggs.
Once the eggs were on the table, the stacking unit would be activated, and we would be shooting anything between 40-80 images depending on the egg size. The lighting was crucial to the photography and I had already established how I would light the eggs before setting up in the museum. Images were collated and then stacked in Helicon Focus.
One of the biggest historic threats to wild birds was DDT and the book provides an excellent background on this. What do you see as the biggest current threat?
The story of eggs and the crucial role they played in establishing the devastating effects of DDT is well documented. Throughout my lifetime, I have witnessed, first hand, the demise of wild bird species, not only from my former family home where I was brought up, but from many other areas with which I am intimately familiar. The trends over the last 50 years are not encouraging with species such as lapwing, curlew and starling down by around 60% - many others show declines of anything between 20-40% and this is being driven largely by changes of land use and habitat loss. Large scale housing and retail developments can have catastrophic effects of local bird populations, particularly if the green belt has been encroached and increasingly, climate change is beginning to compound problems. It is difficult to see how this situation can improve and as more and more people are using the countryside recreationally, the ramifications for wildlife are not good. Long term, I see this loss of biodiversity accelerating as we continue to encroach and fragment the land areas on which wildlife depends. Despite this, Fragile grew from my sense of wonder of the natural world and it is my hope that you can share in that wonder too.
You can purchase signed copies of Colin Prior's "Fragile" at his website for £35. Click here to access the product page directly.
It’s easy to think that to be noticed these days, you have to be on social media, but for this issue, we’re happy to prove the exception. We have Guest Editor Joe Cornish to thank for pointing us in the direction of Russian photographer Oleg Ershov. If one or two of Oleg’s photos seem familiar, it may be that you saw them in our subscribers’ 4x4 feature in August. They certainly bear looking at again, as does Oleg’s wider portfolio, and he has provided us with a fascinating insight into his personal development as a photographer.
Would you like to start by telling readers a little about yourself - where you grew up, your education and early interests, and what that led you to do as a career?
I was born in the north of Russia, near the White Sea, in Arkhangelsk, and lived there for 17 years. I devoted all my free time to sports - playing football in the summer and ice hockey in the winter. Then I moved to Moscow to study computers at a technical university.
After graduation, I often changed my place of residence and type of activity. Then the era of capitalism began in the country, and it was necessary to deal with everything, not computers. But the engineering approach to problem-solving acquired during my studies and the mathematical skills I had helped me a lot.
Eventually, in the mid-1990s, I began working for a private company specializing in the import and distribution of food products. Over time, the company became quite large, and I continue to stay there even now.
For 15 years, I was the CEO and did a lot of work every day. And my main desire at that time was to have more vacation days for a photography hobby. Over time, this happened - I already perform more advisory and representative functions and have a lot of free time.
After graduation, I often changed my place of residence and type of activity. Then the era of capitalism began in the country, and it was necessary to deal with everything, not computers. But the engineering approach to problem-solving acquired during my studies and the mathematical skills I had helped me a lot.
What prompted you to buy your first DSLR in 2007 and what kind of images did you want to make at the time?
At first, I used compact cameras for travel photography. Then I became interested in landscapes and looked through the works of other authors on various photo sites. In 2007 I signed up for a two-week photo tour of the Southwestern USA, but did not succeed right away: the offer was oversubscribed several times. Usually, on the first day after the announcement, the number of applications exceeded the number of seats available, and the organizer chose the "right" participants.
Having agreed to write this ‘end-frame’ piece for On Landscape magazine I cast my mind back to my own, early inspirations into landscape photography and recalled admiring Joe Cornish’s images in a variety of National Trust publications from the 1980s if my memory serves me correctly.
I also remember reading his book about Northumberland and a particular 3.30am start on Holy Island which fired my imagination as I wistfully dreamed of pottering around on the beach myself exploring for foreground interest and patiently waiting for the amazing light of sunrise.
Before retiring to my (second) breakfast at 6 that is...!
Later, by several years I imagine, I came across this image by Joe known as 'Gateway to the Moors II, North York Moors'. At once I could see that this is where I wanted to be with my own landscape photography in the years ahead.
But let’s face it - we are not looking at El Capitan here. This is just a simple, fairly unremarkable, but pleasing, English viewpoint.
However, the photograph that Joe managed to create with seemingly modest raw materials is at once immersive, attentively observed, carefully crafted and composed.
A few issues back, Joe Cornish, David Ward and I started a chat about the origins of landscape and composition in art. The goal was to provide a foundation for a series of articles on composition in landscape photography but, as seems usual when I start researching things, I got sucked down the Rabbit Hole and got stuck researching some of the origins of landscape painting. What I found was interesting enough (to me at least) that I thought it worth sharing on our way to the final goal of ‘landscape composition’.
In that first article, I shared some paintings that ranged from the origins of art, cave painting through the Roman period and ending with some ‘World Landscape’ paintings, including one from Albrecht Altdorfer. I want to backtrack to talk about the era that this painting came from as the era represents the origins of ‘independent landscape’, i.e. landscape painting as the subject of the work rather than the ‘by work’ or background.
The Annunciation - Leonardo Da Vinci (1472-1475)
It’s fair to say that the Rennaisance affected art across Europe but its persistence said as much about the environment and dominance of the church as it did about the artistic temperament of the day. The Catholic church, the remains of the Holy Roman Empire, held a strong hold over society and most art, specially commissioned art, was in service to this. The main art of the day was either direct representation of biblical stories or allegorical works about moral rectitude (witness Hieronymous Bosch’s truly disturbing “Garden of Earthly Delights”). If an artist were to include a landscape it would form the background of the work, simply there to provide a foundation. For instance, there is another version of the Mona Lisa, created at the same time but from a slightly different angle. This suggests that the background of both versions was probably a painted backdrop and quite possibly a purchased or commissioned studio accessory. Many artists farmed out their background work to apprentices or, in some cases, completely different artists.
In northern Europe, there began a cultural questioning of the religious status quo, with Luther and Calvin developing Humanist ideas that would play a part in the formation of the Protestant Church. In this environment, artists worked with a little more flexibility and allowed their passion for landscape to reveal itself in their work. This passion for landscape wasn’t necessarily a new thing, but it had been frowned upon as an indulgence, not serious enough to be the prime subject of a painting. Gerard David worked on the cusp of this new era and created fully formed landscapes in the background of his major paintings. In one he case managed to sneak them onto the backs of the wings of an altarpiece triptych.
Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is a work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.
~ Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory.
Through the months of this year, I have written in On Landscape about some of the different fields of landscape photography. My final theme is the Landscape of Memory. The idea is in part inspired by Simon Schama’s 1995 book, Landscape and Memory. Although potentially controversial, I hope it might be the most interesting – and certainly most embracing – category of all.
Schama’s is the historian’s perspective. He illuminates how landscape – nature – remains a subject of veneration and spiritual renewal in almost all major cultures. This seems to contradict the appearance that, since the industrial revolution, human progress has treated nature merely as a material resource to exploit.
In the course of a life, memories are so numerous they fade, dissolve or change to re-form into narratives that suit our purpose. But, are photographs not in themselves distilled memories?
His book is a monumental work that requires days and days of devoted reading…I wish I could claim I had read it all! But the idea is a starting point for the memory of one individual, yours truly, as well as the cultural and collective memory that Schama invokes.
In the course of a life, memories are so numerous they fade, dissolve or change to re-form into narratives that suit our purpose. But, are photographs not in themselves distilled memories? This is highly debatable. Some might argue (Sally Mann for one) that they may even mask or dilute memory… or that they can change it.
My experience is that photographic endeavour deepens engagement and connection with a place and the moment, binding us more closely to it. Memory may then be stimulated, inferred and extrapolated from the image at a later date. But the actualité is probably less important than the imaginative reconstruction it provokes. The empirical truth can never really be retold; everything passes through the filter of memory, the lens of recollection.
I have made thousands of photographs and could tell hundreds of stories about them. Yet a few have ultimately crystallised into something significant…to me at any rate. Whether it is the lessons learned from the individual photograph, or over the period through which the example was made is not so important. Perhaps it is not even about the landscape in the photograph, but these stories are always about the inner landscape, the landscape of memory.
Shotover Valley
Aged 17 and prior to attending university, I spent 6 months in New Zealand, travelling, and working as a sheep shearer’s roustabout for 3 months.
My father loaned me his Kodak Instamatic for the journey; it was the first time I had ever used a camera. His main reaction to my photographs on returning home was shock at my wanton profligacy. I had shot eighty exposures during those six months. Four rolls of (20 exposure) film would ordinarily have lasted my Dad around eight years.
At such an impressionable age some memories remain, and New Zealand certainly left its mark on me. I travelled widely by car and on foot through the South Island with an old school friend, during and after the work experience. We saw fjords, mountains and glaciers on its west coast, and, in the North Island, thermal wonders and active volcanoes. In many ways this was the epic landscape, still wild in parts, that my youthful imagination would have conjured up as an original Eden. Thirty-five years before The Lord of the Rings film franchise first appeared, there was barely a tourist to be seen.
I returned to the UK in late June 1976, a year of drought. As the train rattled its way from Reading to Exeter through the Wessex countryside, fields and woods already yellowed from lack of rain, I was overcome with emotion. It might have been unusually dry… it was scenically not a patch on New Zealand’s alpine South Island. But it was England; it was home. It must have been the first realisation of my landscape identity.
My brother Nick now lives in Dunedin, and I have visited him a few times since that first journey. The picture here was made in April 2018. Memories of New Zealand are, mainly, happy ones.
But they are not as deep as those of home.
Granite Coast
In a moment of mad extravagance, my great-grandfather had splashed out on a holiday bolt-hole in Polzeath, North Cornwall, in 1933. The wildly overpriced, poorly-built house became much loved by his (large and expanding) family over many decades.
In a moment of mad extravagance, my great-grandfather had splashed out on a holiday bolt-hole in Polzeath, North Cornwall, in 1933. The wildly overpriced, poorly-built house became much loved by his (large and expanding) family over many decades.
Late summer holidays were almost always spent here, often with our cousins. Ten kids and four parents, two families chaotically playing and squabbling outside in the sun, or the waves, or hunting the rock pools at low tide. About as idyllic as could be imagined. Perhaps predictably, when the family eventually sold that house it disappeared, replaced by a shiny modernist villa.
As an art student with my first camera (an Eastern European 35mm film slr), Cornwall was the site of my first photographic ideas and experiments. I looked at familiar places with a new, compositionally-critical eye, found myself thinking – worrying – about light and shadow.
Cornwall remains a home from home for me. On returning I carry my many memories. Sharing a name with the county probably helps preserve that sense of belonging too. These monumental, defensive-looking granite ramparts are a mile or so walk south of Land’s End. Framed on all sides except the east by the sea, Cornwall can seem a land apart, and to epitomise what Simon Schama refers to as Britain’s ‘cliff-girt insularity’. But, for me, these mosses, lichens and spring wildflowers evoke a memory of sunlit, warm, life-affirming abundance.
Toledo
The Greek-born Spanish painter, Doménikos Theotokópoulos, was known as El Greco to the people of his adopted city. He made one of the first pure landscape paintings of the Renaissance; the legendary View of Toledo. This in itself was remarkable, but even more so was his treatment of it. Although based on recognisable topography, El Greco’s trademark brushstrokes made Toledo into a fantastical city, a spiritual domain, dramatised by astonishing effects of light.
Because View of Toledo is such a landmark painting, any art student with a lively interest in art history was/is familiar with it. As a young working photographer I travelled widely in Europe during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s; once I knew Toledo was on my subject list for a book on Castille and Léon, seeking out El Greco’s View of Toledo viewpoint became an obsession.
Whenever we attempt to revisit an older view, everything has inevitably changed. Was this the spot? A cafe owner nearby was keen to reassure me, indeed it was. Having found the place, I returned twice before the light co-operated. Not El Greco’s sky, for his was drawn largely from imagination; but at least one that could evoke depth.
By now the cafe may well have gone, perhaps replaced by a multi-million euro El Greco experience museum. I feel lucky to have found my own perspective on a view El Greco immortalised in the memory of generations of art lovers.
Derwent Water from Kings How
In our loft is a large, faded, painting I made as a 15-year-old, while on an Easter family holiday in the Lake District. It is a detail of a twisted, rough-textured, complex old tree. I cannot recall where the tree was, but I do remember we were based in Keswick.
The first book for which I was the commissioned photographer was about the Founders of the National Trust. Its cover picture was of Brandelhow, the National Trust’s first Lake District property, on Derwent Water.
The first book for which I was the commissioned photographer was about the Founders of the National Trust. Its cover picture was of Brandelhow, the National Trust’s first Lake District property, on Derwent Water. I have continued to return to the northern Lakes, building up my back-catalogue of photographs and memories. For all its popularity I have never tired of the unique synthesis of dramatic fells, sheltered valleys, rivers, lakes and woodlands.
I recall a picture book from my childhood. Straddling two pages, one illustration showed a small girl sitting up in bed, totally absorbed in a picture book of her own. From a patchwork fabric her quilt changed into a patchwork of fields, and the end of her bed was all distant hills and woods, a river system and lake. This was no great work of art, but I love that picture; it proves to me that a feeling for landscape is embedded (no pun intended) in childhood.
The view of Derwent Water from Kings How brings that picture to life in my memory.
Bealach Na Gaoithe
Rarely do I recognise the direct inspiration of another photographer, but inevitably there have been such influences. In my book First Light, there is a chapter entitled, ‘Friends and Heroes’, which highlights those to whom I owe a particular debt. Paul Wakefield is one of those. A hero then, I am happy to also count him a friend now. This composition is a homage to Paul’s dark-yet-sunlit, precisely-seen large format film image from Scotland: A Place of Visions. It remains the iconic original, imprinted in memory.
The great writer Jan Morris collaborated with Paul on this book and others about the British Isles. In the light of her recent passing, and the context of memory, it seems only right to remember and acknowledge her immense contribution to nature and travel writing here.
Scotland’s landscape has been the subject of millions of pages of inspired prose and poetry. As much as any nation can be, Scotland is more than territory. It is also an idea, a land of the imagination, a refuge for the soul. It is a paradox and a contradiction, for although the rain almost always seems to be falling somewhere, the colours are richer, the spaces more sharply defined, and the light more brilliant and elusive than anywhere else I know.
Castleton, Drifting Smoke
When out and about with my camera I hope to be completely receptive, to respond to what I see and put myself “at the mercy of inspiration” as the Zen mantra has it. But at the same time a working photographer has to consider practicalities. The north of England is the territory of a calendar that I co-publish each year with my gallery, so if the opportunity arises, I am happy to make images with that in mind.
In late summer heather blooms widely on the North York Moors, close to our home. Although really only at its best for a few short weeks, it forms a much-loved and defining signature of the landscape. Each August I seek an image that may prove useful for a future calendar. Over time these wanderings have coloured my memory, reflecting a cultural memory of the Moors, shared by many.
Eigg, Boulder Field
The first book of which I was the literary as well as photographic author was First Light, published in 2002. The cover photograph is from the coast at Elgol, Skye, and its composition pivots around a beautiful, apparently spherical boulder. That unfortunate rock has now developed a certain notoriety among photographers. I owe it my apologies.
After many years I returned to Eigg in February of 2018, driven in part by memory and a desire to make an image that remained unfulfilled. The combination of elements there is irresistible.
At the time it seemed an ideal cover image, combining interesting geology and cloud-wreathed distant mountains. It was shot only a year or two after I had started with a 5x4inch film technical camera, full-time. This picture was a confidence booster – technically and creatively it seemed I was finding my way.
My next book was Scotland’s Coast, published a couple of years later. The cover photograph was shot on Eigg; interesting geology and cloud-wreathed distant mountains again. But that - apparently self-referential picture - was much more challenging to shoot. In my mind it remained a work in progress.
After many years I returned to Eigg in February of 2018, driven in part by memory and a desire to make an image that remained unfulfilled. The combination of elements there is irresistible. The charismatic geology may seem immutable, but the scene changes minute by minute with the tidal ebb and flow, and Hebridean weather. The accompanying image is one composition that starts to get close, but my memory will continue to tempt me back.
Aspens, Independence Pass
In 2013, thanks to the promptings of Tony Spencer, I found myself in Colorado, co-leading a tour. Tony and I spent a few days before our group’s arrival location-hunting, based on his considerable research. In spite of epic Rocky Mountain perspectives, and the vivid colours of the Badlands we passed, the most memorable spot was a simple aspen grove beside the road below the Independence Pass.
I might have known the geographic location, but at that time I was lost in terms of creative approach. For the preceding five years I had been preoccupied with the new digital workflow, learning to stitch, improving my raw and Photoshop skills, printing my own work, and struggling with the camera. But I had stopped making pictures that I liked.
Independence Pass gave me a photograph I liked… well, loved. It might not have been a big deal; it wasn’t clever, or original. It just distilled some feeling I needed to rediscover. Nothing technical, or spectacular; just pure form and light.
Subsequently, we have always stopped at the same spot with our groups and spent a happy couple of hours beside the road, admiring and photographing these graceful trees. My gratitude and the memory of their ethereal beauty keeps me returning. The image here was made in 2019, reinterpreting the redemption of six years before.
Lost fjord, Greenland
Another Tony Spencer-inspired and organised tour took me to Greenland last year. This was to prove psychologically demanding and utterly exhilarating in equal measure. Every day was a new adventure. On a small (12 passengers) ship we sailed from Svalbard across the Fram Strait, over two days in a storm, to East Greenland. From here we cruised through fjords for almost two weeks, before finally sailing across the Denmark Strait to Akureyri, in northern Iceland.
Deeply sheltered in one of the world’s biggest fjord systems, this day brought light winds and a gently changing sky. The multitude of icebergs grounded in the shallows had to be seen to be believed.
Deeply sheltered in one of the world’s biggest fjord systems, this day brought light winds and a gently changing sky. The multitude of icebergs grounded in the shallows had to be seen to be believed. Hand-holding the camera in an inflatable boat is usually incredibly challenging, but these conditions made it possible.
Such exceptional memories, shared with a wonderful and convivial group. But the other side to this story is the stark reality of climate change in which fossil fuel-hungry technologies like air and ship travel are implicated. It forces us to question our right to undertake such journeys. Unless carbon emissions reach ‘Net-Zero’ sooner rather than later, coastal environments globally will be subject to an irreversible cycle of flooding and severe erosion.
Eventually, under the onslaught of rising temperatures and sea levels, Greenland’s ice shelves will break up, and her glaciers will no longer reach the sea. And then northern hemisphere icebergs will themselves become mere shadows of memory.
I believe human beings need beauty, and that nature is our source. The ice-filled fjords of Greenland are an inspiration to me, and for now at least I hope I can do more good than harm by making photographs of these fabulous, transient landscapes. To galvanise action, political and personal change, we also need to know – and see – what we may lose.
Abandoned Quarry
My landscape memories of this year have been overwhelmingly connected to a book I’ve been working on about the landscape designer, Humphry Repton. Throughout the summer and autumn and up to the beginning of the November lockdown, in the field and on the essential editing and post-production, it has been this year’s one and only big project.
Working on privately-owned estates I was always socially distanced, staying safe, and doing my job. Every location had extensive woodland providing solitude and the sort of visual challenges I love, including complex visual problem-solving. I have never been more grateful for the opportunity to pursue my chosen profession.
Additionally, this process has strengthened my sense of the vital importance of texture and colour relationships in conveying emotional warmth. The many hours of field work and editing have given me plenty of opportunity to work on that. Finishing in autumn, with its dominant earth tones and colours, was a perfect way to end the process.
This corner of an abandoned quarry, a source of building stone, is now a regenerating woodland. The geological memory that led to its exploitation is mostly concealed, and the workings are barely visible. Nature has reclaimed the present. When sometimes I feel all hope is gone, I try to remember this resilience.
In the end, Landscape of Memory might be called landscape of history; or imagination; or even shadows. In the photographer’s actual experience surrounded by the light, colour, texture and space of reality, there is simply the moment; a living space/time continuum. But there is also the inner landscape, vividly coloured by the landscape of memory. Where the outer world collides, or aligns, with the inner world of the artist, a landscape photograph is born.
Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.
~ Mathematician and Physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss
It was 2am in the morning. A few days earlier I had downloaded the last thirty issues of On Landscape. And now I was scrolling through them page by page. Separating the images into two categories depending on how much time I spent looking at them. This two-category sorting technique worked brilliantly on my own images. But I wanted to test it out to see if it would also work on images not mine.
In the first “not my style” category were images whose viewing times lasted less than a second or so. In the second “keeper” category were images I viewed much longer. Often going back to view them several times more before moving on to the next issue. Many of these keepers were as fresh on the fifth or tenth view as the original view. Prompting me to dig deeper and find out why these keepers stay so well preserved across so many viewings. Hoping in the process to discover some of the secrets to making meaningful images.
At the beginning, I had no clear idea of what factors were dominant contributors. Potential candidates included camera and lens configurations. Distance from home. Skill in navigating a tangled reductionist-centric maze of compositional rules. Industrial-strength post-processing machismo. And creativity-inspired uniqueness and novelty? But this exponentially expanding list soon became too impractical.
the second “keeper” category were images I viewed much longer. Often going back to view them several times more before moving on to the next issue. Many of these keepers were as fresh on the fifth or tenth view as the original view. Prompting me to dig deeper and find out why these keepers stay so well preserved across so many viewings.
So, I started to work backwards. Studying batches of existing keeper images using a “forest in the trees” mindset. I found many keeper traits anchored in my own eccentricities. Something I had already anticipated. I also encountered a few pet peeve gatekeepers that eliminated potential images. Which was a bit of an awkward surprise. Many traits became obvious only after their discovery. Hindsight working its revealing magic.
And on that introductory note, here are four of my most important keeper image traits: colour; curiosity; details; and title.
Colour
I can still remember in vivid detail, peeling my first colour print off a newly bought Kodak Rapid Colour Processor Model 11. It was around 1972, give or take a year or two. I had strapped it to two wooden slats straddled across the bathtub. The memory of that pivotal moment is the source for the quote at the beginning of this article.
With each additional colour print, I became more convinced that colour is where I want to be. Where I am supposed to be. Where I need to be for the rest of my life. A decision I have never once regretted making.
One of my favourite colour images is "Horizontal Meets Vertical". In this image, the bright surf acts like a highway dividing line. Ensuring two incompatible ecosystems get equal, collision-free billing. On the left, the refreshing cool blues of the ocean. On the right, the warm sun-loving oranges and yellows inhabiting the near-vertical cliffs. A natural for the expressive power inherent in complementary colours.
The "Almost Dinner Time" image is another example where colour plays an essential role. Here we have a late afternoon sun streaming through leafless oak trees still hesitating to enter spring. Paired with green grasses that got a head start at the beginning of the winter rains. A harmonious collaboration only visible when viewed through analogous RGB colour wheel hues.
Horizontal Meets Vertical Big Sur, California
Almost Dinner Time Mount Diablo State Park, California
Curiosity
Many keeper images contain a concoction of intriguing elements worthy of further inspection. Often bordering on the chaotic. Which is the preferred way the natural world presents itself to us anyway. Always a bit rumpled and dishevelled. Like the random musings, our minds like to engage in when we are in a happy and contented state of being.
Many keeper images contain a concoction of intriguing elements worthy of further inspection. Often bordering on the chaotic. Which is the preferred way the natural world presents itself to us anyway. Always a bit rumpled and dishevelled.
These elements have the capacity to expose my innate curiosity. Not the “pixel-peeping” kind only capable of focusing on the craft of photography. But the kind that consistently spawns why, how, where, and what questions. All worth scooping up with the click of a camera shutter.
One of my favourites is the "Forest Oasis" image. A prime example of the complex patterns that permeates much of nature. It did not take long after I arrived at this location, for the questions to start flowing. Do the self-similar rivulets forming the waterfalls have a well-defined fractal dimension? What kind of geology allows water to seep out across the entire cliff side? How many different plant species live between the rivulets? Questions that elevate my awareness of nature’s tenacious interconnectedness. Making me feel more alive. And in the process enhancing my viewing experience far beyond superficial eye candy.
Once, when viewing the image "Nomadic Pebbles", the following questions arose. Were these pebbles destined to become sand? If so, how much longer would it take? Ten thousand years? More than a million years? During a later viewing, a second set of questions stepped forward. How did these pebbles end up at this location? If not the blue bedrock, then from where? How long ago? Is this their final destination or a temporary stop along the way?
Both images prompted internet searches that spawned more curiosity than answers. A sure-fire guarantee that extra viewings will never decrease the image's net worth. Continuing instead to enrich and deepen my appreciation of nature's inner workings.
Forest Oasis McArthur-Burney Falls State Park, California
Nomadic Pebbles Bean Hollow State Beach, California
Details
I often encounter what I call fireworks images. Images streamlined for a rushed sugar-high fast-food kind of visual experience. Overloading all my senses the instant they appear on my computer screen. Only to reverse direction and immediately rush back into a forgotten oblivion.
But I also encounter keeper images resisting these instant gratification spikes. Urging me to slow down. On many of these occasions, I often take time out to brew a fresh cup of coffee. Augment it with a generous slab of fresh-out-of-the-oven pumpkin or banana nut bread. Before settling down to uncover additional interpretations and insights overlooked during previous viewings.
“Slow photography” should not be confined to the image capture end of the pipeline. But also encompass the visual interactions with the polished image at the other end. Easy to do if the image contains enough engaging details to make it impractical to digest in one viewing.
The image "Next Generation" is a perfect example. One could crop the left and right sides of the image to the point where only a thin sliver of the centre remained. Squeezing out everything except the twins taking centre stage in the image. But in the process, one can lose the structural details that bestow it with a sense of place. Details such as dappled sunlight strolling through the partially shaded forest. Wrinkled tree trunks sporting ages capable of outlasting many generations. A verdant meadow brimming with macro opportunities. Ambitious mountain tops sporting spectacular bird-eye views. And a bluer than blue sky primed and waiting for an unobstructed milky way to circle above the horizon.
The subject of the "Ambition" image has a long history. Before I settled on applied mathematics, I also considered a career in geology. And while it never happened, geology is still a latent force in many of my intimate landscape images. In this image, I was captivated by the diversity of stones inching up steeply inclined layers. Stones sporting brown and blue hues. Rough and smooth surfaces. Round and flat shapes. Some even pocketed with mysterious holes. A pleasing chaos of engaging patterns and textures begging for closer inspection.
I often encounter what I call fireworks images. Images streamlined for a rushed sugar-high fast-food kind of visual experience. Overloading all my senses the instant they appear on my computer screen.
Next Generation Trout Meadow, South Lake Tahoe, California
Ambition Pescadero State Beach, California
A Title
I prefer to launch an image into the public world armed with a title. A small token of appreciation designed to give it a head start as it embarks on a life of its own. When selecting titles, I lean towards expressions reflecting memorable facets of my life. Finding the right title always culminates in an exhilarating feeling of completion. A guaranteed ‘This is as good as it gets - it does not get better than this!’ moment every time.
The image "Curiosity" had another contender. "I Dare You to Get Closer". Both capable of influencing the mindset of the viewer when they first enter the image. Both had equal quantities of pluses and minuses. Requiring the flip of a coin to finalise the decision. Both titles gave me the freedom to strengthen the visual weight of the lichens. Increasing their area to better balance it with the much brighter waterfall.
The title "Thrashing About" has an interesting etymology. It was how one of my mathematics professors characterised students during final examinations. During my life, I found many other applications for these versatile words. Including the title to this image and the revision process used to clean up this article.
Curiosity Latourell Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon
Thrashing About Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, California
Summary
There you have it. Four personal traits which consistently find themselves embedded in my keeper images. I’m confident the future still holds more traits worthy of discovery. But for now, they are more than adequate to help evolve my photography in the right direction.
Acknowledgements
The idea for this article sprouted from Allister Benn’s YouTube video, “Landscape Photography | Composition | Why, NOT HOW...” It's well worth watching.
Colour management as we know it in digital photography is often more about strange terminology than anything else, presenting itself in the form of profiles, gamut’s and unusual numbers. But colour management goes deeper than that, it centres around human vision which is a fundamental part of the visual arts, including photography. So I believe a deeper understanding of human vision, and the way it interacts with colour management can help us unlock the potential in our images, as we edit, view and print.
A fundamental principle of vision is seen in the interaction of colour. Leonardo Da Vinci wrote of these effects in his notebooks 500 years ago, and his observations are just as relevant today. “Of several colours, all equally white, that will look whitest which is against the darkest background. And black will look intensest against the whitest background. And red will look most vivid against the yellowest background, and the same is the case with all colours when surrounded by their strongest contrasts.” In essence, Leonardo noted that the colour perceived is determined by its surround.
“that will look whitest which is against the darkest background”
“And red will look most vivid against the yellowest background” You be the judge, the point here is the effect of different coloured backgrounds on an adjacent colour.
While these examples may seem like a pre-school lesson, I believe they provide an important insight.
While these examples may seem like a pre-school lesson, I believe they provide an important insight. We spend most of our lives observing colour without much conscious thought, yet we find ourselves using these largely unnoticed visual effects artistically and technically in our image making.
We spend most of our lives observing colour without much conscious thought, yet we find ourselves using these largely unnoticed visual effects artistically and technically in our image making.
The effect of a deep black can be counter intuitive. To brighten an image, it would seem more logical to increase the exposure than to lower the blacks, but a deeper black can be exactly what’s needed. In the same way, coated photographic papers with deep blacks, such as satin or baryta papers, appear to have more punch than rag or matte papers, even though the paper itself is just as bright, the blacks do the heavy lifting.
In colour science, a related effect was studied by Bartleson and Breneman. Just as contrast can be increased by using deep blacks within an image, they observed that contrast appears to reduce if the surround is dark, and increase if the surround is light, as shown here with Ansel Adam’s ‘Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico'. I came across this example during a discussion with Mark Fairchild, a Professor of Colour Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Mark had attended an exhibition which displayed Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico as the centrepiece of the show. Unfortunately, it was presented in a way that Adams would not have intended, against a dark background and directly illuminated. The effect created luminous whites, but the all-important black values appeared dark grey and effectively destroyed the centrepiece of the show. In his book The Print, Adams states his preference for a middle grey background. Today, official use of his images is generally not permitted on a dark background.
You could say that including Simon Baxter as a featured photographer is thanks for saving me from a long stay in London when the Beast from the East shut down all travel north of Yorkshire. But then again, he seemed happy with the cup of coffee and a bit of cake, so perhaps it's more likely because his photography has a consistent and creative vision of the world which he explores and shares so well through his YouTube videos (we've talked to him before about his video work here). Fortunately, Simon was happy to spend some time answering our questions and sharing some of his favourite images with us. We hope you enjoy his work and if you do, we can highly recommend exploring some of his videos on his YouTube channel. (Oh, and keep him in mind if you ever need a lift 'up North!')
Can you tell me a little about your education, childhood passions, early exposure to photography etc?
My earliest memory of photography is buying a compact film camera from Argos while on holiday in Cornwall. I must have been younger than 10 at the time. I progressed to a Pentax 35mm fully manual film camera and I recall watching a photography series on TV by Chris Packham. I started out by photographing things in the garden, household objects and then rallycross racing at the Croft race circuit near Darlington. Another hobby when I was young and into my twenties was freshwater angling. We enjoyed fishing at secluded lakes and quiet rivers where I would photograph the mist rising from the still water at dawn or the colourful sky and reflections from the setting sun. My interest in photography and being creative has always been present and my approach to it shares many parallels with my passion for angling and mountain biking.
Mountain biking dominated my spare time while studying for my degrees in Business and then a Masters in IT. It’s a hobby that I, unfortunately, had to give up due to a back injury but it’s an event that slowly led me back to photography, finding solace in nature, and developing a deeper connection with the landscape.
I think pride is something that has slowly developed as a result of an effort to seek a form of photography that offered solitude and therapy for both physical rehabilitation and to control my negative thought processes. In that process, I not only found my voice in photography but discovered a whole new world within my local countryside.
What are you most proud of in your photography?
I think pride is something that has slowly developed as a result of an effort to seek a form of photography that offered solitude and therapy for both physical rehabilitation and to control my negative thought processes. In that process, I not only found my voice in photography but discovered a whole new world within my local countryside. I spent a long time searching for quiet and rarely trodden woodlands where I could feel the peace and enjoy the sense of child-like adventure. Pride was the last thing on my mind, but looking back, I feel a sense of pride in having turned my life around through photography. I am equally proud and thankful to have been able to do so by creating images of the woodlands I’ve discovered and have grown to love.
In prehistory – you know, 20 years ago before a gazillion images were uploaded on to the Net each day – photographers found out about new locations by hearsay, reading about them or (on very rare occasions) seeing an image in a book. In those days we usually had little idea of what we would find before we arrived. At the time it seemed frustrating but in retrospect being free of the burden of expectation actually looks like a wonderful blessing. On the few occasions where I have set out to photograph a famous spot, I have almost always been disappointed with the results. In fact the image that I am perhaps best known for was one that I stumbled upon following a series of unfortunate events.
Starting in the 1980’s and on into the 1990’s, the American photographer Michael Fatali made a number of 10x8 images in a place called Coyote Buttes, in the Paria Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, Arizona. He gave each photo a poetic title, such as Tales of Time, Vertigo or The Wave. He was careful not to say where each photograph had been made. Fatali was not the first to photograph there and others – notably Jack Dykinga – have made equally stunning images. I don’t know if Fatali coined the name The Wave but it has become a landscape icon in the internet era. It has even achieved the ultimate accolade of becoming desktop wallpaper for Microsoft Windows™ computers. (yeah, right…)
Starting in the 1980’s and on into the 1990’s, the American photographer Michael Fatali made a number of 10x8 images in a place called Coyote Buttes, in the Paria Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, Arizona. He gave each photo a poetic title, such as Tales of Time, Vertigo or The Wave. He was careful not to say where each photograph had been made.
In an era where everyone incontinently shares the GPS location of their photos Fatali’s reluctance to say where he made these images seems almost inconceivable. Of course, the interest of every keen photographer who knew of Fatali’s work was piqued. In the mid-nineties, Joe Cornish was travelling through the desert southwest of the USA and met a woman who reluctantly told him where these images were made. Not long afterwards, Joe enlisted me and fellow photographers, Phil Malpas and Clive Minnitt, to accompany him on a pilgrimage.
Nowadays, this region is rightly considered one of the desert southwest’s most amazing locations for landscape photography. Ancient sand dunes, subsumed within the Earth’s crust, have been fossilised by millions of tons of pressure over millions of years. Millions more years of uplift and subsequent erosion by wind (and a little rain) have stripped away the overburden to reveal beautiful swirls of pink, yellow and cream Navajo sandstone. What’s not to like? Well, access isn’t straightforward.
First of all, visiting Coyote Buttes is dependent on acquiring a permit. The Paria Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness is split into a number of permit areas. Coyote Buttes is itself split into north and south. Only twenty are issued for each area per day. In those days, ten were issued for the next day from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Ranger Station nearby. The other half were available over the Internet a year in advance. Whilst researching how to get permits, Phil found out that they normally went within a few minutes of being released so he sat with finger poised over his mouse to claim four permits for Coyote Buttes North (CBN) for three consecutive days. I doubt that would be possible today as the popularity of the area has increased enormously since 2009 (the year when Microsoft used it on millions of machines for Windows 7). In 2018 there were 168,317 applicants for permits, with only 7,300 people allowed access per annum. That’s a 4.3% success rate. The pressure for permits was nowhere near so high in 2001 but we still needed Phil’s diligence. Thank you, Phil!
In this article, Peter tries to understand what it is we are trying to communicate in our photographs.
My Problem
Let me start with an anecdote. I was visiting a local art and craft fair a few years back, held in a nearby village hall. The exhibits on show were mainly paintings by local artists, but there was a small photography display that caught my eye. The images were excellent, I really liked them. There was a set of three in the style of a high key snow scene with a few trees and a fence. From this simple description, you will be able to imagine what they were like. There was a young man hovering nearby who was clearly the photographer, and we started chatting. He told me where the photographs were taken, the efforts he made to get the right composition, how difficult it was to get the correct exposure, and how he considered his photography as art. He just happened to mention that one of the images was accepted into the Landscape Photographer of the Year, and I was duly impressed. But then just as the conversation was coming to a natural end, he added that what he tries to do with his photographs is express his feelings. At this point the conversation stalled. I asked him to explain, but he struggled to find anything more to say. I’m assuming he was serious when he said he used photography to express his feelings, but he just had no more words to flesh out what he meant.
Generations: This is about ageing and is both sad and hopeful at the same time.
I’ve always remembered this conversation and it keeps coming back to me as I read an increasing number of articles or listen to talks, which also say the communication of feelings and emotions is the primary purpose of photography. It’s not always ‘feelings and emotions’; other words or expressions are used, for example, the photographer should convey a message, or provide a personal view, an interpretation of the scene. He or she should add something from within, should ask questions of the subject, and find answers. However expressed, the point being made is the same, the artistic photograph should have that something extra.
There must be something in these sentiments for them to be expressed so strongly, and so frequently. Such views appear in magazines, in talks and frequently in On Landscape articles from regular and occasional contributors. Unlike my conversation at the art fair, the authors of such articles do support their case with much richer arguments to provide extra detail. The authors are very articulate and inspiring, and their photographs are great. But often (nearly always) I find the ideas are hard to pin down in any practical way. None of the articles ever say ‘in this photograph I’m trying to …… ‘. So, we’re left guessing as to what the photographer’s intent actually was. Am I the only one to feel this way? Based on the photographers in my circle, I’m not alone.
So, what is this missing ingredient, this something extra? What does it look like? Can it be opened up and made more accessible? Is this even a sensible question to ask?
Under the pier: I was attracted initially by the light and the colours, but quickly realised this was also about pollution.
The extra ingredient
I’ve thought about this a lot and asked myself how this relates to the way I take photographs. Do I try to express feelings and emotions when I take a shot? The answer is sometimes yes, but often no. When I’m aware that I have something to express, I wouldn’t necessarily talk in terms of ‘feelings and emotions’, but there would be something about the scene I wanted to capture. For me, there are other drivers at play. The photographs I’ve used to illustrate this article have captions which describe what was in my mind when I took the shot.
Do I try to express feelings and emotions when I take a shot? The answer is sometimes yes, but often no. When I’m aware that I have something to express, I wouldn’t necessarily talk in terms of ‘feelings and emotions’, but there would be something about the scene I wanted to capture.
I found a few interesting quotations around this subject. The first goes way back to our favourite landscape photographer, Ansel Adams.
“A great photograph is full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.” Clearly, Ansel was very much into expressing feelings.
More recently, Gerry Badger (2010, p166) argues that:
"The real trick - and here photography becomes immensely difficult and complex - is deciding what to photograph. And that, in essence, is a two-level process. The first is deciding on the raw material - trees, nudes, war, raindrops etc – which represents a photographer finding his or her subject matter. It's an important step, but not yet ‘job done’. The second, and much more difficult step, is to say something – something unobvious and personal - about the raw material. The two are very different entities, and a photographer's subject may bear only the most oblique reference to his or her subject matter."
Here Badger isn’t asking for ‘feelings and emotions’ but is asking for some added value from the photographer, something over and above the material reality of the scene itself. Badger, having made this important distinction between stages one and two, goes on to make the damning comment that most photographers “never progress beyond stage one, except in the most trite and obvious ways.” If this is so, maybe photographers grow into expressing feelings and emotions, having mastered the technicalities of photography and sound composition. It’s a higher level of skill that not all will aspire to, achieve, or appreciate.
Pier and boat: This is entirely about producing an attractive image.
Cold and alone: My initial intent was to produce an attractive image of the hut and the aurora, but in post processing I realised the single line of footsteps in the snow and the stars in the sky created story of being cold and alone.
In another quote, Bright (2004, p8) says that what really counts when assessing whether a photograph might be considered as art is that “the work communicates intelligent ideas that are worthy of attention, appreciation and investigation”. This sounds weighty, and puts a bit more flesh on what might be “feelings and emotions”. Cotton (2004) approaches photographic art in a similar way. Her book explores the motivations and working practices of the photographic artists but from the beginning places most importance on the ideas that the photographer is wishes to communicate. This is seeking clarity on the photographer’s intent. I find the word ‘intent’ a more accessible and meaningful term. What is it the photographer is trying to do? For both Bright and Cotton, the ‘idea’ that underpins the work is the distinguishing aspect that qualifies the work as capable of being considered as art. Maybe were getting closer.
I know I get as much enjoyment from the process of photography, the friendship groups, the outings, the continuous learning, as I do from producing the photograph itself.
Where do motivations come from?
I think we need to take a step back and explore the motivations of the enthusiast photographer. Some might be motivated by the need to express their feelings and emotions, but for most I’d argue the motivations are more varied and complex and driven by multiple factors. I know I get as much enjoyment from the process of photography, the friendship groups, the outings, the continuous learning, as I do from producing the photograph itself.
We’re all influenced by everything around us. The images we see, the people we know, the networks we are part of. All shape our way of seeing. These are external drivers that become internalised. This being so, is there scope to be totally original? It is certainly very difficult. Must the underlying idea address the big issues in life, like Salgado or Burtynsky, or the many bits of minutia that captures our eye. I suspect the latter for most of us.
I also wonder if it is it possible for every image to have something new to say? How many new messages are there to be shared? Certainly less than the number of photographs that are produced. What happens when a photographer has a recognisable style, for example, the high contrast architectural image, or the ICM or multiple exposure, or long exposures seascapes, or any one of many more. Can each of these images produced to the same style each have something new to say, or is a point reached where the images become repetitive, technical exercises and the production of a beautiful image becomes the main motivation? And what happens when these styles are copied by others, which happens all the time, even to the point where workshops are held to teach the technique. This surely makes it a technical exercise rather than the communication of something deep and meaningful.
Survival: I saw this tree and the single root stretching out to the shore and immediately thought the tree was hanging on for survival.
This presents a number of challenges for the enthusiasts wanting their work to be considered as art. Evidently, it requires the enthusiast to be thinking in terms of communicating ideas as a core part of their purpose, but I’m not sure that communicating an idea is typically ingrained in the working practices of most enthusiasts. At least not explicitly. So much militates against this - the places where enthusiasts show their work, the competitions, salons, the judging and selection processes, and the focus on the single ‘impactful’ image, do not encourage the presentation of work designed to communicate core ideas. The notable exception to this is the RPS distinctions which require a Statement of Intent to support the work.
However, what does work in the enthusiast’s favour is the pictorial culture that prevails. Robert Adams, in an interview (Di Grappa, 1980, p12) puts great importance on this aspect of an image “… my feeling is that composition is the main tool we have and that a photographer has to use it. Composition is what concentrates the viewer’s attention. A bad picture doesn’t make evil seem any more evil – it just loses your audience.” In his own writings he (Adams, 1981, p27) talks eloquently about the need for beauty in photography, but makes the point that for a picture to be beautiful, “it must in some significant respect be unlike what precedes it”. Adams is arguing for sound composition as an essential starting point, the quality that enthusiast photographers have demonstrated, but in asking for the something different is also calling, like Bright and Cotton, for an underlying core idea to be present.
These arguments about the images having that something extra are expressed from the point of view of the photographer. But it is relevant to ask what the viewer gets from the image and whether the viewer sees the message that the photographer seeks to convey.
Kings Cross station: This is a multiple exposure and part of a panel of images telling the story of visitors to London rushing around all the attractions.
What about the viewer
These arguments about the images having that something extra are expressed from the point of view of the photographer. But it is relevant to ask what the viewer gets from the image and whether the viewer sees the message that the photographer seeks to convey. This again is difficult. Much has been written about the visual image being a language, and how this language is based in our culture. Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, provides a theory for how this works (a subject worthy of study, and of a separate article). But the visual language is far more imprecise than the written word, so the viewer has a tougher job extracting meaning, and there is every likelihood that that meaning will not coincide with that intended by the photographer. This is more so for landscape images, where the ‘signs and symbols’ are far more generic than in other genres such as say portraiture, sport, wildlife. Is this why so many landscape photographs rely on beauty rather than message for their attraction?
However, the viewer can be given a helping hand to understand the photograph by the provision of a meaningful title. A factual title suggests the image is more of a record of the scene. A more abstract title can point to the real message behind the image.
Stairs: This is a design shot intended solely to produce a beautiful image.
So where does this leave us?
The purpose of this article has been to dig a little deeper into what that something extra is that makes a photograph. I am not questioning that this something extra exists, it clearly does, but I am asking to find a way to understand what it is in a more practical way. I don’t know that I have been successful. I seem to have asked more questions rather than provided answers.
Which brings me to my request. It would be really instructive if the authors of articles in On Landscape and elsewhere gave some insight into the ideas they were trying to express in the photographs illustrating their articles. I have tried to do this with the captions attached to my photographs in this article. But authors never usually do this. There is one exception - Raphael Rojas. Raphael has not only written several articles along these lines but has also written an eBook called ‘The Photographic Message’ which includes a second half where he presents 50 images along with the motivations behind each image. Thank you, Raphael.
If readers are prompted to comment on this article can I invite them also to attach an image plus a few words on their motivations for taking the photograph. Was it beauty or message or both? That way we might get some practical insight into what it is that photographers are trying to achieve.
Tranquillity. The intention was to produce an attractive image capturing the tranquillity of the lake.
References
Adams, R (1981), Beauty in Photography, Essays on defence of traditional values, Aperture
Badger, G (2010) The Pleasures of Good Photographs, Aperture
Bright, D (2011) Art Photography Now, Thames and Hudson
Cotton, C, (2004), The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Thames and Hudson
Di Grappa, Carol (Ed), (1980) Landscape: Theory, Interview with Robert Adam, Lustram Press
Generations: This is about ageing and is both sad and hopeful at the same time.
Under the pier: I was attracted initially by the light and the colours, but quickly realised this was also about pollution.
Pier and boat: This is entirely about producing an attractive image.
Cold and alone: My initial intent was to produce an attractive image of the hut and the aurora, but in post processing I realised the single line of footsteps in the snow and the stars in the sky created story of being cold and alone.
Survival: I saw this tree and the single root stretching out to the shore and immediately thought the tree was hanging on for survival.
Kings Cross station: This is a multiple exposure and part of a panel of images telling the story of visitors to London rushing around all the attractions.
Stairs: This is a design shot intended solely to produce a beautiful image.
Tranquillity. The intention was to produce an attractive image capturing the tranquillity of the lake.
Clevedon Pier. The intention was to produce an attractive image using long exposure
Just over ten years ago whilst sitting around the dinner table on holiday in Northumberland, I announced to my in-laws that I was going to give up my job and start a photography magazine. This came as a bit of a shock to them but also to my wife as I’d forgotten (ahem) to tell her as well! Fortunately, there weren’t any major repercussions (well - in hindsight anyway) and over the next few months Joe Cornish and I chatted about content, design etc and On Landscape was born. Actually, it wasn’t On Landscape at the time, we called it Great British Landscapes but quickly realised that it had an audience beyond Britain. Even from the first few months we had people from as far away as Australia, Brazil and Canada subscribing and now we’re about 50% from Britain and 50% from the rest of the world. From the start, we had an inkling that it should be successful but we didn't think we'd have the level of support we now have.
In celebration of our ten years of publishing our magazine, we thought we'd pick some of our favourite content for you to look back on, particularly if you weren't a subscriber from early days. But, to be honest, I enjoyed going through the older content and rereading some of our articles because, even if the content hasn't changed, I certainly have and am getting different things from them when rereading.
In the beginning
From the start, the first few issues were a bit of a mix of video interviews, reviews and editorial but there was still some great content. In the first couple of months, we had a series on Aspect Ratios from Joe Cornish and one of our most popular articles called “Shooting into the Sun” (a result of search engine optimisation, rather than my writing I imagine).
There were also some really informative and inspiring videos from Joe Cornish about some of his old & new images and also about post-processing. We're currently transferring these to YouTube so apologies if you can't access them all at the moment. Here's a sample of the "Hindsight" series you can view now though.
We also wanted to inspire people with information about some of the pioneers in landscape photography, for instance in an early issue me and Joe looked at the work of Galen Rowell and also reviewed a couple of his books.
We've run a few Master Photogarphers since then, one of my favourites was Josef Sudek who should be more well known to our landscape photographer community.
Some topics keep recurring throughout the history of On Landscape and early on we had a couple of reactions to social media's propagation of the 'Wow!' image. Julian Barkway and Dav Thomas took complementary positions (partly for the sake of argument I imagine!)
From the start, we wanted to make sure we represented more than just the wow and one of the more inspiring articles from a photographer pushing the boundaries was an interview with Michael Jackson on his Poppitt Sands work - Thanks Rob Hudson!
We were often told that one of the best ways to get lots of page views was to include equipment reviews. So we made a bit effort to ensure we were predominantly equipment review free and concentrated instead on the art and science of photography. However, occasionally we did think that some review content was useful but only when there wasn't much coverage elsewhere on the internet. For instance, some of our first reviews including a survey of colour film, which we spread over three different articles. This was a massive undertaking and I hope some people found it useful. Sadly it's also an indication of how film has changed in this short period with only half of he films still in production (3 of the slide films and 3 of the colour negatives films, Velvia 50 and 100 plus Kodak E100G and then Kodak Portra 160 & 400 and Ektar).
The other testing we did was in response to a 'test' on the old Luminous Landscape website. It compared the Phase One IQ180 with 8x10 film, saying the reign of 8x10 was over. Well, we couldn't let that lie and so we applied ourselves to a 'proper' test with the conclusion "oh no it isn't!". The article was just simply a resolution test though, it also looked at differences between resolution and sharpness and did print comparisons (quite revealing) and it prompted Dav Thomas' "Why Size Doesn't Matter" article. We promised not to repeat this for a long time and we mostly stuck to this. However, when the IQ150 came out (150 MAGA Pixies!) we had to give it another go and had to conclude that it's finally pretty close (although the edge still goes to a well-taken 8x10!)
Coming from a scientific background (many years of pointless engineering research toward a PhD) I was very interested in some of the more 'esoteric' (read boring and pointless) studies of aspects of photography. I was particularly interested in how colour is perceived and recorded and a couple of early articles looked at some of the inconsistencies both our vision and our cameras. One of the more interesting aspects (to me) was the differences in how we remember colour. So much so I realised I've actually written two articles with the same title over the last ten years! They cover different ground though so I hope they're interesting enough to at least a few other people.
I've also been interest in the subjects that we photograph and have investigated the science behind autumn and some interesting facts about some of our favourite trees.
And a final pick from me - I loved playing with pinholes and writing this article about how they work was such a good excuse to combine my love of science and photography.
Being a good photographer, having interesting thoughts about photography and having the skills and inclination to write them down in a way that informs and entertains is a rare combination. Fortunately, there are a few photographers out there who can do a great job of all three. My personal favourite writer and someone we're lucky to have produced quite a few articles for us in the past ten years, is David Ward and we would be remiss if we didn't include a couple of my favourite articles from him.
(Un?)Fortunately, there is only one David Ward but on the other side of the Atlantic, there is another excellent photographer who has written many articles for us, covering issues from psychology to history, geography to neuroaesthetics. Guy Tal consistently explores some of the fundamentals behind what we do as photographers and to read many of his articles is to explore our own psyche and perhaps help us realise what it means to live the creative life.
As well as Guy and David, there are a load of people who write less often but have still provided lots of excellent articles for On Landscape such as Richard Childs, Alister Benn, Raphael Rojas, Colin Bell, Andrew Nadolski, Thomas Peck, David Tolcher, Doug Chinnery, Graham Cook, Harvey Lloyd-Thomas, Dav Thomas, Keith Beven, Lizzie Shepherd, Mark Littlejohn, Matt Lethbridge, Paul Gallagher, Paul Moon, Colleen Miniuk, Ted Leeming & Morag Peterson and Theo Bosboom. We're lucky to have such a good pool of writers to draw from.
One of my favourite interview over the past ten years was with Thomas Joshua Cooper. A proper misfit rebel screaming at the world through his camera. If you ever get the chance to meet him, say hello, buy him a bottle of red wine and look forward to a few hours of free form entertainment.
Our favourite regular columns are always worth looking back on. Here's a couple of our favourites from 4x4's (from an International Landscape Photographer of the Year!), Endframes and Featured Photographers
One of the saddest events of the year was to witness one of our contributors and friends pass away during a Zoom interview. Richard White was a truly passionate photographer and a friend to the magazine. In his memory here is his first interview for us and his last.
I hope you'll excuse me indulging myself in a wade through our back issues. It's been great to spend a little time reviewing some of our old content and it's inspired me to find more for the next ten year anniversary. What the world will look like by then is anybody's guess but I wish you all the best in recording it!
When Charlotte asked me to write this article my first thought was had she approached the right person? After all, I am no student of photography and these days rarely shoot natural world landscapes. But reading the brief again and seeing urban images were in scope, doubts were banished.
Photography is not just my passion, it's a way of life. When I jumped off the corporate ladder, I committed to achieving success in the world of photography too. In the early days of learning my craft (do we ever stop?) landscape tours and workshops was the order of the day. I enjoyed the subjects enormously but a few years later my head was turned by two themes: the American Road and Olympic London. They took me in a new direction from which I have seldom looked back. Today I describe myself as an urban / cityscape photographer who makes big prints of London and other world cities for UK and international clients.
We all see hundreds of images every day and most aren’t even worth a second glance. Favourite images don’t easily spring to mind so how would I go about choosing one? My approach would be to firstly identify a photographer who inspires and influences me then delve into their work. In the photographic world, inspirers make me think, and influencers make me do something different. I considered a handful of photographers mainly comprising masters I have had the pleasure of learning from. Nine such photographers fall into a few groups.
Great UK Landscape Photographers: The work of Charlie Waite and David Ward immediately came to mind. Both of these esteemed photographers and their work were important to me in my early days. Had I written this article a decade ago I would probably have referenced one of their images. I discovered the work of Joe Cornish and Tony Spencer much later but also including them in this category is essential. I decided not to select an image from any of these four gentlemen as our contact is less frequent these days and therefore their influence is less than it was.
Visual storytellers: I admire the work of Gregory Crewdston and Julia Fullerton – Batten. Both create amazing portraits, often in landscape settings but their work is outside the scope of this article as it is people led.
Architectural and urban photographers: Julia Anna Gosporodou creates quite brilliant photographic artwork featuring the world’s architecture and urban landscapes. Luca Campigotto makes spectacular images of New York, Shanghai, other world cities and more. Both photographers create wonderful images in styles that influence me today and several could have been chosen here.
But instead, I want to draw your attention to the work of my good friend and sometimes mentor Roger Arnall. Roger is an Australian photographer who will be known personally to many readers. We first crossed paths on a 'light and land' tour twelve years ago, and have travelled together many times since. I have selected his work because more than any other photographer he has the most direct bearing on my image making today. The acid test being the invaluable advice and guidance he gave me during a tricky multi city commission last year.
Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted from our subscribers. Each portfolios consisting of four images related in some way.
Submit Your 4x4 Portfolio
Interested in submitting your work? We're on the lookout for new portfolios for the next few issues, so please do get in touch!
Straddling the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the Chignecto Isthmus lies at the head of the Bay of Fundy. Much of its southern area is marshland, among which are the Tantramar Marshes. These tidal salt marshes have been dyked since the 17th century and are mainly used to grow hay and as cattle pasture, though recent efforts have reclaimed portions for wildlife, including numerous migratory bird species. As many as 400 hay barns once formed a distinctive feature of the landscape, but most have fallen to age and winter storms.
The Marshes are drained by several streams among which is the tidal Tantramar River. Its waters are reddish-brown with alluvial mud as it meanders towards the Cumberland Basin. The Basin’s wide mud-flats are inundated and exposed twice a day by the Fundy’s famously high tides.
In these summer photos, I’ve tried to project the expansive sky and bright colours of the Tantramar landscape; on a grey winter’s day the Marshes can look a good deal bleaker!
Nature has the last call when the beauty of a landscape unravels. A photographer can thus only develop pure patience after understanding this fact. The outdoors have been calling my soul since I can recall. And in view of these odd Corona days, I came to realise how gifted I was. Taking travelling for granted is rather easy in Europe. However, and thanks to quarantine, I was forced to see my local area with different eyes. This brief body of work expresses my introspection into my close surroundings.
Landscape photography has always been about getting as far as I can from home and scouting for the perfect view. Landscapes exceed the decisive moment, and are the result of a close and pristine relationship with nature. Nonetheless, it is remarkably hard and challenging to shoot the local habitat. This is because the deep connection with our ordinary surroundings bias our gaze so deeply that it becomes nearly impossible to find anything of interest around us. After noticing this, I was reassured that travelling and photography are a match made in heaven. This is because it is a hack – any foreign place or culture provides the opportunity of being easily surprised.
A wise friend once told me that everything had already been photographed. Therefore, I should stop worrying. “Try shooting everything that has already been captured in your own way, and you’ll find that everything is new for your camera and your eyes” he said. To reinterpret the world was his command, and so I followed his advice. Nature was generous to me, and I’m sure that these ordinary places had never been photographed in such a way. The colour palette vibrantly gets along with itself, everything in this venue screams for serenity and compositional balance – a rural East German countryside shaped by light of the magic hour.
I used a telephoto lens with these landscape images on principle. And this is often a preferred decision in contrast to wide angle options. Here, the four photos share something with each other. They all provide instant access, and human presence gets lost in the field. There are no distracting natural elements in the foreground. There is just less emphasis on interrupting features, making the complete image the main subject of the storytelling act. The landscape evolves and is free from obstacles. It flows in front of the viewer. It is an open invitation what the condensed visual impact has to offer. And this is my tribute to the Utopian human life we all shall pursue.
Life is a collection of moments. And a photographer is the agent who has the power to capture these situations. The mechanism and indeed art of photography aims to interrupt the constant progress of change that is life in order to create long-lasting memories. It always involves subjective judgement about the situation at hand. I am simply an ordinary photographer who is in love with natural light.
This is a selection of pictures from those I made during the eight weeks of officially imposed lockdown in the Spring of 2020 as the French nation responded to the threat of Covid-19. All the pictures were taken within 1 kilometre of home - the maximum distance allowed for casual exercise. I arranged them as pairs of images, to give an impression of the shifting and contrasting emotions generated by the experience of confinement. After the end of lockdown I was able to show the full set of eighteen pictures at a private exhibition locally. You can still see them on my website - www.bluehorizons.eu.
My home is in southern France, between the mountains and the sea. I like the wonderful light here, and gathering and sharing impressions of the hills and coastline, the changing seasons, and traditions and events in this region.
