evolution, not revolution
I spent many childhood hours closely observing a father, who was a highly accomplished self taught artist, use incredible skills to create the most amazing pictures of everything from wildlife in charcoal to watercolour landscapes. Some of this passion definitely rubbed off, because I too spent a great deal of the pre-internet, pre-iPhone years of the 1970s and 80s losing track of time absorbed in my drawing. I was good enough to study up to A Level before life’s other priorities took hold and it all took a back seat for a long time after that.
Photography was not even a thing for me until digital had begun to fracture the legacy of film. I was definitely a frustrated artist and the instant feedback of digital highly appealed to me. Don’t like the result? simply try again and again and again without it really costing you anything at all other than time and effort. I still love that aspect of the digital process.
“ art of the landscape ” is more than a name, it’s an intention and an objective
Anything worth doing is worth doing well and I was eventually obsessed with trying to capture birds and wildlife. There are several problems with this pursuit; you need massive telephoto lenses which cost a fortune, you need to sit for hours waiting for highly elusive creatures to reveal themselves and when they do eventually show up you might have nothing more than a fleeting moment to capture something worthy. This activity is absolutely not for those with short attention spans and I commend those who apply themselves to this endless hunt especially when there is often no guarantee whatsoever that you return home with anything decent for your effort.
The thing about wildlife photography is you will almost certainly find yourself in beautiful surroundings and eventually, almost out of sheer boredom, I started to turn my attention towards this environment of lakes, woodland, colour and texture. Not only was it all in plain sight, but it certainly wasn’t going anywhere. Best of all a high quality short focal length prime lens cost a fraction of a giant super-tele and didn’t break your back.
In my experience, the more you look, the more you see and eventually I wanted to start to introduce interpretation by capturing movement, utilise shallow depth of field, creative blur with Tilt/Shift lenses and ultimately experimentation with different frequencies of infrared light. This has really stuck with me for many years now - my approach has really become all about the title of this whole website, whereby “art of the landscape" is more than a name, it’s an intention and an objective.
I have very much enjoyed where this refined purpose takes me. My Backwater series for example is all shot using a combination of infrared and narrow depth of field, an attempt to build the idea of dreams within dreams from local forgotten ponds on the edge of fields and woodland no more than half a mile from my front door. These locations are rarely visited or loved so it seemed like a challenge to see if you really can find art in places like that. I’ll leave it to you to decide if I pulled that off but I became very fond of these overlooked hinterlands - they are at least a long chalk from trying to capture endlessly sharp grand vistas that seem to be the destination of other landscape photographers anyway.
The journey isn’t over yet for me of course but landscape photography has become how I try to show the world how I stay grounded and connected to the earth, whilst hopefully inspiring others to see beyond the obvious occasionally too.