I wouldn't normally mention political subjects on this blog but hopefully this goes beyond this. The government is currently proposing the sell-off of all publicly owned forests. We have to smallest percentage of forest land of any European country and our access to it is being eroded. This move would undoubtedly have a detrimental affect on the management of the woodlands as fare as environmental and public use is concerned. Please consider the facts presented on the following websites and, if you think our forests should stay in public hands, please sign the petitions.
So you got an Amazon Kindle for Christmas! Lucky you. Lucky for me as well as Kath, my long suffering photographer’s wife, was kind enough to buy one for me and, I have to say, with no sponsorship involved, what a great little piece of kit it is too. No more the pile of paperbacks lying beside the bed. Was that why she gave me it to me I wonder? Anyway, there are many things that a Kindle can be used for apart from the obvious but what has this got to do with photography and, to be more succinct, what has this to do with Great British Landscape?
It’s like this. I’m one of those long suffering computer users who just don’t feel happy reading interesting articles, such as those appearing in Great British Landscape, which are of any length on a computer screen. Something just does not work for me. Ring any bells? Ever printed something off to keep and read later? Enter the Kindle!
Now what follows is not a definitive guide. There’s more than one way to skin a Kindle as they say and, before starting this really brief tutorial, if that’s what it is, I have first to give the proviso that I accept no responsibility whatsoever for anything that I may say or that you may do on reading this article that causes your Kindle or PC to go into meltdown. Scared? Don’t be as nothing is going to happen. Trust me I’m a doctor. Well ok I’m not but you know what I mean. It’s also important to mention that the copyright of anything you download from the site and covert remains with the author and is for your personal use only.
Depending on what version one has of the Kindle the user can connect to the web via a WIFI connection and / or via a G3 connection. Great yes but in viewing web pages the Kindle has problems in that it loses the inbuilt functionality of the Kindle which allows the user to scale fonts and page sizes to fit the screen. It’s this functionality, amongst others, which helps to makes it a great e-book reader. Let’s have a look at what I’m talking about.
The above image shows an example of what Joe’s recent article on aspect ratios looks like when viewed via the internet with a Kindle. The text is pretty small right?
In the above screenshot I’ve rotated the viewing screen and set the magnification to 300% on the Kindle and the text is still virtually unreadable at that scale. That little box means that one can zoom into part of the content. Believe me when I say that using that option s a pain.
Now let’s have a look at what a conversion can do.
The above image shows an example after conversion. I think you will agree that it’s much better. The article is now scaleable and customisable in such a way so as to suit the particular requirements of the user. Better still you can even take Joe on holiday with you without having to fork out for his airfare etc!
If you’re still reading this you must have a Kindle or at least be a tiny bit interested, so I’d better get on with it. As I say there will be other ways in which this can be achieved but here’s what I did. Forgive me if some, or indeed all, of this appears obvious.
Go to the site and open the article which you want to convert. To illustrate this I’ve chose Part 2 of Joe’s excellent series on Aspect Ratios.
Select what you want to copy by holding down your left mouse button and dragging down the page to highlight what you want to copy.
Use your right mouse button to select copy.
Open MS Word and paste the contents into a new document by again using your right mouse button but this time selecting the paste option.
Save the document using whatever title you want but it helps to keep it relevant. It also makes things easier if you can remember where you have saved it.
Ok so far? Now follows the slightly ‘geeky’ bit:
In order to get what you have saved in the MS Word document into the Kindle in a format which the Kindle can handle properly you need to convert the word document. Amazon can do this for you although I think there may be charge. If you want to explore this option I’d recommend viewing the Amazon Kindle support pages at http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display
Download and install the free application called ‘Mobipocket Creator’. Again it’s worth mentioning that there are other applications available and it may be worth doing your own research to find one that is more to your taste.
Once installed it’s a matter of running the Mobipocket application, selecting the MS Word file option on the menu to import your file and then selecting the ‘Build’ toolbar icon. This will then convert your Word file into three file types with the file extension names of html, opf and src and create a folder in a location chosen by you in which to store them. It names the folder as per your document title.
Then all you have to do is connect your Kindle via the USB cable which came with your Kindle to your PC and copy the file with the src extension into the directory called ‘Documents’ on your Kindle. Disconnect the Kindle from your PC and your file should now be available on your Kindle menu page. On opening it you will find that it is now both customisable and easy to read as per that last image above.
The loud groan which you can hear is being made by iPad owners by the way! For them viewing a web page will be infinitely easier. But you’re a Kindle user and a Kindle is an e-book reader and not an all singing and dancing piece of Apple kit. (I’d love one by the way but not at that price!)
I hope some of you will have found this helpful. It will, if nothing else, have given you a short introduction into the world of e-readers. Downloading and installing ‘Mobipocket Creator’ will take a little bit of effort on your part but once you’ve converted your first file the rest will be a breeze. Incidentally reading pdf files is also a pain on the Kindle but the software can handle them as well.
As you can see from the images above the Kindle can be used to view images in monochrome. This is not all that successful in my opinion but it’s better than nothing. If you are interested in also pursuing that option then I’d suggest browsing online for help on how to accomplish that or, depending on Tim and if there is any interest shown, I could produce another short article.
Anyway, there it is. How to take Joe on holiday with you and never even have to buy him an ice cream!
Jim is a contributor to the "Open Source Photography Guides" project and is the author of "A Photographers Guide to Lossiemouth" which is designed as a guide for landscape photographers who wish to photograph seascapes / landscapes at Lossiemouth in Moray Scotland. Here's a link to Jim's website http://www.jimrobertson.co.uk/
Before visiting the National Media Museum to see Fay Godwin's latest photography exhibition, I didn’t know a whole lot about her apart from the fact that she was supposedly a ‘landscape’ photographer (although much of her work appeared not to be) and that she influenced many other landscape photographers of her era.
After seeing this exhibition though, my mind has been comprehensively changed. She most definitely is a landscape photographer and in my mind it is in this ‘mode’ that she shines - one of only a few professional landscape photographers of that era. The following is an account of my research about Fay and an overview of the exhibition.
Biography
I’d like to start with a little bit of background about Fay though. Born in Berlin in 1931, Fay grew up in various countries having a British diplomat father and an American artist mother (of Scottish ancestry). They were posted to various countries and this multi-cultural, upper class, artistic environment created a passion for the contemporary arts and literature that permeated her life.
She finally settled down in London at the age of 21, living a bedsit life but spending most of her time travelling Europe as a travel representative. After six years of this continuous wandering, she took at job at a publishers where she was in charge of commissioning book covers and typography (another design influence! - ed). This background, that surely influenced her later reputation as a stickler for perfection in her own books also introduced her to her husband, a publisher of some renown who worked in literary publishing. The contacts that her husband’s business created were to be very useful to her in later life.
Although she was taking pictures of the children during as they grew up, it was only in 1966 that she started to look at photography as something more serious and an investment in a small darkroom with enlarger set the scene for her self tuition. Three years later, her marriage had broken down (is this something to do with photographic obsession - hope not - ed) and her husband told her to get a serious job as a ‘secretary or something’.
The nascent feminist in Fay took arms against this attitude and took out a loan on the best camera she could buy (a Leica) and started touting her skills as a portrait photographer, using her publishing contacts to get work. For over five years she built her reputation but wanted to move into other areas of photography (she said that if she didn’t have children she would have wanted to be an adventure photo-journalist). Unable to make herself available at a moments notice, as a freelance photographer of the time must, she worked out that books were the way forward. Having already had a disappointing experience has supplying photography for one book, she started to propose book ideas to her old publishing contacts. This eventually led to her first book on the North Wessex Downs and the Chilterns, “The Oldest Roads - An Exploration of the Ridgeway” published in 1975 when she was 45 years old. It was this year that Bill Brandt included her in his “The Land” exhibition which have her art profile a big push and validated her landscape photography work.
Her husband died in the next year and she was also diagnosed with cancer. It was after this period that the landscape became more prominent to her, although it should be said that she was a keen walker before that and would often take her camera with her. An aside during a portraiture assignment with Ted Hughes in 1971 about potentially photography the Calder valley led Fay to photograph this area for the next seven years. She finally met up with Ted again in 1978 (a year when she also won an Art’s Council grant) and they finalised the collaboration with the book ‘Remains of Elmet’ (republished as just ‘Elmet’ with additional photography and a book that Fay said she would like to be remembered by).
Fay worked in the landscape for the next 6 years and It was her “Land” book and exhibition that brought her fame. The book put together all of her work from the previous decade and even though the Art’s Council had funded her with a substantial grant, the project took an enormous effort to get off the ground (never mind the problems with huge batches of Ilford and then Agfa film not working, she finally got recompense but lost many trips worth of photography). A sponsorship by CAP (I’m presuming the CAP from CAP-Gemini, the consulting group) helped make it happen in the end and the result was a true celebration of landscape.
You wouldn’t think that it was so beautiful if you heard Fay talk about it though. Despite being considered by most landscape photographers as the pinnacle of her career (and she herself admitted to it being her best work) she went on to reject the notion of beauty and landscape, even going so far as to stating that her photography did not fit anywhere in the ‘sublime’, romantic tradition (although I have my suspicions she either didn’t understand the term - unlikely - or chose to reject it because of the art establishments attitude towards it). It seems to me that she was seduced by the art world and her photography started to change at this point.
In later life Fay even rejects the term ‘landscape photographer’, insisting that she is a documentary photographer - someone who reports on the landscape. This could be just a burgeoning politicisation but I find it difficult to believe that such a dramatic change in character should appear at such a late stage in life. She was quite well known as a ‘difficult’ woman, one publisher she encountered described her as a ‘severe young lady’ and I think this abrupt nature contributed to her reactionary comments about landscape photography.
Whatever the reason, her photography now become more dedicated to documenting the abuses of the landscape with the odd surrealist Bresson like aside. This output was probably also triggered by her appointment to the presidency of the Ramblers association and the issues around the sell of of the countries forests (something we’re becoming equally attuned to at the moment). There was a mass politicisation of the walkers movement at that point with mass trespass occurring on a regular basis and the “Forbidden Britain” campaign was started. This campaign was an obvious one for Fay to support and she has said in later interview that it was her best method of supporting the cause. The book that followed “Our Forbidden Land” was voted ‘green book of the year’ and documented the current and historic closures of land, from highland clearances to the Thatcher governments sell-off of 40% of the publicly owned forests in Britain. This work was very important for it’s time but I think the negative side of it is the retrospective effect on her earlier landscape work. The great work that was made in representing landscape as a valid art was reduced by it’s reinterpretation as political commentary. The strength of work in skill and composition reinterpreted as a some sort of documentary commentary.
Not that we should think of this later work as ‘bad’ though - it is just as important in it’s own way as the earlier work (and we shouldn’t forget her documentary work in factories from the 1960’s) but they are very different in intent and execution. Fay was a pure landscape photographer turned contemporary environmental photographer.
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The Exhibition
And so the exhibition! Well, like I said at the start, I wasn’t expecting a lot out of it but just looking at the first couple of pictures changed my mind. These are beautifully printed objects (which I presume are printed by Peter Catterel) and the first two, images of the Glencoe valley from the Buachaille end, have a wonderful luminosity. I went to see the Ansel Adams exhibition in Wolverhampton and I have to say I preferred the printing here.
What came across most thought was the use of sky and light in her pictures. You can tell by looking at multiple pictures that there is a consistently beautiful timing in capturing a sky that supports the rest of the picture. Even if it’s just an accenting cloud over a key feature it works well but most of the time the sky becomes a fully featured part of the final work and the sense of harmony this gives is wonderful.
This is a large exhibition, the pictures are only about 14” in size and are fairly closely spaced but this flow of images starts to give you a sense of her consistent vision at this point in her life.
There are a couple of feature stands, one showing Fay’s old Leica and Hassleblad cameras (atlhough I could see no Leica pictures in the exhibition) and the other more interesting feature is a folder of her contact prints and printing notes.
It was very interesting to see how she approached a subject, in this case the photograph of the lone tree paddling at the edge of a lake in Cumbria. She readily admits to producing a lot of film and of taking many versions of her shots but I was surprised to see how many variations she had shot of this tree. You almost could read the flow of though - one shot centering the tree, one shot with more space on the left, one with more on the right, one with space at the top, move to the right and realign the background and centre the tree, one more space left, one more space right, one with more branches at the top.
This isn’t the sort of ‘scattergun’ approach you would expect but it obviously works. Perhaps it means that she was still experimenting, working around different compositional ideas, or that if she had the time she would work a subject intensely. It also suggests that a lot of her skill was in the editing process, selecting pictures that matched the mood she saw at the time. The exhibition also has a couple of videos and a selection of books to browse through (with a full length video of her South Bank show feature in another room). The videos are enlightening and well worth a watch.
Not all of the pictures will excite the typical landscape photographer, a few take some looking at before they reveal things and some didn’t reveal anything to me at all. However, a good majority I connected with in some way, appreciating what she might have been trying to capture and enjoying the act of interpreting.
As a last observation, it is interesting that as she nears her own ‘back yard’ (the South) she stops taking pictures of the ‘wild’ and the hand of man starts being introduced and her compositions often become more ‘difficult’ to interpret. Is this the budding photojournalist asserting control? I don’t know but having commented on the direction her photography took after this book/exhibition, I should probably say that you can see a germ of those ideas towards the end of her decade in the landscape. The most successful of these to me, a pair of facing pictures in the book, are of some discarded pallets near Faversham and an abandoned Mini in a lke at Cliffe Lagoon. These pictures show a wonderful crossing over of her compositional, landscape oriented side and her photo-journalist side - pictures that make you want to look longer for their beauty and balance but that still communicate an opinion on the disfigurement she sees; almost reminding me of the way Burtynsky combines photographic vision and environmental message.
I am not criticising her later work, however this exhibition has shown me a side of Fay Godwin that I missed when looking at pictures found one by one on the Internet - I'm a landscape photophile after all.
Books
Finally, the book “The Land” is well worth purchasing (there is a more detailed review in another article in this issue) - my copy was bought for £8 from Abe Books (http://www.abebooks.co.uk) and as far as I can tell contains all of the photographs from the exhibition and a few more. Landmarks, a retrospective of her life’s work, is a very well produced book but for the landscape photographer, hunt down a copy of the “The Land” to appreciate her skills and vision as a landscape work. Oh, and get to see the exhibition if you can - it’s really worth it if only to get a true flavour of one of Britain’s most lauded landscape photographers.
If you want to see more work from Fay Godwin’s contemporaries, try looking up Paul Hill and Raymond Moore who worked at the Photographer’s Place and also John Blakemore (who is lecturing at the re-opened Photographer’s place in March I believe). Fay achieved a lot more recognition than these photographers possibly because of her more documentary nature in later life, useful publishing and literary contacts and because she was one of the only women photographers around during the height of feminist politics in the 70’s and 80’s. It has also been said that she was influenced by Ansel Adams, Bill Brandt, E. Chambre Hardman and Paul Strand.
As a percentage of images made, those which are actually printed is very small, more so with the advent of digital photo sharing on the web and especially for those who employ a machine-gun shutter firing philosophy.
Nevertheless those special images which we do decide to commit to print, are clearly deserving of this accolade of being made, by preparing the files so as to show them at their finest quality. This means that if you, ‘your own harshest critic’, are happy with them, then others, even the print-sniffers at your exhibitions will begrudgingly mutter their approval too.
The final print is the culmination of a lot of different variables being brought together on paper at a particular size. Sometimes compromise is necessary and there are no real hard and fast rules. There are however ‘good practises’ and this feature aims to raise awareness as to things which contribute to raising the quality and success rate of your prints. Once you have developed a method of working that suits your personal preferences and equipment, there ought to be little need to change.
This issue we're talking to Angie and David Unsworth, a photographic team (how novel) from Grasmere in the Lake District. A former painter, David works with his partner Angie to create beautiful images, nearly all taken within 10 miles of their house. A recent self published book (reviewed elsewhere this issue) is the first half of a pair that documents their experiences walking in the fells. The second half will cover Autumn and Winter to the Spring and Summer of the current publication. You can buy the book from their website listed at the bottom of this article.
In most photographers' lives there are "epiphanic moments" where things become clear, or new directions are formed.
What were your two main moments and how did they change your photography?
Spring Mists
The fact that we (myself and Angie) work as a team is I suppose the initial spark that lead me to my work in photography. Up to then I worked as an artist for 15 years; self obsessed, very driven but very solitary - you may say I was the classic Ruckenfigur. The idea of working as a collaboration seems so obvious now but at the time it was revelatory - a complete change in direction. A new media with its challenges and potential and the thought of working creatively with another person was both frightening and wonderful. Several years ago whilst scrambling in the depths of Tilberthwaite Gill I met a collector of 'suiseki' (or near mountain stones). This is the traditional Japanese art of choosing and displaying stones which resemble the wider landscape or mountain form. After that chance meeting I began searching for these stones myself and became fascinated by their encapsulation of the wider landscape. This near, far relationship and ambiguity of scale was a major influence on my life as an artist, and still resonates in our photographic work today. I have always been intrigued by the Ruskinian "truth to nature" ideal. As a painter one can manipulate the landscape for effect by bringing out form, texture and hue to maximise the emotional content. I find the discipline of photography, of having to work in an entirely subtractive way, very challenging but hugely rewarding; all we have is what is in front of the lens - and this is all we really need. Beauty by subtraction and the romantic movement's most powerful legacy - the fragment - inform all our photographic work.
Much of your photography has been taken with a 10 x 8 camera. How and why did you decide to use such a beast given the distances and heights you walk for your photographs.
Outflow
I guess its back to the "truth to nature" ideal. Working in 10 x 8 strips all the peripheral workings of a camera away. It's photography pared down to the bone - no lens distortions, no compression of verticals, no compromise. I rather like the physicality of the large cameras. Like painting, you feel involved with the creative process; compositional subtleties become apparent and you work very closely with the subject. If some aspect is jarring it is immediately apparent on the huge ground glass screen. These subtle nuances of form are lost when using a smaller format: nothing gets quite as close as the 10x8 to the reality we see around us, and the resulting huge transparencies are just stunning. The fact that in changeable weather, which we often work in, you very often have only one chance to make a photograph gives a tension and coherence to the photographic process and demands an intuitive approach. Thus, what to many must seem like an archaic method, becomes its appeal. I can see why this is not a common method of photography in an upland environment - carrying 35kg of kit around will never appeal to many, but it does seem to suit us.
You work as a team and credit your photos with both of your names, how do you split the technical and creative parts of your work?
It's actually very easy. Angie and myself have an uncanny ability to tune into the same features in a landscape. Angie has a natural eye for strong composition and you can't teach that. Having a dual credit also gets past the problem of ego; this is our work.
Coming from that theme, do you argue over compositions?
Spotlight
Coming as we do from completely different photographic backgrounds (mine in the fine arts and Angie's in reportage) we seem to "see" the landscape in a very similar way. In any creative partnership this is incredibly rare and means we are in tune with each other and the wider landscape. (Angie says the subject matter seems to detach itself from the rest of the scene and look more in focus. She feels magnetically pulled behind the eyes when confronted by something which compels her attention). Angie often pushes me to seize the moment - I am far more likely to say "we will come back another day" if things are not just so. We are very lucky that we live and work in the landscape we photograph. Our house is out on the fells above Grasmere, in the heart of the Lake District, so we both live and breathe the landscape every day throughout the seasons in every conceivable mood This undoubtedly helps us see the subtleties and potential and gives one a sense of getting under the skin of a landscape. It is a slowing down process, spending time in the landscape, working with it not taking from it.
Your photographs are quite dynamic for someone who uses 10 x 8 - how do you find your compositions?
I rather suspect that the compositions find us....... We like the idea of working in challenging conditions. One of the most useful items in our kit is a lightweight tent, in fact many of our photographs could not be made without it. Used as a day shelter it keeps wind and rain, snow and hail off the camera and gives us a safe, warm place from which to work. If we are somewhat comfortable we can spend hours, even days out on the hill, slowing right down into the rhythm of the landscape. We often make only a single exposure in any given day - clarity of vision is everything. Of course many times the moment you plan for simply does not happen, so we pack up and go home. We never feel cheated though; as every hour spent in the field leads to a greater understanding of the landscape and ourselves.
I believe you were an art student. Did this prepare you for photography?
Rising Sun
Most of my inspiration and personal philosophy comes from the art world. My references are underpinned by my experiences as a professional artist for the previous 15 years before the switch to photography. I firmly believe that photography is a valid means of artistic endeavour. Having worked in both disciplines I see far more similarities than differences. Yes, photography can be populist and crass but so too can the art world. There is more common ground than many may suspect.
It's particularly pleasing to see the Lake District portrayed in such a fresh way. Do you have any advice for photographers wanting avoid cliche in the Lakes?
In an area such as the English Lake District it is easy to believe that little remains to be discovered. Our advice to anyone visiting the Lakes would be to slow right down. Spend time in the landscape before reaching for the camera. Do not become a copyist; get off the beaten path and explore, both imaginatively and physically. Actively trust your own creativity, spend more time looking at your immediate surrounding: the Lakes excel in their mid-distance scenes and details. And remember it is your own interpretation.
You have published your own book. Could you tell us a little bit about the ups and downs to this process and would you recommend it to other photographers?
Anything worthwhile is going to be difficult and testing. The book is a direct communication of our ideas and personal philosophy. One of the main reasons behind the book was to reach a wider audience. Visitors to exhibitions are usually self selecting, one tends to attract the same audience again and again, but with the printed page we can reach out to people who may never think of going to an exhibition but will quite happily pick up a book. Books are a wonderfully egalitarian art form. We passionately believe that landscape, particularly colour, photography, has been for too long sneered at by certain sections of the Arts community as the preserve of the amateur - particularly in this country. Our book seeks to portray photography not as a support to text but as unapologetic images for the viewer to weave their own narratives around. It has been one of the hardest things we have ever done. It needs endless patience, attention to detail and consistent conscious awareness at every stage of production. We wanted the whole process to be done in the UK. Sadly this kind of publication is a dying art in Britain- but we eventually found a traditional printing and binding company who understood our vision and helped us enormously. Things will go wrong. Be kind to the people who are working for you and the process can be hugely rewarding
You are another camper like Tristan Campbell - does living in the landscape for a daily cycle change the way you see it?
Greenburn
Undoubtedly. Time spent in a landscape is I believe fundamentally important to the creative process. I met a Japanese calligrapher a few years ago who told me that in her work 99% of the time was spent in thought and meditation, grinding the ink, preparing the paper and practising the movements necessary for fluidity in each character. Then in two or three intuitive moves her work was complete. I cannot think of a better analogy for the methods of spending time in the landscape. Chance favours the prepared mind.
What sort of things do you think might challenge you in the future or do you have any photographs or styles that you want to investigate?.
At the moment we have only made photographs around our home patch. In fact all our images have been made within a 10 mile radius of our studio. The next great challenge is to take our camera (and our philosophy) to other areas. Where this will be and how we will achieve this we are still investigating but that is the obvious next step. We are also in the process of setting up a wet darkroom, though trying to fit a 10x8 enlarger into a 16th century Lakeland cottage is proving to be quite a creative challenge in itself.
Thank you
And thanks for Angie and David for another great interview - you can see more of their work at Greenburn Publishing.
ICC Profiles and colour management seem to be the bane of many photographer's lives. Understanding why and how to apply them seems a little like magic. Most of this confusion arises because simple descriptions of how they work are few and far between. I hope this article can act as an introduction to the intricacies of colour management, letting you get an overall understanding and acting as a jumping off point if you wish to look further.
The first thing to understand is why we need colour management at all! Well we’ll try and use an anology so bear with me.
In our analogy, we have a designer from France and an engineer from Germany talk to each other about the colour of a lawn mower they are working on and both of them agree that they would like it to be green. However, unknown to many people is the fact that French green is different from German green. The French see green as a yellowy-green whereas the Germans see a richer, summer green. So, the French designer won’t be happy with the German result.
What we need is a universal language of colour that can get around these problems. This is where colour management and icc profiles come in. Colour management experts have defined a set of standard, reference colours and in order to describe the green colour to the German engineer, they need a translation from the French to the standard colour system and then another translation from the standard colour system to the German. In effect, it’s as if the English language is being used as a standard colour system so that when we translate the French vert, we get ‘yellow green’ and then we translate this to the German gelbgrün.
In colour management terms, the icc profile defines the translation dictionary to convert from a particular colour source (a printer, scanner, etc) to the universal colour space.
The difference in our RGB images is that they have values for each component from 0-100%. However, 100% Red coming out of our Epson scanner is different to the 100% we need to send to our printer to get the same colour. Hence the icc profile translates from the 100% scanner red to a universal colour and then translates again to value that can be sent to the printer that gives the same colour.
The other aspects of colour management come in when we don’t have the same language on either side of the equation. For instance, imagine we have a stunning camera that can capture a huge range of colour but we’re working with a printer that can’t cope with some of the extremes. For the sake of argument lets imagine the cherry red that we capture can only be represented by a deep pink on the printer.
Rendering intents (you know, those ‘perceptual’ and ‘colorimetric’ stuff that you’ve skimmed past before now) are ‘rules’ built into the profiles that describe how to ‘remap’ colours that can’t be represented. Let’s look at a few of these.
Relative Colorimetric
Sounds complicated, however it just means that anything that can’t be handled ends up as close as possible. In this case it means that any colour more intense than deep pink, ends up deep pink.
This can be a problem if you have large areas of colours that can’t be handled and where they should appear as gradients, for instance an intense sunset being rendered to print could cause real issues.
Perceptual
Instead of just pushing all the values that can’t be rendered to a single value (i.e. clipping), perceptual intent scales all of the values down in order to encompass the out of gamut values. This looks better where you have gradients of colours out of gamut but many colours will end up duller as a result.
The following diagram will hopefully make things a little clearer..
Comparing the methods for converting between two colour spaces between perceptual and relative colorimetric rendering intents
The best result is probably to use a combination of manually pulling colour saturation down to bring colours closer to the gamut and then using relative colorimetric. By doing this, you are effectively managing the out of gamut values by hand, effectively generating a custom intent just for your own picture.
Other intents are available but are mostly useful for graphics as they change the colours in pictures (saturation intent keeps the saturation the same but changes the colours to ones that are available).
Black Point Compensation
The icc profile system has a system in place to map the whites from one profile to the whites of another. However, there is no equivalent system to do the same with the blacks. Because of this, without black point compensation you may see areas of an image blocking up when converting from one profile to another.
Black point compensation is a system that compresses or expands the shadow end of an image in order to fit the destination profile. This means that certain areas in the shadows may shift slightly but the result is essential in order to convert photographs from source to destination.
The process still doesn’t help ensure that you don’t block up blacks when printing however, and it is nearly always a good idea to lift up the shadows in your photograph (using a luminosity curve for instance) and experimentation is the best method (although somewhere between 8 and 20 points seems to work well - as in the screenshot below).
Correcting for the black point in a print
This document is meant to change over time and to improve depending on feedback - if you have any suggestions for changes to improve the legibility or understanding of the concepts involved, please let us know.
In this one hour video, Joe Cornish talks through his workflow for taking a file just exported from a digital Phase 45+ file using Capture Raw through to assessing the final print.
The author, Fran Halsall, teaches digital imaging at the Peak District Photography Centre and as such is ideally placed to capture the changing weather and light in the English Peak District.
The Peak District National Park, the subject of the book, is a diverse environment full of photographic potential and easily visited by many of us due to its location nestled between Manchester & Sheffield, close to major trunk routes. It is this accessibility which has made it the most visited National Park in the UK. (which brings with it issues of environmental wear from so many walkers).
Many National Parks have magnetic locations for photographers, places which have become iconic and as a result often over-photographed. Take Ashness Bridge in the Lake District as an example. Certainly, these views are well photographed for good reason, they are beautiful and I have to declare I am still trying to get my ‘own’ image of Ashness Bridge. (As landscapers are we ‘collectors’ of locations?) However, images of such locations can become diluted in their impact by such over-coverage.
The Peaks stand out as different to me. It is hard to think of an iconic location in the Park. Certainly, there are places to where us photographers gravitate, Higger Tor, Mother Cap, Padley Gorge, Mam Tor, Stanage Edge and so on. But once at these places, each photographer seems to be able to find their own image rather than having a set of tripod holes to queue for. On good mornings Higger Tor can host several photographers but we each drift off looking for our own images rather than getting in each others way to get ‘THE’ shot.
This brings with it wonderful challenges for us. There are fewer ‘easy’ compositions in the Peaks. We have to work for our images, but there is so much to work with. Rock formations, heather, ridges and peaks, farmhouses and dry stone walls, exposed copses and ancient woodlands. The diversity of the landscape provides endless compositional possibilities across the seasons. Autumn & winter, in particular are stunning as is the heather display in late summer. A good autumn days shooting in Padley Gorge is difficult to beat anywhere. The landscape suits those who shoot the wide expanses of moorland but also holds so much for those who like to make ‘found’ images of fine detail.
With such a varied and challenging photographic area, many of us welcome books which might help direct us to locations with promise, especially if they give guidance on the best times of year to visit. Our time for photography amidst a hectic schedule is precious so getting the best from that limited time is vital to us. Hence I picked up Frans book with keen anticipation. What did I find? Would this be a good guide photographically to the Peaks or would it be another of those dreary books which end up in discount bargain book stores at shopping malls with mediocre images?
The book is nicely produced and printed with pages roughly 10 inches (250mm) square. Fran gives us a brief history of the National Park (Britains first) and follows with a chapter on its varied geology and shows how this affects the look of the landscape. Included is a map of the various distinct areas of the Peak Park - The Dark Peak, The White Peak and the South West Peak (which perhaps ought to be known as the Mid-grey Peak?) and what character you will find in the landscape of each.
She spends some time outlining how some areas of habitat are managed and also shows details about the woodlands, reservoirs, rivers and ancient landmarks that enhance the area. After a chapter about agriculture in the park she then sets about dealing with each area photographically.The book concludes with some suggestions as to further reading and technical notes on the photography (always useful).
Fran is a competent photographer who has, over time, built up an extensive collection of images covering the area in some depth. As is inevitable when writing a book on a distinct area, not every image is going to be breathtaking. She obviously puts in the effort to get out when the light is good and this is reflected in her work, although many images are made in less than ideal light. It gives a sense of a photographer who puts her boots on, shoulders her rucksack of gear and sets off to explore. Some images get made in ideal conditions, while others taken during the day sometimes show less flattering light, but it would take decades of patient work to cover every location in perfect light.
Amidst the images some are very good indeed and she shows a sensitivity to the landscape she so clearly loves from the way she writes about it and photographs it. She manages to capture the Peaks as they are, rather than showing an idealized view of them. For most of us the images will seem attainable rather than having the effect of making us feel we could never achieve such heights of photographic ability. Mainly, her compositions are open and capture the sweep of the landscape but in amongst them are closer ‘intimate’ landscapes.
She seems to favor the use of a polarizer and also discusses at the end of the book how she favors making multiple exposures and combining them in Photoshop as opposed to using graduated neutral density filters to balance the dynamic range of an image. Her panoramic images she makes by stitching multiple exposures.
I was struck by how few of the stone circles and other ancient sites there are in the Peaks that I knew about. Fran shows an intimate knowledge of these and their locations and has worked to photograph them all. They may not be as spectacular as Callanish or Castlerigg, but they still make very interesting subjects for landscape images. I didn’t know about ‘The Grey Ladies’ near Birchover or the ‘Nine Ladies’ on Stanton Moor or the ‘Five Wells’ chambered tomb on Taddington Moor come to that. For me as a landscaper, to be directed to such good subjects is worth the price of the book alone.
I am pleased to see she doesn’t give GPS coordinates, exact directions and tripod holes for each image in. Rather she gives enough information for us to get a feel for places we would like to visit ourselves but leaving us in the dark just enough to make us then work to find our own image of the place. In this way it is a good guide to the Peaks and for me it has opened up many places I didn’t know existed and now want to photograph. If we couple the book with an Explorer OS map of the area, we are set up to get out there and make images.
Our photographic press seems deluged with images and locations guides from Scotland and particularly from Dorset and Cornwall. (Partly because these areas are dripping with prime, stunning locations and probably for this reason the majority of the countries landscape photographers seem to base themselves down there, and then write about the areas as they are so familiar with them). This leaves areas such as the Midlands ‘under-covered’, even neglected by photographers and as the press.
This book helps to restore the balance a little It will hopefully inspire many more photographers to get out and investigate this wonderful area and, as a result, might increase the coverage the Peak District gets in magazines. I have no hesitation in recommending it as a location guide and source of inspiration.
On the other hand, do I really want ‘my’ Peak District invaded by loads of photographers with better skills than me? Do I want the tors and moorlands to be inundated with tripods much as Bamburgh beach at dawn is these days? (I can see them having to establish a ticketing system up there in the same way we queue at the deli counter in supermarkets in order to prevent riots as some selfish individual strolls down and plonks his tripod in front of everyone else's just as the light peaks - better stop, I can feel a rant coming on!) Perhaps I should have kept this to myself so I could enjoy this fine landscape in precious solitude?
The Peak District by Fran Halsall Published by Francis Lincoln
ISBN - 978-0-7112-2828-3
Cover Price (Hardback) £14.99
Amazon Price - £9.73 - see book on Amazon
Authors website - www.fran-halsall.co.uk
Continuing our reader profiles, I caught up with Alex Taylor on the phone last week and he told me a little bit about his passion for landscape photography. Like many photographers of a certain generation, Alex started with a Zenith camera, bought as a present when young (in this case a Zenit11 - mine was a Zenith E) and along with the odd roll of Kodakchrome 200 used this through his teens until more important things arose (so to speak).
Nothing much happened as far as photography went then until he met his current wife about 14 years ago. Her step family is from Canada and when he went to visit, he was told by his father that he would have to "Get some pictures if you're going to that Rockies place!" and so started a long lasting passion (for his wife as well as his photography I presume).
An electrician by trade working in Halifax, his interests in all things engineering has led him to build up a little collection of cameras including Rolleiflex VA/VB, Yashica LM's, an RB67 kit, Bronica S2s,SQ-As, ETRSs, Mamiya 645 and C33s, Nikon FE and an XPan as well as working his way through to his fourth digital SLR (a D700).
He did mention a love for the panoramic photograph, mentioning that the XPan used to make some wonderful transparencies. He now shoots and stitches panormaics on his D700 though, taking inspiration from Mark Denton and also from David Noton's stictched pans. However, it's Joe Cornish's First Light that got him intrigued by photography (I think it's been responsible for a fair few photography obsessions) and he's been on a few of his workshops which he well and truly recommends.
The places he most wants to visit? Kananaskis in the Rocky Mountains, Skye and interestinly Saltwick Nab (although those of us who has been there know the amazing potential that often gets ignored in this incredible place). He's just bought a Toyota campervan (Granvia petrol 2WD version) and is hoping that this well see him getting further afield.
Well, this month I was going to be writing about remote graveyards and burial grounds that I have discovered or researched and visited on my wanderings. however, having closed the doors of our gallery for the last time on the 31st of December it has had the last laugh by keeping me tied up for a further three weeks just relocating the office, framing and printing equipment.
Driving back and forth to Oban with car loads of gear, paperwork and rubbish I have plenty of time to ponder whether I will ever find the time to do what I actually moved to Scotland to do and the time to wonder exactly what that 'to do' was!
My first love has been and always with be the outdoors, landscape photography my way of expressing how I feel about mountains and valleys, woodland and coast. Having started hillwalking on family holidays to North Wales aged four, Britain's mountains have occupied much of my recreation time over the years while the OS maps around all my previous homes are covered with the marks and notes of my footpath bagging obsession. Ten years ago when I took up photography, travelling at weekends into The Peak District, walking still took a lead roll with most days averaging twenty or more miles in order that all paths and routes were covered. While this is hardly compatible with large format photography I still hanker after those days of multiple summits, descending exhausted at twilight with the thought of a long, hot shower and a mug or two of tea spurring me on. I still get as much if not more satisfaction from travelling on foot through the landscape as in making the images themselves.
I think Joe wrote in Outdoor Photography a few years ago these words of advice, 'Get out more, and take less pictures'. Sound practical advice that I believe is paramount to successful landscape photography since only by immersing myself in the subject matter do I believe I can fully understand what it is I am to say in response. Nature and the landscape provide the inspiration for my work but I need to have spent time in the hills before I can relax enough to make sense of what I am seeing. The difficulty comes when you only get the odd day here and there to get out and therefore don't get to pass through the invisible door in to the creative zone, images are made that perhaps show this lack of connection.
"As you sit on the hillside,or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens." Stephen Graham.
Perhaps the answer is to fill a few weeks of time with photography as Christopher Burkett does and then return to the office or in his case darkroom to continue the work there. I rather suspect that he derives as much pleasure from the printing of his images as he does from the taking the original photograph since this is the completion of the process. I don't know if he has to do the more mundane administration tasks too but these are an inevitable by product of running any business and cannot be avoided if you need to earn a living. Anyway, I couldn't stand being cooped up for most of the year waiting for a few precious weeks outdoors.
The question is, are there any landscape photographers here in Britain for whom the act of photographing, being out with their camera accounts for the Lions share of their working week? Personally I find it impossible to get any more than 50% of my time with my camera, if I spend five days out, I need at least that many again to manage the images made and to catch up with day to day admin. I suspect that in reality I'm doing OK even though it doesn't feel that way when I'm stuck at my computer aware that the clouds are colouring up nicely outside. I can remember when Joe was travelling up to photograph for Scotland's Mountains there were numerous occasions when trips were postponed due to deadlines for proofing, meetings, lectures and other commitments. None of us it seems are completely free to follow our dreams but given the need to earn a crust perhaps I need to accept that 100% of my working week, every week spent out in the field was never going to be the reality.
So, what am I going to do? Well, to expand on Joe's wise words I intend to get out more but be more discerning about the images I commit to film. To seek inspiration from my peers, from nature and from art, music, books and film. But most of all to chill out a little, enjoy my photography and worry less that others out there might be getting more than me, after all they're probably not.
"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."John Muir
As you may have read by now, I have spent the last week and a half looking at the life and works of Fay Godwin (click here to see our biography) and talking to various photographers about her work. The overall impression is one of an incredibly passionate, often difficult woman who had an almost tunnel vision approach to the art of promotion of her photography. She was also a foil for her times, a female single parent in the political environment of third wave feminism and a close friend of many radical (for their day) literary figures (Feminist writers Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Edna O'Brien and political writers Salman Rushdie and Gunter Grass to name a few). Her 'pure' landscape work in the book and exhibition land gradually become more political as she engaged with the issues that she was passionate about, in her case it was initially about access to our landscape but also became about the urban environment (for instance her photography from her Fellowship of the National Museum of Photography allowed her to explore colour photography and she did so by exploring the urban environment of Bradford, taking an almost Atget style approach.
In later life she found it difficult to get out and about and concentrated on abstract pictures, the results of which I can't personally engage with in any way (and it seems the popular press rejected them in a similar fashion, something she became quite embittered with).
The two books I'm showing extracts of her are "Land" which I would consider an essential purchase for anyone with an interest in British landscape photography and "Landmarks", a retrospective of her life's work. Land is a book that contains some exquisite black and white photography - landscapes that whilst not pushing creative boundaries, shows a quiet appreciation for our environment. Working for front to back, she works her way down the country from her ancestral home in Scotland down to the South where she called home until she died in 2005. The pictures vary from the sublime, romantic tradition through a range of quirky Strand/Bresson like composition and onto more modern Brandt/Raymond Moore inspired peices. The works are softly printed, a good reflection of the exhibition prints in many ways and more than good enough to appreciate the artistry involved.
"Landmarks" is a different beast, it includes a good biography and opinion piece at the start and a large collection of very well printed pictures covering the large range of Godwin's work. The pictures are organised into nominal sections but not ordered in any chronological fashion (which is a shame). They start with the extraordinary leaping lurcher, as much of a signature photograph as Fay ever took and continue through Bresson like 'comedy' street photographs (what looks like a Bison intimidating a bucket at one point) and through her portrait work. We then have a large selection of photographs from the Land trilogy ("Land", "Our Forbidden Land" and "The Edge of the Land").
What comes next is enlightening. In 1988 she visits Hawaii and produces some fantastic photographs in a pure landscape vein. She revisits in 1992 and 1995, again producing excellent work using her Hassleblad, and in colour on the last visit! I'm very interested in finding out more about these and will be talking to the Media Museum and the National Library about potentially gaining access to write a dedicated piece on them.
I came across Angie and David Unsworth whilst browsing the lf-photo.org.uk forums. Someone had posted a link to a Cumbria newspaper (the Westmorland Gazette - link) which featured a photograph of a couple using a 10x8 camera. Being a bit of a large format junkie (and I am starting to include more digital photograpy into the magazine and my practises - bear with me) I couldn't resist chasing this one up.
I paid a visit to their website (Greenburn Publishing) and was delighted to see more than just the usual Lake District snaps and also much more than just the usual large format style. The pictures were extracts of landscape, snippets of views and scenes, more ideas about the landscape than pictorial representations. I had noticed that they had a book for sale and put down a payment for it straight away.
The book is a self published, no compromises effort. The oversize format added considerably to the cost but Angie and David were insistent upon giving the pictures the room to breathe on the page. There is very little narrative in the book, a short introduction by Julian Cooper opposite an appropriate photograph of a slate face in one of the many abandoned quarries that the Lakeland offers. A one page introduction talking of the history of our attitude to the Lakes and the wild in general and we're off into the heart of the book, well presented and printed photographs.
Most of the pictures are presented one per spread on the facing page - ensuring very little bleed through in the pictures (i.e. you can't see the picture on the other side of the page bleeding through). And what pictures they are; you won't find many obvious near/far compositions, most of the pictures are either horizonless extracts or long distance views of the mountains and the weather. And what weather! The key to many of these pictures is the lighting - they spend hours in a location waiting for just the right conditions, suffering the elements inside a temporary tent until just the right moment occurs.
At the back of the book we have a set of field notes that talk about the conditions when the photographs were captured and also what equipment the photographs were taken on (mostly 10x8 and 4x5 with the occasional Hassleblad square capture thrown in for good measure).
The Lakes are often considered a spent force in landscape photography, somewhere that has been 'done'. Well it may be the case that most roadside pictures have been done and the major Wainwright paths have had an almost continuous stream of consciousness digital capture event happening on a daily basis, but get off the main tracks, move around the edges of the mountains and follow the streams and hill paths and you'll find a new world - one that only a tiny fraction of the landscape photography fraternity has seen. That most of these pictures have been taken in a 10 mile radius of their home makes me both extremely jealous and very impressed; obviously we can't all live in such amazing surroundings but we should definitely try to venture off the beaten path more often.
This is not a cheap book, but is a highly recommended one if you are interested in seeing a different approach to landscape photography and another way of seeing the lakes. Oh, and this is just the first part in a two volume set, the Spring and Summer collection as it were. The next issue will be Autumn and Winter and I for one am really looking forward to seeing what follows.
Foreword: this article is written from the perspective of an unashamed iPad fanboy! There is a (decreasing) view that iPads are just doubling up on what can just easily be achieved with a laptop. However without entering into a debate you have to ask yourself the question why netbook sales, seen as replacements for laptops a year ago, are rapidly decreasing in the face of the onslaught from Apple.
An iPad is not a replacement for a laptop or a desktop - it's different and the way you approach or use it has to be different. Watching my 2 year old daughter work through an iPad to get to her favourite Whinnie the Pooh movie is an example of where technology has merged seamlessly with functionality. I'll admit, I was a sceptic. Then I had a play with one...
Photographers love and hate technology in equal measure. We all know it: that desire to shop for the latest gadget, the delicious agony of spending time researching for something that, ultimately we know we will buy. Gadget porn and photography go hand in hand as it were. The iPad is slim, attractive and beguiling. It just wants to be picked up and stroked, played with and ultimately when the affair is over, loved.
It is an intriguing device; part multimedia do it all, highly portable, very open to productivity and it certainly is a game changer.
In the 2 months since I have had mine, I have to say (quite unashamedly) that there has not been a day when it has not been used. It has been used for business both personal and photographic. I have presented from it, shown clients my portfolio, administered web sites and servers and in the end I am writing this article on it (whilst on holiday using the insanely useful wireless keyboard, “Compass stand” from 12 Degrees South and a beautiful writing app called iA Writer...Microsoft Word now looks just plain fugly.)
Ok so what does it actually mean for a photographer? What use does it have? What can it be used for? What can't it do and where does the future possibly lie?
All important questions but the most important thing to realise is that it will not replace your desktop, laptop or whatever you use to do the heavy lifting in image processing that each of us (whether we use film or digital capture) inevitably do.
You can't use it for Photoshop (Adobe does produce an App, but it is easily outdone by the class leader) Lightroom or Aperture. There just isn't the grunt within the hardware.
The brilliantly sharp and luminous screen is not colour managed or indeed manageable. Though images resized at 132dpi, sharpened carefully, SRGB colour space and imported and displayed via a 3rd party App (such as Goodreader, which avoids the degradation that does appear (at least to my eyes) when importing via iTunes) look stunning. And here’s a quick and easy way to do it
Printing is possible but supported printers are few and far between and even then it is wireless only.
You can attach USB based devices to it but it's limited and carefully controlled. Your favourite scanner is a no no!
Other than that in my view it can pretty much do anything else you can imagine to support your photography or photographic business. Present and showcase images, emergency on the road storage, update social networks with images as you take them, client meetings, web browsing, email, write articles, manage your website, shop from and with, access cloud based storage and your "x"GB device becomes a storage monster. The list goes on and on
Consequently with such a broad range of uses it is difficult within the scope of this article to cover all areas. So over a series of articles I will show a workflow that would cover an imaginary landscape shoot:
Gathering all the bits together (complete)
From research and planning (to follow)
To arriving at a location and use in the field (to follow)
Taking the images home to the studio and melding the process with your desktop (to follow)
Finally, image preparation and presentation (to follow)
I hope to highlight at each stage the thought process I would use and the "tools" or rather Apps that I would use to help move the workflow along. An App is quite simply a program that is written to do a particular thing - as the saying goes: if you can articulate what you want then there is an App for that!
Apps are bought from the App store on the iPad or through iTunes. They are relatively affordable which means that you will probably buy loads and use 10% of them. So save yourself some pennies and carry on reading but like camera lenses...you can never have too many. Unlike camera lenses you will never have to justify the purchase or sneak them into the house!
The workflow is App intensive simply because these are the right tools for the job. My intention is not to provide a review of each of the Apps - there are enough resources out there that will do that in far greater detail. However I will delve into some of the things that I think make that particular tool useful.
But just like your camera gear, consider the iPad as the camera body which you then need to kit out...
Accessorise, accessorise!
You're a photographer right? So the good news is that just as soon as you have your shiny iPad in your mitts you need to get that card out of your wallet again! Oh the release of retail gadget therapy. So before you open the box make sure that you have the following in your possession: (note most of the hyperlinks point towards Amazon as I find their returns policy to be the best there is)
a screen protector: these are good. You do not want any sort of scratch!
a case: this is a great one, as is this. Want serious protection then try this! You will find that just like camera bags there will (happily) never be the perfect one
an additional power cable (this one is extra long and very useful.) A word on charging: if you have an iPhone the chances are that your phone charger won’t work on its bigger brother. The iPad has a greater current draw which means that you will end up replacing all of your iPhone chargers with iPad/iPhone compatible ones! Oh and very likely your laptop or desktops USB connection point won’t charge the iPad either. Check with your manufacturer to see if they have produced a bios update to increase the power output.
a desktop stand (these are fantastic) so that you can use the iPad in conjunction with your desktop.
a portable stand (buy this. End of) for easy display of your iPad (client presentations, portfolio slide shows, watching films...)
a keyboard (optional as well. The iPads virtual key pad is cleverly done. But if you are going to write for any length then you should invest in one.) Personally, just buy the wireless one. The keyboard and dock has dodgy ergonomics as the keyboard is way too close to the iPad. It's also heavy and cumbersome.
strictly optional, but it just helps to highlight what manufacturers are thinking that the iPad will bring is this, a unique portable card reader and USB drive. Just note that this is the only external USB drive that works with the camera connection kit. Other USB drives will not work.
Like I said, it's just like buying camera gear and we've only just started!
Research and Planning
Items required:
your favourite comfortable location for serious work from your lap (see it’s all about having fun whilst you work!)
The inbuilt web browser is good but it is severely lacking. This App is without doubt the best web browser for the iPad. With tabbed viewing, simulated browser experiences (fool the website you are viewing into thinking that you are using Firefox for example) and its ability to clip to Evernote or Readitlater is makes web based research a breeze.
A fantastic cloud based notes, filing, and writing tool. All your documents available across all your mobile devices, anywhere! Best of all for research you can "clip" links or whole web pages to a properly organised notebook and then keep adding to it. Add in scanned articles, place names, ideas or record conversations on locations with your fellow photographers and keep them all in the same notebook!
There are a lot of weather based Apps but most of them are USA centric. This one is very clear and reasonably accurate
And now what?!
Ok now you have all of those, your wallet is feeling much lighter and you are wondering what do?! First of all you need to pick your location and in the next article I will tell you how to string it at all together!
Guy Aubertin is a UK based photographer with a near obsession for the latest tech and a passion for 5x4 cameras....and coffee!
I'm looking at post processing photographs with haze or mist today at the request of Kostas Petrakis. The picture above isn't particularly great but it's as extreme an example as I could find for use in demonstrating my techniques. The picture below shows the whole picture followed by a sample from the mid-ground where you can use a slider to see the before and after shots.
In the video I'll be using techniques such as local contrast enhancement, shadow highlight, colour balance and component curves and finally an interesting trick with unsharp mask. I'll be going into how each of these techniques work (in possibly a little to much detail but you can skip ahead because of our new streaming video server).
Joe Cornish spent some time talking about a set of pictures taken on one of his trips from the Scotland's Mountains work and which produced one of his favourite photographs (when this video was recorded anyway), and one of mine.
The video of Joe disappears at a couple of points and towards to the end of the video. This was an issue with the video camera we were using at the time which has now been replaced (and hopefully will not occur again). Hopefully the screencast and audio are still sufficient to enjoy the presentation.
Had he lived, Galen Rowell would by now be 70 years old. That his name still resonates down the years says much for the power of his art. I still remember finding Mountain Light at Stanfords, Covent Garden, on a grey London day in 1986. The colour and compositional invention and energy compelled me to buy, even though £25 was a lot of money for me. Twenty five years ago! I was lucky if I made £100 a week then. I read the text, every word. Several times (I made sure I had my moneys-worth). Along with David Muench's Nature's America, Mountain Light was my main inspirational, practical and conceptual resource for many years after.
Revisiting the text recently was fascinating. Photography has gone through a technical revolution. As if anticipating what was to come, Galen wrote, "Thoughtful photographers have become aware that photographic styles which depend on quirks of present chemical technology instead of on consistent personal vision will become passé. Only those based on the qualities of light and form will remain equally valid in whatever new technologies evolve." I certainly worked for years in a way that owed much to this philosophy. My 2002 book, First Light is inspired at least in part by Mountain Light.
Some of the changes the revolution has brought does mean that the reproduction quality of Galen's work has been eclipsed. Those who have seen large prints at his Bishop (California) gallery will understand what I mean. Even the double-page spreads in his books look over-enlarged (by our newly-elevated expectations). His devotion to the 35mm camera served him well in almost every respect, but in terms of ultimate photographic quality the images are inevitably limited by the colour films and lenses of the day.
He was a world-class climber and mountaineer, and such an extraordinarily communicative writer one can argue that photography was really the third of his talents. If so, that makes him a true polymath, a contemporary Leonardo da Vinci. But even if he was a better mountaineer and writer, consider the images he made! In my edition of Mountain Light an introductory plate shows his friend Ron Kauk free-soloing (climbing without any protection) beside Yosemite Falls, perhaps a 2000feet vertical drop immediately below. Where was Galen? Twenty metres to the left. Even with protection (rope/harness etc), this is a position only accessible to the rock-climbing elite. He used his athleticism and strength to create photographs most of us could only dream of, by dashing across open landscape to position a rainbow (Potala Palace) or by running uphill to 'unset the sunset', one of his favourite techniques. Curiosity and intellect mean there is a sound practical and scientific basis for most of his methods. My personal understanding of how rainbows 'work' came from reading Mountain Light, as did my knowledge of the Alpenglow and various other lighting and weather-related effects.
When he died in 2002 shock waves reverberated through landscape and mountaineering photography circles. Although he had lived more than his share of lifetimes, all who knew him felt that his fitness and good health meant he would continue to be an innovative and influential photographer for years to come. As digital slrs have improved over the last decade I have frequently speculated on the images that Galen Rowell might have made with them; with the great image quality now available 'handheld' I am sure his trademark style would have had a huge shot in the arm, and inspired him to new heights. In spite of digital, his books remain, both words and pictures, recommended reading.
-- Joe Cornish
Galen Rowell
Galen Rowell was the iconic adventure photographer. A world class mountaineer, a hot-rodder, a photographer and a writer - for his 62 years he lived more than just a single life. Hopefully I’ll be able to do it justice in this short summary of his photographic life.
Born in 1940, Galen had an intellectual upbringing, his father a professor of speech and philosophy and his mother a concert cellist, both of whom were members of the Sierra Club (John Muir’s environmental movement in the US). They would spend much of their spare time hiking in Yosemite with prominent environmental heavyweights. Galen climbed from the age of ten and worked up to roped climbs of Yosemite cliffs at 16 years old (his mother was an experienced climber also).
But instead of picking up his parents ‘eco aware’ lifestyle, Galen became a climbing ‘dropout’, spending his time with college dropout friends . He started a ‘hot rod’ business after working in a gas station for a year (ok, a small car repair shop that funded his trips to Yosemite and the car to manage the runs and back roads). By his late twenties, during the golden years of rock climbing in the US, he had many first climbs under his belt. It was during this period, at age 22, that he started to document his climbing with a Kodak Instamatic 500 ; not his first camera, that was a Brownie, won for selling newspaper subscriptions when he was 12. Interestingly most of his early climbing pictures were taken on this Instamatic. He is on record as saying that it rivalled his Nikkormat for quality and that he liked the square picture format (26mm x 26mm on a fixed Schneider Xenar 38mm f/2.8 lens).
For those first 10 years of his photographic life, Galen shot pictures of his climbing activities. He upgraded to a Nikkormat FTN in 1968, though he was disappointed to find that even though it was the “professionals’ choice”, it didn’t make his photography any better.
Some of his early ‘landscape’ photographs were made with the Instamatic camera (I can’t find any landscape pictures earlier than 1968 - you can tell if they are earlier as they will be square). It seems obvious in hindsight that the purchase of the Nikkormat coincided with an urge to make money out of photography. Despite many rejections in the next four years, he decided to pursue a career as a full time photographer in 1972.
The next six years were to be incredibly busy and productive for Galen, even for the workaholic that he was known to be. The big break came when a photographer friend asked him to help with a National Geographic article on Yosemite valley by covering the climbing scene. When the original photographer was called away on another assignment, Galen shot the work anyway and landed himself a front cover article dedicated to the first free ascent of a Half Dome route (free meaning ‘without ropes’).
In those six years he went on seven international expeditions, including to China, Patagonia, Nepal and Tibet and produced his incredible “In the Throne of the Mountain Gods” book. However, the Sierra Nevada was his soul, his anvil of creation. The photographs he produced there are those that show his approach to photography and his philosophy.
Galen’s photography was mostly about the extraordinary. It was only in the last few years of his life that he really immersed himself in capturing the subtle side of the Sierras. Amazing light, stunning mountains, beautiful fields of flowers, rainbows, sundogs, lenticular clouds and of course those mind blowing ‘graduate filtered’ sunrises and sunsets. These are the moments that Galen looked for and captured, moments that raise the pulse in a similar way to his climbing. He mentioned a few times that the ‘meditative’ nature of climbing was similar to the meditative nature of photography, in the way that both climber and photographer enter a ‘zone’ where time slows and senses are heightened. However he was well known for moving fast when he needed to, famously running for over a mile at 12,000 feet to line up a rainbow with the Dalai Lama's palace and, as joe has mentioned, repeatedly running uphill to get another sunset shot.
The visual extremes were often questioned for veracity. An image of a rainbow ending in the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet was so extraordinary that people often walked past it, thinking it an obvious fake (nothing changes). This is probably why Galen wrote so much about the morals of the photographer and how ‘reality’ should not be distorted through the use of filters. Although his justification for the polariser is a bit much - saying it simulated how the eye saw things. He did, however, single handedly popularise the use of the graduated filter though, working with Singh Ray to develop a range of adjustable, neutral filters that became commonplace items in most photographers kits.
It was probably his writing that made Galen so many fans and it is still his compilation books that so many modern photographers refer to. Galen wrote about every aspect of photography from the business to the philosophy, from technical to moral. Although much of it has become dated (Kodachrome officially died last week, for instance, although a 75 year lifetime is pretty damned good!) most is still as relevant today as it was then.
Galen and his wife, Barbara, died when he was 62 years old (2002). Returning from a trip by plane, their pilot crashed near to the runway, killing all on board. The fact that Galen risked so much and died from something so mundane is a confusion for many - a ‘wrong’ death, if any can be right. Galen would have continued climbing and photographing in the Sierra Nevada (he is still the oldest man to have climbed El Capitan, Yosemite at 57 years old) and his photography was still getting better.
How can I be inspired by Galen Rowell..
Galen had a passion for the outdoors that came first and gave him the appreciation for the outdoors. His fitness that came from his climbing and hiking allowed him to get further and take pictures of areas that photographers had not seen before.
Live the landscape first, have a passion for that first and let it drive your photography. Keep fit and go that bit further. If you don’t get an image that you love, make sure you’ve loved just being out.
Galen used a 35mm camera when nearly all other photographers were using large format and maybe medium format (although the medium format photographers were called ‘lightweights’). His philosophy was to get out there and go further, carrying equipment that wouldn’t restrict his movements.
Use the lightest camera you can - go out with just a compact now and again - use it hand held or maybe with just a monopod.
Don’t fuss about resolution (that means you large format users). The picture is more important! 3x2 ratio can work in the right hands!
Galen was addicted to the dramatic light, looking for conditions where direct light and reflected or diffuse light combined. He would also look for storm fronts or edges of weather systems to get the breaking light.
Get out early, leave late, get out just before the end of a bad weather system.
Galen would take multiple compositions of any shot. As a stock photographer he wanted combinations that would offer the best options for a picture editor. In one of his articles he talked about taking a portrait shot, then a landscape (bracketing plus and minus half a stop) and then pulling out to give space for copy and repeating the process and then maybe trying a different wider crop for a different copy placement.
Take multiple versions of your great shots, shoot wider to include space for copy.
Galen learned photography from the age of 21 to 28 on a Kodak Instamatic and this didn’t stop him taking some astonishing landscape photographs.
Don’t be an equipment snob, make the most of what you have got and get out more.
Galen repeatedly wrote about being true to the subject, not distorting the inherent truth of a picture (there were a lot of photographers using orange filters to create sunset colours at the time). He only used graduated filters and polarisers (and used the polariser less and less once Fuji Velvia came out). He let the film do the processing for him, creating stunning pictures with the smallest amount of equipment.
Buy a cheap 35mm camera and shoot some Fuji Velvia 50. You can easily sell it for the same as you bought it for later and you will definitely learn about colour from the way film renders scenes. Manually focusing and metering a scene will help your photography too (You can pick up an Olympus OMx and lens for £50 on ebay).
Rule of thirds, rule of thirds - it’s all we hear from photography magazines, camera clubs and composition guides. According to these sources, the rule of thirds is the prime rule in photography and you should break it at your peril. In this article I aim to rip up this part of the rule book and show it for the misdirected rubbish it really is (it’s acronym is ROT, in case you need reminding).
First of all let’s start with the origins of this rule. According to our research, the first mention of the rule of thirds is in a book “Chromatics” by George Field where Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir John Thomas Smith (1797) are referenced as follows:
“Sir Joshua has given it as a rule that the of warm to cold colour in a picture be as two to one although he has frequently therefrom and Smith in his Remarks Rural Scenery would extend a like rule to all proportions of painting begging for it the term the rule of thirds according to which a landscape having one third of land should have two of water and these together forming about third of the picture the remaining two thirds be for air and sky and he applies the same rule the crossing and breaking of lines and objects &c”
Philip Hyde
So it seems that this rule of ratios is intended at first to be applied to colour ratios but then became extended to all ratios within a picture. Even then, this author immediately follows with “the proportions in both cases are to be governed by the predominance of light or shade, and the required effect of a picture,”. So even this early in the game, the rule is being knocked. He goes on to say.
“This rule, however, does not supply a general law, but universalises a particular, the invariable observance of which would produce a uniform and monotonous practice. But, however occasionally useful, it is neither accurate nor universal, the true mean of nature requiring compensation, which, in the case of warmth and coolness, is in about equal proportions, while, in regard to advancing and retiring colours, the true balance of effect is, approximately, three of the latter to one of the former; nevertheless, the proportions in both cases are to be governed by the predominance of light or shade, and the required effect of a picture, in which, and other species of antagonism, the scale of equivalents affords a guide.”
It is thought that the rule of thirds is originally related to the golden section - where the golden section appears from the golden ratio of approx 1.6:1 - hence the rule of ‘golden ratios’ moves those ‘key third points’ further into the corners. These golden sections supposedly originated in antiquity and were the basis of much historic art and architecture. But many experts say that these ratios can’t be found in the pyramids or the Greek parthenon and other buildings. The obsession with these ratios only really reappeared during the time of da Vinci and this was from Vitruvius’ treatise on proportions (although it is widely thought that even Leonardo didn't really use the golden section). [see wikipedia golden section page for more]
Michael Kenna
So, if there is very little behind the ‘rule of thirds’, why do people hold on to it so strongly as a compositional crutch. After going through hundreds of different pictures, the amount that conform to the rule of thirds is minimal.
I’ve seen critics call objects that are close at the edge of the picture as ‘nearly a third’ and also, anything slightly away from the exact centre as ‘almost a third’. Hence the only things that don’t really fit the thirds rule are objects almost against the edge of the picture, objects in a corner or objects/lines smack bang in the centre. So by applying the ‘rule of thirds’, we’re saying “Don’t put things at the very edges of the frame or slap bang in the centre”.
Another contradictory thing about the rule of thirds is that I’ve yet to see a picture that uses all four of those ‘third’ hot spots. Why not? Surely if it conformed to every third it would be so much better!? In reality it would look very odd, with weird symmetries disturbing the eye.
David Muench
It is probably true that the ‘first guess’ placement of an off centre object with no other context will probably be around a third point (but within quite a large tolerance). However, if we can use a musical analogy (and it’s probably one of the most productive genre to access analogies from) a ‘third’ placement is like a major chord in music and just as a song full of major chords will sound dull very quickly, a picture with just thirds will do the same. I tend to place horizons quite close to the edges of the frame - a rule of fifths would work very well.
Just as a side test, I went through twenty of Joe Cornish’s pictures and logged some ‘focal points’ and horizons. The vast majority of the horizons were on a 25% line, although a significant minority were at 20% and 50%. As for objects, the spread was all over the shop but nothing got closer to the edge than 20% of the frame width to the edge.
So what can you take out of this article? Well for one, composition is more than just aligning a few objects with a simple grid (but I guess most of you knew this before you read the article). What composition is about is flow and balance and I’ll use the end of this article to announce a new series starting in February which looks into composition. We’ll study to approach the task of composition from working in the field to honing a composition with your camera on a tripod and predicting/waiting for complementary light.
The pictures in this post are from some photographers that are well known for their compositional skill. I looked though many of their best photographs and it was consistently difficult to find pictures where key elements, such as horizons or focal points, sat on the 'third' lines.
Michael Marten talked to me on the phone last week and we had a very pleasant chat that ranged from German romantic painting to victorian missionaries. We did get to cover photography at some point starting with Marten’s background as a half German, half British forces child. His educational career took him into the realms of religion and history and a graduation present of a Pentax SLR served him well when he moved to Iona shortly after.
He fully intended to shoot reportage style pictures but when he got to the island, the lure of the wilds were too much to resist and he ended up taking pictures of the beaches and interior, using cheap print film (he had to have some money left to invest in the whisky community) and suffering for the week turnaround before the pictures came back. Like many film photographers, he kept notes of each photograph to describe settings, light, etc - learning from each mistake.
He now lectures at Stirling university on religion, history and the politics of the middle east although his doctoral thesis was on the cultural impact of Scottish missionaries on Palestine - this led to conversations about Caspar Friedrich and the way that European society changed its view of landscape at the start of the 19th Century. Marten also talked about his interest in how painters spend days researching pictures compared with modern photographers, and how he’s interested in capturing pictures without content, pictures of nothing but with structure. Being close to Portobello in Edinburgh helps access to beaches, a great source of nothingness.
He learned his craft whilst working in a gift shop on Iona and became a little tired of the thousands of postcards they sold. When a Martin Guppy of Mull, who was himself just starting out, offered to make some postcards for the shop, Michael got to ‘spec’ the shots. Learning the processes and what was possible and what didn’t work was good learning and a great inspiration.
Since working in the university, he has found a strange parallel between acting detective in the search of a coherent story from the chaos of the archives and trying to take pictures, drawing order from the chaos of nature.
He now owns a couple of film cameras, his favourite being a Nikon FM2 plus a 28mm and 50mm lens; he also owns a Nikon D90 which he uses for some professional photography commissions and landscapes with 10-24, 18-200, 35 and 50mm lenses. He even buys the occasional KwikSnap Fuji cameras (producing some embarrassingly good results!). Most of the film that goes through the FM2 is now Velvia with some Ilford FP4 Plus.
Finally, inspiration comes from many sources (most listed on his website but stand outs being David Stanley, Tony Mamic and Bruce Percy).
A big thank you for this interview and you can see more of Michael Marten's work at http://www.marten.org.uk/
Tristan Campbell is a photographer whose work stood out for me when I started working with the camera. His pictures of the Hebrides were particularly interesting and had a unique style that transformed his pictures. Since those early pictures, I have watched as he started using a large format camera at a similar time that I did, but it wasn't the type of camera that I was interested in, it was the original vision of the landscape that made his pictures different. His excellent (self developed) photoblog is always an inspiration and the work he produces always rewards the time spent looking. Very recently I bought his 8x10 camera off him as he is moving to a lighter weight Walker 4x5 camera (the 8x10 camera weighs nearly 14lb with no lens! Possibly not the most practical beast to go camping with) and asked if he would mind answering a few questions for us.
In most photographers lives there are 'epiphanic' moments where things become clear, or new directions are formed. What were your two main moments and how did they change your photography?
The first such moment has to be a few years ago when my wife bought me a small lightweight tent for my birthday. It simply opened up so many new possibilities for me. I could position myself in remote locations and photograph well past sunset, then at dawn you have a second chance in different conditions.
The second one would have to be the period of reflection after my son fell critically ill at just five weeks old. Thankfully and miraculously he pulled through and is now a beautiful healthy toddler. After this disturbing time the pull back to the area I had been photographing just the day before he fell ill seemed even stronger. I think this was the point at which my photography changed direction somewhat and I settled fully into large format photography.
I remember seeing some of your 'early' pictures (at least as early as I can find) and seeing a distinct change in style happening on your Hebrides trip. I was very impressed with the feel that you created with "It's here as it breaths" and "Never the Rainbow". Was there something about this trip that was 'different' and why don't we see similar photographs later on?
My photography has developed and changed directions over time and I hope it continues to do so. In my late teens and early twenties I was very much into gritty, grainy black and white urban photography. Then I explored the landscape first with 35mm film and then digital. I tended to travel light and fast which allowed me to react to the light and weather conditions and cover a lot of ground.
These days I explore the local landscape which for me is Nidderdale in North Yorkshire. I guess I tend to have a more considered approach now, usually planning well ahead by researching maps, sunrise times and directions. I have a long list of places to visit at certain times of the year and I know what weather conditions I'm hoping to hit on. To do this I'm perfectly content to visit the same location a dozen times to get the exact picture I have in my mind, rather than to come back with a handful of pictures which are ok but not really what I was looking for.
You moved from digital photography to 4x5 film and then 8x10 film. What was it about film that converted you and having used it for a while, what is it that keeps you using it?
The move from digital to 5x4 took quite a while. At first I always took a digital camera with me in addition to the large format camera and this combination just did not work for me. I always ended up using digital and neglecting the large format. Once I ditched digital completely the large format camera came into its own.
With the recent addition of a Jobo CPE (thanks to your blog for the inspiration) I can now handle the entire process myself. To end up with a physical result which has taken considerable effort to achieve is very satisfying.
There is also something to be said about going out with such a basic camera after working on a computer all day long. It is nice to leave technology behind for a while and be in complete control of the picture taking process.
However computers cannot be left out completely. For me one of the most important things about using film is the digitisation process. Early after getting into large format I was lucky to acquire a second hand drum scanner. The quality of scans from these machines is just incredible and had I not had access to this I feel I may well have returned to digital out of frustration of not being able to extract the information from the film.
You return to the same places again and again, finding new compositions and feels - do you think this process improves your ability to see when you then go to new places?
Returning to the same location again and again is very important to me at the moment. I've been photographing the same small area of land now for at least 4 years. By getting to know a location so intimately it becomes a really special place that you are personally attached to. The more you look, the more you see. Almost every time I visit I seem to stumble upon something I've never noticed before despite walking past it sometimes hundreds of times.
Such an approach certainly is an exercise in learning to see but I'm not sure it significantly improves my ability to see when I visit somewhere new for the first time. Usually I will research any new location before setting off and once there find that I'll typically locate my picture quickly. Then if the location was inspiring, I'll revisit under different conditions and in different seasons.
You have mentioned to me previously that finding time for photography is a challenge, how do you ensure that you get out as much as you want?
Yes, finding time to get out can be very difficult with a young family, school, nursery runs and a full time job. Winter always seems to be the hardest with such short days. Late spring to early autumn are my most productive months. In summer if you get up early enough you can get to your location pre-dawn, spend a couple of hours exploring and photographing and be back home before the rest of the family even wakes. During these early hours you have the landscape completely to yourself - other than the police who seem to pull me over on a regular basis if I go out between 2 and 4am that is.
In the end it doesn't really matter if you can't manage to get out for a few months. I'm not trying to earn a living from photography and it just makes the next time you do get out that bit more special.
Your granddad, Cyril Campbell, was an accomplished photographer - please tell me a little bit about him and how he influenced you as a photographer.
Photography was a real passion for my granddad, I have a lifetimes worth of his negatives and slides up in the loft just waiting to be explored further. I believe he actually took the same route as myself in that photography developed from his considerable skill at painting. The landscape was probably his favourite subject but he was equally at home photographing still life or portraits and he had a real knack for winning competitions.
Unfortunately my real passion for photography only really started to develop about a year before he passed away. I will always feel regret that we did not have much time to explore photography together. There were so many questions left unanswered and he had so much to teach. He is a major source of inspiration and motivation for me and he always will be.
You go camping with your camera, how do you manage to carry a large format camera set up and all of your camping gear? Does being 'embedded' in a location provide something that a single visit doesn't?
Managing equipment when camping is simply a matter of compromising. I have a lightweight 65 litre backpack which leaves just enough room for my 5x4 camera, one lens and some film once it has been packed with the essential, basic, camping gear. For choice of lens I always take my 65mm Nikon which I find is my most used lens.
Single visits are absolutely fine but I guess it comes back to my desire to know and experience a place more intimately. You really do get to know a mountain by spending the night on it, I've certainly had some experiences I'll never forget. You can position yourself in a hard to reach locations and not have to worry about getting back down before it is dark (or descending in darkness). It's just a great experience to become part of the landscape you are photographing.
You started your art with oil painting and sketches, how does that experience influence your photography?
As a teenager I have to admit I was rather obsessed with oil painting. I would often start a painting and not stop until it was finished, no matter how late at night. The landscape was a dominant subject matter and I was very much inspired by old masters such as Constable, Turner, Jacob Van Ruisdael and Caspar David Friedrich. Lots more inspiration came from modern artists and illustrators such as Mark Hamilton, Daniel Chard and H R Giger to name just a few.
For me the picture 'Autumn Past' shows a strong link to Caspar David Friedrich but overall I hope that these influences do not show through too prominently. It is important to have your own vision and outlook on your subject matter but inspiration is equally important to bring both fresh thoughts and motivation.
You primarily use negative film, something I haven't done a lot of myself. How do things like dynamic range, colour, detail compare with digital capture. (Oh, and why the rebate?)
Right from the outset starting with large format I decided I would be using colour negative film exclusively. My first 5 working years were spent developing and scanning colour negatives for a daily newspaper so I was already very familiar and comfortable with the medium.
The most obvious difference for me between film and digital is in the way film handles highlights. Digital tends to give a rather harsh cut off for blown highlights. Film on the other hand keeps building up density giving a beautifully smooth transition.
The dynamic range of colour negative never fails to amaze me. With digital I relied heavily on graduated neutral density filters to handle the highlights. At first I did the same with colour negative film but I soon realised they were generally just not required. I find the tonal range has much more depth and the subtler colour of negative film very satisfying. Typically I tend to overexpose the Fuji by about a stop which gives beautiful pastel colours and ensures you have good shadow detail.
On my blog, which is a rather informal showcase of my work, I do indeed tend to include part of the negative in the presentation of my pictures. I guess the reason for this is simply to show that the image really was taken on film. People always seem to assume a photograph is taken on a digital camera and I think it is nice to show that film really is an extremely capable medium to work with and a viable alternative to digital.
Owning both film and digital cameras, how do you compare the advantages and disadvantages of each?
There are very distinct advantages to both. Digital allows you more freedom to work fast, experiment and learn. The quality of digital can be amazing, particularly at high iso speeds. Typically I use digital for social events such as the odd wedding where the pressure to work fast and deliver high quality results is high.
However not being able to see the immediate results with film can place you in a different mindset where you are concentrating more on your subject matter rather than checking if you got the shot. Colour negative film is simply amazing, for me the perfect medium to work with. You can achieve a completely different look to digital, pastel colours, wonderful highlights - even film grain can be used to great effect.
What sorts of things do you think might challenge you in the future or do you have any photographs or styles that you want to investigate?
In the immediate future my aims are:
To perfect my view camera technique further so I'm squeezing the utmost quality out of the medium.
Develop my vision to use a wider variety of focal lengths to my usual ultra wide angle lens selection.
Fit in more camping trips and perhaps even a visit to the coast.
Other than that I'm looking forward to exploring my usual square mile further and maybe even venturing into the next OS grid square!
Longer term I'd like to develop ideas for pictures depicting mans influence on / position in the landscape.
Who do you think we should feature as our next photographer?
I know this is a British based magazine but over the last year I've been following a couple of American photographers who's work I have found very inspiring. Two of these in particular would be Ben Horne and Joel Truckenbrod.
Back here in the UK I always find David Clapp's work to be a huge inspiration but in general I do try not to spend too much time looking at other peoples work in case I start to inadvertently copy!
Many thanks for Tristan for this very interesting interview and for the permission to include some of his pictures. You can see more of Tristan's work at http://www.tristancampbell.co.uk/.
Galen Rowell, as you can read in the short biog in our ‘master photographer’ section, is one of America’s most famous landscape photographers. His career coincided with the massive growth in demand for colour images and adventure photography; his commissions took him all around the world. However, his ‘home ground’ was the Sierra Nevada and he eventually moved to Bishop in 2001.
Winter sunset, Gates of the Valley
This book covers Galen’s relationship with the area and, as well as a great biography, includes wonderful, high quality pictures covering his photography from 1968 to 2002 (with a couple of earlier ones from his climbing photography). The reproduction in this book is excellent although it has to be said that some of Galen’s more over the top images are almost too garish for reproduction in any form. The most intense sunsets in the world shot on Fuji Velvia are an acquired taste I think, no matter how breathtaking the views. But the massive glowing lenticular clouds and sierra waves aren’t all this book is about and it does a good job of providing a balanced view of Galen’s photography.
Sunrise on Tioga Pass, High Sierra
And the photography itself, whilst undoubtedly very good, isn’t the considered composition of Ansel Adams and only in the last years does it approach the depth of Eliot Porter. However, to rank it by comparing it with these masters is to misunderstand what it was that made Galen so special. It was his relationship with the land; the fact that he was a photographer second and that his primary passion was always climbing. Galen’s photography shows many flaws, from over-gradding to focusing issues, and I’m sure the shots will be soft compared to the standards we have today (he shot many of his photos at f/22 which, because of diffraction, see comments for more, means they would be the resolution equivalent of a seven megapixel DSLR).
Twilight mist, Merced River, Yosemite
The thing to remember is that with Galen, it’s the package that counts; he was a brilliant climber and writer and a great photographer. To understand why people like Galen Rowell so much, buy this book and “Mountain Light” and get a taste of the ultimate adventure photographer..
For those that don't know (and you can find out more in this issue of the magazine), Galen Rowell was a photographer, climber and all-round adventurer. Born in California he and his wife sadly died in plane crash in 2002, but he left behind a legacy of fantastic photography, particularly images taken high up in the mountains.
Mountain Light is a celebration of Galen's pursuit of what he called 'Dynamic Landscapes' - landscape images that combined rapidly changing light conditions, spectacular mountain scenery and often an athletic pursuit of these conditions. It's a book full of inspiring landscape images, but this isn't just a coffee-table book - it's a real photographers book and its 240 pages include an amazing amount of information and tips on landscape photography, as well as a short history of Galen Rowell's own photographic development.
Clearing Mist - El Capitan
In essence the book can be split into two parts; seven chapters discussing various aspects of Galen's work and eight 'Exhibits', each containing the story behind a number of similarly themed photographs.
The chapters themselves are basically pure text, and whilst they do take some time to read they are well worth the effort. Starting with Galen Rowell's early photographic career they take you on a journey through Galen's mind; his approach to photography, how he looks at composition, light, equipment and pretty much everything else you could ask for. Even the experienced photographer will find plenty of useful information and it's the sort of book that makes great reading if you're feeling in a photographic lull.
Whilst the chapters make great reading, for me it's the 'Exhibits' that really shine. These look at a series individual photographs and analyze them in more depth. Not woolly artistic intent but real information; the circumstances that led to the images, the thought processes behind them and the technical compromises that may have been necessary in their making. In fact if I had one complaint it would be that I'd like to see more them - as it is the book is a little text heavy compared to most photography books.
Horse Tail Falls
It's also in these exhibits that Galen's own distinctive style comes through, not just via the images, but also by the accompanying text. Many of his images come from anticipating certain light condition coming together and Galen is someone who happy to take an active role in pursuit of these conditions - not afraid to run with his gear to reach location before rare and transient conditions disappear. To a newcomer to photography his style may appear to involve a certain degree of luck, but in reality it is his experience that allows him to be in the right place at the right time, and his finely-honed understanding of technique that then enables him to make successful images.
Mountain Ridge
In summary this is a book that should sit proudly on a landscape photographer's bookshelf. Although the book is principally about film-based photography (you're not going to find any tips on Photoshop or post-processing technique) the vast majority of the information is just as applicable to digital photographers. Whilst the images are more than capable of speaking for themselves, the textual content of the book is equally as good. Each time I pick it up I feel I learn something new, and Galen's natural enthusiasm for photography and mountain scenery shines through. This should be on your must-buy list of landscape photography books and with Galen's intrinsically dynamic style is the perfect complement to books from the likes of Joe Cornish, David Ward and Charlie Waite.
