Why Landscape Photography?
For me, landscape photography is about capturing huge stretches of time in one beautifully detailed, emotionally charged moment. A millennium or two of forest formation. A few thousand years of flowing water scoring through land and countryside, turning stone to sand. A million years of pelting winds, drizzling rain and beating tides carving their long attacks into rock, cliff face and mountainside. The whole geological history of Planet Earth is chiselled with great drama into our landscapes. And my eternal joy with the genre is creating landscape photos that convey the true character of that history in a way that helps us reconnect with it. And I do that by making careful choices.
Capturing Deep Time in Landscape Photos
Just as the passage of time has invested our landscapes with so much majesty, power and wonder, as a photographer, time is also the most important investment I can make in drawing out the land’s magnificence for the viewer. Good landscape photography takes a lot of meticulous planning, research and patience. Beyond finding visually compelling locations, you must also work out the best time of day and the right season to visit them. Once you’re there, you then need to hike around to find the perfect vantage point and consider how the different kinds of light that fall from dawn to dusk will alter the mood of the final image. Away from crowds, urban development and human influence, our forests, plains, prairies, beaches, canyons, deserts and mountains are shaped only by the endless charge of the elements. Landscape photography is about expressing these wonders of our natural world – their deep and important stories that stretch across eternity.