benjamingraham.co.uk

The 11th UK Landscape Photographer of the Year

Following a failure in my website's primary picture archive, many blogs have lost their images. I am endeavouring to re-instate these from back-ups. Bear with me please while I undergo this labourious and very sweary process...

Not what, but when and how

Not what, but when and how

This has to be the most significant thing I ever say to people looking to improve their landscape skills:- It is seldom about what you shoot... It is, almost invariably, about when and how you shoot it. To demonstrate my point, please consider the first and second images in this post. They were shot in the same location, in the same position, with different points of view, at different times of day. Above image: Felpham seafront. A simple, unglamorous location coaxed into bec

Visual art or aesthetic pollution?

Visual art or aesthetic pollution?

That old chestnut. I was recently in a discussion with a friend about some images we had been viewing in an on-line gallery. Clearly we were not going to agree about them. I felt that, in terms of framing, point of view or composition, they mostly had no sign of intrinsic authorial effort and that any one of them could have been a random black and white shot on a telephone camera that was being used to record a walk through a town centre, full of strangers, on a busy Saturday

ICM impressions

ICM impressions

In the previous post: Before and after dawn - mood swings - I touched briefly on why, even if conditions are not ideal, we should use our time on location productively, to experiment with technique and to work the scene. I suggested a number of things we could do to add variety to the haul of images with which we return home. Left: "Epilogue" Sunset at Doniford Bay, north coast of Somerset Nikon D810, 50mm f1.4 Nikkor, ISO 64, 8 seconds at f11, polariser, hand-held 2nd Septem

Before and after dawn - mood swings

Before and after dawn - mood swings

Together with all the primary technical stuff - the exposure, the focus, the field and point of view, the balance, the composition, the textural and tonal relationships and so on, the successful conveyance of mood or emotion, in other words - the way it makes the viewer feel and think, is vital in a photo. Above image: Littlehampton's East Pier, shot from West Beach Nikon D810, 14-24mm f2.8 Nikkor at 24mm, ISO 64, 4 seconds at f13, tripod 17th November 2015 I wrote in my prev

The blue hour

The blue hour

What a lovely part of the cosmos we inhabit for our photography. With soft light and cerulean tones, there is a magical moment in the clear-skied, pre-dawn blue hour when the light from our local star, in our tiny solar system's share of the universe, casts a sublime, relatively uniform luminance over everything. The dynamic range of the scene is agreeably compressed and balancing exposure is made easier. All these elements in combination reduce or eliminate the need for grad

OPOTY 2015

OPOTY 2015

I was blown away to read the news today that six of my images were on the initial short-list for the Outdoor Photographer of the Year competition 2015. I am honoured and humbled to be in the company of so many talented and creative photographers. Much as I would like to progress further through the contest, looking through the other short-listed entries, I realise that that's quite a tall order and, to be honest, just making it to the short-list is amazing enough for me - for

2D or not 2D

2D or not 2D

Some of the challenges we face when producing landscapes is how we manage the representation or interpretation of... the movement in a scene the 3D depth of the topography that our eyes perceive and our brains routinely construct for us the atmospheric conditions and intrinsic mood of a vista ...and transpose those physical and atmospheric elements in the real world, into the medium of the static, two-dimensional photographic image. Above image: "Convergence" Field of young b

Fog

Fog

Fog is an addictive weather condition for photographers. Once we've experimented with it, we all fall in love with it: the way it softens and adds a glow to the ambient or artificial lighting, the bursts of light rays it causes when the sun breaks through it in a woodland, the palpable mystery it contributes to an otherwise normal or mundane scene. Random and ephemeral, fog gives us momentary opportunities to make something compelling of pretty much anything. Above image: Inc

Mist and Drizzle

Mist and Drizzle

As a general guideline, broad daylight and blue skies make for some pretty boring landscape pictures… The best photos are very often acquired in the sort of conditions that many wouldn’t associate with photography. Winter Fern at Kingley Vale Nikon D810, 14-24mm f2.8 Nikkor at 24mm, 3 seconds hand-held, f13, ISO 100 09.43, 1st November 2015 When I shot this one, I was up in the Kingley Vale Nature Reserve, photographing the giant old yew trees at dawn. Incessant drizzle, earl

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