Photography: Attempting To Keep It Natural
Today we’re so immersed in visual images, be they moving video, film, poster, in magazines and on T.V. that we’ve become used to the eye-catching, the bizarre, and the digitally manipulated.
It’s always been true that photographers manipulate their images, either by using coloured filters on their cameras or by using manipulation in the darkroom. Projecting slides onto ground glass screens for use as the background to images and making collages from photographs and rephotographing them were also frequently used techniques.
By and large though photography was used to record events, even if as in the case of fashion photography, the sittings were contrived and theatrical.
The landscape photographer is faced with an immediate dilemna. Does s/he attempt to record what’s there, which is largely the style of Charlie Waite, and perhaps Charles Kippen, or does s/he seek to elaborate some aspect of the landscape such as the rolling waves of the ocean by extending the exposure time, which is a technique that has been used by the talented David Noton?
Here I do nothing more than seek to convey the landscape as-it-is, so why the monochrome image?
Quite simply it was proving impossible to produce an accurate balance of greens, blues, greys and brown that expressed what I saw when I pressed the shutter release. The monochrome image expresses it perfectly thoough!
Kumlubuk: Rocks and Distant Mountains
