I tend to find myself reaching for certain lenses more than others, which can restrict my photographic style. For this trip up the River Wye I forced myself to take just one lens: a 70-200mm f2.8 that I don’t use very often. Sometimes, by deliberately restricting the possibilities, I get to discover images that I might otherwise miss, such as these beautiful caustics in the river.
Spring comes late in the Cambrian Mountains and the hawthorn in the lane has yet to show much sign of it. Nevertheless, sitting outside this morning, writing this, there’s a spring-like feel to the air that I’ve only really noticed in the last week.
A pair of ravens have been nesting down by the stream for the past couple of weeks, apparently turfing out some crows that had been starting to build there. This morning, I watched a grey squirrel in a territorial dispute with a woodpecker, eventually chasing him from the dead tree, so it looks like the squirrel is also rearing young.
The rooks are nesting on the green. I was told they used to nest there every year until the day someone took a 12-bore to one of them, at which point they scattered everywhere before settling in another tree across the main road. For a couple of hours they stayed there, making an enormous noise and giving an uncanny impression they were holding a meeting. A little while later they left for the churchyard, never to return to the green. That was many years ago and they seem to be back now.
The early snowfall in October could have been a warning sign of things to come, the snow finally arriving in force this week and forcing me to park my car in the village for the past few nights. Even so, the knee-deep drifts on the lane up to Marsh’s Pool this afternoon still came as a surprise.
This view was taken looking southwards over the pool, which, not for the first time this winter, is starting to freeze over. A local farmer told me people were skating on it a few weeks back.
I sometimes get asked by friends and colleagues for advice on what camera to buy, because I’m “into cameras”. Of course it’s important to have a good camera but I can’t say I have a huge interest in them for their own sake. I certainly can’t get excited about fancy features because I never use them.
The camera is a tool. Photography, by extension, is simply the medium. Surely the purpose of any photograph is the message. It seems to me that by obsessing too much over the equipment and process of photography we risk missing the point and reducing it to a purely technical exercise.
In many ways I find it surprising that a mechanical process allows much scope for artistic expression at all, but it is the physical link with reality that makes photography—with all its limitations—so powerful. For me, good landscape photography lies on the balance between straightforward representation and creative expression, and my aim when photographing the landscape is to capture a sense of “place”.
I don’t claim that there is anything hugely deep and meaningful about my photographs. I usually just try to show something that I consider interesting or beautiful, but I sometimes wonder what it is that attracts me to these subjects and places.
Seemingly without evolutionary purpose, aesthetic appreciation of the natural world is almost universal in our culture. Does our love of the natural landscape simply come from romantic notions of a former age, an age without some of the concerns of the modern world? Or, at the risk of sounding a bit “new age”, is it a sense of our disconnection from nature that causes us to respond in this way?
I don’t know the answer but it isn’t an obsession with camera equipment that gets me out into the wild at unsociable hours to be bitten, soaked, frozen and sunburned. Photography just gives me the reason to be out there in the first place, to experience nature and to reconnect with it in some sense.
If there is a common message to my work, I would say it is simply that we need to learn to value our countryside in an age where the wild places are under greater threat than ever. I hope that photographs of the natural landscape can further inspire us to protect what we have, rather than simply becoming a record of what we have lost.
