Over half term I went on two photoshoots, one in St. Ouen’s and the other by St. Catherine’s woods. The weather those days was rather poor, filling the sky with a lot of fog, which I feel adds atmosphere. I edited them pretty experimentally, switching between wanted to add brighter, more saturated colours, and wanting to keep them in black and white to preserve the mysterious tone.

I went through all of my pictures using the P and X tools to decide which I wanted to use. I then edited them, adjusting the colours, contrasts and exposure. I colour coded my images based on how much I liked them, yellow for liking them and green for images I definitely want to use.

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My images from my rural landscape photoshoot

Best images

what is rural landscape photography?

Rural landscape photography is in many ways similar to photographing urban landscapes. The difference is rural photography is about capturing the “life” in the countryside or in areas that are not built up. Rural can be seen as something old, natural and slowly changing, while urban is mostly modern, man made and fast changing. rural landscape photography is used to capture beauty in the natural landscape, without being changed by human existence. For example places like sand dunes, beaches, woods, fields and the countryside are rural and mostly unchanged. However these places will change slowly overtime due to other natural occurrences like extreme weather, heat and rain. rural photography is a popular form of photography due to settings that are bursting with life, natural features and an explosion of vibrant colour, whereas urban photography is often more dull and full of grey colours.

Fay Godwin

Fay Godwin first became interested in photography in the mid-1960s as a result of taking pictures of her young children. Alongside early portrait work, she developed a sophisticated landscape practice, often collaborating closely with writers to produce in depth surveys of particular rural topics or regions. Her photography has sometimes been linked to a tradition of romantic representations of the British landscape, in the manner of Bill Brandt or Edwin Smith. But, as a socialist and active environmentalist, Godwin makes the land in her photographs reveal traces of its history, through mankind’s occupation and and intervention.

Fay’s life

in the 1990s she was offered a Fellowship at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (now the National Media Museum) in Bradford, which pushed her work in the direction of colour and urban documentary. She also began taking close-ups of natural forms. A major exhibition of that work was toured by Warwick Arts Centre from 1995 to 1997; Godwin self-published a small book of that work in 1999, called Glassworks & Secret Lives, which was distributed from a small local bookshop in her adopted hometown of Hastings in East Sussex.

Godwin was introduced to the London literary scene. She produced portraits of dozens of well-known writers, photographing almost every significant literary figure in 1970s and 1980s England, as well as numerous visiting foreign authors. Her subjects, typically photographed in the sitters’ own homes, included Kingsley Amis.

The first edition of Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence, her book collaboration with poet Ted Hughes, was published by Rainbow Press in 1979. The book was also published in popular form by Faber and Faber (with poor reproduction of the images), and then re-published by them in 1994 simply as Elmet with a third of the book being new additional poems and photographs.

Fay’s work

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Through my 2 photoshoots which I did out of school, I gathered these 15 images as my best shots of a romanticised rural landscapes. I chose them by going through each album which I made and picking them with “Z” then added them all to a separate album where I had them all together as it will be easier for me to organise and edit on Adobe Lightroom to fix the lighting/experiment with the filters/etc. I will be choosing 4 of these pictures to do an edit of in depth where I experiment with different filters, relating to my chosen photographers work.

My first photoshoot I focussed on going on a walk, where I took pictures which showed a progression but the photos came out more industrial than I wanted as there were many buildings included in them. I really liked the way the clouds add extra detail to my photos from this photoshoot as it was a nice day as it completely changes the atmosphere of the photos.

For my second photoshoot I focussed on going through another walk through a natural landscape in Jersey which is quite hidden and natural due to the wildlife throughout it, due to the weather the clouds made the background quite bright and overexposed in some pictures, which I will be editing in Adobe Lightroom but I think that it will help to develop my photos to be similar to Ansel Adams. I really liked doing this photoshoot as I got a variety of photos from flowers, trees, bridges, etc.

Here is my plan of ideas which I will follow as a guideline to help me with my photoshoot of rural/natural landscapes.

Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West.

He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favoured sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. Adams was an advocate of environmental protection, national parks and creating an enduring legacy of responses to the power of nature and sublime condition.

He created a Zonal System to ensure that all tonal values created by highlights, low-lights and mid-tones are represented in the images.

The Zone System is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development. It provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results. Although it originated with black-and-white sheet film, the Zone System is also applicable to roll film, both black-and-white and colour, negative and reversal and to digital photography.

Ansel Adams was also very concerned with the tonal range of an image, the 11 zones in Ansel Adams’ system were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tonal values you would see in a black and white print, with zone 5 being middle grey, zone 0 being pure black (with no detail), and zone 10 being pure white (with no detail).

ANALYSIS OF ANSEL ADAMS’ WORK

Moon and Half Dome by Ansel Adams is a prime example of his work, the heavy contrast between tonal values (ranging from the pure white of the snow and moon to the pitch black of the shadows on the mountain). The texture of the mountain is very visible, adding more depth to the images, strong shadows which are in the foreground frame the centrepiece of the moon and cliff- leading to a very atmospheric, dramatic image which successfully exudes strong emotions (linking to romanticism) and a steady, clear aesthetic.

For my second photoshoot I started at Waitrose and made my way into the valley behind it until I got close to B&Q which is where I stopped. I focused on taking rural landscape images of my surroundings and switched between the monochrome and colour setting to get different types of images. I also wanted to see what they would look like if I edited them in black and white. I mostly took photographs of the trees and paths because they are what interested me the most.

Contact Sheets

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Best Shots

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Romanticism emerged after 1789, the year of the French Revolution that caused a relevant social change in Europe. Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until the mid-century. Romanticism spread throughout Europe in the 19th century and developed as an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that embraced various arts such as literature, painting, music and history. Romanticism was also expressed in architecture through the imitation of older architectural styles.

Romanticism was an art form that rejected classicalism and focused on nature, imagination and emotion. Landscape photography was popular at this time, therefore, romantic landscapes were common. The landscapes focused on the beauty of nature and included a lot of running water and vast forests.

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Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He and Fred Archer developed an exacting system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a deep technical understanding of how tonal range is recorded and developed during exposure, negative development, and printing. The resulting clarity and depth of such images characterized his photography.

The zone system of Ansel Adams divides the photo into eleven zones; nine shades of grey, together with pure black and pure white. Adams, who photographed in black in the white negative film made sure to expose the darkest parts of his scenery. This way he prevented having pure black in the photo. When developing his photo paper, he made sure to manipulate the dark and light parts in his photo in such a way, that the shades of grey would follow his zone system.

The Zone System is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development. The Zone System provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results. Although it originated with black-and-white sheet film, the Zone System is also applicable to roll film, both black-and-white and colour, negative and reversal and to digital photography.

Adams’s reputation soared in 1931 following his first solo exhibition, featuring sixty of his photographs of the Sierra Nevada mountains, at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. In 1932, Adams founded Group f/64 with Edward Weston, the group was active between 1932 and 1935, during this time they comprised a group of photographers – including Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Consuelo Kanaga, Henry Swift, Alma Lavenson, and Sonya Noskowiak. The group advocated Straight and unmanipulated photography over pictorialism.

During the early 1930s, Adams wrote for the magazine Camera Craft and published his book Making a Photograph in 1935, in which he demonstrated a technical, but straightforward and approachable way of writing about photography. Making a Photograph was a great success and continued the newly established tradition of the photography manual. The book was illustrated with high-quality reproductions of his photographs, and technical commentary about how to “make” rather than “take” the best photographs.

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Don McCullin

Sir Donald McCullin is a British photojournalist, particularly recognised for his war photography and images of urban strife. His career, which began in 1959, has specialised in examining the underside of society, and his photographs have depicted the unemployed, downtrodden and impoverished. McCullin has documented the poverty of London’s East End, the horrors of wars in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. As well as creating pictures of arranged still lives, soulful portraits and moving landscapes.

McCullin was called up for National Service with the RAF. After postings to Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus he returned to London armed with a twin reflex Rolleicord camera and began photographing friends from a local gang named The Guv’nors. McCullin was persuaded to show these to the picture editor at the Observer in 1959, he earned his first commission at age 23 and began his long and distinguished career in photography.

McCullin mainly focused on photographing and writing about the wars and the main events going on around the world, one of his bigger pieces was in 1961 when he won the British Press Award for his essay on the construction of the Berlin Wall. His first taste of war came in Cyprus, in 1964, where he covered the armed eruption of ethnic and nationalistic tension, he initially wrote for the Observer and, from 1966, for The Sunday Times. Away from war Don’s work has often focused on the suffering of the poor and underprivileged and he has produced moving essays on the homeless of London’s East End and the working classes of Britain’s industrialised cities.

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From the early 1980s, he focused his foreign adventures on more peaceful matters. He travelled extensively through Indonesia, India and Africa returning with powerful essays on places and people that, in some cases, had few if any previous encounters with the Western world. At home, he has spent three decades chronicling the English countryside – in particular the landscapes of Somerset – and creating meticulously constructed still life’s all to great acclaim. Yet he still feels the lure of war. As recently as October 2015 Don travelled to Kurdistan in northern Iraq to photograph the Kurds’ three-way struggle with ISIS, Syria and Turkey.

Image Analysis

I have chosen this photo because of its harsh light from the sun which looks like a mist covering the mountains. The light sort of resembles a spot like shining on the stage which how you can only see it directly on one spot in the midground. The angle which the photo was taken at makes the pebbles and rocks in the foreground seem bigger than they are. Ansel Adams must have gotten quite close to the ground to take this as the rocks are mostly in focus and they slowly lose that when they get further away. The smaller rocks are also a lot more pigmented than the mounts in the background due to the angle and closeness of the camera. The photo is also a good example of Adam’s zone system, for example, the clouds would probably be placed at a 9 or 10 whereas the spaces in-between the smaller rocks might be put at a 0 or 1 which shows how Ansel captures every different contrasting shade in his photos.

Juxtaposition

A juxtaposition involves pairing 2 or more images together to show similarities or differences between the them. It often involves positioning the different subjects next to each other [for example a tall and short person] and photographing them in order to present how the differences/similarities between them.

One way of doing this is by recreating an older photo by posing the model in a similar way to the older image. This would be a juxtaposition as it’s comparing the past to the present and showing the differences in life through a similarity [the positions of the models]. The website ED.EM.03 presents Henry Mullins [mid-1800’s] and Michelle Sank’s [2013] work on portraiture side by side, emphasising how things have changed over time from the camera quality to the type of clothing being worn.

My Juxtaposition

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For this juxtaposition, I found an old photo of me as a child and decided to take some photos of myself with the butterflies on my face. I kept the older photo the same but decided to lower the saturation on the remake other than the orange of the butterflies, drawing attention towards them, in order to create a contrast between the colourful and bright nature of the older image. This way, I was able to establish a juxtaposition through the age of the images and through some of the visual aspects too.

Up Close

Up close photography involves taking sharp and detailed photos of the subject, usually isolating the subject so that it’s the only thing in frame which draws a lot of attention towards all the details [such as texture, scratches etc] in the final image.

Taking up close portraits usually creates interesting results as the wrinkles/texture in the skin are exaggerated in a way that emphasises the persons features as they are. Japanese photographer Satoshi Fujiwara is a good example of this as he secretly takes extremely close up portraits of passengers on trains in Berlin and edits them to make the ‘models’ unrecognisable, emphasising on their skin, imperfections and obscuring their individuality.

“I set out to obscure the individuality and specificity of the subjects in the pictures/images in this series. In facial close-ups, I used framing and trimming to make it difficult to identify the individual by eliminating elements such as clothing and personal effects.” –Satoshi Fujiwara

Another photographer who takes interesting, up close portraits is Bruce Gilden, an American photographer whose goal is to take unflattering photos, with the help of a flashgun, of random people he sees in a variety of places from New York, France, Russia and many more. He originally started by taking photos in black and white but has gradually switched to shooting in colour, allowing him to truly capture the people he sees.

“I’m known for taking pictures very close, and the older I get, the closer I get” -Bruce Gilden

My Portraits

In order to create these edits, I increased the saturation and clarity of the images, giving them a more distant and unrealistic feel. I then increased the sharpness of the images to make sure each detail was clear in the area that was in focus [as I used a shallow depth of field for my photos].