During our half-term break, I spent my week down in the Spanish region of Andalucía, photographing the gorgeous natural landscapes around the nearby towns I visited. I planned each day around where I could take photos for my landscape project, such as travelling to cities such as Torremolinos, travelling to rural towns including Guaro and central Coín, and just walking through the area.
I ended up with over 2,000 photographs by the end of my trip, varying from urban landscapes to features of typical romanticism, at different times of day and multiple angles.
I edited 20 images overall, a few in the dramatic, monochrome style of Ansel Adams, and the rest in a style that brings out the natural beauty of the photograph.
When it came to making these images, I wanted to adapt Ansel Adams’ style into my work, but more loosely and modernised, especially with the issue of most of the local area being covered in roads, paths and more traces of civilisation, as opposed to Adams’ pristine natural landscapes, so I decided to replace his use of rivers to lead the viewer’s eyes across the image with the paths and roads I was walking across, creating a similar, but unique composition. When editing, I also had to make the decision of whether to desaturate the photographs into black and white, to mimic his style – to do this further I had to dehaze the image to imitate the dark, moody skies featured in his pieces thanks to the red lens filter he used. Although I did take a lot of photos at night, because of my inexperience with camera settings I wasn’t really able to get a good, clear image that wasn’t grainy, so I would need to improve on that for the future.