Below is a collection made up of a small number of images I have taken on different occasions, some in Athens, Greece from this October half term and others more recently around Jersey. I plan to take more in the coming week however as there really aren’t many here.

Robert Adams is an American photographer born in 1937 in New Jersey. He is perhaps most famous for his sarcastic portrayal of human damage to the Midwest through his deadpan compositions.

Adams started out as an English professor, learning photography in his spare time using his 35mm reflex camera purchased in 1963.

He has since released multiple books, most important being The New West, as it epitomises the New Topographic style.

Here is an analysis of one of his most famous images.

“I think if you placed me almost anywhere and gave me a camera you could return the next day to find me photographing. It helps me, more than anything I know, to find home.” – Robert Adams

The ideology of the New Topographics movement was largely a social one. Post-War America struggled in many ways, some being in its capability to urbanise quickly enough to house and transport the ever growing population, limit the rapidly worsening inflation issue and develop more modern attitudes towards the vast emergence of mental illness.

This scramble for suburbia characterised the post-war years, with legislation such as the GI Bill of Rights passed in 1944 which provided monetary means for returning veterans to attend college and purchase homes, allowing them to settle and start families.

The realisation that the American Dream had not been fulfilled was one felt prevalently in this era, with the large expansions within the Civil Rights movement leading to profound progress in legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Within the next 20 years, the Cold War spread fear of Communist ideologies reaching the West as well as the very apparent threat of nuclear war.

With these issues being felt nationally, photographers were inclined to revert away from the idealised landscape photography that had been the primary style for many decades (for example the work of Ansel Adams). They felt that this did not at all accurately portray life in Post-War America and therefore wanted to demonstrate the effects of consumerism and urbanisation on society, this largely through the use of bleak scenes in muted tones to emulate the sad and nostalgic effects.

This coagulated in the form of an exhibition held in 1975 in New York in attempts to bring the nation into the photographers’ minds.

I think that lots of my images have similarities with the work of Fay Godwin, Ansel Adams and Don McCullin. Here are some examples.

My images were mostly taken in the L’etacq area on a fairly cloudy afternoon. I don’t like the majority of these images however as unfortunately my ISO was too high resulting in an extreme lack of resolution. I will also include some images I have taken in other instances that respond well to this objective.

Exposure bracketing is a technique used in low light conditions which allows a photographer to ensure that they will definitely capture every aspect of the image without under or overexposing it.

This is done by taking more than one image (typically three), with one being overexposed, one correctly exposed and the other being underexposed. This allows all light levels that are detectable by the human eye to be shown in the image when all the exposures are blended together.

This can be done automatically in the camera’s settings or manually with control of the shutter speed, moving it up or down in increments.

Here are some examples taken with the manual method in school.

And here are some taken with the automatic method, which only takes three exposures in one go.

Where: L’etacq clifftops & surrounding area

(lots of dramatic landscape giving way to distant horizons giving lots of opportunity for focus on skylines)

When: Late afternoon/evening

(chance for colourful/dramatic skies and eerie effect through twilight)

What: Horizon and landscape

(to allow simplicity and brilliance through observational style photography)

How: Using Aperture priority setting

(to ensure the entire photo/focal points are in focus)

Why: Replicate work of Romantic artists

(such as Turner/Don Mccullin/Ansel Adams/Fay Godwin/Constable etc.)

Don McCullin is one of the most famous and successful photographers alive, and has been knighted for his efforts in documenting some of the most brutal conflicts the world has seen in his generation.

Born in 1935 in London, he was evacuated to a farm in Somerset during the Blitz. He was awarded a scholarship to attend Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts, however, following his father’s death when he was only 15, McCullin left school for a job on the railways. He was then enlisted in the RAF in 1953 for his National Service.

Having been posted at the Suez Crisis, McCullin worked as a photographer’s assistant after failing the written theory test to become a RAF photographer (possibly on account of his mild dyslexia) and he was mostly in the darkroom during his service. It was during this time that he purchased his first camera (a Rolleicord) for £30 whilst working in Nairobi, pictured below.

His photographic career began in 1958, after his image of a local London Gang was published in The Observer.

From 1966 to 1984, McCullin was employed by the Sunday Times Magazine to document the man-made and ecological disasters happening across the globe, and his coverage of human strife in a multitude of settings is famed for its raw and honest nature.

McCullin’s images of the Somerset landscape depict a dramatic, isolated perspective and use the defining nature of the film camera to the fullest extent. Their consistent employment of the ethereal cloudscapes and rolling hills of the countryside combine to create quintessentially Romantic images.