The Season’s
Think of where you live and how the change of seasons effect your view out of your window. If you could time lapse the seasons throughout the year, you would be amazed by the light, clouds and the sun as it comes through that one window. If you then take that thought to one your favourite spots that you love and visit so often, then your imagination is starting to run into overdrive with thoughts.
The seasons bring life and death of the vegetation like trees, flowers, and shrubs. The wildlife also changes as some go into hibernation during the winter while others thrive all year round. Our world is unique for some as the change in seasons are clear to see, while some places are not so clear.
Living in the UK, we are kind of lucky in that the four seasons are much clearer to see and feel. Some of us like the sun, while others like the cold, being in the middle is kind of a bit of both, and can hold strong backdrops.
What Looks Best.
It easy to fix on one look, one style or one colour, but if you open your mind to it all, then each day holds an image that can be captured and express in a number of ways. We all love a sunrise or sunset, but through the year the sun can be seen larger or brighter. That clear sky sunrise or sunset, is, well clear, but if you add cloud cover, then you have something unique as it ever changes through whats called the golden hour and beyond.
Example.
The weather forecaster says the day will start dry but cloudy most part with some clear sky’s at times, sound familiar? So a couple of hours before, your looking out the window and its still grey and no brakes in the cloud, and you put feet up in front of the telly, then you get up to make a cup of tea just as the sun starts to go down and the clouds part and let those beautiful red and orange colours of the sun break through. You think, why didn’t I go out when I thought about it earlier. Well if we could read the weather that well, we would all be taking amazing images.
End of day and the sun broke through.
Taking A Risk.
You see with all the best technology and weather apps, you still can’t beat just going out and waiting. Maybe most times you wont be rewarded, but when you are, you have an amazing opportunity to capture something not just beautiful, but a one off that gets everyone to admire your determination and resistance to the weather and love the image you’ve captured.
It doesn’t have to be a sunrise or sunset, but a mood created by the season and the weather, but more on the mood.
Example.
You have a single tree in a field, say a big old oak tree, would it look better with leaves or without? You could say to look pass the tree and think of the weather conditions. Maybe mist or fog, sunlight breaking through behind it, snow on the ground, dark clouds set behind the tree, do you know see the tree with or without the leaves? Maybe a single object next the tree, a cow, a horse, a sheep or even a deer if you lucky.
You could start to think that the weather is a mood, that can be dark, grey, light, broken by the objects in the landscape that can be brought into the mood and can be singular as well a collective.
Through the mist ones a sheep.
Colour or Black and White?
Have you ever looked at one of your images, which is colour and tried to edit it as black and white? Sometimes I see a image that is just shouting out to me to try it in B&W, but I think you have to explore images when you edit to see if you can make it more engaging, moody, bring the image to another level.
B&W isn’t for everyone, but when you explore some of the great photographers of the pass, they only had B&W to work in, so they made works that had something that made the image come alive.
Photographer Ansel Adams called ‘The Tetons and the Snake River’
This image by Ansel Adams called The Tetons and the Snake River, taken in 1942 shows the depth of light breaking through the dark clouds from the left to right of the mountains and grading light shimmering along the river, but then think what would it of looked like in colour? Well sadly only Ansel Adams knows that, but he saw an image and figured it out to become a B&W that would stand out, that others, like me admire what he captured and the effort he went to and the many disappointment days he must of had till he came across this moment, a flicker of a second and then it was gone.
See if you think about landscape photography in a way that there is no right or wrong time to photograph, and mood and elements can make an image, if you just take the chance to explore, there is always an image to be captured, maybe you have to wait anything from a season, a change, something to trigger you to get out and see what will happen, wait just that bit longer, to get that image that makes it feel worth all the torment, it might of cause you, but makes you feel the image.
The camera is just a tool that breaks down what you can see from edge to edge, how you fill that space and how you interpret what is within that frame. It’s kind of thinking outside the box, but actually within the box, which has no right or wrong time to its outcome.