From The City to The Country…
It’s been a while since I wrote anything for this blog and now there are two posts in a week, its been busy in my “proper” job and now it’s half term, which is bringing some welcome relief and along with it, some time to write a couple of blogs and of course, get out with the camera and do some editing.
This year has seen a lot of change - a new job in a different part of the country, which is very different to where I was when I based in London. I loved London, but I really love where I am in the Lake District, in North West England. The change of pace is more than welcome, but it has present a number of challenges for me from a photographic point of view and that’s what I want to talk about here today!
London was great, like really great. More importantly for me, it’s where I fell in love with photography. I took a few shots on my phone, enjoyed editing them and they were well received by friends and family, as well as a small amount of followers on “The Gram”. I eventually took the plunge and went out and bought a DSLR - my trusty Canon 80D.
It’s the camera I still use now for just about everything I do (something new on the horizon, but nothing is cheap so it might a be a very distant horizon!)
I soon got into street photography, cityscapes, urban photography and quite quickly realised that night photography and stuff in low light was what I wanted to do. I became obsessed with shallow Depth of Field (DOF), bokeh and long exposure. Bright lights, bright colours and lots of playing with colour temperature were my go to edits. I loved a light trail!
As time passed and I spent more time out of London, making images in the Derbyshire countryside I realised more and more that I wanted to be back out in the country, have a slower pace of life and focus on creating landscape images and continue to dabble in wildlife photography.
The transition from town to country has been amazing and I love the slow pace of life, but it’s been a steep learning curve in terms of photography.
It’s a game that we’re always learning in, but this move has made me realise just how much I still have to learn. The landscape photography style is incredibly different to the way I used to work in London. Here’s some of the things I have learned, present in a bit of a “compare and contrast style”!
Composition is King… but in a different way that I used to find when shooting in the city. One of the things I have learned shooting landscapes is that foreground interest is one of the keys to a successful image. Leading lines are something which I have been able to transpose from one genre into the other, but leading lines in nature need more work to help them make sense in an image, this was easy in London because they were such an integral part of the built environment and designed by engineers and they like straight things!
Focus Stacking… This is something that I used to do when I was in city, but not to the extent that I have done since I have been shooting landscapes. Even at the class f/8.0 it can be tough to get the whole scene in focus, so to really nail that corner to corner sharpness, being able to focus stack is something that you should be able to do.
Dramatic Light… When you have it, it makes everything almost easy, when it’s not there, you have to think on your feet and you have to think hard! It’s very wet in this part of the world, which means it’s often very cloudy, and quite often there is rain falling from them but with clouds, come shadows and breaks in the cloud and when those conditions hit with the sun then it’s just photography heaven!
Given the amount of night photography I did in London, this wasn’t something that often troubled me, but rain always added the element of reflection which was a welcome addition. Oh and when the sunset or sunrise kicks off in the Lake District, well that’s just something else!
Sunrise/Sunset… Golden hours, need I say more? Invest in an app like PhotoPills so that you can find the best places to be for those sunrises shots, and if you can get up high in the hills (safely!)and can see a sunrise and a cloud inversion in all one then you’re in for a real treat!
Dynamic Range - You’re likely to (depending on your camera) need to shoot some HDR stacks to capture as much dynamic range as possible, especially if you are shooting in harsh light or it can be hard to capture all of the detail and you’ll end up with crushed blacks or blown out highlights. Be careful though, it can make your images look “digital”/artificial, so what you do in post is key with these.
You don’t always need to shoot the whole scene…
this is something that I am still working on. With such wide views and incredible scenes, it’s always tempting to try and shoe-horn the whole scene into an image. Sometimes I will try and leave the wide lenses at home and this forces me to try focus on parts of a scene rather than the whole view. Pick out details and find the interest, give your viewer something to look at! This is very different to what I used to do a lot of in London, which focussed a lot on having the subject in the foreground and using this to force the DOF and create all of that magic bokeh-sauce!
So what’s the take-away from this? I suppose that my overarching point is that you don’t stop learning. No matter how good you are or what you shoot, there’s always room to improve, to develop and to grow - if you don’t think you have anything to learn then you won’t get any better; that’s the only given there is!
I’ve developed a huge amount as photographer since I moved, but you don’t need to move to get better, but get out of your comfort zone and go an shoot something different, you never know, you might enjoy and you might learn something new…