Influences
When I first started taking photographs I just went out and took photos – I have always graduated towards landscape and seacape. Most of my photography was dictated by holidays and days out. I just took pictures of where we went without having an agenda or even thinking about what I was trying to achieve with my photograph. In terms of actually thinking about what and why I was taking photographs for did not enter my head for the first 20 years of my photography. The first influence that I can actively remember is when I first saw the photographs of Lee Chapman in his gallery in Keswick about 8 years ago.
http://www.leechapmangallery.co.uk/default.html
What I liked was the depth and detail of the shadows in some of his photographs.
My next step forward was in 2008 when I went on a weeks course with Jonathan Chritchley in the South of France.
http://www.jonathanchritchley.net/
By now I was actively looking to learn more and develop my photography. I found Jonathan through some random googling. I went on the course because I liked the pared back and minimalist style of his work. It was on this course that I began to play with desaturating my images and begin to work with long exposure. Through 2009 – 2011 I began to work more in B & W or desaturated colour. When I was made redundant in 2011 I signed up for a 6 month distance learning course with Jonathan. At the end of this I was clearer about my style, definately B & W and using long exposure for work other than water related shots.
This last part of my development came about when I discovered the work of Michael Kenna.
I was still in Brussels and had found a great little photography bookshop near to where I lived. I was browsing through the rows of books and came across ‘In Hokkaido’ and ‘Mont St Michel’. I was drawn to them because of the way the books were bound and presented. Then I looked inside and was really hooked. The first thing that got me was the simplicity of the photos in ‘In Hokkaido’. Starkly B & W, just a line of fishing poles in a calm sea or a line of trees on the horizon with a white foreground of snow and a clear sky. ‘Mont St Michel’ took me longer to appreciate less stark but steeped in shadow and dark spaces. All achieved by photographing at night or with long exposures of some times many hours.
Where has this led me? I am moving away from conventional landscapes that surround me here in the Lake District. I like the element of doubt that is introduced with a long exposure time of say 10 minutes. You can see the scene in front of you but the way the light and clouds move during the exposure adds a tension to the process. I am leaning towards seascapes and coastal vistas with big sky and sea areas and perhaps just a hint of of land protruding into the photo. I find that I will take 3 or 4 long exposures of a scene but I am not striving for the perfect technical exposure. What I look for is the best movement and interaction of light and shadow in the photograph and work on that image to get the final photograph. To date I probably have less than 10 photographs in my portfolio that realise what I am trying to achieve. The next part of my journey is to work on that vision for my photography and build up a revised portfolio.
