As I have taken a mysterious (to me not sure why) hiatus in my photography lately I am contemplating how to renew my motivation. The area I live in is not very spectacular as far as landscape photography is concerned. It is relentlessly flat and as a result can seem dull. This of course is where one should double down on finding beauty and I think of this as the challenge.
Recently my wife an I have been hiking in local woodlands, Monk’s Wood and Holme Fen. Holme Fen I ‘discovered’ on a train trip from Leeds. Looking to the east I saw woodland that seemed to consist of all Silver Birch. I resolved to find where this was. A few weeks later we went for a walk there and I found it looked promising.
Around this time I received a new issue of
OnLandscape a landscape photography magazine published in Scotland. Delivered as a PDF I always look forward to the next issue. It so happened this issue 193 featured
Stephen Segasby, and some of his black and white woodland photography. He is from not too far away and his photographs look similar to what I could achieve and so offered some inspiration.
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| Credit: Stephen Segasby |
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| Credit: Stephen Segasby |
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| Credit: Stephen Segasby |
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| Credit: Stephen Segasby |
Then in that way that things seem to cross your path when you need them to
Steve O’Nions came out with a series if videos with a woodland theme.
Woodland is Hard...
4x5 Photography - Making mistakes and being fussy
4x5 Photography - A Softer Landscape
Film Photography - Slowing down with 35mm
Steve O’Nions makes a point in his videos that the challenge of woodlands photography is the jumble of visual complexity resolves as a mess generally and confuses the eye in a photograph. Human vision is of course stereoscopic. When in the woodland the eye perceives depth and untangles all the lines created by the branched, limbs, and grass blades. Once photographed these are projected on a plane and the eye is confused. Stephen has a photograph above that epitomizes this problem in the first photo above.
So now I am thinking when I can next dedicate a day to woodland photography. My wife and I did go to Monk’s Wood for a walk however it was a walk where I happened to bring a camera so the results were not studied. Being winter shooting handheld at ASA 80 (what I expose Ilford FP4+ at) is a challenge and so many were underexposed as I was forced between f8 and f2.8 at 1/60 to 1/30 of second. Fortunately the Rolleiflex 2.8F has a very smooth leaf shutter meaning if one is careful you can shoot a slow shutter speed. The results are below. A start but nothing spectacular.
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| This was a canopy of yellow leaves. The contrast of the branches fantastic. Color would have been great here. For black and white a yellow filter would have darkened the blue sky and lightened the leaves giving a different effect. |
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| This was a blatant underexposure. The lack of shadow detail is a dead giveaway. What I intended was to use the shaft of sunlight to highlight the small leafy plant at the bask of the oak. The result however makes it appear it was exposed by shining a flashlight (torch) at night. |
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| This works fairly well as the lines are simple and uncluttered. Again underexposed as there is no shadow detail and the scan was barely recovered in photoshop. With the wider aperture of f5.6 I made two exposures where the hyper-focal version was a bit sharper. |
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| This had good promise as a simple scene. What is not apparent in that the visual complexity hides the bright leaves on the branches at mid-frame. These were bright yellow and so in color are picked out easily by the eye. This is lost in the visual complexity of the background unfortunately. |
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