Just before Christmas we asked our readers for a bunch of questions that we could put to Joe Cornish when he visited next and the response was fantastic. In the end we recorded two hours of audio but to keep installments to a useful length (a lot of people say they listen to them over breakfast or during a commute) we’ve split it into half hour sections.

So, a big thank you to Joe and everyone who submitted their questions and here’s the fourth and final section..

Just before Christmas we asked our readers for a bunch of questions that we could put to Joe Cornish when he visited next and the response was fantastic. In the end we recorded two hours of audio but to keep installments to a useful length (a lot of people say they listen to them over breakfast or during a commute) we’ve split it into half hour sections.

So, a big thank you to Joe and everyone who submitted their questions and here’s the third section..

We've also included an incidental collection of snowy images to run alongside this item.

Marc Adamus is a photographer who has taken adventure landscape photography to extremes. His hero is Galen Rowell and he shares a lot in common with his lust for further, higher, colder, (insert hyperbolae here) and I would say if Galen were still around today and active his work wouldn't be too far removed from what we're seeing from Marc himself. Although he's based in Oregon, he has travelled and photographed much of North America. We contacted Marc after he released a batch of stunning images taken during 2012 and he answered a few questions for us and talked about a few images. We've transcribed the interview but have also included the recording (at the bottom of the transcription) if you wish to listen to it as a podcast.

Tim: Okay, well I’ve put a few questions down, so I’ll just dig into those if you like? I noticed in your other interviews, because I had a look around online and I listened to a couple of podcasts, that Galen Rowell is a big inspiration. Galen started his vocation by climbing and not photograph, how did you begin your photography? Was it photography first or the outback back-packing first?

Marc: Oh well, part of photography for me is just the product of a lifelong interest in every type of outdoor adventure, I just always really, really enjoyed getting outdoors. I got out of high school at 16 and I spent the time just scraping together whatever funds I could find through whatever means to pursue an interest in backpacking through the high country and getting out there in winter, doing some mountaineering and a little bit of amateur climbing as well, and I actually found Galen Rowell’s work through his climbing. I knew him as a climber through his many exploits around the world - he was regarded as one of the very handful of top climbers of his era. The climbing world was extremely familiar with him, and I at that time had a budding interest in photography but mainly just for the purposes of documenting my own trips and bringing those memories back for people. And when I saw what he was able to do with a camera as well, I think over time that really influenced me to take my photography more seriously.

Just before Christmas we asked our readers for a bunch of questions that we could put to Joe Cornish when he visited next and the response was fantastic. In the end we recorded two hours of audio but to keep installments to a useful length (a lot of people say they listen to them over breakfast or during a commute) we've split it into half hour sections.

So, a big thank you to Joe and everyone who submitted their questions and here's the first section.



and a transcription (apologies for transcription errors - we are getting around to proof reading these soon)

Tim: Hello and welcome to On Landscape. We are here with Joe Cornish with some questions raised by our readers, so ‘Hello Joe’.

Joe: Good morning Tim.

Tim: We put these questions up about a week ago and we have had some great responses and what I will do is I will say who the questions are from and read the question out and we will take it from there.

So, the first question is from Alex Nail and Alex asks ‘I would like to hear an adventure story or two, a tale of bad weather or exhaustion or something along those lines. I have had a few bad trips myself so I’m sure Joe has a tall tale or two and they always make entertaining reading, well when they end well‘.

Joe: Well, thanks very much Alex. If I can say so, that is probably fairly typical coming from Alex, not that I have met him, but he is a photographer who has definitely ‘pushed the boat out’ once or twice I think.

Tim: Likes an adventure.

Joe: Judging from his pictures, so I am kind of slightly embarrassed to answer it by say that, although I have done a huge amount of photography out on the hill over the years, most of my trips are day trips and especially when I climb in the higher mountains they are usually made in reasonable weather because I am fairly safety conscious, being a father of two children and not wishing to die just yet, so I try to stay, more or less within, let’s not call it a ‘comfort zone’ but within a ‘safety zone’.

I think in recent years the closest thing I have had to, well let’s say an interesting experience with, was on Beinn Ime in the Arrochar Alps the day before my 50th birthday and that was; I got caught in a blizzard, fairly high up on a mountain and the forecast was mixed but I hadn’t expected it to be anything like as vicious or as spectacular as it was. Basically, it said sunshine and showers. Well, of course, sunshine and showers down at sea level is sunshine and showers.

Tim: Sounds quite pleasant, doesn’t it.

Joe: Yes it does, yes. It makes for good light and it’s a good photographer’s day. I set off before sunrise; it was in early March so not very short daylight hours, set off well before sunrise and I actually had two goals in mind on the day, one to take a photograph of the Cobbler, which is an interesting shaped mountain in the Southern Highlands, and then to walk past that and then to climb onto the slopes of Beinn Ime. I had a specific view that I was looking to photograph.

Tim: Is this for Scotland’s Mountains?

Joe: It was for Scotland’s Mountains and, as I say, the day before my 50th birthday, and so I had managed to get a couple of pictures made in the early light, which was quite nice, as the clouds were ebbing and flowing, coming and going, and then essentially I had about an hour and a half hike to get up high up into the shoulders of the main mountain past the Cobbler, which I managed to get a five-four picture of.

As I started climbing, it got cloudier and generally more moody looking and I was thinking, ‘well, I need to be careful as I go’, and then the wind started to pick up and by the time I was close to the main shoulder of the mountain, not right on the summit but high on the hill, it really,

We've feature David and Angie Unsworth in a previous couple of articles, one as featured photographers and also an interview with David about his work and influences. They also have a book of their photography, A Landscape for the Imagination.



David and Angie now have an exhibition of their work at the Brantwood, former home and museum for John Ruskin. We talked to both David and Angie after a great day at a secret quarry location. Here's the interview. We've also included some images from the exhibition at the end of this article.
Podcast
https://youtu.be/ruj0x_Mt0TY

The Bings are Scotland's version of the great oil/gas rush that is currently happening in Alaska and America but in this case the oil shale was baked in great ovens to remove the oil.

There are sadly very few women 'in' landscape photography. Whether this is to do with the problems of being out in the landscape at odd hours of the day is for a different article. What is interesting is that the amount of 'interesting' women photographers is disproportionate to this lack of total numbers - again something for a different article but in the meantime we will ignore the gender and just celebrate the unique photography of Anna Booth.

Jon Brock and I met up in Port Mulgrave recently and we ended up having a brief chat about his self published book, "Vision and Craft" as featured in a previous issue of On Landscape. We recorded the chat for your enjoyment although make sure you've been to the loo before you listen to it :-)

Whilst discussing plans for the magazine and other ideas, David Ward, Joe Cornish, Tim Parkin and Andrew Nadolski took the opportunity to record a round table discussion covering a question that has been asked more than once in the past (usually around mid October in the last few years) what exactly is landscape photography (or more usually put "That's not bloody landscape photography!").

The session was recorded for your offline delectation as long as you don't end up angrily disagreeing and causing pile up due to landscape photography inspired road rage.

Please chip in with your own thoughts via the comments, email, twitter or facebook (preferably once you've stopped driving or get released on bail).



 

 

Guy Tal is writing an article for us but we thought you'd like a podcast to listen to whilst you are out on location or just travelling to work.

One of our accepted goals as photographers is to ensure that our final ‘product’ is correctly exposed (we’ll come back to what ‘correctly exposed’ actually means later).

Digital cameras can supposedly record 13 stops of dynamic range but real world tests show that although it’s possibly to detect differences at the 10th, 11th and 12th stops, they are swamped by noise. The real dynamic range of a good DSLR is about 8 or 9 stops. To put the that 8 stops into perspective, just picture the histogram on the back of your camera. The 8th and 9th stops are represented by the last single pixel width line on the left hand side of the histogram. In order to get good quality images, it is best to get the exposure within 8 stops. This is still better than slide film which manages about 6 stops although a way to go before it gets to print films nearly 10+ stops of usable dynamic range.

So it makes sense for us to limit our dynamic range so that nothing in the scene exceeds these values. Many photographers use graduated neutral density filters to hold back parts of a scene but there are still situations where our chosen composition, for instance shooting a valley or out of a cave or at the coast where the rocks can impinge on a grad (think Porth Nanven).

In these situations, there are only really a couple of solutions. One is to use print film (a solution that Andrew Nadolski used in his book “End of the Land” where he used no graduated filters), barring this though, we need to take multiple exposures and blend them together somehow .

That somehow is the subject of this article. In summary there are loads of somehows and there are various vociferous arguments about which techniques are best and we’ll try to cut through some of these to recommend what works in terms of the end photographic product. Our goal will be to create believable results and so we won’t be covering the more extreme ‘tone mapping’ techniques (although I won’t be saying that most extreme HDR is crap - it’s just more of a ‘special effect’ that makes me queasy but some love0.

The first thing to mention is that there a bit of a dichotomy between capturing large dynamic ranges in photographs and creating the sorts of bold saturated landscapes that have become de-rigeur in the landscape photography community. There have been quite a few studies that have reported on our ‘acceptance’ of different saturation levels and they have discovered that we can ‘believe’ high saturation pictures if the scene itself is also high contrast. We have difficulty accepting strong saturation if the scene is itself very low contrast.

This means that in order to make a believable image of a scene that encompasses a large dynamic range, we should be limiting the saturation. And conversely, if we want high saturation, we should be trying to capture scenes with limited dynamic range.

I think that this is where the inherent success of slide film comes in. Because it inherently can only record a low dynamic range image, it’s high saturation remains fairly believable - to an extent ;-)

What this implies is that some of the tricks that slide photographers use to make picture fit in the range of their film are still useful for digital photographers. For example, most slide photographers will not shoot in direct sunlight and if shooting straight into the sun, will wait until the sun goes behind a cloud (even if it’s only a very thin cloud) which will knock a couple of stops of brightness off the area around the sun and probably knock a stop of brightness of the highlights in the landscape.

However, back in the land of exposure blending :-)

There are two primary ways of combining multiple images together. The first is to use a HDR program of some sort, which will produce a true HDR image (pre tone-mapping) and the second is to blend the images together in so...

David Muench is one of the first great colour landscape photographers. With a huge back catalogue of publications, he has influenced a generation of photographers and has created many of the places Americans now call icons. Tim Parkin and Joe Cornish go through the book "Nature's America" discussing its influence on Joe and the assets of the photographic skills shown inside. We hope you enjoy it (apologies for the video quality - hopefully it's good enough for the purpose.)
Part One
https://youtu.be/5wbOUoldBGk
Part Two
https://youtu.be/17nwflQ-WwA

Robert Garrigus volunteered his photographs to be the subject of Joe Cornish and Tim Parkin's photography critique and what a good couple of compositions they were too. Many thanks Robert.


Part One
https://youtu.be/362kVm1OB-w
 
Part Two
https://youtu.be/B6bOVnMVc1M

 

We're taking a little detour in our Hindsight series with a video covering two complementary images from Joe's Scotland's Mountains book

David Clapp, Tim Parkin and Dav Thomas met up in the Peak District just as On Landscape was being formulated.

Our Hindsight series continues on with a series of pictures from Scotland's Coast.

‘Hindsight’ screencasts - we review a picture that works well, a picture from the same session that didn’t quite make the grade and a shot that was archived.