Research: Landscape Photographer of the Year 2016 Exhibition and Book

Posted on By Tony

Visit

On the 2nd Feb 2017 I visited the Landscape Photographer of the Year exhibition that was showing at Waterloo Station.  I chose to visit this because if I were to have named a genre of photography that I have most followed before starting this course, it would have been landscape.  As well as wanting to see the images, I wanted to see if I had a different perspective on things even after just the small amount of work I have done so far.

Categorising a Photograph

One of the things that first struck me was the different categories of pictures.  Categories were not created for the different content, eg towns, countryside etc but instead for the different approaches to the creation of the images.  The categories are:

  • Classic view
  • Living the view
  • Your view
  • Urban view

People in Image

I particularly found myself drawn to the images from the “Living the View” category as I found that the inclusion of a person (people) in the image created a totally different perspective to the image.  For example, in this image taken by Iain McLean (see Fig 1) which I took from the book of the same exhibition (Landscape photographer of the year, 2016) the inclusion of the two people looking over the wall creates an entirely different image to the equivalent without the two boys.

Fig 1 Trophy Presentation Day (2016)

This is a new perspective for me, I would generally have been looking to eliminate people from my landscape photographs so as not to distract from the landscape.  But what I have realised is that having a person in the image, interacting with their surroundings, can serve to emphasise that landscape rather than distract from it. Many, most even, of the images in this category achieve the same effect.  It is an area I would like to explore further.

Depth

I noticed that most of the images conformed to one of the two approaches explored in Exercises 1.2 and 1.3 of this course.   I have used some of the images I saw within my Exercise 1.2 and so have not replicated them in this post.  The image below by Iain Tall (Tall, 2016) uses the technique of straight-on capture and has lines running out of the frame.  This echoes the technique of László Moholy-Nagy introduced in the course book.

Fig 2 Let’s Take a Selfie (2016)

 

I particularly like the two ladies taking a selfie on the top row which enhance the image so much that it even became the title of the image “Lets Take a Selfie”.  Again, in the past I think I might have waited for them to leave so that I could get a clean image, so removing what has become the making of this one.

My Learning

The two points that I have highlighted above are points that I would probably not have spotted even two months ago and so I was pleasantly surprised at how I have already begun to evaluate a photograph in a more specific manner than simply “Does it look nice”.

I think that the importance of framing the image to include or exclude specific items, to create depth (or not) plus many other attributes is something that I have started the journey on becoming more aware of, with a long way to go.  This awareness is something I will obviously look to develop further both in terms of evaluating my own or anybody else’s images but equally important when framing my own images at the point of capture – many of things cannot be adjusted in post-capture processing by cropping (as I have written about here).

Bibliography

Landscape photographer of the year. (2016). 1st ed. AA Media Limited.

Figures

Figure 1 McLean, I,  (2016) Trophy Presentation Day [photograph] in Landscape photographer of the year (2016). 1st ed. AA Media Limited.

Figure 2 Tall, I (2016) Let’s Take a Selfie [photograph] in Landscape photographer of the year (2016). 1st ed. AA Media Limited.