I attended the RPS Landscape Photographers Calendar Workshop training course (Worobiec, 2017) to pursue further my interest in photographing landscapes and in particular, to explore further the interest that my studies have triggered in the idea that not all photographs have to have the ‘wow’ magazine cover look in order to have value; in fact it may well be quite the opposite.

The course was run at the RPS Headquarters and delivered by Tony Worobiec, a well-regarded, and well known landscape photographer.  The format of the day was to spend a period of time covering each month of the year and to introduce four of five mini-projects that could be undertaken in that month; each of the projects was illustrated using Tony’s own images.

An example project for February would be “Capturing the Empty Landscape” and would be focussed on the graphical qualities of bare fields and perhaps any tracks left by machinery.

Tony’s images are all beautiful and it would have been easy to draft into admiration of the aesthetic qualities of the images alone.  Indeed, the discussion was on images themselves rather than what one was trying to express through the image.  That said, to express something in the way one wants, it is necessary to be able to create the image and I did pick up on a number of key points:

• Editing – We covered 12 months, 5 topics a month and perhaps four images per topic – that is 12 * 5 * 4 = 240 images. Despite this, I don’t think that any two images were even remotely the same, but they did all go together as a cohesive body of work.  This reminded me of the editing process and how important it is to create images that are different yet consistent.   In my Assignment 1, my original submission contained too many images that essentially had a path running up the middle of them, my corrected set eliminated this but I had thought “how long can you keep this variety up” as image archives grow.  Quite a long time seems to be Tony’s answer.

• Shot selection – For landscape scenes, I think in my head I had the rather formulaic approach of very wide lens, horizon on the 1/3rds, decent piece of foreground interest, and then the subject of interest for the picture taking up the background. This perhaps is why I have found it difficult to create variety in my shots.  Tony’s answer to this that he now often uses his 100-400mm lens.  The course was not focussed on technical matters, rather it was biased towards the images themselves, however, this one piece of advice has really struck home with me.  The choice of a longer lens and placing the subject of interest much larger in the frame, and of course being able to eliminate the wider scene seems to create shots that are significantly more interesting.

• Soft Light and White Skies – you won’t find a classical ‘chocolate box’ countryside picture with a white sky, it will be blue and bright and the scene will have lots of contrast. Tony’s shots, in the main, stay well away from this and instead exploit the much softer light of an overcast sky.   Any structure to the sky at all allows some interest and if the sky really is plain white, Tony’s answer is to use the sky as a blank canvas backdrop and see what interesting things you can place over that canvas.  In Assignment 1, I found the soft dullish light of January provided me with quite an interesting look, Tony has taken this forward into many of his images.  Even during the bright months, his images will typically be taken at the point in time after dusk when the sky and the ground have the same light readings or close to it.. This whole perspective continues to expand my thought process beyond the wow image.

On reflection, many of the points I have highlighted above can readily be seen in the exhibition Drawn to the Land by Sophie Gerrard that I describe here.

A useful day.

Bibliography

Worobiec, T. (2017) The Landscape Photographers Calendar Workshop. Bath [Lecture at Royal Photographic Society Headquarters, Bath. 5 March]