Monday 6 June 2016

Sherwood Forest - Photography Week 17 (2016)

I remember the first time I tried landscape photography in Sherwood Forest. After about 30 minutes I had had enough as I could not see one shot. The problem was the complexity of the landscape and the difficulty of selecting a composition.

The same is true today but now I tend to embrace the complexity and enjoy the challenge. It also has a name - intimate landscape photography.

Intimate landscape photography is an embracing terms that covers the middle ground between a traditional landscape (proportioned between land and sky) and a detailed or abstract study (where the context is either deliberately ambiguous or not essential to the subject). One definition I have seen, although I can't re-find the reference, stated that the intimate landscape is everything from the end of the toe to the horizon but no sky.

One of the best intimate landscape photographers is Hans Strand. In his book Hans Strand - Intimate 1, he explains how some of his images take years to finalise. One year he might see the potential and then returns again to improve the framing or the usage of light. It is this dedication and confidence in a composition that I admire and would aspire to.

Hans also writes "the untamed chaos of the forest needs a lot of analysing to come up with a well composed image" (Strand 2015). How true this is... and the stage before analysis is simply being comfortable seeing and capturing the complexity... as I attempted during my latest visit to Sherwood:












I don't normally digitally frame my images but sometimes it helps to contain the composition in the same way that a mount works for a print.

Reference:

Strand, H. Intimate 1. Triplekite Publishing. 2015.





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