Just finished two books on landscape photography. Charlie Waite’s
The Making of Landscape Photographs
and Michael Orton’s
Photographing Creative Landscapes.
Charlie Waite’s book is landscape photography in the classical style. Waite focuses on very careful composition and lighting. Each photograph in the book has notes on why Waite picked a certain composition and details the tools of the trade which he used to create the photo. All the classic tools are here: a polarizer to increase saturation; a graduated filter to hold back the exposure for the sky; and even a stepladder or a truck roof to get a better perspective or to simplify the horizon line. Charlie explains when and why he uses each of these tools.
His type of photography reminds me of baroque style classical music, something like Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It’s classical style in the best sense of the word. The compositions are formal and structured with careful attention to every detail of form, light and tone. In one photograph of an orchard, Charlie picked up every white stone in sight so that the bright stones would not disrupt the colour palette for the shot he had in mind.
Most photographers do their best to hide the flaws in their photographs, but Charlie has a section for each photograph pointing out where he thinks a photograph can be improved. After reading these notes, I sometimes go ‘how could I have missed this!’. It’s very instructive to see a perfect looking photo and then realize what could be improved. I get an even deeper appreciation of his pictures once I understand how he overcomes these obstacles to get a great pic.
Michael’s Orton's style is almost the opposite of Charlie’s tight structure. Michael uses creative photographic techniques to make photographs that can look like an impressionist painting. Instead of the sharp focus and long depth of field of traditional style landscape pictures, Michael uses deliberately out of focus shots, motion blur and slide sandwiches to create a photograph that tries to capture the feeling or emotion of a landscape rather than a literal description of it. Michael sometimes deliberately moves the camera during an exposure to stroke colours on his photograph, just as painter would on canvas. I love Michael’s approach. If there is nothing beautiful to photograph, the photographer can create something beautiful.
These are two very interesting books with photographic styles that are a delightful counterpoint to each other. Both authors have web galleries if you'd like to check out their work:
