Landscape Photography on the edge - into the unknown

well hi everybody i'm uh joining you today from the garvel islands which are a series of little islands off the west coast of scotland now i'm here today with my brother my older brother who's a professor in glaciology at santander's university and he's over here to do some research uh and he asked if i'd like to join him today so i've come here with my camera and i'm photographing this incredible landscape um and we're the only two people on the island so it's pretty much the copic friendliest place i can think of to be right now now the really fascinating thing with this place is that there's evidence of glaciers that came through here uh 700 million years ago so the rocks i'm standing on are glacial till um which are 700 million years old so when these rocks were formed there was nothing to see them with there was nothing to see this landscape with we're talking single cell life was all there was on the planet when these rocks were laid down so it's fascinating to stand here as a landscape photographer standing on 700 million year old rocks and making photographs of these rocks interacting with the ocean the fact that they're still here is just remarkable i find it totally fascinating and having some amazing conversations with my brother about the whole geology so really this is where we are today this is the first time i've made a video outside in months and months and months and i'm just so excited to be here so yeah let's have a look around let's see what there is let's make some photographs because i'm definitely feeling creative and inspired to be here so when we were able to land the the boat my brother and i had to walk about three or four hundred meters along the coast over some very treacherous ground actually it was it was uh it was really really slippy and i was feeling uh not very good on my feet at all but this is basically where we dropped the bags now this is a 700 million year old rock here um and it's actually sub glacial till so it's the the clay-like material that was underneath the glacier and these are the the stones that were embedded in it you know 700 million years ago so it's a really fascinating surface and it still reminds me very much of a lot of this type of material i've seen in the himalaya up in the everest region and other areas of tibet where glaciers are actually still in existence and you see this kind of clay-like surface as the glacials are retreating and this is the stuff that's kind of left over and anyone who's ever drunk a cup of coffee using glacial water knows exactly how awful this stuff is and but what i was really fascinated with was this beautiful orange rich um weathered section down the middle and this composition is really just about color and contrast and the the flat grayness of the the glacial material uh juxtaposed with that beautiful orange mineral-rich band that's running down the middle there quite a simple composition and really it i think one of the great things about photography is giving things like this validity is that this isn't just a glacial photograph it's not something that's of only interest to geologists and i find the combinations of shapes and forms and colors and contrast really really fascinating and i'm happy to point my camera at it it's actually been a couple of months since i was out photographing last um when anne and i had that trip to the northern isles a few months well yeah two months ago and it's just lovely to be out to be honest and um i'm not here to make photographs and again this is something i've talked about an awful lot is you know i've got my camera with me and i've got my tripod with me and i've got my photos with me but i'm not here to make photographs i'm only making photographs when something really asked me to make a photograph and and i think that's a really cool way to go about it is i don't have any sense of expectation and i don't have any sense of a purpose or a goal of being here photographically but what i do realize is that i'm creatively driven to make photographs um and it's serving some other need in my psychology and it feels good to be engaged with the world it feels good to be fascinated it feels good to be interested and excited by things that are catching my eye or the sound of the water and working its way around the rocks and so forth so it just feels good to be out um and i think we forget that an awful lot of the time that it's just good to be out it's good for the soul it's good for our mind it's good for our mental health it's just good to be out the second scene's a little bit more traditional we're using the same elements uh we've got this big surface this big broad surface of of weathered uh glacial till here with the same little stones and then just this little rock pool it really stood out to me and what i liked in particular was the roundness of this surface um and then the kind of more angular vertical um darker rocks in the back but this tideline uh warmth very much mirrored the same tone that was in the rock pool there and i quite like doing this is that if there's um if there's a tone repeated in another part of the frame i think it's a really interesting uh way to sort of combine them and the fact that we have a vertical line here or a very slight gradient i think adds just a little bit of just enough of a dynamic in the frame so that it's not too up and down everything just gently points out to the right hand side there and then takes you into the big blue just the calm water that totally surrounds these islands on this particular day anyway i can imagine in the winter just waves crashing over all this stuff and it being a decidedly not friendly place to be or a particularly dangerous place to be so i i was very drawn to the scene and this was the first more wide-angled shot that i took this is a really fascinating scene first of all the colour of the water in the pool is incredible but look what happens when we change our perspective on here see how the reflection of the sky moves around in the frame and this is where the position of the camera is just so important because you can see if we move around and how we move the cam the our viewpoint up and down change is the relationship between all of those different elements and creates all these really fascinating interactions of play and light so yeah having a bit of fun here now this was a curious one this i really loved the way that moving the moving the phone around or moving the camera around really changed the perspective of how this kind of cool rock um pattern it's almost like a wolf or a crocodile or a dragon or something like that how it interacted with this reflection of the sky um i could either close it up so there was no reflection of the sky this is just a rock surface reflected from above my head um being reflected into the water and i've got a tiny bit of polarization going on just so i can see through the reflection uh here and just through there so we're getting a i i've got various versions of this photograph where they're fully polarized which means you can see tons of detail and what that does is reduce that transition or completely unpolarized where you get this really white reflection which tends to hide everything that's underneath it this is the beauty of the polarizer and this is why i have my case canine polarizer on my camera the whole time anywhere where there's reflections i want to be able to control the amount of the reflection uh very simply processed you know just to highlight the colors in the pool were really kind of in congress that this rich orange it was almost rotten there was something evil about it and actually just off out of shot here on the left hand side a big stag had fallen uh and probably during the rutting season that had been fighting another stag and it had been pushed off a cliff and it was lying there it was a massive beast um but it was really quite horrible smelling uh so this place felt like a bit of a affected pool of yuck it was almost like you know things fell off there on a regular basis and kind of rotted into this water so again this is where photographs don't always articulate 100 the nature of the environment you know um i've called this lying by a mission many times is that we make photographs that don't truly uh reflect the event good morning day two on our deserted island adventure we're actually on a different island from yesterday um and it's amazing the boat coming over just so gorgeous to be out in the water it was quite busy driving down today a lot more traffic there was some delays and as soon as you get on the water you're suddenly just out in this world of your own again and now we're on this island doug and i are the only two people here um it's somewhere i've never been before it's a landscape i've never seen before um totally blue sky day it's uh about 10 30 in the morning so you would call this sub optimal or some people may call it suboptimal um but i'm going to go and have a look around and find no doubt some interesting things to point my camera at so it's kind of exciting just to be out here feeling so much more mobile than yesterday um i've been sat at my desk so much over the last few months that i get really unsure on my feet especially on this really difficult ground going in tight again and this one is taken at 45 mil so this is still my 2470 and at 45 mil so it's much more of a a real view you know we see the world more or less at 50 millimeters so the visual relationships of these elements is is more or less how i experienced them and what i liked was there was because we're on the west side of the island we were in shadow until about 2 30 in the afternoon and in this particular place there was a definite coolness to this surface there was a kind of it felt bluish and then this rich warmer surface behind again it's just a colour contrast i talk about the five triggers all the time luminosity contrast color atmosphere and geometry this is the geometry this zigzag line going up the center of the frame which i put in the frame to have you know quite a strong impact this nice luminous triangle pointing into the shadow area on the right and then this cool to warm transition and again we've got these little warm sections on the surface of the cooler stuff which helps to marry in with some of these warmer tones that are scattered around the frame in other places so again it's always the same for me it's luminosity contrast color geometry and atmosphere now this photograph doesn't contain atmosphere i actually focus stacked this image so there's a shot taken for the back and a shot taken from the front just to make sure it was really tack sharp if i had made the back surface out of focus or less focused that would have been introduced a more atmospheric feel but i wanted this to be almost architectural in nature you know a real study of the geology it's nearly noon and i've had an incredible hour and a half or so just making my way slowly along the coast just finding that transition zone between water and rock to be fascinating now the fact that my brother's here doing some research and and studying 700 million year old glaciers um gives you a fresh insight into the geology of this place and every surface that i'm walking on is ancient ancient ancient rocks and it it's it's amazing not to to actually have a mobile phone connection we're out in an area of the west of scotland there's no we're on an island there's no buildings there's no habitation no one really comes here apart from curious geologists and and to be walking through this landscape and truly feel alone uh now am i bursting in the bubble by making this video and talking to you folks well yes and no um i think it's important for us to feel as if we're part of something bigger than ourselves and i think landscape photography has that capacity to share and to unite and to unify and what's really striking me today is that there's so much polarization in photography good photography bad photography popular photography introspective photography and what's really striking me just now is it's all photography and if i'm out here exploring this place as soon as that question comes into my mind i wonder if this will be popular or i wonder if someone will like this um is that in its own right bursting in the bubble and i think no it's not because um i might find it cool and curious and maybe someone else out there might find it cool and curious and that might be enough to make them feel confident enough to go out and shoot this type of stuff without feeling as if the world is going to condemn them for having an honest and open opinion or photographing things that might not be necessarily very cool or very popular so i i like to think of this as a um an enabling video where if you find it cool and if you find the rocks at your feet exciting and interesting and dynamic and engaging or the types of things i tend to find i look at the curious interaction between shapes and space that's something that really intrigues me the concept of negative space and positive space and so i'm having a whale of a time out here exploring somewhere i've never been and i might never come to again um so yeah let's embrace openness let's embrace um sharing our quirks and our interests with the rest of the world purely because there might be just someone else out there who really digs what you dig and you might enable them to feel better about themselves finally i spent a lot of time pointing my camera down at as the tide dropped normally we associate really low tides with boring seascapes because we we like the rocks that are not covered in barnacles and you know all of the chaos that the sort of that intertidal zone tends to get but as the water dropped the kelp this really heavy deep kelp that was just coming to the surface so the water was so low that a lot of this kelp was just flopping about on the surface and i was just so fascinated watching it you know as the waves would come in it would just waft gently from side to side it was a really dynamic place i must have spent an hour or more i'm just sitting there watching this amazing life um an alien world to me but something that i've found really really fascinating and when i processed this i made it intentionally quite dark just to allow the rich orange warm tones of the kelp and the luminosity as it was getting the bit of sunlight on it just to really shine through in this photograph and i think this is possibly one of my favorites of the day and it was certainly the moment that i really felt most in tune with the landscape so yeah some interesting photographs today and and i really enjoyed being there well what a couple of days it's been exploring basically uninhabited islands off the west coast of scotland having the place to ourselves amazing geology 700 million year old rocks uh learning all about that incredible period of history um when there was no life on the planet it's just fascinating so yeah i made some really interesting photographs things that i just found really amazing thinking really about time and rhythms and flow and motion and the line that just keeps coming back into my mind is we're only immortal for a limited time and it's funny because i was talking about it to doug and it's a line from a rush song and he said oh i've thought that before you know when i was doing all that mad stuff uh that we're we are immortal for a limited time and then we reach a point where we can't do a lot of that mad stuff anymore um so yeah thinking a lot about time and the time that we have available to us and how we can use that time productively to do positive things uh so here at expressive photography is about inclusivity rather than polarizing and so yeah get out there with your cameras and be expressive it will do you good [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 3,225

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, Landscape photography, how to, tutorials, composition, educate, expressive photography, barriers, vision, experience, tutorial, lesson, be better, happy, motivation, inspiration, inspire, Luminosity, Processing, Understanding light, Light, landscape, emotion, personal development, contrast, Transitions, Adobe, creativity, abstraction, local, dodge and burn, masterclass, Kase Filters, Wolverine, Magnetic, K9, Grads, Polariser, remote, Scottish, islands

Id: cFfshvd5Nco

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 05 2021