LEE Filters Masters of Photography - Charlie Waite

Charlie weight is one of the UK's best loved landscape photographers he started life as an actor but fell in love with photography in the 1980s since then his work has been published in around 30 books he also runs photography workshops in holidays with his company life in land and launched the hugely successful landscape photographer of the Year competition which is now in its tenth year I spoke to him in his Dorset studio about three of his images hi charlie thank you for inviting us here today we're going to be talking about three of your pictures and I understand this first one was taken in the lake districts is that right it was it really was and in fact one of those wonderful occasions where that pre-visualization and the planning you know and all of that stuff it sort of comes together and eventually with a little bit of tenacity determination hope it happens and it's a very enjoyable process and so for you part of the experience is actually just the being there perhaps as much as taking the picture that is the best thing anybody has really said to me it's so true well so that's exactly what it is and if you're not fully engaged with the whole business of being there you you definitely will be the poorer for it so this picture in particular what sort of time of day was it was it late in the day with that Lloyd yes it was actually it was sort of mid mid afternoon on an autumn day so the sun's quite low and I think that's the great thing about looking up I think very few students we have with lass and land now it's better but they used to not ever look up to see what the what the relationship was between the sky and the land beneath and once you can orchestrate up there with down here you're really in business I have a feeling that the brain and the eye an amazing kind of double act and they when you arrive what is what lies behind the impulse to want to make a photograph in the first place it's a sort of an amazing kind of rapid scanning process your detector picked up and then you think oh yes I think I'll do a photograph here so technically was there anything you had to deal with yes the filtration has always been part of the the entire photographic process what you're doing is you're just very very subtly with amazing restraint and a lot of care you're using filtration to produce an image that has parity with what you've already done here in your but in this case a graduated filter very very subtle 0.45 I think just a slightly prevent this rather panner area of the sky in a way beckoning the eye of the viewer because you don't want some little bright bits of sky saying hey come and look at me but you're really trying to produce an image with a sky that equated to what you saw it's so rewarding to be able to orchestrate your filtration your exposure as one sort of entire entity on its own made up of different considerations and then when you get the result back in the way that you did with the transparency you looked at the on the lightbox and you said that's what I did and I got it right so this next picture there's two things that play here I suppose aren't there because the panoramic format is notoriously difficult to get right and also you're in Bolivia so you have to get it right there tell me a bit about the story behind this one well there's a certain amount of good fortune involved I have to say firstly altitude sickness which has got nothing whatsoever to do with photography but on that occasion it really did have a lot to do with it in that it was a horrible period of a bad weather coupled with me not feeling well and when I recovered the weather recovered and I got to a little island in the middle of Lake Titicaca where it was and I found this rather delightful little thatched contraption for wonderful better word what was particularly interesting was that there was nothing else and so I wasn't really quite sure what to do I thought that that isn't enough I need something else and the wind was just beginning to get up and then enter stage left we talked about serendipity or perhaps even greater powers dare I say enter stage left was about with a sail and a blue sail not pink not green not yellow but blue the same blue as Lake Titicaca I mean diabolical bit of good fortune and then the relationship was secured between the sale of the boat which is triangular of course and the triangular nature of the little patch and so you're at altitude obviously the light the atmosphere at that sort of altitude is different from when you're photographing down the road in Dorset so again technically speaking did we know what sort of filter did you need for this this kind of scene here well you're absolutely bang-on about that altitude gives phenomenal clarity and it had rain for about five five or six days so a very mild graduated filter is always I think handy to have as well as sometimes a strong one and a polarizing filter but not used too much a polarizer is a bit like alcohol it's it's great at the time but afterwards the next day you don't feel so good so I always think a polarizer shouldn't produce a blue that could so easily become violet or indigo and not reminiscent of a pure blue and so you have to use it with great restraint in fact all filtrations should be done with restraint and with with real care so when you talk about using the polarizer with restraint does that mean you didn't rotate it fully so that it was fully polarized did you not send it back a little bit and I always think it's quite a good idea to take a polarizer and look through it yourself before putting it on the camera because the polarizer will have an effect on something somewhere all of the time the polarizer will have an effect on on any surface that reflects light and it could even be the thatch the top of my head the sail you know even a reed a piece of foliage anything it increases contrast to a degree so it has to be done very judiciously and and yes not all the way it's quite a good idea just to say where will I write that's what my polarizer is doing it at this particular rotation what is it doing elsewhere what effect is it having elsewhere and then trying to find a happy medium yeah and so with the area of graduation be have being just on the clouds or would it have been lower than that because you've got the sail here to consider yes very good point in an Alpine setting a graduated filter gets quite upset but it's perfectly manageable that's one of the reasons that you get a soft grab which is so effective but you're quite right it hasn't clipped the top of the sail so it's just nudged into the top of the of the clouds which thankfully were all on the same pretty well horizontal line so this last shot that we're going to talk about I understand is fairly local to you so how important is that aspect of photography to you to have places nearby that you can revisit in any conditions at any time of year it's very important and I wish I could discover more little secret places I think one thing that's rather magical is finding a particular vantage point that one likes and enjoying seeing it obviously you know in different performances and I have a little phrase that rather like nature suspended in one of its most perfect performances it requires late afternoon sunlight and it's got to be roughly about this time of year you know sort of very very early spring needs low-light because again with any landscape you know and any painter I think would probably feel much the same oblique light is always really handy to try and create shadows and the relationship between highlights and shadows are terribly important again to talk about really that sense of dimension sense of depth we were discussing earlier so shadows play a huge part I think in landscape photography and so what was the light doing on this occasion was it moving quite quickly did you have much time to think really well it was moving quite quickly and that's rather enjoyable when the the configuration of sky and light and landscape underneath and the relationships between all three of them really when you have moving clouds that are going quite fast with wind at high altitudes you can utilize the sky in a in a particular way I still felt that it needed just to be increased the contrast a little bit between the amphitheater feel and the background which again worked very well indeed because I don't think it's obtrusive I think it it was a genuine shadow I don't think you can use a graduated filter of any strength to sort of masquerade as a shadow you know a shadow has to be a shadow and the dark sky has to already be dark you is very very I think foolish to try and and suggest that a sky which had no rain in it did have an is really impossible to produce so you really want to use a graduated filter to enhance what already prevails and just to slightly increase it to a very very mild amount and that it was already a very dark sky full of rain in fact it is raining in the distance over here so I just wanted to be able to use her a grad as we call them very very subtly and actually and there's no harm in this is a very good idea bring it down slightly over her horizon itself yeah and that's very nice to do it in pre putting it on the camera so you just hold it up to your eye with care you just go up and down up and down up and down you familiarize yourself with where it's going to the effect it's going to have and then pop it on it's it's it's so much more rewarding to be able to observe and witness and analyze and determine where you want to place your graduated filters so you cook the meal all in one go you come back in the way that we did with transparencies and you say to your printer print as is print it just like you saw the transparency and I think that's hugely pleasurable it's been really interesting to talk about these pictures and learn a bit more about them so thanks very much you

Channel: LEE Filters

Views: 27,720

Keywords: lee, lee filters, charlie waite, masters of photography, landscape photography, camera filters, nd grads, polariser, Ailsa McWhinnie, xposure

Id: tHgbXsJY5_A

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2016