The Art of Landscape Photography

hello and welcome everybody to today's talk about the art of landscape photography my name is martin kluge and i'm here as a representative of the art photography gallery in cape town and i'm really excited today to have two very successful photographers with me who work out of cape town let me introduce first jorge milan landscape photographer welcome and my friend gallery owner photographer artist you name it martin osner welcome thank you good i'm very good um gentlemen today's talk is fascinating for me before because i as a fellow photographer have never really tapped into the big world of landscape photography but you guys have and you are actively producing and selling so what i would like to do today is um uncover your both of your approaches to this kind of art and find out the underlying dna of both of your works side by side if that makes any sense sure just before we start we will just for the audience we will not actually go very deeply into technical questions regarding camera equipments and settings but rather focus on the artistic process of the behind the work also because of we have a lot of art lovers and clients watching so it's not that's not getting too technical um gentlemen before we dive in the deep end of this conversation uh martin i just wanted to um explain that you explain your work relationship how do you guys meet i mean a lot of people of the audience have never been to your beautiful galleries they haven't seen your work life where you represent your work but also work and other artists can you just tell us how you met yeah with pleasure button i um for a while now i've been aware of how hot's work in fact i was introduced to his work through my daughter samantha she follows hohart's on social media and very often she would be coming to me and say you must see the work that that milan is posting and she would show me and it was impressive and so on but i didn't think that much about it and then uh i also teach photography and and so does ho hot and and we obviously have students who have been you know with both of us yeah and i'd be teaching a course and i'll be saying a few things and the student would say to me no no that's that's not what holghardt says you know so so his name was now coming up in the lecture room as well and um i think i've heard it was it was at the exhibition at the end of of last year that we met you what came through to have a look at the work and we finally got to meet face-to-face and it wasn't it was shortly after that that we invited him into the circle of trust and we invited him into to be represented by our gallery and and that's where we are today great okay let's start the journey you told me in the beginning um you are not shooting any other subject matter which is really interesting for me so how where did landscape photography start for you i think my love of landscape photography originated mainly from my dad and his brothers being obsessed with plants but specifically indigenous flora so all of our holidays where most people would go to either the sea or they would go to wildlife parks all of our holidays centered in some way around chasing flowers so we would also go to parks and wilderness areas but it was more as i said landscape oriented then particularly wildlife oriented and i'm also a major introvert so i like shooting things that can't talk back to me so landscapes you know i've found a natural inclination towards landscapes and where photography started for me towards the end of high school i really loved playing with the camera when we were on holidays and at the end of high school i would say to my dad you know i'd like to go and study photography and he laughed at me and so when first year came i found myself in a vsc in the engineering field and i proved to my dad how quickly i could drop out he then admitted defeat and he bought me a dslr camera which back then was a canon 400d you know it was like the kit camera you could find at a macro or a game store and he enrolled me in a part-time course and upon first inspection of the materials i just saw well it's full of spelling mistakes so it's probably going to be full of technical mistakes and so i went on to the internet and i saw well here's all of this information in so much more detail and it's all for free so i spent two or three years um where i would just shoot sunset every single day on some beach or a mountain somewhere in the western cape and i'd spend all the rest of my time just posting to online forums reading our park and improve my photography and here we are 13 years later yeah it's interesting for me because it's the other way around i shoot people and i can direct it but you can't directly unscathed that's the reason why i work with people martin this this question is a bit more difficult to ask you because you your work is so varied i mean you shoot in so many different disciplines so let me ask it differently why do you shoot landscape photography so i was involved a lot of my career in studio photography photographing boring things that people wanted to use for marketing and i spent a lot of my time in the studio under controlled lighting so when i made a decision to go into fine art photography the very first thing i did was to get outdoors as you know my work is very varied and i was a liked by sean o'toole the art critic when he looked at my work he described my my portfolio as a as a shop a sweet shop when you walk into a sweet shop and you get licorice all sorts on one side and you get toffee apples on the other side and he said it's all sort of you know very vibrant all over the place but he said at the end of the day it tends to tie up together and in fact that was actually one of the the that was one of the things about opening a gallery at that stage which proved to be successful was the fact that there was variety so so landscape is just part of one of the genres that i shoot but if there is many you are right [Music] all right this question is for both of you especially in this time of covet 19 and travel restrictions where people literally can have a journey only in their head do you think that landscape photography will get even more relevant now what do you how do you feel i think so yes you know um the the main thing is that now that we're locked up in our homes i mean we can move about a bit um now but during the hard lockdown i think that people really realized how important nature is and how much we appreciate nature and not being allowed to go into nature just for a month i know it drove me completely crazy and i think landscape photography all of a sudden people realize that it's it's the most incredible way to bring nature into your home and get the effect that nature has on you without being able to get out there and is that what you want to capture yes i would say you know martin uh to give some context to the viewers we're here in heart bay where martin and martin live if you have had a bad day do you ever go out onto chapel and speak to look in the ocean sure landscapes and beautiful natural scenery has an incredible effect on the human psyche it lifts our mood it makes us it calms us down it soothes us or soothes us and that's just at any moment in time you know if you go out in the middle of the day when the light isn't that great but there are special moments when the light and the weather and everything just lines up perfectly and moments like that can have us leave a significant mark on the viewer you know we all have stories of when i was 17 i went here or there and it was the most incredible sunset ever and my goal is to capture that moments like that now the problem is that we experience moments like that with all of our senses we can see and hear the ocean you can taste the salt in the air you can smell the flora you can feel the waves crashing against the cliffs but when you take a photo of that you're dealing with only a two-dimensional medium that you experience with only one sense vision but if the photographer does everything absolutely perfectly it's possible to capture all of those experiences a simple example would be you can use slow shutter speed to blur the grass thereby capturing the wind if there's a lot of spray hanging above the surf and the sunlight catches it just right you it's possible through nostalgia and memory when a person views that photo that it can trigger certain emotions that can trigger those senses again and you can experience that moment and those places through a photo and the person doesn't have to have been to say heartbay you can have a similar memory from somewhere on the californian coast and the photo can awaken those memories that you have of you know a different place and that i would say is my goal is to to capture images like that landscape photos the purpose should be to be able to experience a place without having been there if i can just come in there just regarding this question do you know i have never seen our nature walk so busy ever the cars are lined up like you would not believe so i think that i i agree that that sense has been heightened for sure and and landscape photography in any case is is actually one of the most popular genres that there is it doesn't even have to fight for that position it's already there so it's even going to become more popular both from the buyer's point of view as well from the photographer's point of view is that why you think that people invest into landscape photography with art i think uh you know landscapes right through the history of of art in all different mediums has always been a popular genre always and you know and if you look at why that is i think it's because you're inviting nature into your home so so you know the the the positive thoughts that uh that we're talking about that positive energy that you that it tends to give that those memories of wonderful places that either you remember you were at all you wish to go to visit it does all of that and the bigger they printed the better they feel like quite realistic so we get quite a few people coming through our gallery when they come and they look around and if you know you say can i help you is this something you're looking for very often they're looking for a beautiful landscape they might say it needs to be desert or it needs to be ocean or it needs to be forest and they may have an idea but it's landscape okay then i must ask you this when i stand in front of your heart both of you are i cannot but wonder how much photoshop does go into this kind of work great question in my particular style of photography i'm trying to represent nature and document nature special moments of nature and on the one side we have the scene that nature gives us and on the other side we have the camera trying to capture it and sometimes the camera gets very very close to the original scene and sometimes it doesn't get quite so close we've got some examples of the waterfall is a simple point where the the scene was captured by the camera very very close to what it looked like in reality other examples like the dragonsburg image was not quite so close to the reality and there it takes a significant amount of contrast and color to get closer to it you know we may think that every time a new camera is released that the technology is incredible but it is still so far off human vision that it requires different amounts of photoshop and different photos but the goal is to represent nature honestly and we always i always want to do as little as possible but sometimes you need to do a fair amount of photoshop martin i know your answer will be different i don't want to fence it here so i'm going to be quite clear on this so i 100 agree that if you're photographing an area where it is recognizable and you're bringing that forward and delivering that to the viewer then i think your your your limitation to your to photoshop would be based on developing just like the digital darkroom days i sorry like the the chemical darkroom day so it could be just like that where you were coming to the computer and you would actually develop that picture up to the best that it can deliver but no more than that so i understand that you don't want to see table mountain upside down and things like that however if i can cross over onto the other end of the the fence and i can just say in my world of art photography photoshop is one of the greatest tools that that we have it's undermined today because everybody uses the or a lot of people use the word photoshop as if you're cheating so if they see and even if it's a really interesting picture and it's a it's a you know it's it's they'll come to you and they'll say has that been photoshopped and my answer there is yes it's been photoshopped beautifully because because photoshop is a wonderful tool for photo editing but it depends on what your end goal is so creatively yes there's a lot of photoshop going on in certain of the images but not all yeah while we're talking about that maybe just briefly talk about let's talk about equipment briefly i thought we weren't going to do this but you have to just a little bit so do you have any favorite equipment martin that you use i'm gonna i'm gonna do i'm gonna do the good thing here the and i'm going to hand this over to ho hot again and then i will give you my answer um okay i will give the audience a satisfactory answer and martin can um give the philosophical answer so i shoot on fuji but i don't think it matters what you shoot on what matters is the process the intent in the case of landscape photography the landscape the light you know it's everything that you do with the camera it's not the camera itself yeah exactly i use a camera that works and i'm not prepared to go much further than that because i think it's i think too much emphasis gets put on the equipment and not on the and not on the artistic ability and technical ability of the photographer or artist so it's the same as asking a painter tell me which brushes do you use what oil do you use what acrylic do you use that doesn't matter what you ask is about the the actual artwork itself and photography should be no different as long as it works yeah yeah that's right i agree all right then maybe more importantly how do you think digital photography has influenced your work and and does it matter i suppose in a way it doesn't really matter because i've been you know i've come from right through film photography all the way into digital and nothing really has changed the photographic process still remains the same but i think the one thing that digital certainly has done for me it's allowed me to explore more because it's cheaper so you can take photographs and delete them as donate them back to cyberspace and try all over again whereas with film you would always count your your money and always double check and by the time you've got your phone developed and got it back you didn't even know whether they were yours in the first place so so i think film photography or digital photography has certainly allowed one to explore a lot more and and that it's certainly done for me okay let's maybe talk a little bit about social media versus printing um first of all you have a lot of followers on instagram do you think it really matters and it reflects in the sales and second question would be do you shoot specifically for the one or the other that's a good question um and i am currently in the process i would say i'm in the process of trying to switch more to shooting for print than for social media now the the first issue is that if you think you know about instagram the explore tab we have all of those little thumbnails where the image is maybe that size you're trying to compete for people's attention in that little space if they open the image up then you've got that much space but all in all people are you know investing all of this time and effort to present this whole art form that big and there's a certain recipe that works for that size it is big bold lines usually shot on a wide angle lens bright colors which can be achieved by either chasing pink sunsets or by over saturating everything and editing and the problem is that if you blow that up to a massive size and you put it in a beautiful contemporary space with natural colors it just looks kitsch and overpowering now the image that would look more beautiful in that contemporary space would usually have more subtle colors would be rich in texture and detail and conversely when you shrink that down to that size it completely disappears so the trend that i've seen is that photographers who have massive social media followings let's call it more than 100 000 they don't really sell prints whether they've tried or not i don't know but you don't see them selling prints and again conversely the photographers who are very successful at selling limited edition prints at premium prices often have little to no social media following so it looks like two entirely different industries if i had to choose between getting 10 000 likes on a photo versus hanging in a gallery and getting one sale i would take the one sale any day so it's two very different industries but you know social media feels a bit superficial to me whereas the whole gallery and printing thing feels like an authentic enjoyment and engagement with the art okay while we're on the subject martin i have a really good question already from the audience which fits in here very nicely do you think showing your work on social media undermines its value in the gallery space no not at all no i think social media is a wonderful tool for that again you know how has mentioned that certain pictures do better on social media but but certainly in our gallery space we we often get inquiries because of of you know photographs posted on instagram or facebook or what have you what we do tend to do though is we try to to show what the print looks like in that contemporary home where you actually see the end result rather than just the picture and that normally helps a lot as well that people can see and and appreciate the value of what a great landscape photograph will do gives you a feeling of the space yes and how you can use it as well yeah and normally simplicity breeds success so yeah um so but do people literally buy from insta of instagram yes yes absolutely we do make sales a lot of our overseas clients who have never been into our gallery do place orders but you know the end of the day the difference between what you see on a social media post to what you see in real life is like chalk and cheese and and that emotional contact when you come into contact with something in a gallery where you see the quality you see the size you see the intention it's much easier to actually make a purchase because you you yeah it's overwhelming and youtube you've just got to have that but i do find people and and many times people actually buy straight off the website or straight off the online shop when that printer arrives with them and they unroll it for the first time at the picture frame or you know and get to see it we get we get those sort of comments where they say oh my god it is far better than what i ever imagined it to be and that's the reality of the print there is no substitute for it no substitute at all um many people have a good camera today and shoot landscapes so how do you manage to separate yourself i've found over the years that you know there are various trends that evolve and they usually last about two or three years each and every time that i've tried to chase a trend to try and you know stay on the cutting edge that when that trend fades away i've got two or three years of work where i altered my shooting style and i altered my editing style because nowadays the trends are a lot to do with editing where all of a sudden two to three years work is completely outdated and you have to go back and re-edit all of that and i found that the work that i did while i was not chasing a trend when that train fades away that work is still relevant there may be highs and lows where if you don't chase the trend and there is something that's very trendy your work sort of falls to the back but the moment that things go back to normal and people are bored of a trend then you're at the cutting edge again so i think that the main thing i've learned over the last 13 years particularly with landscape photography is stay true to nature because nature will never go out of fashion you know nature is always trending and particularly in a day and age where we are destroying more and more of nature the pristine wilderness that we have left just becomes more and more popular and trendy so yeah i found that stay true to nature and your work will always be relevant yeah and and martin um how do you know when you have a half shot at print that will be released on a gallery wall what makes you decide well i think first of all my my workflow's a little bit different to to many so let's start with you out there shooting and i suppose your question is how do you know at that point that is actually i think it's that little feeling you get in your tummy that that little like the little butterfly thing that says oh my god don't we screw this one up because you just you just know you're on to something the light has come together it's feeling magic everything is starting to work so so that would be the one thing that would put you into sort of okay watch out for this one this is this this could be one but but then i lock my pictures away in any case for at least six months when i when i get back from a shoot because i tend to find the emotions are too high so the fact that you were climbed up halfway up a mountain the fact that you made it certainly at my age and all of that tends to now play a role and you look at the picture and it's got extra value but once that subsided maybe the picture doesn't have that value so so at that point at that point yeah tip yeah yeah because i'm over excited after you shoot and sit down the next day and then you're yeah you're right and yeah do you also get that feeling yeah it's a little bit like being in love you know you you know my my main thing is when i'm on a trip and i'm lying in bed and i keep looking at the images then i know that it is something special but what martin says is 100 true you know sometimes you're so obsessed and sentimental over the effort that you put into the photo but particularly when dealing with nature sometimes you can shoot a place ten times and the light will just screw you um and you think you've gotten something amazing because of all the effort you've put in but it's not special and just um there are two elements the one is giving a time for all of those emotions to fade away and the other one is to to have a good um critic who can tell you you're being emotional that photo sucks yeah that would have been my next question how do you handle critique because i when i studied i said that before to you it was so valuable you know to have the other artists discussion with them and and have the influence of other artists and i think that was very very valuable um so how do you handle critique are you asking me yes i mean look i first first of all being involved in in the in this you know sort of the gallery space where you put your work up on the wall for the public to see the public has become my ultimate critic and they if they like it they're usually interested and they will buy one or they'll give you a comment if they don't like it they walk right past and if enough people walk right past then then perhaps there's something there but but so critique from that point of view it's i've sort of got used to that but i do have my go-to person who's of course fond of lender great landscape photographer he he has got a very good eye and he's brutally honest in fact too honest but so what i would do is i would send him maybe my top 12 what i think from a trip and i would leave it with him and he would take a long time to to come back and then one day i get the call to say uh which is my friend are you sitting down and i knew you know you know okay here it comes and you listen but you still do not actually agree because that emotion still comes back but normally you know you know what a couple of weeks later a month later a year later two years later sanity sort of prevails and you morally start agreeing but you need that you need that person who can tell you that and i'm sure you find the same yeah you know one of the most sad things nowadays especially when i'm trying to teach students is to try and get them to have someone to go to full critique when i started out 11 12 years ago the process was take a photo put it online and all of the photographic communities had a healthy agreement that you would receive constructive criticism on your photos and nowadays no one allows that anymore if you critique someone's photo even in a positive way on facebook or instagram you get blocked from their account so i also have a friend like of course alex he's a british guy and as as martin says you almost need someone who's too honest like to the point where they lack social text who will just tell it to you as it is you know if there's anything wrong with that photo they will say it and you will go back to the drawing board but that is just in producing digital photos and there's as martin says the next level where you print it and you hang it on the wall oh yes and the potential by the potential buyer is the ultimate critic if they love it they will buy it if they do not love it you know if they like it they'll look at it comment on it but it's the people who just walk right past that this is a difficult poll to swallow and i'm i'm newer to the process whereas martin has decades of experience with that uh but yeah but there's still vulnerability which yeah there is and i said i want to also mention that the print is the ultimate critic as well so let me bring that in here now the moment you put ink on paper you would i'm sure you experienced this as well but the moment you print something and you look at it it's the ultimate policeman it shows you everything you did right but it flashes everything you did wrong right down to the smallest area that you made in your processing it will show it to you and i think that's the one thing that i certainly you know when i talk about photographers coming into the industry or people wanting to get into photography there is just so many that shoot pictures and they live on cyberspace and they never really ever get to hang on a wall where they can be seen in all all their fame and glory and i think that's quite sad yeah and it is such a nice feeling as well if you frame your own artwork oh you haven't made a mistake then it's like if you if you've made a mistake it's a very expensive feeling so do you martin i mean this is also a question for both of you but do you follow the rules or guidelines when it comes to composition i see you very carefully use the word guidelines and well done to you now look i think they're very important but as you know i i would rather not call it a rule because i tend to find a rule as binding yeah so if you want to change a rule you've got to call in a whole group of people and you've got to vote against it and then a new rule replaces that but it's still a rule so i think a guideline is probably a better a better way and and i think also these guidelines certainly they work i don't know if you agree with me but they actually do work and that's because they've been passed down through art through ages so there's certain things that we know that if we do we're going to have a better chance of actually presenting our work before public so i think they need to be respected again i'll use course here as an example one day when we were discussing this over a bottle of wine he said to me and i've never forgotten this he said to me as far as it comes to the rules of composition he said it's pretty much like like the law he said if you if you if you live by the law you'll sorry live by the law you will be judged by the law and he said so he would rather respect the law but live under grace and i think that's such a such a nice way of tying it up so i think if you want to be creative you want to make your your own name you want to build your own sort of feel to the picture that's fine but just you know respect those guidelines you know many people say they want to be revolutionaries when it comes to composition they want to rewrite the history books of composition well that might be true but perhaps you need to just go and find out and learn what you are wrote yes what you are revolting against before you actually go and create this revolution yeah i think it's a good idea and for you rules guidelines um i think what martin said is very important that people need to figure out what they want to revolt against at first you know the interesting thing for me was that because i was self-taught i didn't read up so much in composition it was only when i had to start teaching people that i saw well okay everything that's written here this in this book is what i've been doing the whole time uh and i think anyone who gets to a point where they can make a living from photography they have an inherent talent for composition you know and people see it as this set of rules that someone established that you have to follow and i don't think that is what happened i think that people with a talent for composition and for art follow certain natural guidelines for design and people analyzed that and figured it out and established the rules of composition according to what was naturally happening and and it's exactly as martin says and i see it and a lot of people they want to break the rules before they know what the rules are you have to master the rules in order to break them there's always a technical justification according to a rule for why you can break the rule either through space negative space or symmetry or some rule like that uh so the rules are very important they can be broken but you need to understand what it is that you are breaking yeah i understand that's it's i also put in a question here from the audience i've got earlier but i think it fits here quite nicely did you always have an eye for framing a landscape or is it developing by continuously shooting if you can answer that i think there's a foundation of natural sense for composition there's definitely um you know i think people have biases that you have a foundation and then you have certain biases that drive you in the wrong direction where you do need a little bit of feedback and it comes back to having a critic to tell you you could have composed that in a better way or you know maybe you should have shot wider or tighter there's an element that doesn't add to the narrative of that photo so you know people are born with or whether it's natural nurture but you have a certain foundation and you need to nurture it add to it and get a critique on it but then again there's a dangerously fine line of being too influenced by other people and losing your natural style but yes develop it and get feedback on it okay martin do you do you go out and shoot for an art collection specifically and what's your approach there do you have a specific idea no i'm quite strange when it comes to that i i've always said that i'm a painter trapped in a photographer's body but because of that i have maybe 20 30 projects going on in my head all at once so no i don't do that i tend that that tends to put me in a controlling position and when i try to control it i mess it up so i would rather go and shoot with an open slate and say okay what is there here that i can find what is there that talks to me photograph that and then if i see something that is starting to work i say oh yeah that's beautiful that we're going to put into the boundary line collection you know or that's going into complex simplicity and i've always been said that the names i give photographs are really good in comparison to what i shoot so that's one of my critics who told me that so but that so that's all running around in my head at one given time so no not at all so do you choose in a specific location for instance where you go and say okay well i do i do a bit of homework on a location to find out that that you know that space is actually a nice area to go and shoot and and i try not to visit the same location twice because i tend to find that that again will put me in a position where i'm going in trying to create something that i already know is possible because i want to rather just respond to what is there so um you know the one little trick i suppose i shouldn't really be even discussing this but the one little trick and you must remember i'm involved in art photography not just landscape photography so so i think i think i'm looking at it from a broader spectrum but if i get to a little town the first place you go and ask for for opinion on what is in the area what they to find is the pub the barman knows everything absolutely everything you take your phone you say this is what i do check have a look have a look is there anything around here that looks like this and and especially like that old abandoned collection you say yes this farmer's gotta that and this and you know suddenly you start to understand the area a bit and you know where to start go looking and hunting interesting yeah and i passed that on to you with another question on top of that because it fits and all together so how do you feel about other prints shot from the same location well there's a touchy subject firstly you know when i started when i or when i was exploring a lot i was in a very lucky position that there weren't many landscape photographers in south africa if you compare it to say england where every single rock has been photographed from every angle and so i was able to through not too much effort discover a lot of the iconic places in south africa particularly on the coastline and there are a lot of people who go out and take that same photo and it's not a it's not a nice feeling if people go and you know there's a little bit of a humbling feeling and there's a little bit of a they're plagiarizing me feeling but i am equally guilty of going and shooting a lot of places that other people shot before me and martin had a you know he was making a point about all art is influenced by some other art so we're very lucky in africa that we still have so many places that can be discovered uh and i always try to say to people you know try and make an effort to find something unique because there's it's there's a certain sense of exploration and discovery that excites us and seeing a new location for the first time if you're the first person to photograph something there is a lot of value to that in showing people a place for the first time so it's worth the effort but most of the time or i think it's the same as with the compositional rules you can't go and break the rules if you haven't mastered them first so go and learn the technical side first at the iconic locations and then try to look for something new yeah i think that's just uh you know we were talking uh earlier before the actual show we were talking about exactly this and there is a wonderful book called steal like an artist yeah it's uh and i'd forgive me but i can't remember the author's name but you'll be able to be able to find it on the internet and it talks about act exactly that is is is going and getting the best out of everything but then taking all of that and making it your own so i think when somebody goes and copies a composition from corner to corner from you know trying to make something almost the same or even better than the original person i suppose there i would have a little bit of an issue because i think one can make a make a as an attempt to actually make it your own but you but at a certain point you've got to break away from that fold and you've got to go and and try to do something yourself yeah what i mentioned earlier about you know experiencing a landscape and then trying to capture it that i believe is the original organic process with landscape photography with landscape paintings before that is you go and spend time there the landscape makes an impression on you and you try to communicate that to the viewer and the problem that we have with photography being so popular is that i think 90 of landscape photos being taken there's none of that organic process people are just trying to copy a photo that they've seen and as modern says there are varying degrees on it you know we may see a location that we really love go to it and then try to find out an interpreted interpretation of it and the other side is i've seen people going to dateflay namibia and they have a print or the photo on their ipad and they go and they shuffle around and they look until they find that exact composition where there is zero creative process involved and and that's not right and over the years i've had luck with various locations where i've gone to a place that i saw photo of got something slightly different and there are other places like date flay where i was lucky enough to go there for the first time now i arrived at this place you think how the hell am i going to get a unique shot and i thought i'm not going to so let me rather just enjoy the place so i walked past the trees i just found a place to chill against the dune when everyone was done shooting i got up i walked to when i saw here's this amazing pattern in the clay pan and i photographed that and that turned out even to this day i think i shot it nine years ago it's still one of my most popular photos um but sometimes you stumble upon unique locations with a bit of luck other times it takes a lot of hard work but what i what i think i can close that off on is it is so worth the effort finding a unique location that no one has shot it's it is extremely rewarding and that's why i think one of the important lessons i can pass along is for people to stop copying other shots and try and find something unique and make it their own so so one of the greatest photographers that ever walked this planet mr ansel adams said if ever you want to learn how to take a good photograph learn where to place your camera but he didn't say place your camera exactly where somebody else did okay yeah okay maybe let's do a quick game some some quick questions quick answers um very easy so if you had a choice film or digital alright i'm going to throw this back at you so so if you had a choice strawberries and cream which one would you prefer both you just answered my question okay okay for you if i could get someone to do all of the development and the scanning and the cleaning and the fullness free then full otherwise digital sorry digital all right compromise and get the shot or walk away walk away i think that's uh i think certainly yeah no walk away come back on another day always walk away don't compromise you will have to sleep with that compromise it's not comfortable never sleep with a compromise evening or morning light um i always argue with people that it makes no difference if they try to tell me that the morning is this or the evening is that they are definitely certain factors involved but um i'm gonna i'm gonna stay uh on the fence here and so it doesn't matter evening life i think uh evening like for me tends to linger longer it seems to stay around a bit longer and also i think at the end of the day there's a lot more dust and pollution or whatever in the sky and so the light tends to be a little bit warmer but yeah i won't finish it i'm gonna go evening all right overriding factor composition or light i'm gonna sit on the fence again both equally important sure okay you're putting me in such a predicament but it's fine no light definitely light i think light is the secret ingredient in in great landscape photographs and sometimes composition needs to be made around what's happening with lighting so light for me comes first composition second all right interesting sharp or blurred rather a blurred photo of a good concept than the other way around yeah because some people are far too obsessed with the technical side and they completely neglect the artistic artist exciting you have perfectly focused and exposed photos of something so mundane yeah we come back to mr adams here who said that there's nothing he likes worse than than seeing a sharp picture of a fuzzy concept and i shoot a lot of fuzzy concepts so yeah but you shoot a lot but but let me also say it's one or the other so there's no fence sitting here when it comes to yeah so you've got you know a picture that was meant to be sharp which is slightly bird is an error so either you do a proper job at blurring and use that artistically or you do a proper job at shooting at shop yeah yeah okay um location international or local and why oh local local i think just even as an artist it's just it's a lot easier to work locally where you know your heritage is and you understand everything i have shot a little bit overseas and i i think probably my most successful country where i've actually shot a little bit of work is scotland but i tend to find it it's absolutely beautiful it's breathtaking but it feels very uh where do you put a chocolate boxy to me it's almost too perfect and i think our landscape over here is just so diverse and so rugged uh it just it for me it just i'd rather shoot local with your iceland pictures i saw them they're amazing thank you um you know if you're trying to compete on a global stage we may think you're in cape town you go to blowbox strand and you see another three photographers and i've got a lot of competition but you go to a place like iceland to the beach with a with the glacial ice on it and on the morning with terrible weather there are 50 photographers there all with a big tripod filter system serious photographers last two hours in patagonia and we had the same thing it was this perfect morning it's a two hour uphill hike from town and there were about 50 photographers there that went to that effort to capture that place and and it ties in again to what i said earlier about the merit of finding a unique landscape that no one has ever seen before and in africa we have that in crazy abundance you know things have changed a lot over the last 10 years with it becoming such a popular hobby but we still have so much if we look at namibia you know everyone's so obsessed with sources flay that they just go there and all around it you have these like a just a treasure trove of unique shots waiting to be discovered so for me locally definitely and i traveled a lot over the last 10 years and the feedback that i got from those photos just tell me focus on africa because the africa photos just get so much more attention from the global community all right last one of the quick questions with the not so short answers do you shoot for yourself or for an audience that might buy do you know i think the only time i shoot for an audience is when i'm trying to create work for the gallery for visitors who who come to cape town who come to south africa then i have in mind maybe iconic places of cave town or iconic places that they may would that they would like a photograph but but that's to put bread on the table more than anything else but besides that no absolutely not i think that again comes down to the controlling factor and then you go in trying to actually shoot for something that you think you should be getting and you're missing what's actually happening so while you're shooting this way everything's happening behind you and you're missing it so no not with an audience no i photograph purely for for myself and i'll decide later how i'm going to work with those images you're right i would say you know it's it's both a blessing and a curse is that everyone who does landscape photography as a hobby so many of them give the images away for free that they've devalued landscape photos so whereas ten years ago i used to make a lot of money from my landscape photos and i had to shoot for clients and what the market demands and as that happened both martin and i switched over more to teaching but what that's done that's wonderful is that i don't make money from my photos anymore and because of that i can shoot whatever the hell i want so i find that i'm very seldom shooting for anything that anyone specifically wants i'm shooting 100 what i want to um and that that has been a wonderful liberation over the last few years i will bet you anything you want when you look back in the years to come at your career it's at that time that your best work has come yeah i'll bet you [Music] and um we got two more really nice questions from the audience the one is for both of you do you set goals for yourself and do you have a bucket list of locations or do you chase the light okay i also have a little black book location some i have not been to and i have to go to some of places that i've saw on trips and i didn't get the light and i need to go back to so you know in terms of chasing the light you plan a trip in the right season you go to the place and you always budget a bit of time at each location to work with the variable of light so whereas you know there's a big element of chasing the light it's more like sitting around and waiting for the light so it's a very passive process of chasing the light but but yes there are many locations that i go back to but you'll often find that you know the first time you saw a location it wasn't a specific type of light you go there and now you get completely different lights perhaps what you often have is you are planning to shoot a shot in that direction and then the magic happens in that direction and you end up finding something completely different at the same location so sometimes nature throws you a curveball and you catch it and by random luck you get an amazing shot so sometimes it's planned sometimes it's luck but yes there are so there's definitely a bucket list of locations yeah also like at least i try not to visit the same location twice as i've said i tend to find that i get a little bit jaded if i do that so i like to go in to a situation which i haven't seen and i think you see it with new eyes it's almost like i don't know if you've been at home for a long period of time like we have in lockdown you get so used to what's in your home that you don't really see it and then you maybe go away on a holiday and you come back a month or two later or if you're that lucky and you walk in and suddenly you notice you know what the pot blonde is actually dead and the color yellow that i painted on the wall is like extremely bad and now you see these things for what they are so i tend to find in my photography that's the sort of approach i prefer is once you see things with new eyes and you haven't seen them before i think my creativity sort of works better there all right so then we have one last question for you guys from tyrone he said i know we don't want to talk too much about gear but have you ever got a new piece of equipment that excited you so much for a shoot yes i would say every time that i get a you know that i only upgrade gear about every five or six years but every time it's such a revolutionary change that you know you're capturing so much detail and the first thing i think is well i can print this so much bigger and there will be so much more detail on the print and then every time that does give me a bit of a boost to it sort of gives me a little you know push to go out and get back there it does really motivate me to some extent it's nothing like the smell of a new camera just even when you open the box it's a special moment so so i think that that happens naturally regardless and um one more thing what's your most successful print or prince the the waterfall definitely the waterfall yes yeah yeah i must say i i really enjoy that shot of yours very much and and now that we're representing your work it's actually that photograph and the one in sources flay that you spoke about with the upside down tree it looks like an upside or tree laying down those two get the most amount of views so quite crazy now i think for me the uh funny enough the most successful print in the gallery of mine is an abstract photograph yeah and it's it's a complete and pure abstract okay forgive me but the name is long it's analogies and anthology and i can hardly even spell it but but you did not know it's a photograph of the underside of fishing boats which i've put into uh which are putting to photo montage to look like an old dutch harbour with little inlets coming in and yachts floating around you've got to have a little bit of creativity maybe a couple of glasses of wine and you get to see it but that's actually has been the number one selling print and the second which is special to me is is the abandoned number one which started off that whole abandoned collection so yeah yeah and that uh with the old um the car on the pole and yeah yeah yeah so i think that has always remained special to me and is there um a measure of success for your landscape photography well i would say definitely if someone buys the print then it's been successful for me there's there's so much emotion involved as we spoke about you know putting a lot of work and emotion into a photo we think that that is the measure of success and we tie a lot of emotion to a photo because of that but i think at the end of the day you know if someone is willing to spend the money to put it up on their wall and look at it for 10 years or put it in a drawer and hope that it appreciates some value then i would say that's the ultimate measure of success yeah i agree it's always a humbling experience always unbringing experience when somebody invests in something that you have done which you love doing what next for you guys what can we look forward to um i've been very distracted over the last few years with another business for everyone who does photography as a hobby and that is finally getting to the point where someone else is doing most of the work so i haven't been doing much in the way of original shooting over the last few years and my bucket list book has gotten a lot longer and i'm looking forward to getting back to shooting a lot of original work and then in the new partnership with martin i'm really really looking forward to not just you know when i get a new photo post it on social media like like like and it's gone and forgotten in cyberspace but rather printing it putting it on a wall and inviting people to come and look at the print improper lighting in the proper size yeah that's a very exciting prospect for me okay martin oh we've um we are moving our gallery we're actually in the process of moving our gallery from green point now to woodstock got a beautiful location in woodstock on the main street so we're busy shop fitting at the moment getting the gallery space ready i'm hoping to do a show of her heart's work we tried to do that before covert turned up but that didn't help us so once this is all blown over and we're able to return back to some sort of normality we'd like to give give that show not be excited about that and then of course the abandoned book that you know we did a short print run and then if we decided to pull it off it wasn't actually exactly what i wanted so we were close now to to printing and then launching the book so between the gallery and the book how hot's work and whatever covert 19 has to still offer that's what's next great guys thank you so much good luck pokhart with you i will definitely be there and good luck to you we will always stay in contact and maybe just for everyone out there have a look at the website there's some hopefully nice discussions coming on thank you so much for joining us and have a good day [Music] you

Channel: Martin Osner

Views: 12,461

Keywords: Landscape Photography, Landscape photography art, Landscape photography prints, Landscape photography prints for sale, Martin Osner, Hougaard Malan, Fine art photography, Landscape wall art, Landscape photography photo art, Wall art, Photo art, Landscape photography discussion, Artist discussion, learn photography, photography, south africa, gallery, art gallery

Id: be0bpmCIu84

Length: 57min 34sec (3454 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020