I don’t want to show you what the landscape looks like, I want to show you how it makes me feel …
Nigel Fawcett, 2019
The first three articles on the angellightphoto blog are a rough attempt to get to the heart of what my photography is all about. You will discover that my work revolves around three related keywords: landscape, wildness, and nature. In this, my first post, I will briefly explore the subject of landscape:
I was about eight years old before we had our first family holiday so, as a small boy growing up in coastal Essex, my knowledge of the landscape was limited to the flat marshy estuaries near my home, and their associated saltings and mudflats.
Seeing the landscape of the wider world came step by step.
Those first holidays only took me as far as the South Downs and the Isle of Wight. But, after the flat lands of Essex, the rolling chalk hills of Sussex and the IOW seemed like mountains to me.
By the time I was in my teens, we’d ventured as far as the Gower Peninsular and, eventually, made it to North Wales and the Lake District. My first real mountains. Fell walking, mountaineering, and rock-climbing became my passion.
Since those days, I’ve travelled the world — always with my camera — and have come to love and respect the amazing breadth of landscape that our beautiful, but fragile, planet has to offer. Every type of landscape is unique. We, as photographers, have a duty to capture images that are capable of evoking the same kind of emotions in others that we experience ourselves when we take them.
Achieving this, is certainly easier when we remember that, whatever landscape we find ourselves in, what we see is so much more than just geography or geology. If we take a moment to look around, then we start to notice how such factors as texture, colour, weather, latitude, light, shade, and altitude, all affect the mood of the landscape. It is through getting to know how the environment interacts with the landscape that we get to know its nature. Gaining an understanding of how this intimate knowledge affects photography is the catalyst that turns the ordinary everyday into the memorable and exceptional.
Capturing the nature of the landscape is, above all else, my goal when it comes to photographing the landscape of this incredibly beautiful planet that we live on. For me, this means more than just recording its tame side. It means capturing its spirit. Its wild side. Its very soul.
