Digital Photography in Available Light

essential skills: digital photography in available light

Personal expression

The image can act as more than a simple record of a particular landscape at a particular moment
in time. The landscape can be used as a vehicle or as a metaphor for something personal the
photographer wishes to communicate. The American photographer Alfred Stieglitz called a
series of photographs he produced of cloud formations ‘equivalents’, each image representing
an equivalent emotion, idea or concept. The British landscape photographer John Blakemore is
quoted as saying:

‘The camera produces an intense delineation of an external reality, but the camera

also transforms what it “sees”. I seek to make images which function both as fact

and as metaphor, refl ecting both the external world and my inner response to, and

connection with it.’

‘Since 1974, with the stream and seascapes, I had been seeking ways of extending

the photographic moment. Through multiple exposures the making of a photograph

becomes itself a process, a mapping of time produced by the energy of light, an

equivalent to the process of the landscape itself.’ John Blakemore, 1991

Communication of personal ideas through considered use of design, technique, light and symbolic
reference is now a major goal of many landscape photographers working without the constraints of
a commercial brief. Much of the art world now recognizes the capacity of the photographic medium
to hold an emotional charge and convey self expression.

Rocks and Tide, Wales - John Blakemore