Over the last few months my photography has changed direction. I have opted for more intimate landscape images, close-ups and woodland scenes. I have also spent some time doing street and urban photography and documenting places I have visited with my camera.
While traditional landscape photography is a type of photography that I love, I have moved away from it for a few reasons.
Firstly, I don’t often get to travel to locations that offer good opportunities for landscape images. The best opportunities close to where I live are for woodland, urban and general photography. I have lots of opportunities to capture close-up, and even macro, images.
My second reason for not doing as much ‘big landscape’ photography is that I don’t feel skilled in this area and am often disappointed in my results. I need to learn techniques such as focus stacking to have a sharp image throughout the whole frame and some post-processing skills to avoid ending up with flat images.
The first reason for not doing landscape photography was remedied recently when I was on a trip to the west of Ireland and encountered many beautiful landscapes, both inland and coastal.
I had no excuse not to at least try to photograph these beautiful places.
I also needed to use this opportunity to upskill.
Here are some images from my trip:
On my journey home I suddenly noticed this beautiful sky and fortunately I was close to a viewpoint. I wasn't the only one with this idea on that evening so I joined many other photographers who were trying to capture nature in all its glory.
The colours in the sky changed many times in the course of the thirty minutes or so that I spent there, then just as quickly, all the colour was gone.
While I may need to improve further in this genre of landscape photography, my efforts on this trip did help me realise that I still enjoy capturing traditional landscape images as I get to spend time in nature and I get to witness the beauty of mountains, lakes, oceans, and skies.
I can never fully capture that beauty in an image but I do get an opportunity to be part of all that the natural world has to offer to the landscape photographer.