My photographic journey (part ii)

I fell in love with photography again as a result of rediscovering Cartier-Bresson and wanting to find a way of capturing something of the flavour of the places we were visiting on our travels. Few things beat a good black and white street shot from a European capital.

Whilst exploring around street photography I also found on YouTube some landscape photographers, Thomas Heaton in particular, and by watching and emulating I started to enjoy being on the top of a hill as the sun set.

Some of the aspects of landscape still enthralled me - the exploring and the solitude, but also recording the light in a panoramic landscape image, although the huge quantity of over-processed shots on sites like 500px and getting to some location that one has researched and worked on, only to find it is the one place everybody else has been for that one shot of a place does become a bit dull after a while.

And so I was puzzled to find myself in the Tate Modern in the summer at an exhibition that I had selected because it was pretty much the only thing on, showing abstract paintings and photographs in close proximity. That sparked my imagination in a new and surprising way, and led me to explore another way of making an image…

My photographic journey (part i)

The first photograph I saw which made a real impression on me was Brett Weston’s beautiful ‘Canal, Holland, 1971’ which was in a photography magazine I came across in my late teens.

Probably around this time, but here my memory is little more vague, I became aware of a two photographs by Cartier-Bresson; the man jumping over a puddle outside the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris and the view looking down on a street with a passing cyclist from Hyeres.

At the time I was given an Olympus OM 20 35mm film camera for a birthday and I loved to shoot with Kodachrome 64. I still have that camera, and it still works, but my photographic output declined rapidly once I had left University.

That is, until….