In considering this brief I wanted to show what attracted me to live in this landscape. With its rolling hills and big skies. In reading further through the course materials and the books I wanted to get up high to get a perspective I saw in a lot of the artists i looked at. I will explore this more, later in the course.

In this first part of the course we have looked at beauty and the sublime both words are subjective but both have a language within landscape and the arts. I look forward to developing new ways of looking to see this beauty in areas outside of the norm. This language talks of capturing the peace of the landscape in pastoral pictures or capture sublime pictures in untamed weather in a wilderness.

In looking at these exposures i feel their strength is the sharpness showing the detail of the cricket match to the distant hills of Pendle, Ingleborough or Pen y Ghent in equal measure. To improve them I could have used a longer lens to get into the detail however this would have changed the sublime element in the pictures. I am going to develop this further by capturing some details of life for future works.

Technically I realised I wanted a wide shot. I have an 8mm fisheye but this would have been too wide relegating the village to a small area of the exposure and making the hills just a straight line. I also have a 400mm lens but this would have put me into the detail which I felt didn’t fit the idea I had for the brief. So i decided to use my 50mm prime whilst it can be opened to f1.8 this lens is at its best at F5.6 this gives sharpness front to back.

I looked at landscapes by Turner, Gainsborough, Friedrich`s and others but the one i liked most was Paul Nash his work before the first world war is wonderful. It calms me and sums up the English countryside. It has the rolling hills and then the strange trees,  wonderful. I looked at his later work and you can see how the First World War changed him. However he still used trees to tell his story. I see lots of trees in our landscape but don’t want to just use one I want to use them to lead the eye through my shots.

In a lot of the paintings I looked at I could see that the eye of the artist was in midair (discounting Gainsborough) he painted portraits in a landscape. This perspective is possible because a painter uses his/her imagination. Edward Burtynsky puts his camera under a drone. I can do neither with my camera however I can climb a hill then up a pinnacle to gain even more height to achieve the same perspective. My outcome must be one which shows the whole but takes your eye through the picture seeing the details as you go.

Contact Sheets for this assignment.