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Landscape Photographer of the Year: Collection 14

Obregon Obregon

Is from: Southold, US
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Mon 17-Jan-22 09:17 AM | edited Mon 17-Jan-22 11:43 AM by Obregon
Landscape Photographer of the Year: Collection 14 by Charlie Waite

It’s easy to take a landscape photograph. All you have to do is press a button on a camera. It’s much harder to find a landscape photograph.

The Landscape Photographer of the Year contest is run by Charlie Waite every year. The requirements are for landscapes taken in Great Britain within the last five years. The best images for each year are published in a book.

Most of the pictures in this book show a great deal of planning. (A few seemed to be taken by people out on a walk along with a camera.) I imagine the better landscape photographers discovering a great piece of terrain; imagining what it would look like if the sun was at a particular position in the sky; picturing what weather would make a better picture (I like a dappled light peeking through the clouds onto a hillside); and then waking up after reading the weather report, hiking to the place they had picked and waiting until things were what they pictured, or at least as close to it as possible.

The problem with contests is that you can only pick what is submitted, and at least for this contest, the judges have to pick enough pictures to fill a book. (Maybe that’s why I consider some of the pictures in this book to not even be landscapes.)

If you never looked at a book of landscape photographs, you will love many of these pictures. If you are a regular viewer of landscapes, you will see that they seem to fall into certain categories. My favorite is from a high steep mountain, looking down into a valley at a stream, with a cloudy sky (and that dappled light on the hillside). The really great photographs take the form and use it to explicate the content of the image. . (Charlie Waite, who organized this contest and whose name appears on this book, has taken such pictures.). At the risk of insulting photographers, I look for something like the paintings of Casper David Friedrich, who painted landscapes that made us wonder what lay beyond the experience of life. One doesn’t have to go that deep,but one should at least say “Ain’t nature grand”

That’s a long way of saying this is a nice book, It just didn’t knock my socks off.

G