This summer, it’s nearly certain that people will be heading to the great outdoors. As we look for ways to escape the heat and pandemic woes in crowded cities, many of us will turn to national parks and other public lands for respite. And, plenty will bring their cameras (or, at least, smartphones) along.

That begs the question: With a large number of folks eager to enjoy nature and document their trips, how can you be a respectful photographer while still getting that shot you’ve been dreaming of? We chatted with a public affairs officer at the U.S. Forest Service, who gave handy advice on how to enjoy your summer trip while keeping the environment and fellow travelers in mind. 

Related: How landscape photographer Erin Babnik captures epic photos without leaving a trace

How to be a good photographer and visitor: Use common sense

Common courtesy

Let’s be honest. Nothing ruins a good view more than a rude fellow visitor. Forest Service Public Affairs Officer Scott Owen recalls the time he visited Canyonlands. As he admired the landscape, another tourist approached and asked him to step aside.

“This gentleman comes up and goes, ‘Excuse me, sir….you’re in my way for my selfie.’ I wasn’t taking a picture. I was just standing there. That really rubbed me the wrong way,” Owen remembers. “I wasn’t real close. I wasn’t blocking the whole thing. I was just standing in one place, but the sunlight wasn’t good enough for his Instagram post.”

When it comes to sharing public lands, Owen highlights that common sense is the best guideline. With any beautiful location, it’s reasonable to expect that you’re not the only one who’s curious. Have respect for others who are coming to enjoy the space. Chiefly, don’t be a view hog, wait your turn, and don’t obstruct trails. If you drop your gear bag in the middle of a path, don’t be mad if someone steps on it.  

“We want to make sure that we’re being good stewards and that we’re not just out there to take that splendor away from somebody. I understand that there’s a need to get a picture, but just try to be a little bit flexible. Try to have awareness of others,” Owen says. Aside from common sense, be sure to also make note of written and posted guidelines. Clean up after yourself and make sure you have the necessary permits, if applicable. 

Treat wildlife with respect

Remember, wild animals are exactly that, and the place you are visiting is their habitat. It’s easy to forget this in parks and spaces where wildlife may be more habituated to humans, but at the end of the day, it’s still better to be safe than sorry. 

“Always be aware of wildlife out there, especially if you’re out on a trail without many people around,” Owen advises. “Even if the wildlife seems like they’re ‘tame,’ they’re still wild. Have a plan in case you come into contact with those animals. Know what you’re supposed to do and have the appropriate equipment there to make sure that you stay safe.”

Use the buddy system

Venturing into the great outdoors poses inherent risks. If you’re planning an excursion, use the buddy system and don’t go alone. Take someone with you and devise a check-in plan with someone back home. That way, in the event that an emergency does befall you, people know to check in and call for help.

What is commercial photography and do you need a permit? 

“Permit required” might be two of a photographer’s most dreaded words. However, their necessity isn’t arbitrary. Permits allow agencies to regulate often-times popular locations and ensure that the land is protected. 

“We want to make sure that we’re doing mitigation there so that other members of the public can see something that’s similar to it,” Owen explains. “It’s there to protect members of the public because we’re all public. We all own the land.”

So, what does that mean for the average citizen? According to Owen, if you’re just coming for personal enjoyment, click away (but keep in mind the common sense discussed above). 

Photographers engaging in commercial activity will usually need a permit. Though “commercial” is defined as any form of compensation (whether that means money or bartered services, ads you run on your YouTube channel, affiliate links included in the content when you share it, etc.), it’s best to call the field office that manages the land you’ll be visiting to clarify if a permit is necessary. Due to this ruling in which a federal judge ruled the National Park Service’s permitting system unconstitutional, policy across land management agencies in the U.S. is now in a gray area. 

However, not all public land is managed by the National Parks Service; others include the Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Determining who manages the land you’ll be visiting dictates whose policy you’ll need to comply with. Remember, doing your due diligence is always worth it.

The post How to be a respectful photographer when visiting national parks appeared first on Popular Photography.

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In April 2015, Quintin Lake set out to walk the entire perimeter of the coast of Great Britain, photographing the edges of the land where it intersects with the sea. He didn’t plan to do this uninterrupted, but in sections up to two months, after which he would return home for a while. This 11,000-kilometer (6,835-mile) journey ended in September 2020, after injuries, COVID-19 lockdowns, and plenty of terrible weather. His project is called The Perimeter.

Why did you choose such a daunting project?

I guess I just felt really inspired. As a photographer, inspiration is the thing where, if you feel you’re struck by it, you don’t want to let it go. I felt really inspired by all the intertwined layers of history and geography on the coast of Britain, which makes it hard to define. I felt really inspired by that ambiguity, and I wanted to see more of it and to understand what made this island what it is, because I’ve previously always found inspiration in kind of exotic places, like the Arctic, or deserts, or [places like] Iran. This was me going back to my roots, trying to understand what home is.

Related: Before color photography, there was the Lippmann process

What is your main genre as a professional photographer?

I pay the bills mostly by being an architectural photographer. My background was as an architect, and that’s how I earned a living for many years. I would use that money to buy time to do interesting trips, such as going to the Arctic. Now, I think more strongly as an art photographer, at least, that’s how it feels.

‌How much time did you spend preparing before you started your walk?

I guess with any kind of big project like this, you can’t think about it too much, because there are so many problems and difficulties. I think there was a two-week period between having the idea and starting. I thought, in a way, the stakes are quite low; if it doesn’t work, I can just stop.

I was really surprised because I thought no one would care about this project until there was a book or other physical object. But there was something about it; I had a BBC interview after two weeks of walking, and all I was doing was tweeting. And when that happened, it led to other people being interested. And then I felt, I’ve really got to finish this now! I felt people were rooting me on. I thought it would be just a private thing for me for years.

What did you tell people you met as you were walking? Did they believe that you were planning to walk 11,000 kilometers around the coast?

It sounds crazy. But the beautiful thing here in Britain is that everyone said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. I’d love to do that.’ No one said crazy. Sometimes I got mistaken for a vagrant, many times I got mistaken for being a bird watcher, because of my long lens, and there were some misunderstandings. But when I was talking to people, and I told them what I was doing, they were really positive about it.

I think the British just love the coast. And most people have some connection with walking or enjoy that for recreation. And everyone knows a bit of the coast from their childhood or a special holiday. And the idea of just keeping on going, I think appeals to people. Though some people I met thought it would be all sandy beaches and ice cream!

‌What about gear? You’re someone who is used to hiking and walking, and you’re in good physical condition but you still had to carry a lot of gear. How much did all of your gear weigh?

My backpacking gear was was light in England; six to eight kilograms (13.2 to 17.6 lbs) without food and water. But then my photography gear was four to five kilograms (8.8 to 11 lbs) extra, depending on what I took. As I got fitter, as the journey went on, I actually ended up taking more gear, bigger tripods, and I took a drone. In the north of Scotland, with heavy winter gear, it was about 20 kilograms(44 lbs) base weight, and with food and water, that could go up to 25 kilograms (55 lbs). In England, it was more like half of that.

(Here is a detailed breakdown of all Quintin’s summer gear, with precise weights.)

What sort of camera did you use?

I used a Canon EOS 5DS R, which, at the time, was the highest resolution full-frame camera that was weather sealed. I took a 70-300mm lens, and I think around half of my pictures are on the longer end of that telephoto. I also took a 16-35mm wide zoom.

‌All your photos are in a square format. Why did you choose square?

What I’m interested in is a kind of geometry and serenity and stillness. I’ve done a couple of other projects, following the Thames and the Severn rivers, in that square format, and I found that was really inspiring. It was good for me in terms of interpreting the landscape that way. With the coast, because one generally thinks of horizontal seascapes, that seemed kind of perverse, and it helped me look at look at things creatively with a constraint that was a bit fresher.

‌When I look at your photos, they don’t feel like the seaside. They feel like they’re reducing the landscape to a detail rather than trying to show the whole vastness of the landscape.

I think that detail, or that abstraction, can actually reveal more about the subject and then the whole, and I think it helps the viewer focus and helps focus me as well. This week, I’ve been editing the Forth Bridge, the iconic bridge next to Edinburgh in Scotland; it’s probably one of the most photographed subjects in Scotland. It’s fantastically beautiful and interesting, but I’ve been trying to find a very pared-down image of it. It’s a different way of looking at the subject, and I find that approach helpful, especially on a well known subject like that.

‌Is this approach partly influenced by you being an architectural photographer?

A portfolio of images I’d give to an architectural client would have 20 images, probably five of those would be detail shots; I would see that as part of the story of any given building. And I guess I’m interested in materials and geometry, and I tend to look for that, whether it’s a landscape or a human-made object.

‌I imagine that as you walk along the coast, you spend hours each day, and you see iconic locations in the UK where people shoot photos, such as Durdle Door in Dorset, or the white cliffs of Dover. But it looks like every half mile or so you found an incredibly interesting thing to photograph. And it makes me realize that if photographers just look carefully, there are always interesting things to photograph around them. They don’t have to be the iconic bits of the landscape.

I agree. There is beauty and interesting things wherever you happen to look, if you open your eyes and do look, but I was surprised that every single day had glimmers, sparks of beauty and interest. And some days were like an opera of joy. I did think, at the beginning, there would be some days where I wouldn’t produce any images, but even on days where there was maybe a storm all day, there would be a moment where the storm would lessen. And some of these images turn out to be quite good, they sort of look like tracing paper, layers of gray in Scotland, and that was quite interesting in its own way.

‌You really had two journeys. One was the journey of yourself, enjoying the walking and the other was the journey of the photographer.

Yes, that’s right. I did have quite a few injuries and problems. I had a torn tendon, I had shin splints, and the constant challenge of hypothermia, because I walked through all the seasons and it’s often very wet. I got slightly traumatized by the rain in the northwest in the winter. There was so much rain, and it was so cold all the time, that you had to keep moving to not get cold. And then when I came back down south, and it rained, I braced myself for being cold and wet for two days nonstop. And of course, it’s not like that, because it just blows away.

‌Not many of your photos have people in them. Why is that?

I tried to photograph someone most days, so there’s a bit more at the end but I often didn’t see anyone for days at a time, let alone photograph them. But I don’t think it’s my strength as a photographer. Also, for me, the mystery and the stuff of interest of what makes Britain Britain is the landscape. It’s misunderstood and often stereotyped in a kind of butter packaging way of rolling hills. I’m interested in the power stations next to the disused factories, all that kind of stuff as well as the ancient mythologies. I think if you get an interesting landscape, and you put someone in it, the person is always going to be more interesting. The human form and the human face are so compelling that it means that you can’t see the landscape. So for what I wanted to do, which was an exploration of the pure landscape, I consciously didn’t have people in it most of the time.

So you’ve been in the editing stage for quite some time. How many photos do you have altogether?

It was 454 days of walking, and that equates to 179,000 images. So each day was around 300 or 400 images, most of which were bad. I would normally edit that down to around 20 that I think are okay, and every few days there’s a really special one. Each day of walking takes between one and three days of editing. I finished editing day 364 yesterday, which is well over three-quarters of the way; I’ve got 90 days left. The whole project will take seven years: five walking and two editing.

Sometimes, everything synchronizes: the subject, the light, my energy levels, and I got really strong images. I’m thinking now of Knoydart, which is a very wild, uninhabited part of Scotland, where I shot a rainbow in a storm. It seemed like a different season every few minutes; it was just so extraordinary and exciting. I think I spent about a week, in terms of hours of editing just that one day’s images, because I felt there’s so much material there. Conversely, if it’s been a very rainy day, I might be able to edit it in a few hours, because there are only three images that come out. And then once I’ve edited [the images], I put it on my on the blog and share it, and then that will be the source material for what happens next.

So what’s next?

I won’t be finished editing till the summer. When this is finished, it will be publishing a book, and producing an exhibition. Financially and psychologically I doubt I could do a project like this again as it’s been such a labor of love. I’m a bit fearful of how I will feel when that last image is exported from Lightroom and the project is finally finished. Exploring the world with a tent is in my DNA, and I will never stop that as it stimulated my creativity and makes me feel the most alive.

See more of Quintin Lake’s photos and buy prints at ThePerimeter.uk.

The post Quintin Lake on walking and photographing all 11,000 kilometers of the British coastline appeared first on Popular Photography.

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To celebrate Earth Day 2022, we’re revisiting some of our favorite environmental stories and interviews from the PopPhoto archives.

Nature is full of interesting and beautiful things. But creating a pristine nature photograph requires a lot more planning and preparation than driving to a geotagged Instagram spot and hoping to capture something great. Award-winning wilderness photographer and Canon Explorer of Light, Erin Babnik has been shooting beautiful landscapes since the days before social media. Her career photographing natural environments began from a place of curiosity. And curiosity is something she tries to maintain in her work to this day.

Here, Babnik speaks with us about her favorite places to shoot, essential gear and why it’s crucial to preserve these beautiful places for generations to come. 

How did you get started with landscape photography? 

Before I was a photographer, I was an art historian. I specialized in Ancient Greek art mostly and actually had to be a working archeologist as well. I did a lot of excavations in the Middle East. They required photographing objects so I could use them in my dissertation and develop an archive of photographs for teaching and research. I found myself going way out of my way to make the photos as good as they could be. I really enjoyed that process. I was getting really annoyed with all of the restrictions of trying to take tripods into archeological sites and having to ask for special access. Finally, it just dawned on me, “You know what? I used to love to just go out in the mountains and backpacking. It would be kind of fun to take the camera out there.” This was before the era of social media.

It sounds like you had a long-time love for the outdoors before you started photographing it in a more formal way.

I always took a little film camera with me, but that was just more so to document what I was doing. I totally got out of it, the more I got into academia, I was just spending all of my time in these dusty, underground libraries. I’d forgotten all about the stuff I used to love to do outside.

I was slowly already turning into a working photographer, even while I was still in academia. My photographs were getting good enough that other people were starting to hire me to do work for them. That led to stock photography work and eventually, my fine art landscapes started to bring requests for things that I wasn’t even offering, like workshops and post-processing instruction. 

Finally, one day I was like, “You know what? The iron is hot, maybe I should strike it. I think I really just want to do this.”

Was it difficult to make the career change from academia to full-time photo work?

It was really an intensely emotional decision for me, after investing so much of my life into one career, to take a turn like that. But in the end, I decided that was the best thing I’d ever done. 

I think the thing that was really holding me back for so long was the idea that I was giving up this other career. When I realized that actually everything I had done before: the lecturing, the teaching, the traveling to exotic places, all of that was just awesome preparation for what I’m doing now. I’m still teaching. I’m still traveling to exotic places. I still get up really early and get really dirty. It’s all the same, just repurposed.

Speaking of getting up early, how important is the time of day that you are shooting when creating quality landscape photos? 

The most common advice that landscape photographers get is that the quality of your light is everything. But the time of day sometimes is actually relative only to a certain type of environment. Let’s say that you want to photograph a slot canyon. In the middle of the day, when the sun is high and can get down into that slot canyon and create bounce lighting, that’s going to be your prime time. Whereas let’s say you want to shoot a mountain scene, then maybe you want some low sidelight. That’s going to be an end-of-the-day situation, either sunrise or sunset. Timing is everything, but it all comes down to what your motivation is.

How much does patience play into getting good landscape photos?

Again, that’s one of those things that goes both ways too. Standard wisdom would tell you that you should come up with an idea and then wait for the right moment, return to a location as many times as possible, until you finally realize that idea. The other side of that coin is sometimes just being flexible and not having expectations. Being able to let go of them will enable you to see something that maybe you would have overlooked, or would have dismissed.

Where are some of your favorite types of terrain to photograph? 

I have two offices, one in Southern California and one in Europe, in Slovenia. In Europe, I’ve spent a massive amount of time in the Dolomites. I started exploring that region before it was even really on the map for most landscape photographers. When I first started going there, again, before the age of social media, most Americans didn’t even know Italy had mountains.

That remains one of my favorite places to work, but I do a lot in the Alps too. In the United States, I tend to really like desert environments. I think that these two areas, the Alpine areas and then the desert, have something in common, which is that they are very changeable environments.

Mountain environments really change a lot with the seasons. A low atmosphere can make the landscape look utterly different from even one second to the next.  I love that. It’s the same thing with desert environments because they are always changing. The ground is literally changing a lot in places like Death Valley. It might be a lake one month and just this incredible pattern of polygons another month. You come back the next month, those polygons have all changed and it’s a dune field. I’m always looking for something that I don’t feel as though I’ve seen before.

With the rise of social media we’ve seen a lot of these once-pristine and remote landscapes getting too much traffic and getting destroyed. What sort of guiding principals do you use in your workshops to encourage newer photographers to respect the land they are photographing?

I’ve written and done a lot of speaking on exactly that topic because it’s an important one. One of the most important things I think to keep in mind for any photographer is that these environments are not trophies to be hunted and collected. And really, the magic doesn’t even lie in the location. The magic lies with you, the photographer. Wherever you go, you’ve got to make your own sunshine. Those are going to be the most meaningful photographs for you and they’re also going to probably be the ones that do the best for you in the long run.

I think what’s going on with many of these places is just overuse. Too many people are being directed to too few places because they think that’s where the magic lies. And if you spread people around the planet more, these places will have a chance to recover. Basically, it’s about educating the public on the sorts of things that they might not realize are harmful.

What are some examples of things that people are doing that they might not realize harm the environment? 

Picking wildflowers or pitching a tent on top of wildflowers can kill them to where they will not come back, ever. If you move a rock, that might cause soil erosion that will damage an area. Walking on any kind of non-durable surface too much can make it never come back. In the Columbia River Gorge photographers have gone to photograph certain waterfalls and they all like to stand in the same spot and that spot used to be lush with ferns, and now it’s just dirt because of too many feet. The environment can’t heal itself.

Being very aware of the difference between a durable and a non-durable surface is important. Understanding things like cryptobiotic soil, which helps to hold the soil together—without it, an area can become just an absolute dust bowl. Critters live under rocks. You move the rocks, you deny that critter its home. And then there’s a knock-on effect that can devastate an environment once you start messing with its little ecosystems. So take only photos, leave only footprints, but don’t leave the footprints on the non-durable stuff.

In addition to your camera equipment, what sort of gear are you taking with you when you go out to take photographs? 

A lot of it depends on the environment. One of the things I always have with me, that really has nothing whatever to do with camera equipment, is this little mat that folds up into three or four sections. I can use that for so many things no matter where I am. If I’m in a desert, I can use it to shield my camera from some glare or it can make a little roof over my camera. If I’m doing a low to the ground shot, where I need to be so close to the ground, I can sit on the thing. If I’m camping somewhere, and I’ve got a campfire, it makes a great way to fan the flames. It’s extremely handy.

My first aid kit always comes with me. I also have a spot locator, which is useful if I’m out in remote areas, no matter where I am. Then there are all the layers. There’s actually a lot you need to carry as a photographer, so clothing layers, maybe food, snacks, trekking poles, all kinds of stuff.

What advice would you give someone who wants to get started with landscape photography? 

Explore and experiment a lot. That’s the way that I developed as a landscape photographer. And I really stand by it. Learning to see is the most critical part of really developing as a photographer and the best way to do that is to get out and experiment with things. Try things and find things to photograph. I say often that exploration is the key to creativity because the more that you find to photograph, the more that you find yourself. So if you can get out there and find stuff, you’ll shortcut across that barren landscape of all the stuff that has been seen so often that people don’t respond to it anymore.

Go to the stuff that excites you. Follow your own nose and you’ll probably progress more quickly and hit upon solutions that are more exciting to you sooner. See for yourself, but also have some other fresh eyes on it to help you see what you may not be noticing.

The post How landscape photographer Erin Babnik captures epic photos without leaving a trace appeared first on Popular Photography.

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In March 2020, when COVID-19 led to worldwide lockdowns, Michael Kenna had a full calendar of trips and exhibits planned for the months to come. Instead, he found himself stuck at home with nowhere to go. Rather than taking new photos, he went back into his archive to look with fresh eyes at some of his earliest work. The result is Northern England 1983-1986, a book of photos from the area around where Kenna was born and grew up.

What was it like when lockdown hit?

It was ridiculous, as my schedule was absolutely packed in 2020. I had many exhibitions scheduled and book projects ongoing, and I planned to photograph in a number of countries. Then it was a matter of one after another being canceled, postponed, and canceled again.

How did you decide to go back into your archives?

My publisher, Chris Pichler, at Nazraeli Press said we should make a book of something. I couldn’t complete any of the projects I was working on at the time, so it was a matter of looking backward. Fortunately, I have thousands of unprinted negatives to fall back on, and some of these were from Northern England. This work was made before I started going to Japan in 1987. Between 1983 and 1986 I made many photographs on various trips over three or four years. I’d printed some for exhibitions and then just forgot about the rest.

Your photos today are all in a square format, and what stands out here is the fact that these photos are all in a standard 3:2 aspect ratio.

In 1987, I bought my first Hasselblad camera with a waist-level viewfinder. For the 15 previous years, I had been looking through a 35mm viewfinder. Things had become a bit predictable. I composed in certain ways that I knew. I always made the decision, whether it should be horizontal or vertical. I was ready for a change.

How did the Hasselblad change the way you take photos?

After I bought the Hasselblad, everything was suddenly viewed back to front in the ground glass viewfinder. I found it was very difficult to work! But I also found that I began to experiment and do new things. I put the camera on the ground because now I could. I placed the camera just above water to see the reflections from that viewpoint. I propped the camera against the side of a wall. Everything became a little different and my compositions changed to be more graphic.

You are resolutely a film photographer, and always has been. What is it about the process of shooting film that you like so much?

I think the whole analog process exudes calm. For me, it’s a meditational journey. I’m absolutely sure that I could be a photographer without film, without images. I could go through the whole process: travel to places, look for situations and scenery, spend hours exposing, looking at subject matter, and not have a result. It would be frustrating in some ways because I couldn’t make a living, but it is a wonderful process to work as a photographer. I just love what I do from start to finish.

[I love] planning the journeys, making schedules, airline reservations, going to places, finding or trying to find things to photograph—the search, the frustration sometimes, and then suddenly discovering something that is just phenomenally fascinating for perhaps a few seconds or for hours or days. And then there’s the processing and months later first seeing the images, [it’s] almost like opening Christmas packages. “Oh, look at those images! Where did they come from?” Sometimes the photographs I thought would be interesting turn out to be quite ordinary. Equally, sometimes the ones I thought were quite predictable are really interesting! The joy of unknowing! The printing is a whole other story; alchemical and magical with a steep learning curve.

Digital photography, at least for me, takes away some of this indecisiveness, this unknowing of what I have. With film, precisely because it is so unpredictable, I want to search even more. I know myself enough to realize that I have little to no idea when I have an interesting image. That comes later when I see the negatives. As a result, I’m always looking for extra possibilities and options.

The style of the Northern England photos is similar to your current work: there are no people, and the light and shadows are almost like characters in the scenes. Do you compose these photos as though the are sets on a stage of life?

I sometimes allude to precisely that. For me, my photographs are akin to sets on the stage of life. In this Northern England series, the empty warehouses, for example, had only recently been vacated, many of them were due for demolition, and most are not there anymore. When I photographed [them] at night, along the canals where nobody went anymore, these places were artificially lit as if on a stage.

I sometimes reference my interest in the moments before actors appear, when we can still use our own imagination, and there’s a certain kind of pent-up atmosphere of anticipation. Once the characters are there, I get drawn into their story and listen. I become less aware of the stage as the characters draw me in. After the actors leave the stage, my head is filled with their stories. But before they appear, there is a certain amount of ambiguity, a potential for my own story. I can try to imagine what could happen, what has happened in the past, and what may happen in the future.

One of my favorite photos in the series is Steep Street, Blackburn, Lancashire, England, 1985. The quirkiness of the titled light pole in front of the buildings means you can’t tell if it’s the pole or the buildings that are tilted.

I still wonder why I didn’t print this image at the time I made it. I love that photograph, but just passed it over when I was choosing my initial selection back in the 80s. When I came across this negative again, I thought, “WOW, that is amazing!” I suppose we look for different things at different stages of our life. I just didn’t see it at the time.

You’ve published dozens of photobooks; how important are they to you?

They’re critically important. I think it’s a duty, a responsibility, a desire and wish for a photographer to propagate their work, to share images, to transmit photographs into the public domain. I’m completely aware that the prints I make are silver gelatin, handmade, hand-retouched, matted, mounted, signed, and numbered. They’re like precious jewels to me, and I absolutely love this process. But how many people are going to see the original prints? Alas, not so many. Books are, therefore, a prime way to show a photographer’s work.

See more of Michael Kenna’s work here.

The post Landscape photographer Michael Kenna on viewing old work with fresh eyes, and the joys of the analog process appeared first on Popular Photography.

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The winners of the 2021 International Landscape Photographer of the Year (ILPOTY) competition have been announced. And there are some incredible photos among the top 238 shots (we’ll explain the number in a second) so let’s dive in. 

About the competition

The ILPOTY is in its eighth year. From the 4,504 entries, the top 101 are chosen to be featured in an associated photobook. With a prize pool worth $18,000, it’s a big competition to win. 

To decide the winners, every photo is scored out of 100 by five judges. This year, to be included in the book, a photo had to get 85.2% or higher. However, there were an additional 137 photos that scored above 84% and, since space isn’t really an issue online, they’ve been included in the expanded gallery. 

The title of International Landscape Photographer of the Year (and the top prize of $5,000) is given to the photographer with the highest average score from the portfolio of their top four photographs in the competition. 

There are also awards for Photograph of the Year ($2,000), and five Special Awards:

• The Monochrome Award.
• The Amazing Aerial Award.
• The Snow and Ice Award.
• The Night Sky Award.
• The Hand of Man (Urban Environment) Award.

An expansive take on landscapes

For a competition with “landscape” in the name, the ILPOTY uses an incredibly loose definition. In the terms and conditions, “no restrictions” are placed on post-production or photographic techniques used. 

Similarly, in the results announcement Peter Eastway, the Chairman of the Judges, declared:

“Our philosophy is that all approaches to landscape photography are valid. It is not up to us to say whether an image is a landscape or not. As a result, in the 2021 International Landscape Photographer of the Year awards, you will see exponents of many different styles presenting their rare and carefully considered compositions. Some of the landscapes are straight out of camera, others are from the photographer’s imagination.

I find it quite compelling that what drives one landscape photographer can be so different to another. For some, the capture of nature at its most wonderful is reward enough. In fact, these are the moments photographers live for and being out in the landscape is often as enjoyable as shooting it with a camera.

However, the history of landscape art is much broader than merely creating a record of nature. It is interpretive, imaginative and inspirational. Other photographers take their captures and re-map the tonality; some take several captures to produce a landscape of the mind.“

I’m not sure I 100% agree with everything he is saying, but it’s undeniable that the top shots are visually stunning. 

The International Landscape Photographer of the Year

Turkish photographer Aytek Çetin won the top prize for his series shot in Cappadocia. The “fairy chimneys” look like something from a sci-fi film. 

Max Rive from the Netherlands took second place for his portfolio. I’ve actually followed Rive on Instagram for years and am a huge fan of his work, so I’m delighted to see it recognized in a competition like this. 

And Andrea Zappia from Italy took third place. I particularly love his shot of the mountain refuge overlook the glacial moraine. 

International Landscape Photograph of the Year

Tanmay Sapkal from the USA won the Landscape Photograph of the Year for his shot of comet NeoWise in the Marin Headlands. 

Cédric Tamani from Switzerland took second place. The image looks like something from a Wes Anderson movie.

And Ben Goode from Australia took third place. (That cloud is so perfect).

Special Awards

Heiner Machalett from Germany won the Monochrome Award.

Chris Byrne from the USA won the Amazing Aerial Award.

Mimmo Salierno from Italy won the Snow & Ice Award.

Hans Gunnar Aslaksen from Norway won the Night Sky Award.

And Chris Kirby from Australia won the Hand of Man Award.

How to enter next year’s competition

The 2022 competition hasn’t been announced yet, but, if it’s anything like last year’s, the deadline for submission will be some time in November. All shots will need to have been taken after 1 January 2020. Each entry will cost $25 and every fifth one is free. To win the top prize, you’ll need to enter at least four images. 

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Growing up in New Jersey, photographer Ben Canales didn’t have a lot of stars to look at. Now, however, he spends many nights out in the cold with his camera pointed towards the horizon, capturing the heavens and the land below them. He shared with us some crucial tips for getting amazing shots of the night sky.

What do you look for in a location for shots of the stars?
One of the first things you have to do is get away from the city. Whether you’re traveling or at home, you have to go somewhere without light pollution. Ideally, you can try to get at least 50 miles from a big city if you want really clean skies.

After that, I typically look for a landscape feature I can key on. Is there a mountain on the horizon or a lake that will provide reflections of the stars? I often look for a human element like an old barn or a ruin or something like that to include in the foreground.

How do you balance the foreground with the light of the stars?
I try to make everything completely dark. If I start with complete darkness, then it’s up to me to add light. I can add it at any level I want to. On a moonless night, the stars set a certain light level. Then, I’ll have a headlamp or some small LEDs I can position in order to light paint onto the scene. I can choose what I want the viewer to see. I’ll take anywhere between five and 25 shots of a certain scene using different motions with the headlamp until it starts to look right.

How do you manage the light of the moon?
You can go out when there’s no moon—what astronomers call a new moon—up to a half moon phase or less. Once you get more than that, the moon becomes so bright that it can actually make the sky look like daytime. On a full moon shot, you have to peer into the sky to see the stars.

No moon gives you the most clarity in the stars and the brightest milky way and all that stuff. Once you start factoring in the moon, you can use it to illuminate a really big landscape scene. It’s always important to be aware of the moon phase: when the moon is rising or setting and what angle it is coming from. You don’t want to be surprised by it.

You have to have a pretty good understanding of the night sky to get shots like this. How do you track where the stars will be?
There’s a fantastic online program called Stellarium. It’s kind of like Google Earth for stars. You punch in the location at which you’re going to be and the time you’re going to be there and it takes you to that spot and simulates the star field, the moon phase, and the brightness of the location at that time. You get a 360-degree view that you can scroll around and look at.

Darkskyfinder.org is useful as well. It uses population densities to try and guess about light pollution levels. It’s a good way to research where you should go.

Does the time of year during which you’re shooting make a huge difference?
It has taken me a couple years to learn something that astronomers know by heart. In the summertime, from about June to October, the milky way is particularly vibrant. One reason is that it’s standing vertically until about August and that’s what’s really going to make it show up in our shots. And for us northern hemisphere folks, there’s a particular bright section of the milky way that only rises above the horizon in the summer months. In the winter months, it lays perpendicular to and never crests the horizon. It also gets more lost in the light pollution.

The southern view is what you want. The northern view looks very messy. It looks like someone spilled a salt shaker into the sky. The southern view has that globular glow. So, when you’re picking a location, you want it to have a non-light-polluted view of the southern half of the sky.

How does the weather play into a successful nighttime star shoot?
Over the years, I’ve learned to interpret the cloudy descriptions on weather websites. If it says mostly clear, then you’re fine. Passing clouds are fine. Partly cloudy is usually the tipping point and once they say mostly cloudy, then it’s usually not worth trying. You’re going to go anywhere between 45 minutes and three hours, so there’s a big commitment to these efforts.

What kind of shutter speed are you using to keep the stars in place rather than having them form trails across the photo?
Thanks to cameras with great high ISO performance, you can get a static shot of the stars in under 30 seconds. And that’s really only happened in about the last three or four years. When I first got into this, everyone was doing star trails, but it was mostly because they couldn’t get their camera’s ISO up high enough. Now, because of these insanely high ISOs, people are getting cleaner 30-second shots that freeze the position of the stars.

What if we actually want the star trails? What’s the best way to go about creating them?
There are two methods for creating star trails.

The static method is where you take a 30-second exposure and keep repeating it over and over with something like an intervalometer. Then, in Photoshop, you just combine them all as layers into one file. You switch the blending mode to lighten and Photoshop will progressively overlay the stars so you get trails. This is getting popular because it also gives you the files you need for a time lapse video all in one effort.

Then there’s the old-school method where you attach a cable release to the camera and you do single exposures of anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours. So, instead of using ISO 3200, you’re going to ISO 400 and instead of F/2.8, you’re using an aperture like F/8. You just have to do the math to compensate the extended shutter time.

Both methods have their own distinct look.

Your shots are very much landscape photos, do you always use a wide angle lens?
I do enjoy a wide angle lens. You always want to see more of a scene. But, I’m realizing that my particular desire is for a 24mm lens. A slightly tighter shot brings more attention to whatever I choose to be in the foreground. If I want to get a really wide shot, I’ll do an 8-10 shot panorama that will give me a really wide view, but without the distortion.

What kind of gear do you need to bring for a night shoot?
You need a tripod, obviously. An intervalometer is also nice if you’re going to be doing star trails. One thing I found out about was those little hand warmers that you put inside of gloves or boots. I bring some of those and tape them around my lens barrel because as the night goes on, there tends to be moisture condensation. You’ll set up a star trail or time lapse shot and everything will be fine. Then, later in post, you find out that the lens fogged over at 2 AM or something. A hand warmer on the lens will keep the temperature high enough for that moisture to build up.

A lot of people don’t realize how cold it gets shooting stars. It’s not that people have never done anything at night before or have never been cold, but usually all our activity outdoors is actually active or you’re sitting around a campfire. When shooting stars, you’re standing by a tripod for 30-seconds to five minutes at a time. The only motion you’re doing is to push the shutter. We’re not generating any heat, so dress like five times as you think you should because there’s nothing worse than shivering through the whole night and not being able to concentrate on the shots. I dress like the marshmallow man out there.

What do you use for a light source when it comes to painting the objects in the foreground?
I use a headlamp as a light source in a lot of my shots. Everyone thinks you need a bright light source, but they forget you’re trying to balance your foreground with starlight. A headlamp is plenty. Sometimes I’ll bring a little lantern. Those constant light LED panels are fantastic if they’re dimmable. I’ll put them on the lightest setting, it’s barely turned on, and that’s usually enough light to blast a whole scene. I never bring a big giant mag light or anything like that.

Can you offer some specific camera settings that will give a good starting point for a star shot?
The go-to settings are 30-seconds at F/2.8 or whatever the fastest aperture your lens offers. Then set it to ISO 3200 or higher. Shoot RAW because you want all that data to push and pull in post. I generally set a white balance of tungsten or fluorescent. If you do auto balance, you’ll likely get this ugly orange night sky. With time lapses, white balance can also change as the night goes on. The more that you can get right in camera, the easier it is when you get home.

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Whether en masse or standing nobly on their own, trees play a huge environmental and emotional role in all of our lives. The tree, in many parts of the world, is our seasonal barometer. If we are lucky enough to have a tree in our garden, we will know its character and personality and enjoy a real and meaningful relationship with it. Because of our familiarity with trees—their height, girth, color, and shape—they play a crucial role in providing the viewer of a landscape photograph reference points for depth, distance, and dimension within the image. (I call this DDD.) Trees help to delineate the landscape and, as with cloud shadows, can create a three-dimensional effect in photographs.

ENTER OUR JANUARY PHOTO CHALLENGE: TREES

Framing It Up
A tree needs to express its character, its setting, and its sense of nobility. Trees in random volume don’t speak to me. But trees in an orderly, regimented design do. Therefore, I am always looking for the tree that stands alone or trees in an organized collection. There is no telling where those might be, so I often spend hours driving in search of them.

There is no typical shot setup: Each potential image brings with it a different set of considerations involving design, shape, pattern, color, relationships, depth, and so on. Symmetry plays a role, too. I am careful to avoid verticals bisecting horizontals, if I can. In all situations, a tripod is mandatory.

A wide-angle lens can suggest that the area being photographed is more expansive than it really is, and the eye and the brain can detect whether the lens used was extremely wide. The lens that I like to use, and did for many of these images, is the 50mm lens on a 6x6cm camera (roughly the equivalent of 28mm on 35mm format) because to me, it seems to equate to human vision.

My other lens preference is short telephoto, as I don’t care to compress planes within a landscape too extremely. I want viewers to feel that if they were standing by my side, their vision would match my own. Many of my landscape photographs are in a square, or nearly square, format. The square promotes the tree as a center-stage player, given that space above, below, and to the sides can be of even proportions.

Damme, Belgium. Trees fade into mist for the shot, center, made with a Nikon D3S and 24–120mm f/4G AF-S Nikkor lens, at full tele for mild compression. Exposure: ¼ sec at f/22, ISO 200.

Light and Season
Lighting, the catalyst to all photography, should be at the forefront of any photographer’s mind. Front light produces flat, unatmospheric, sterile, shallow images. But backlighting is excellent for silhouettes, particularly if the shape of winter branches offers great design and rhythm.

Direct overhead light—which photographers often reject—can deliver pools of shadow that can be very intriguing. I used this technique in the image of the “bobble trees.” Mist, rain, and overcast conditions can provide images that convey atmosphere.

In northern climes, we seek the ravishing yellows and reds of fall color, bringing thousands to gawp and wonder—for those screamingly vivid colors, the photographer will travel hundreds of miles.

The winter months can transform the tree to create a skeletal and often haunting look, with its naked branches perhaps fringed with snow. Many a landscape photographer enjoys the near-monochrome look of the deciduous winter tree and may prefer its boniness to an evergreen slumped under the weight of snow. In winter, the shape of the branches, which at any other time play a secondary role, now have to be considered for their form and their muscular nature.

Onward to the moist and shiny leaves of spring, reflecting so much infrared radiation that infrared photography enthusiasts can have a field day taking the viewer straight back to winter. With my color photography, I often trip myself up by using a polarizing filter to remove the white-light reflection from some of the reflective leaves, only to find that green, one of the trickiest colors to render correctly, turns almost fluorescent. You would think I would have learned by now!

Then to the summer swelling of our trees, where the muscular limbs of the mighty oaks can barely be seen through the many thousands of leaves. (I have learned that an average-sized oak will drink 50 gallons of water per day.) In my experience, the fully-leafed summer tree can look lumpy and without form, rendering the landscape thick, dense, and hard to delineate. For these reasons, summer in the northern hemisphere is my least favorite season for photographing trees.

Buttermere, Cumbria, U.K.A shaft of sidelight cutting through the mist defines a lone tree against the mountain. The photographer used a Nikon D700 with 24–120mm f/4G AF-S Nikkor lens to make the exposure of 1/60 sec at f/16, ISO 200.

Don’t Overdo It
The brain and the eye are an amazing double act. Together, they are able to detect falsity and unrealistic colors, and on doing so go into automatic reject mode.

Thus the polarizer is a dangerous filter. It isn’t just the sky, the water, and the land that it affects; it is all of them at different times, in different lighting scenarios. Look through the polarizer off-camera to establish the effect it has on everything before deciding whether to use it or not. Remember that the polarizer reduces white-light reflection and can increase contrast. With a cloudless sky, it can produce unrealistic violet or indigo blues. Graduated (split) neutral-density filters, on the other hand, may be crucial in order to reveal, in high contrast scenes, subtle nuances in the sky that the photographer wishes to preserve.

Getting it right in the camera is its own reward, but digital manipulation is not a crime. Yet its use should be as an enhancement of the photographer’s artistic intention. Contrast, minimal sharpening, and minor cleansing are all that I would recommend. Like sharpening, increased saturation should be applied with great care.

This past fall, I found myself in Colorado thinking that no one would accept the natural rendition of yellow, no doubt accusing me of massive oversaturation. What is a landscape photographer to do except subdue the colors of nature at the risk of being thought dishonest and fraudulent?

_**Ticino Valley, Italy. **A stand of trees (top right) contrasts with the field’s golden tones. Exposure was on Fujichrome Velvia 50 in a Hasselblad 500CM body._

On the Avenue
Whichever season it may be, trees will more often than not arrest the photographer, and it is no secret that my “tree fix” often comes with a tree avenue. If anyone shares my love of an avenue of trees, it seems to me to be important to maintain the secrecy and mystique by denying the outside world a look in. A chink of light seen high up in the frame, be it from the blue sky or a white-sky highlight, may serve to undermine the feel of a majestic nave of a cathedral.

I remember years ago making an image of an avenue of trees that offered a perfect shape of a bottle of white wine at the far end and, without wishing to sound too fanciful, it seemed to me to haul the viewer through, and outward, toward the bright light of hope.

I shall be forever attracted to the tree avenue and always find myself evaluating its uniformity before I commit to setting up; it’s no good having a gap where a tree may have been felled, and where a stream of light may attract the eye to a break of continuity.

But what landscape photographer can resist the lonely tree? I know that I am unable to do so.

Ronda, Andalucia, Spain. Overhead light creates a near-abstraction. Same camera and film, this time with 250mm f/5.6 Carl Zeiss Sonnar lens (roughly 140mm in 35mm).

Charlie Waite has just launched the USA Landscape Photographer of the Year competition, for which Popular Photography serves as a media sponsor. For details, see usaland​scape​photographeroftheyear.com.

Valensole, France.

Buttermere, Cumbria, U.K.

Lot, France.

Damme, Belgium.

Épernay, France.

Amiens, France

Ticino Valley, Italy

Ronda, Andalucia, Spain

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If, like many photographers, your list of favorite subjects includes sunsets, try going abstract by rendering them as blocks of color. Alfonso Calero, a pro photographer and photo tour leader from Australia, credits his success at this to his source of inspiration: the paintings of Mark Rothko.

“I get the color effect by blurring the scenes with slow shutter speeds and camera movement,” Calero explains. He gets the perfect effect by bracketing the speeds of both the shutter and camera movement. Other tips for producing Rothko-like sunsets:

• Rotate the camera on a tripod to maintain a straight horizon line. If your tripod head has a spirit level, use it to keep the scene plumb.

• Adjust color intensity by bracketing color saturation and exposure compensation.

• Use a Neutral-Density filter to achieve slower shutter speeds in bright light.

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Oliver Wasow has been working with constructed photographic images for over 20 years in both analog and digital mediums. His manipulated landscape photography has been shown in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery in Washington D.C. in addition to a number of national and international galleries. A prolific image collector and compositor, Wasow recently shifted the focus of his work, from a long-standing interest in landscape and urban tableaux, to quiet and affecting portraits. To find out more, we caught with Wasow and discussed his most recent series, Portraits.

When did you get the idea for your Portrait series and how did it come about?

I had gone 30 years without ever photographing a person, my work had been mostly interested in (as most fine art photographers are) issues of fiction and artifice, exploring constructed images in a pre-digital time and way. I had never really had any interest in photographing people because I had just thought of them as being too historically specific…and a kind of documentary photography that I wasn’t interested in. At the same time I had a parallel practice where I was collecting images and had a real interest in vernacular photos and from an aesthetic point of view was really interested in old studio photography—setups with backdrops like in carte de visites from the 19th and early 20th century.

At some point, I decided that photographing people was something that I wanted to do and because I [was] shooting these with a greenscreen, it allowed me to work with landscape images which I had been doing for many years. The project was born out of the desire to collapse those two things into each other. It was also born out of a realization that a lot of the rules that I had set for myself about not photographing people were completely contradictory to the rest of my practice.

Who are the people pictured? What is your relationship to them?

They are my family and friends, mostly because they’re available to me. My goal isn’t to reveal something about these people that is true to their personality necessarily, though that does end up happening anyway.

One of the photographs in particular that was a real catalyst for me in this series is of my brother. He has chronic schizophrenia and has always been a big figure in my life. While I would like someone to see that photograph and not need any background information about it, there’s no question that making that portrait it was a way for me to try to break down the emotional distance that I’ve always had in my work and to try to engage with something that had meaning for me directly and wasn’t filtered through postmodern irony or critical distance. I’m torn—there’s a real attempt at sincerity and genuine emotion in this work and at the same time I have a distrust of that.

There’s three photographs of my wife in the series. She boxes, and in one of them she looks old and haggard, and it’s not a terribly flattering picture of her. In a way it’s fictitious, yet it’s not. There are other images of her in my work that are more romantic and idealized. I’ve never believed that a photograph has the ability to capture the essence of a person, but it can certainly capture multiple aspects of individuals.

How do you make the images? What is the process from start to finish?

My subjects are shot against a greenscreen and the backgrounds that I drop in are composites made from multiple landscapes, usually from paintings. In many of the pictures, you can actually see the line of the wall against the floor, a reference to carte de visite and old studio photography. After the background is dropped in, I work to create a play between the background and foreground. I want a certain degree of seamlessness in terms of the overall hue/saturation and the brightness of the image. Sometimes there may be a light coming from the background or it may look like something in the landscape is in fact, also projecting light out into the studio but I also want them to be separate. For me, the fact that I’m using paintings in the background is very relevant because I consider the images in this series to be as much paintings as they are photographs.

What’s the relationship between the sitters and the backgrounds that you’ve put behind them?

It depends on the shot. There’s a picture of a boy with a donkey, the boy is my son and the donkey belongs to me. The scene behind my son is from his favorite video that he was playing at the time. While that’s probably not apparent to most viewers, for me it was relevant.

There’s a picture where Dana my wife is wearing boxing gear and in the backdrop behind her are jagged and violent-looking mountains. There’s also picture of a friend of mine who’s a writer who is Lebanese, and he is posed in a very Orientalist style. The image was shot in his apartment and the Odalisque pose was his idea. There’s definately a relationship to varying degrees, usually the background comes later.

How do your portraits relate to the other work you make?

I’ve always been interested in the tension between the sincere and the romantic and the cool, distanced, ironic and fictitious nature of photography. I think that there is a thread that runs through my earliest work to the present of an almost overstated spectacle of romance and beauty that is borderline kitsch. I’m interested in photographs that have a tenuous relationship with reality where they’re both believable and not believable. I think a lot of photographers enjoy exploring that space. Science fiction, in the past, was a place for me to explore that, particularly before Photoshop, when the believability of the photograph was still relevant. And now that that isn’t relevant, I’m less interested in the Science Fiction aspect than I am in the mysterious and romantic nature of something being both a painting and a photograph.

What is your interest in the imagery and technology of the past?

I’m curious about what happens when you collapse the present and the past together—a classic postmodern strategy. There’s a moment in early Pictorialist photography where painting and photography were very closely tied together. Before fine art photography decided that the way it was going to distinguish itself as a fine art was through the Decisive moment and the documentary status of the photograph, there was this period where it flirted a lot with painting, right when painting was flirting a lot with photography. What interests me about digital technology today is that it is re-introducing that collapsing of painting and photography in on each other again. Photography is becoming increasingly a post-production, painterly activity.

Wasow’s work is represented in New York City by Theodore:Art

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When we set out to find modern masters of the b&w landscape, we were astonished at the quality and variety of monochrome scenics being made today. Three artists tell us why digital tools have both transformed b&w and kept it thriving. One started as an audio design engineer, another as a photojournalist, and another as a commercial shooter. All of them were drawn to creating landscapes in black and white, and while all three can be said to work in a “classical” style, each has a distinct character to their images. Staying with Film The sole film shooter of our trio of monochromists, David Fokos might be considered a traditionalist’s traditionalist, particularly given his camera gear: a vintage Korona 8×10 view camera, plus one—and only one—lens, a 210mm f/5.6 Rodenstock Apo-Sironar-S. (On 8×10, the lens is the equivalent of about 28mm in 35mm full-frame terms.) He uses Kodak Tri-X Pan sheet film. But after developing the film, Fokos goes digital. If a negative looks promising, he scans it at very high resolution (the grayscale image file is—hold your breath—800MB) and sets to work on it in Adobe Photoshop. He often spends more than 100 hours on an image—and sometimes ends up discarding it anyway. Why not capture digitally? A major reason is that Fokos prints big—sometimes up to 7½ feet wide. “And 8×10 film gives me the resolution they require,” he says. “It’s only been within the last couple of years that digital capture has been able to rival this.” Fokos also notes that the reciprocity failure (the tendency of film to be underexposed at long exposure times) of Tri-X helps keep highlights from blowing out during such long exposures—sometimes as long as an hour.

Which brings us to the David Fokos look. “For scenes that contain a lot of motion, my exposures range from 20 seconds to 60 minutes,” he says. “This process eliminates what I have termed visual noise—all the short-term temporal events, things that are moving, that can distract us from focusing on the underlying fundamental forms. In a way, it is like peeling back a page to reveal a world that, while very real, is not experienced visually.”

The first image in the accompanying gallery, of Shark Tooth Cliff on Martha’s Vineyard, MA, was taken at about 90 seconds. At that duration, Fokos realized that the moon would show motion blur. So he took a fast exposure, too, and composited. He also adjusted local contrast and burned in the top and bottom.

Fokos’ other image in the gallery, “Eight Rocks and a Stone,” was made on Lucy Vincent Beach on Martha’s Vineyard. Captured at less than a second at f/45 or f/64, it is one of Fokos’ few images that stops motion. He says he wanted “to make an archetypical image that represents my summer spent walking on that beach.”

Digital at Step One

While Chuck Kimmerle’s compositions evoke the last century’s landscape masters (he cites Edward Weston and Fay Godwin) he believes that digital is a different aesthetic from film. “Digital capture has a different look and feel than does film—not better, not worse—and I feel those differences should be celebrated and used to advantage,” he says. “I would never try to make one look like the other. If I really wanted or needed a Tri-X look, I would shoot Tri-X film.”

Kimmerle shoots with a Nikon D3x, and his lenses include the Nikon 24mm, 45mm, and 85mm PC-E for their tilt and shift controls. For the photo “Sage Fence, Dead Horse Road, WY,” in our gallery, he used a 24–70mm f/2.8 AF-S Nikkor to make the exposure at 1/4 sec at f/8, ISO 100. “This image is a good example of right place at the right time,” he says. “The sagebrush is located along a fence line I had driven past half a dozen times, never noticing anything special. Then, after a day of looking for photographs, I was heading towards home and, shortly after sundown, literally saw it in a new light. The soft, directional, post-sunset light directly at my back made the branches glow, as if lit from within.”

As do most serious digital B&W shooters, he captures in RAW and converts later. In terms of “Sage Fence, Dead Horse Road, WY,” Kimmerle felt that the image looked too sharp and harsh. So he added a blurred layer in Photoshop, a technique sometimes called the Orton Effect (after Michael Orton, who pioneered the technique using slide sandwiches).

Kimmerle, who usually confines his edits to dodging and burning, notes that this was an unusual level of manipulation. “Working digitally offers far greater control and many more options for interpretation than can be found in a standard darkroom, especially for black-and-white work,” he says. “Sadly, many people fall victim to the traps of the power of post-processing. They don’t know when or how to hold back, to be subtle. They do too much because they can, relying on digital tricks and gimmicks that mask an image rather than enhance it.”

Kimmerle makes landscape images exclusively in black-and-white, he says, for two reasons. “The first is that I am far more interested in an object’s form and texture than I am its color,” he says. “Those traits are more powerful, more emotional, than an object’s tint and hue. The other reason is that I am a firm believer that creative photography is a two-step process: the creation of the image, and the presentation of the print. Or, to quote Ansel Adams, ‘The negative is the score, and the print the performance.’”

Two Very Different Hats

To peruse the website of Chris Clor, you might get the idea that he’s two different photographers. His commercial work in color for corporate clients tends toward wildly imaginative (some might say over-the-top) composites clearly not meant to represent reality. His black-and-white landscapes, such as his photograph of the Isle of Skye, are highly classical, even austere. “Since much of the black-and-white subject matter I shoot is landscape or cityscape, I have adopted a more straightforward approach to the photography, prefering almost no manipulation,” he tells us. “Something about black-and-white demands a bit more photographic realism, since at its core it is already an abstraction—we see in color.”

For the Skye image, Clor used his Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II and 24–70mm f/2.8L Canon EF lens for an exposure of 1/200 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100. After going grayscale, he did “minimal dodging and burning, a bit of noise reduction in the sky, and sharpening.”

Clor is currently using very different gear. “I prefer my Sony NEX-7 paired with a bucketful of old Olympus OM lenses I own from my very first real camera, an Olympus OM-1,” he says. “These are lenses that are around 30 years old, and in my book, outperform the modern lenses.”

Thinking in B&W

Our monochrome masters agree: to hone your b&w skills, just do it. A lot. “You need to put the hours and miles in,” Clor says. “I would suggest planning a photographic excursion to a place that interests you—not a vacation with the kids where you work in some shooting, but a trip devoted to photography.”

“To become better at working in black-and-white, I think it is important to immerse yourself in it completely, training yourself to see the world as it looks in compositions of black, white and gray,” Fokos says. He suggests capturing images simultaneously in RAW and monochrome JPEG to view the image on the LCD in b&w.

“The biggest mistake made by those new to black-and-white is to rely too heavily on differences in color rather than differences in luminosity, or brightness,” Kimmerle says. “Radically different colors may appear, in a black-and-white image, as the same shade of gray. Seeing in black-and-white is a skill that must be learned by doing.”

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