Galleries » My favourites

My favourites

You may be of the persuasion that the essential ingredients of a successful landscape photograph should always be a mixture of land and sky, preferably with land holding a two thirds majority and sky with a primary leaning towards cyan. My parish is very different and sometimes hard to reconcile.

I travel long distances and create my photography in some of Britain's most dramatic and iconic scenery. Yet I return nearly every time with images that carry no indication or record of the specific place where they were made. It is not that these dynamic and beautiful landscapes do not move me, far from it. Wild places definitely have the power to rouse my emotions, and my initial naivety about their true value has changed into a deeper urge to celebrate their beauty through photography. I feel equally moved to voice this through my own interpretation, striving to create an image that resonates as art.

Landscape photography becomes art when the image surpasses the sum of its parts. Put another way, a photograph is art when the viewer transcends to a place which stirs an emotion within them that is in addition to the reaction caused by the recording of rock, water, sky, plant or mountain. Often it is how these ingredients are arranged in the frame - the composition - that ultimately trips the image beyond the rut of record, into self-expression and then art. When a photograph reaches this stage it is almost impossible to describe in words what it is that fuels this visual emotion.

You may be relieved to read that I have reached the same point here and will finish by revealing what I should have confessed right at the start. Yes, these are currently my favourite images, and despite setting myself the challenge of writing quite a lengthy explanation about each one within the gallery, I still cannot successfully put into words why I have selected them, except to explain that they were discovered through looking with my heart as much as with my eyes.