Some shots from a few days ago, taken on a late afternoon walk in the woods nearby my house. All taken using the Olympus E-P3 and either the 45mm f/1.8 or 12mm f/2.0 lenses. Minimal processing, basically default Aperture conversions. And minimal technique too - noise, blur, whatever.

m.zuiko 45mm f/1.8

m.zuiko 45mm f/1.8

m.zuiko 12mm f/2.0

m.zuiko 12mm f/2.0

m.zuiko 12mm f/2.0

m.zuiko 45mm f/1.8

I don’t do street photography. At least not street photography with people in it. And I don’t do portraits. I’m just hopeless at people photography - I have neither the skills, nor the wish, to photograph people. And so when somebody asks me to photograph their birthday party - because I take photos, I must have a really good camera, etc - as happened today, I find the offence caused by refusing is less than the disappointment I’d cause if I accepted.

Weirdly though, the vast number of photography-related blogs I visit and subscribe to are mainly run by “people photographers”. I just find them more stimulating. There seems to be a lot more inventiveness, a lot more pushing the boundaries than in landscape, or “places” photography, where really there two camps - the romantic landscape, the “fine art photographers”, and the deadpan “post-modern” stuff. Why this is I don’t know. Perhaps there is less scope, or attraction, in pushing the look and texture in landscape, and more in finding new approaches to composition and viewpoint. Of course there’s the Flickr all-sliders-on-11 + extra contrast “style”, and, puke, HDR, but those are just failures of aesthetic judgement, not inventiveness.

There’s also a lot less gear talk on the “people” side, although there’s still plenty. The main difference is that there it’s pretty much all Fuji these days, as opposed to Canikon or very big, very expensive toys.

If there are any active, truly compelling blogs run by predominantly landscape photographers, I’ve yet to find them. But I’m open to suggestions.

I don’t do street photography but I couldn’t resist this. Como, Italy, Olympus E-P3 with 45mm f/1.8 lens. Probably should be black and white - and taken with a Fuji - to really qualify as “street”

Here’s a few of the blogs I subscribe to:

• Jeff Damron’s “Better in Black & White” (actually Jeff does do quite a lot of interesting landscape work, but from a portraitist’s perspective, it seems to me)
• Patrick LaRoque
(I totally love his photography, which is about as far away from mine as you could get. For a start, his is good.)
• Neil Gaudet’s “Ramblings of a Photographer”
• Gordon Lewis’ “Shutterfinger”
• Roël’s Holy f-stop … hmm, you know what ? He does landscape too!
• Robert Boyer’s RB|Design

Now this doesn’t mean I don’t like, admire and appreciate many landscape photographers. Of course I do. A large proportion of the few friends I have are landscape photographers. But they don’t tend to have much really interesting to write about. Maybe they just let the photos do the talking. Maybe we’re all sociopaths.

This is slightly crazy. A few weeks ago I decided to work on a small set of photos of Venice, converted to black & white using the excellent Nik Silver EFX 2.0. Silver EFX does a pretty good job of turning digital images into emulations of monochrome film photography. So far so good. But then it occurred to me that I was actually transforming scans of positive film into emulations of monochrome negative film, which is not exactly an optimum process, since there’s a good 5 extra stops of exposure range in b&w, and the contrast curve in positive film doesn’t like being stretched too much. Well anyway. I’d probably have been better off loading Agfa Scala in my XPan in the first place. Or even Ektar 100. And apart from that, the originals actually were shot very much with colour in mind. But I quite like the way it all turned out.

I’ve decided to publish the set on 500px. I’ve had an account there for a while, but so far I haven’t used it much. What I like about 500px over Flickr is that it lends itself more to publishing sets, or portfolios. Flickr of course allows you to create sets as well, but it really puts an emphasis on individual photos. I can’t say I’ve built up much of a following over the 5 years or so I’ve been on Flickr, so perhaps it’s worth trying another approach. Personally I feel my photos work better in portfolios - in fact I was nudged in this direction a while ago by a professional photographer friend - but photo sharing sites are pretty much all about the latest shot, followed 15 nanoseconds later by the next. Also somehow photos taken recently are granted more worth than ones taken several years, or more, ago. I don’t really know why that is. These photos are nearly 2 years old, but they wouldn’t look substantially different had I taken them yesterday.

I’m not all that happy about 500px deciding that everybody’s photos should be represented by a square preview. That’s them imposing their aesthetic decision over mine. But I suppose everybody else does this too. Otherwise it’s certainly much cleaner and photo-centric than Flickr.

Here’s one that didn’t make the cut. Possibly a little too clichéd.

And there’s another one that didn’t make it to 500px, but ended up on Flickr instead. Well, I wouldn’t want them to feel left out.

On a well known photography gear forum, which I imagine I’m not the only one to far too regularly seek out as a displacement activity, yesterday I came across a question asking “is the Ricoh GRD any good for anything other than grainy black and white ?”. It’s a valid question - the vast majority of GR photos you find on the web are indeed black, white, grainy and often gritty. Auteur street photography dominates. And yet as far as I recall, I’ve only ever published low ISO colour stuff. Probably another reason why my genius is chronically ignored and overlooked.

So I thought I’d give it a spin. Using a “recipe” suggested by another contributer to the same forum, I made a settings set with ISO 1600 (gasp!), hi-contrast black & white, with a pinch of classic square format to taste.

The first three photos here are taken at the “Ala Pelera” watchtower above Camorino, part of the Fortini della Fame built in the early 19th Century in reaction to political instability in Lombardy, as well as famine in Ticino.

Ala Pelera detail 1. Ricoh GRD IV

Ala Pelera detail 2. Ricoh GRD IV

Ala Pelera detail 3. Ricoh GRD IV

The next two were taken in the woods a little way from the watchtower, same general area as my previous post.

Tracked. Ricoh GRD IV

Pipeline. Ricoh GRD IV

So, there we go. I’ve now joined the Ricoh GRD grainy black & white club. Lavish praise cannot fail to follow.

Resizing and framing done in Filterstorm Pro on the iPad. Otherwise straight from camera. Filterstorm is a pretty amazing application, but it’s fairly complicated, and I’m not sure if I’ve got the workflow properly sorted out yet. The uploads seem to be very compressed.

A couple of days ago, while searching for photo books on Paragonia, I discovered the work of Linde Waidhofer, on the Western Eye Press website. Linde is, it seems, a long established landscape photographer with a particular affinity for Patagonia. She has an extremely nice eBook available on her site, Unknown Patagonia, which she is freely distributing in the hope of raising awareness on the risks to a stunningy beautiful, isolated part of Southern Chile which is at risk from the energy industry. This sadly reminds me of similar destructive forces in parts of Iceland.

The location is amazing, and the photography even more so. Linde Waidhofer has an understated style which does not impose itself on the subject matter, does not overly abstract things, but presents natural beauty with great taste and judgement.

Since the eBook is available for free, I would encourage you to download it, enjoy it, and pass it on, and hopefully the message that Linde is trying to put out will spread. And at the same time you’ll discover some classic nature photography (actually not just nature) which deserves to be widely known.