Field journal
Locations, hours and working method for landscape photography across the British coast, moor and hill country.
Where the journal works
Each section holds its own locations, its own hours and its own failures. They are kept apart because the coast and the high moor do not reward the same habits.
Shingle, saltmarsh, harbour walls and the long tidal flats. Tide tables read as light schedules, and the particular problem of photographing water that will not hold still.
Peat, heather, gritstone and granite, from Dartmoor to the Cairngorms. Approach routes, plateau navigation before first light, and the weight you can actually carry up them.
Fronts, inversions, sea fog and the flat days in between. How to read a synoptic chart the night before and decide which hill is worth the alarm clock.
Bluebells, bracken, heather and frost, and the narrow windows they open. Notes kept year on year, so that the timing stops being a guess.
Tripods on peat and scree, filters in hill wind, keeping a front element dry on an exposed ridge. Method that survives contact with British conditions.
The British landscape plates, held in five numbered sets. Each plate carries its location, the conditions on the day, and what the frame was trying to do.
The index
Dated as they were written, newest first. Locations, conditions, and what came back on the card.
The habits learned on Cornish and Welsh cliffs travel well, but the Costa da Morte asks for a few of them to be relearned. Notes on fog, swell and tide planning along a granite shoreline between Cee and Muxia.
The man standing in the wash with a long rod is reading the same water you are trying to photograph, only harder. What the bars, rips and gutters of a surf beach look like from above the tide line, and what they do to a frame.
By day a fishing town photographs as boats and gulls. After closing time it photographs as light on wet stone and the geometry of lit doorways. Notes from the last hour on a September night.
The trial is a drawing made on the moor at walking pace, and every part of the drawing has a name. A field note on where the camera can stand, what the outrun and the drive actually look like, and why the scoring explains the picture.
The best light on most hills happens before the first car arrives and after the last one leaves. A night in a cabin near the trailhead moves the photographer from the wrong side of that window to the right side of it.
Industrial remains sit in the landscape differently from castles and barns: they are working shapes, not picturesque ones. Notes on light, framing and the iron still standing, here and in the Hudson valley.
The animals a landscape photographer meets are encountered subjects, not arranged ones, and they nearly always appear in the worst light of the day. Notes on exposure in grey, raking and backlit conditions.
The landscape photographer's eye is trained on weather, but the principles were learned indoors first: colour temperature, falloff, and what a second source does to a scene. The sitting room is the cheapest studio there is.
In a steep valley the river runs through a moving corridor of light, and the corridor follows the sun, not the photographer's convenience. A field note on water reading borrowed from the wading anglers.
The show orchard photographs itself. The working orchard, the one with crates stacked by the hedge and a press going under a lean-to, needs the photographer to earn the frame. Notes from a Cambridgeshire September.
Between the last trip and the next one there is a season at home, and the discipline that fills it best is the one that practices waiting for its own sake. Notes on what sitting still lends to field work.
Most modern crafts have abolished the seasons; turning wood has not. The log arrives wet in winter and the finished bowl leaves dry in summer, and the photographer who watches that understands seasonal work from the inside.
On a flat coast the only way to change the picture is to change the camera's position, and the one dimension nobody uses is up. A worked example of what raising the camera does that no lens can imitate.
The stunt coordinator's working document is a list of everything that can go wrong, written down before the day starts. The field photographer's equivalent exists but is rarely written. Notes on borrowing the discipline.
The thermos is the honest answer, but the brewed cup on the hill is better, and the method that survives a cold wind at six hundred metres is the method that was decided at the kitchen table first.
The North Sea fog that fills the east coast harbours between May and August is not random. It follows sea surface temperature and an onshore wind with a light gradient, and both are published the evening before. Here is how that forecast turns into a departure time.
Between Aldeburgh and Bawdsey the beach is stone rather than sand, and stone behaves very differently in the ten minutes after rain. A working account of the tide, the wind and the frame.
Graduated filters are a fair weather idea until the gusts arrive. What stays on the lens, what goes back in the bag, and where the vibration is actually coming from.
The plateau is easy ground in daylight and a maze of peat channels in the dark. Route choice, timing from the car park, and where the edge actually gives you a foreground.
Flowering runs by altitude and by burning rotation, so one moor can be three weeks apart from end to end. Notes on where the colour lands first.
Flat grey cloud is a very large softbox, and it suits woodland, water and stone far better than a clear sunrise does. What to point it at instead of going home.
On a firth this shallow the water leaves faster than you can walk. Working out which hour of the ebb gives you the channels, and which one strands you.
Three surfaces that all move, each in its own way and on its own timescale. How to set the legs so the frame is still square at the end of a two minute exposure.
The first archive set opens with the four figure plate numbers kept from the original sequence. What each number records, and why the order is not chronological.
Weathered granite is all horizontal joints and rounded blocks. Overhead sun flattens every one of them, and a low sun from the side puts them back.
The flowers hold their colour for a short spell and photograph badly for most of the day. Which wood, which aspect, and which part of the morning.
Cold air pools in the bottom of a valley on a still clear night, and the cloud that forms there sits below the ridge line. The conditions that make it, and the ones that ruin it.
Archive
The archive is held in numbered sets, in the sequence the plates were catalogued. Each plate keeps its original number.
Elsewhere
Eight notebooks read the way this one is read: for the light, the ground and the method, each on its own territory.
The French review Lumières d'Ailleurs practises travel photography by light: raking morning light over Bali's rice terraces, blue hour on the bridges of Paris, grey moving skies over the Irish cliffs.
For the evening after the field day, The House Pour writes the host's side of the evening's beer at home: glassware, counter space, and the house rules for games that keep twelve people round a small table.
Photographers drawn to northern water can browse the seasonal lake galleries and shore notes of Sunset Country Fishing Notes, a field guide to Eagle Lake in Ontario.
Photographers working a British headland can read North Minch Shore Watch, a shore journal that logs cetaceans from a headland: which whales and dolphins pass the north Minch, month by month, and what sea state and glare let you actually see.
For the longer journey, Teranga Fieldnotes keeps field notes from Senegal: week-by-week life on a long volunteer posting, the community projects it joins, and the first words of Wolof.
On the fishing side of the same patience, Picket Hill Field Notes keeps reading trout water season by season: seams, riffles and pools, and the twelve-month preparation behind a hunting year.
Photographers who depend on honest feedback will recognise the ground covered by The Carolina Kidlit Review: portfolio review advice, how to prepare for one, and how to use the feedback it returns.
For anyone who works a dog on the hill, Shepherd Health Journal keeps shepherd dog health in the field: hips, joints and the care of the working collie, drawn on twenty-five years of Border Collies and farm dogs.
