A Fair Weather Photographer

So what weather do you like to go shooting in?

Most people think a bright summers day with blue skies is ideal, and it does provide great bright light to freeze action shots, but...

Recently I went to a talk by one of the Paisley Colour exponents - Robert Fulton. Robert is simply excellent at landscapes - he not only is compositionally spot on, but he also has the gumsheon to get up early for morning shots, is technically excellent, and is willing to stand up to the welly tops in icy cold rivers for a shot of a frozen tree as viewed by the ducks (which are at this point huddled together on dry land).

The point is, Robert never shoots on summers days. In the summer he is pottering in his garden enjoying the sunshine. His camera is resting in his kit bag. He only photographs in the autumn and winter. He takes most of his images on cold frosty or misty mornings when the sun is struggling to get through the cloud, colours are strong but subtle and the light is diffuse. As a result he takes incredibly atmospheric images. My own best shots are taken up the hills when no-one is there , between storms, when the sky is black and the sun is low and lighting the foreground.

I was lucky enough to have a chat with Robert and to my delight discovered that not only does he have the same gear as me (unusually NOT shooting with a full frame sensor) but he also takes the images that I aim for wonderfully well, uses photoshop with the same ethos that I do and seeks out his subjects in much the same way I do in the location that I had earmarked for the coming years' photography. He certainly gave me something to aim at! On discussing his set up for landscapes I found out that our work flow is almost identical - almost...

We both shoot in aperture mode almost exclusively, using a tripod and preferring the 2 second delay to the fuss of a remote release, we both use hyperfocal depth of field, we both use polarisers and warm up filters and we both post process by masking areas and playing with exposure, shadow/highlight and contrast to bring selective areas of our images up or down.

So what were the differences? That is aside from his skill, eye and experience:

1) I tend to use f/11 or so to reduce chromatic aberation at the expense of sharpness in the distance. Robert said "What's chromatic aberation, I don't bother worrying about that - use f/22. play around with your digital camera and compare the results, see what works for you". Well, f/22 here I come - the huge difference between his images and mine was the critical sharpness at a distance.

2) I'm an evening person, taking most of my landscapes at dusk, conversely Robert gets up early (only shooting in the autumn and winter due to the later sunrises), drives for an hour or so to his favourite spots and then waits for the sun to start to come up. The result, soft colours, golden glows and atmospheric mists on cold morning (no doubt he also suffers a lot of dissappointing wasted trips, but we won't dwell on those). Mist is Roberts trademark and he makes GREAT use of it.

3) Finally, I wait for my shot, take the image and move on. Robert tends to bracket his exposures, rattle off a few shots, wait for the light to change and do it again. He gets lots of similar images and is able to choose the best from a batch of quality images.

So I got what I hoped for from his talk, and more - tips, inspiration and best of all I learned something that was directly relevant to my own photography. I learned that I need to strat getting up earlier in the morning and I learned that "bad" weather is the landscape photographers friend.