soundimageplus: The man-made landscape

Sony NEX-7 55-210mm zoom

Photography by David and Ann Taylor-Hughes

Photographing nature can be difficult. It tends to be chaotic and random. As landscape photographers, we are in the same position as others who do what we do, in attempting to find images of harmony and balance in the midst of all this. This is made easier whenever the hand of human beings has shaped what we see. Living where we do there is very little "pure" nature and landscape left. The non-urban areas are largely agricultural land and there are canals offering a green corridor through all of this.

Sony NEX-7 Voigtlander 35mm f/1.2 Nokton lens

Sony NEX-7 55-210mm

Sony NEX-7 Zeiss 24mm

I often use the phrase location photography to describe the kind of images that we produce, as often its difficult to describe the images as landscape photographs. In the UK apart from a few wilderness areas, there are very places left that haven't been shaped by human activity of some sort. These tend to be the most difficult to access and photograph.

The benefit of a landscape that is one step removed from any notion of a "natural" state, is that its often much easier to produce images with strong visual shapes, patterns and lines. Since we seem to like imposing some kind of order on what we see, mostly to serve our needs, these man-made landscapes work very well in photographs. Particularly when what we have created has, over time, blended in to what was there before.