Fine Art & Stock Photography
A lavishly produced book exploring the magnificent landscapes of Finistère, France's wildest department.
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Working on short videos with my friend & favourite artist Doug Selway made me think again about the concept of time in photographs. My Dust & Shadow project is all about time. It takes the artefacts of the recent past – in this case, fortifications dating back to World War 2 – and treats them as though they are mysterious monuments from a forgotten time. I’m interested in the way we – as a culture or a society – suffer […]
Imagine the archeologists of the future unearthing the atrefacts of our age. What will they find? And what will they make of them? To partially answer the first question, they will find the most endurable of our possessions, but not necessarily the most important. What significance will they attach to the plastic trivia to which we give so little thought? These are just a few of the questions posed by the work of Doug Selway – painter, multimedia artist and, […]
Yup, another Twitter refugee. You can now follow me on Mastodon at: @zolachrome@ohai.social And this is the first image I posted – a shot of the acer tree in our garden that provides a canopy for my ‘summer office’.
I’m finding, with my landscape photography, that I’m increasingly drawn to a minimalist approach. Sometimes to the point of abstraction. It’s not necessarily about simplicity. Some images can be very busy. It’s more about honing in on one thing. Landscape photography is not just about the grand vistas and dramatic scenery. That has its place, for sure. But if you have a dramatic scene in front of you, then getting a dramatic picture takes very little skill or effort. What […]
The title of this post might sound like an expensive new shade of paint from Farrow & Ball. What it’s actually about is finding beauty in even the apparently dullest light. It’s hardly a surprise to be met with overcast skies in Brittany in November. But there is a richness in that light, too. Ignore those people who tell you that landscape photography is all about shooting during ‘Golden Hour’. Flat, grey light has a stillness that can be, at […]
Autumn isn’t just about brown leaves. I think the yellow in this shot is blackthorn. The rest is heather, bracken, ivy and more. This was taken on the Côte d’Armor in Brittany, not far from Paimpol. And slightly further along the coast was this cliff. There’s a lot of green in there, for Autumn. By the way, this post marks a new direction for the blog – using it more like a notebook or sketchbook. So expect to find images […]
There are times when you want to trip the shutter of your camera with as little trauma as possible. When using long exposure times, long lenses or shooting close-ups with macro lenses, for example, pressing the shutter button can introduce vibration that might degrade the image quality, or even ruin it altogether. The easiest way of avoiding this issue is with the humble cable release. This screws into a threaded hole in the shutter button and provides a plunger you […]
This island is a strange place. It hugs the base of cliffs on the Crozon peninsula in Finistère, Brittany. This particular part of the Crozon is a narrow finger of land pointing to nearby Brest. And the proximity of that port town is significant. Brest has been strategically important to France for centuries. And this explains why the Crozon peninsula, which overlooks the approaches to the port, is heavily militarised. It is littered with fortifications, most dating from the 19th […]
On occasion, a camera captures a little too much. Its ability to freeze time creates detail of a somewhat arbitrary nature – waves stilled at the moment of breaking, for example, or the leaves of trees being blown by the wind rendered with exquisite precision that doesn’t necessarily match the mood of the scene or the emotion you’re trying to convey. The technique of using long exposure times to allow moving subjects to blur has a long pedigree in the […]
This is a shot taken on a recent trip to Brittany. I’m pleased with it – which is just as well because it took me nine years to get it. These are the remains of a pier or jetty sticking out into the Rade de Brest – the confluence of several rivers where they meet the Atlantic. It’s shot from the shore of the Crozon peninsula, a beautifully rugged part of Finistère. I was attracted to these pillars because of […]