Revisiting Landscape Photography

By jove, it’s been a while. And yes, I am going to hide behind the typical excuse I’ve always used: I’ve been rather busy… =)

Anyway, that aside… Every now and then, whenever the question gets asked: “What kind of photography do you do?” Even my closer friends have regularly pointed to – landscape photography.

Now, I generally don’t disagree, but the truth of the matter is, it has been a long time since I’ve done any kind of landscape photography. (Come to think of it, I probably have not done it with this new camera at all.) And I’m very much still trying to define my own personal style and character, and that applies to my photography as well.

I recently had the opportunity to attend an amazing one-day seminar conducted by Jerry Ghionis, and I have to say he’s one of the best speakers I’ve ever had the privilege to listen to, and the amount of information relayed and delivered in that one day, in Jerry’s own words: “not only meets your expectations, but exceeds them”. There are some things which he said that really stick, and as he put it, hit a nerve as well.

And there’s way too much to cover if you let me go on and on about this talk. But in the event I never mention it again, please do go for one of his talks/workshops if the opportunity ever presents itself. I am very confident you will not regret it.

Anyway, I am getting fairly sidetracked, so let me get back to what I was saying. I recently went on a family road trip which spanned over 1000km of Malaysian roads, covered 6 states, across a duration of 4 days. This trip presented an opportunity to revisit landscape photography, and so  it was an ideal way to do some rekindling.

Now the thing about the sort of images that come from  a road trip is that they don’t usually have any kind of sequence, and tend to cover a wide range of photographic subjects as you go from place to place. And one thing I’ve picked up from Jerry’s seminar is to shoot with the album or story in mind. I reckon it’s somewhat applicable even to landscape photography, but I think that’s going to have to go wait (and I can put the excuse that I did this trip before the seminar =)). But let me try something nonetheless.

So here’s the plan: to post the images up in stages, in accordance to a certain theme, location, etc. Let’s see if I’m disciplined enough to keep this up…

(The images above form Miniseries 1: Boats at Dawn)

Captions:

The above series images  wouldn’t have been possible if not for my mum who insisted I do the sunrise shots which I merely mentioned in passing on this trip. They were taken at about 7.00 am after a rainy night not very far from Gurney Drive, Penang.

This leading image was the final shot I took after I turned away from the scene captured in the other two images. It was one of those cases where you’re packed up, ready to go, and as you look the other way, you see something else that captures your imagination.

Some might consider this boring, but there was an unexplainable feeling of mysterious silence when I saw this scene. I watched and waited whilst these empty boats bobbed about in the morning waves. Without further rhyme or reason, I chose to immortalize it in a shot.

The following set of images forms Miniseries 2: Malaysia’s Greens.