For artists, light and landscape have always held an irresistible allure. In part two of his inspirational series, Colin Prior turns to lighting and how to capture it in photographs.

With the best intentions, people will often tell me about places where there is a “great picture” waiting for my camera. What they, and even my closest fiends, fail to grasp is that I never simply go out to photograph a particular place - what I am after is the light itself.

Location is certainly one aspect of an image over which you have control. And it is critical, but it’s only the raw material, the starting point for a great image. The skill is in understanding the interplay of light and shadow on the landscape and understanding just when it will make a compelling photograph. “Easy,’ you may say, ‘it’s at dusk and dawn when the sun is low, and the sky and the light is warmer.” But when exactly? In November, March or June? Seasonal differences in the sun’s position at sunrise and sunset will have a very significant effect on how the light affects the landscape.

In general terms, we know that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and that the hours of daylight during the summer months are greater than those during the winter. Although this might seem obvious, I’ve found that people’s understanding of why this phenomenon occurs is all but non-existent. It’s remarkable that something so fundamental to our everyday life is understood by so few - the subject appears to be surrounded with the same aura of mystery as that normally reserved for religious beliefs.

Fully grasping the position of the sun at dusk and dawn is crucial to achieving successful landscape photographs. You’ll also need to look at the geography of the landscape itself to decide if it will benefit from being shot at dusk or dawn. And note the variation of shadow length, cast by the sun at the zenith, during the year. Shooting at sunrise in mid-summer is always a short-lived affair as the sun climbs rapidly on an incline creating conditions not suited to landscape photography. But in mid-winter however when the sun follows such a low arc in the sky, it’s a very different story.

But some of it will be out of your control. In Scotland, due to the northerly latitude, the sun from mid-November through to mid-February is simply too low to illuminate many of the mountain ranges. An in some of the lochs such as Loch Torridon and Loch Maree, the sun never climbs high enough to illuminate their south sides, which remain in shadow all day. This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to shoot good photographs during these months but it is likely that your expectation of how the landscape will look will be very different from the way it reveals itself during these winter months. Ultimately, it is experience that will guide you to a specific location at certain times of the year.

Last autumn, during a spell of fine weather, I travelled to Torridon in the Scottish Highlands, intent on photographing one or two of the images, which I have pre-visualised for some time. For as many years as I can remember, I have thought about photographing Liathach at dawn from its eastern ridge of Stuc a Choire Dhuibhb Bhig. The image I had visualised after my first ascent required the pyramidal peak to be covered in snow and be illuminated by the pink light of dawn. I estimated that conditions would be optimal in late October or early November.

I left late in the afternoon, around 3.30 as the cloud began to dissipate. Liathach is a steep climb over exposed ground and I walked the last ninety minutes in the circular beam of my head torch. I distinctly remember my feelings of relief when I realised I was on the open ground just below the summit, having completed the exposed scramble to the high ground. Once on the ridge, I could see Torridon brightly illuminated by the full moon - in a word, it was awesome.

I quickly set about erecting my lightweight tent on the narrow summit ridge and securing the guys around boulders where there was four inches of snow. Notwithstanding the temperature, which I estimated to be around -20 with the effect of wind chill, the evening passed uneventfully, if not decidedly cool. As I unzipped the tent door the following morning - half expecting to be engulfed in cloud, conditions looked perfect. I was set up well before the sun rose and managed to shoot Liathach against a backdrop of rare colours. Projected onto the atmosphere itself, the mauve earth shadow can only be seen from high elevations beneath the anti-twilight arch, which separates the crimson hues of the upper atmosphere, illuminated by the sun not yet over the horizon. As the sun rose and illuminated the mountain, I made a series of images with differing intensities of pink light before it normalised in colour temperature.

The personal satisfaction of finally achieving an image, which had essentially existed in my mind’s eye for years, cannot be understated. It’s a strange combination of pre-visualisation, of planning, of preparedness, both mentally and in equipment terms and of overcoming many of our instinctive fears, which are essentially based on survival. In order to achieve what I wanted, I had to deliberately put myself in harm’s way. It’s ironic but I experienced a strange excitement, a heightening of the senses as I climbed up this wild mountain in darkness. By the time I had returned to the car the following day, I felt content that I’d successfully achieved the photographs I’d been after for so long.

If this all sounds a bit daunting when all you really want to do is go out and take photographs, there is another path and one which I am finding more appealing. It does not negate the approach already discussed, which is essential if you plan to make definitive statements about certain areas, but it is a quieter approach and one that I’d suggest to any photographer working outdoors. Simply immerse yourself in an area - you don’t need to walk huge distances, just sit down, listen and observe and try to make some connection with the land. A friend of mine maintains that you don’t get to know a mountain unless you have slept on it, a fact with which I concur. Connect internally with your feelings and then try to create expressive images, which visually summarise your feeling about the place.

In my early years I was drawn to the work of Peter Dombrovskis, a talented landscape photographer who lived and in Tasmania. Peter worked primarily with a large format camera and was influenced by the work of Ansel Adams, Brett Weston and Elliot Porter. On the 28th March 1996 while photographing the Western Arthur Range in Tasmania’s remote southwest, the land he loved and which his work did so much to save, Peter died from a massive heart attack. But his work lives on, as does his legacy and I would commend his own approach to landscape photography, which he gave in an interview a year before his death:

“Finding things to photograph is more to do with one’s state of mind rather than the particular environment in which you happen to be. My most productive days are when I move through the landscape with an attitude of acceptance - of leaving myself open to all possibilities rather than expecting to find anything in particular. At best, this intuitive, dream-like wandering may lead to what one may call a state of grace, a sense of spiritual connection with all around, from the wide landscape to the smallest detail”.
- Peter Dombrovskis 1995

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