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Iconic Masters
Perusal of any photography magazine will reveal many with aspirations to start making money from their hobby. They see what has been achieved by the bigger names in the business and become inspired to follow in their footsteps. After the explosion of interest in photography over the last few years with the advent of digital capture, I sometimes wonder if the hopefuls are trying to get going in an already crowded market and in the middle of an economic downturn too. Simply emulating those that are already well established in not enough; you have to develop your own photographic style and vision too.
Those that get listed on this page are perhaps the best known among the landscape photography community. They are well published too with numerous books and magazine articles to their name and I suppose that their extensive libraries of images are doing their bit in contributing to the paying of their bills. They don't limit themselves to Britain and Ireland either but extend their reach further afield with some travelling more than others.
Mr. Noton's photographic life has changed in recent years with a move into the world of digital capture together with the launch of a book and a DVD. His regular column in Practical Photography has decamped to the perhaps more appropriate Outdoor Photography too. However, he remains in the business of selling to stock libraries and to any of us via his website. The prices of prints are not so extortionate given the size of the back office team and the quality of the landscape and travel imagery remains the same.
The photos in his latest book leave you in no doubt that he knows how to put his large format view camera to good use with sheets of Fujifilm's respected Velvia and Provia emulsions. You cannot but marvel at what he can achieve and wonder how he can make something of limited lighting. Film photography may have stayed his mainstay but that's not to say that he is a digital refusenik with monochrome photos from a Ricoh GX100 peppering the text of Scotland's Mountains. and there always is the prospect of using a digital back with his Ebony 5" x 4".
That latest solo work complements earlier ones such as Scotland's Coast and Northumberland Coast. Collaborative ones have come the way too to complement his calendar and print sales. All of these appear on the website along with the obligatory galleries that give a taste of the photos that he makes.
Charlie was an actor before he found that photography made him more money. His Hasselblads have always knocked out some very good shots and he is kept well busy leading photography courses. There are also a lot of photography books to his name.
Another large format camera user and a pro inspired to do landscape photography in place of his previous commercial work by none other than Charlie Waite (see above). The examples of his work that you find here may appear simple but they are certainly not below par. Rather than the wider vista, the finer detail seems to be what is sought out by this practitioner, never ever a bad thing and his articles in the likes of Outdoor Photography may have started something in me too.
This master's panoramic vistas of Scotland's wild places must grace many a wall and they appear on mine too. That isn't all but his reach includes those from other parts of the world too. There was a time when his work might have been criticised for being too recognisable but that seems less the case now than it did, particularly when you start looking through the images on his website. Not only does that allow you but prints, calendars and books but he also gives photography tuition too; there's a lot of variety to be sampled and savoured.
It might be the age of digital capture but here's another devotee to the use of an old style field or view camera. Even fleeting perusal of the results will lead to the inescapable conclusion that he really knows what to do it. There are a number of books to his name too and the theme of capturing how light and land interact feeds into these too. Of course, he hasn't missed out on the opportunity to sell his work either.
