Ian Furniss Photography » Blog Archive

Lifting The Veil

Today’s update comes by way of some new images I took this afternoon on a location scouting trip somewhere along the A5004 High Peak to Buxton road. I’d set out late unfortunately and with the light going early at this time of year i’d not managed to get out quite as far as i’d hoped when I set out.

One of the things I like about landscape photography though is that such things aren’t too important if you leave your attitude behind when you venture out and remember why you take photos in the first place, and particularly why you take them of the land. For me, the reason is simply that I love the moments of solitude and the chance to appreciate the beauty of the earth we live on. With that in mind, the thought becomes less “Now where’s that place I wanted to get to?! I’m running late! My day’s ruined!!” and more like “Ok, so I haven’t made it to that place I was looking for, but who cares?! I might not have got the shots I wanted anyway, and just look at the beauty that is around me … I can get some great shots here instead!”.

So, with the light fading fast, down went the tripod, out came the grads, and I set about looking for something that might inspire me. Now i’m a great lover of water, there’s something about it that I find fascinating in the way that for me it seems to symbolise mans arrogance and the whole “veil of Isis” thing whereby we can walk along ‘seeing’ but not ‘seeing’. There’s a whole world of activity a few feet away from us, and we’re completely blind to it other than seeing the veil that covers it. I digress. As a creature of habit I fired off a good few shots of the sun going down with nice reflections of clouds and banks in the water, but then, what grabbed my eye was the most beautiful tree on the opposite bank.

Now I don’t know what it is about Landscape Photographers and trees but for some unknown reason it seems that they too fascinate the life out of us. If there’s a landscape photographer out there who hasn’t got a picture of a tree in his or her gallery i’ve yet to see it. We’re like lemmings with tripods … It’s a tree… It’s a tree!! I must go to it!! and then you hear the thud as we fall face first over the camera bag.

These images are the result of my momentary journey to the heights of lemming-ness, but with them comes the thought .. ‘Don’t worry if your day doesn’t turn out quite how you planned it. Make the best of what’s around you because you came to take photos of the landscape, it didn’t knock at your door and ask you what you wanted it to be today. A badly planned day can be a good day scouting and you may even get a few keepers you weren’t expecting. In short, lift the veil from your eyes and see what is around you. It’s good to have a plan but don’t become so fixated by it that you can’t see the wood for the trees (Ok, you knew that one was coming but it was just too easy to resist!). Images will scale when clicked.