landscape – Tales from Wild Wales

Golden Hour at the Steel Works.

Family duties took me down to Swansea at the end of March, which gave me the opportunity to spend a day around Port Talbot and its steel works. It seemed like eighteen months since I had last been there (see this post) but on checking my files I discovered that it was three and a half years ago! “Doesn’t time fly” doesn’t really do that justice……

If you live in Wales you will probably have heard the steel works is threatened with closure, yet again, and this time it looks final. Its owners – the Indian multinational Tata – say that the plant loses over £1m a day, and if that is true who can blame them. But it is by far the biggest employer in the area and some 2800 jobs are likely to be lost, while there must be countless other local businesses whose survival depends indirectly on it. It is also the biggest single polluter in Wales, and is responsible for 2% of the UK’s total carbon emissions. Tata say that once the plant is levelled, they will build an electric arc furnace to recycle scrap steel into new steel. This process emits less carbon dioxide but is also less labour-intensive than making virgin steel in a blast furnace. Many jobs will still be lost, and, to be honest , Port Talbot and its environs are already pretty run down. Such are the dilemmas involved in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.

I had been studying the OS 1:25000 map of the area in great detail before my visit, and had identified some potential new viewpoints. But my first location was the one I discovered on my previous visit, on the hillside directly above Port Talbot town centre. From there one looks south-eastwards towards the works, the nearest point of which is more than a mile away. I was going to need my long lens and a tripod.

Over a period of an hour or so I took a range of images at focal lengths from 250mm – 300mm , that’s x10 to x12 magnification. Weather conditions were quite atmospheric; dry and mostly cloudy with little wind, lending an almost monochromatic air with very subtle colouration to the photographs (see above). It was a good start. I then moved further uphill, but found the visual impact of the works was less powerful the higher I got. My second location involved an steep drive on a minor road above the works and then an easy walk. I was higher still here and even more disappointed. From this height the works had a toytown feel to it. It just didn’t hit home at all.

Driving back through the backstreets of Port Talbot I took a left turn on a hunch and was soon confronted by a colourful mural on two walls of a garage. A man was fixing his car nearby so I went over for a quick chat. It turned out that this garage wall was the exact location of the “Port Talbot Banksy” which suddenly appeared in December 2018. It had been bought by an art dealer and removed for safe-keeping, but remained on display in the town until 2022. The mural that I came across, purely by chance, by the street artist Steve Jenks, has none of the subtlety of the original. But the works features prominently on it, which adds another layer of human connection with the steel industry in Port Talbot.

It was late afternoon by now and I could see a slot in the clouds close to the horizon in the western sky. It looked like I might get some golden hour light on the works if I was patient. I returned to my original viewpoint, and the sun crept slowly towards the slot. When it did finally emerge the steel complex was bathed in golden light. Right on cue a thick cloud of orange-brown smoke belched out from the centre of the complex and dissipated into the air above it. It was an exciting moment but………..

……………it felt almost indecent to photograph this filth in such gorgeous conditions. Does the landscape photographer have a responsibility to be honest about their subject matter, or to portray it in the best conditions possible? My day’s photography had asked more questions than it had provided answers. But I’m going to go out on a limb here: this is one of the best photographic locations in Wales.

For now.

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Postcard talk.

*M327 – Snowdon from the Cob, Porthmadog*

Earlier in my career as a photographer I had a whole range of activities which each brought in a certain amount of dosh. Examples include exhibition rental, print sales, calendar sales, book production and sales, and commissioned work. For a number of years I freelanced for the Wales Tourist Board, which was the closest I ever had to a money spinner. But it was a soul-less activity and I felt just like a cog in a machine. Throughout all this time my bread and butter income was through the sale of postcards. But I always felt that with a growing track record like mine I would be able to drop the postcards and work on bigger projects for prestigious clients.

How wrong I was! The bigger projects dropped away for all sorts of reasons and with some minor exceptions all I’m left with is postcard sales. Sales are nothing like they were at their peak say 15 years ago (about 30%) but they do seem to have bottomed out in recent years. There is a whole host of reasons for this – like the use of mobile phones, the ridiculous cost of postage, and shop closures. For example, in the last 18 months three of my very few outlets in south Pembrokeshire have closed; one is now a cafe, one a toy shop and another sells secondhand books. None are interested in postcards. And yes, you do have to develop a very thick skin……

I’m not sure how many people understand how postcards are printed. To cut a long story short, commercial litho printing involves pulling a large sheet of paper/card through a machine. In the case of my postcards, and depending on the machine, the sheet holds 16 or 32 different designs. For the lowest unit price the sheet needs to be full. The drawback is that you end up with the same number of each individual design. And of course some postcards sell much better than others. There are always difficult decisions to be made.

I had been using the same printer for a number of years and their machine held 32 designs. But I began to get frustrated by some aspects of dealing with them and sometimes with the actual printing quality. I decided to look around for another printer last summer. The company I eventually settled on had a machine which used a sheet holding sixteen designs. I didn’t realise at the time that my main competitor had used them as well, but I suppose that is a kind of recommendation. Anyway, the printing went well, and if anything the print quality was better. Things were looking up! I contacted them over the winter to discuss another order.

There had been changes. They had disposed of their litho machine and installed a digital printer. My experience of commercial digital printing had been very poor but I was reassured that this was not your typical digital machine. Some samples were printed for me from the files that had been used for my last job and they were virtually identical. I couldn’t fault them. The biggest advantage was that it is now possible to have any number of each design printed. So if I needed 1000 of one design and 400 of another that was absolutely fine. The unit cost depended only on the total number of cards printed. So I decided to take a punt.

The cards are absolutely fine. Printing quality seems to be as good as the litho printer, and I’m able to tailor the order more closely to what I think will sell. I can’t help wishing these machines had been available many years ago.

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A picture around every corner.

The view of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) from the Cob, near Porthmadog, is one of the iconic landscapes in Wales. For many years I have been trying to capture it to perfection. I had another attempt last week but I’m still not sure I’ve achieved it. I was in position at the south-eastern end of the Cob long before sunrise and had a long wait before I managed to get a few results I was reasonably happy with.

From here one is very close to the Boston Lodge HQ of the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railways. Steam engines are prepared here every morning for service on the lines to Blaenau Ffestiniog and Caernarfon. By now the sun was strong and the activities around the engine sheds were either in deep shadow or strongly backlit. This made some powerful images possible as the trains were put together and then headed off to Porthmadog Harbour station ready to pick up passengers. I love the black-and-white look for steam railways: it reminds me of the last years of steam on British Rail in the 1960’s, when the railway magazines I read were still mostly in b&w.

By this time I was in need of a coffee so I headed off to Porthmadog. Take-away in hand I rushed back to the station just in time to catch one of the morning trains heading off towards Tan-y-bwlch. A strong wind blew a plume of steam across the saltmarshes.

On the nameplate of one of the engines was engraved “Built in 1879”. I told the driver how amazing it was that a machine built almost 150 years ago could still be in operation. He rather burst my bubble by saying that the name plate was probably the only part remaining from the original locomotive. The whole thing has – in effect – been rebuilt around it. The motto of the Ffestiniog could be “re-use, rebuild and recycle”.

I have already written (here) that Llyn Dinas is one of my favourite photo locations in the whole of Wales. On this by now wonderful day for the landscape photographer how could I resist the temptation to drive the ten miles to the lake and see what conditions were like there? I couldn’t and I wasn’t disappointed.

The lake was perfectly still with mirror-like reflections. Birch trees on the far side of the lake had lost some of their leaves, revealing purple twigs and silver trunks and branches. The remaining leaves were in a range of yellows and greens. Between the trees lay dark shadows. It was such a simple photograph to take, but it works so well. The tiny gate on the right-hand side (and its reflection) seem critical to the composition, and the whole thing has a hypnotic, mandala-like effect on me. I could disappear into it.

On such a day it seemed like there was a picture around every corner. But a bank of high cloud was relentlessly moving in from the west and by mid-afternoon it had more or less clouded over completely. Anticipating this I had moved on to the well-wooded Capel Curig area where there are also a number of waterfalls. This kind of subject matter is at its best under light cloud and I found what I was looking for in the village alongside the main A5. These falls are not publicly accessible but a quick hop over a wall gives access to them. Unlike the previous picture this needed very precise attention to detail.

It would be nice to be able to recount how I then retraced my steps back to Llyn Mymbyr where a stunning sunset over Yr Wyddfa awaited me. That would indeed have been the end of a perfect day but it was just too much to ask.

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A little light relief.

It’s usually easier to talk about the weather in the UK than just about anything else. There always seems to be something to say about it. So after the difficult subject I tackled last time, it’s time for some light relief.

It was inevitable that there would be a down side to all the glorious sunshine we had in June (not that relentless blue skies are the photographer’s friend). A cool and changeable July followed, but changeable can be good for the photographer, if it involves cloud, rain and bright sunny days. That for me would be the definition of changeable. July consisted mainly of rain followed by cloud and then more rain. At least there was a chance – dictated by the law of averages – that August would be better. Here we are on the 22nd and how true has that been? Not true at all. At the beginning of the month, the forecasters teased us with talk of an improvement by mid-month, and yes, this time last week warmth and sunshine made an appearance. It lasted less than two days.

I made a decision to “go for it” even though I knew my trip would only be a short one. I headed up to north Wales for some landscape photography. On these trips I nearly always end up at Llyn Dinas (near Beddgelert) but this time I made the decision to search out some new locations. And where did I end up? You’ve guessed it….. Llyn Dinas. And while I was there I realised why: it is one of the very best locations in Wales for the landscaper – and for several reasons. The lake and its surroundings are perhaps as close to “the sublime” as it is possible to find in Wales. More practically, it is very close to the road – always handy for dawn visits; there are fairly secluded parking areas (for the camper van) nearby- ditto; and surrounded by mountains, its waters have a tendency to be still early on sunny mornings; and finally, it is also prone to valley fog. Last Thursday was one such morning.

The top photo was taken as soon as I arrived and shows the lake just post-sunrise. The second shows Llyn Dinas at its idyllic best, about three-quarters of an hour later. The sense of calm that the image suggests is slightly misleading, however, as some voracious midges were making life very difficult for the photographer and it felt far from idyllic! I feel that the warmth from the sunlight on the trees adds an extra dimension that is missing in the earlier photo. After a session here I motored the short distance up to Llyn Gwynant by which time the fog was thinning and lifting quickly. I think some lake-side trees have been removed here, opening up a new vista across the water. I took another series of images with a very different feel, including the third one above.

That was almost it for the day, really. I’ve often wondered what other landscape photographers do during the main part of a summer day. So many are only active during the “golden hour” around dawn and dusk. How do they wile away the many hours with the sun high in the sky? Apart from catching up on sleep, that is….. . During the afternoon I walked up the lower section of the Watkin Path into Cwm Llan. It was more of a recce really, but I did come across a charming little “Andy Goldsworthy” style sculpture. Unlike a Goldsworthy, I suspect this one will have involved quantities of industrial strength adhesive to maintain it’s structure. Otherwise the walk was mainly an exercise in avoiding families with noisy children!

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You may have heard about Happisburgh…..

If you follow environment issues in the media you’ll probably have noticed that this Norfolk village is currently the go-to location for items about sea-level rise and coastal erosion. Like other communities on the East Anglian coast it has been threatened by the sea for hundreds of years. Some – like the nearby Whimpwell and the better-known Dunwich – have long since disappeared beneath the waves. Jane and I had booked a week’s holiday in the Norfolk Broads for the first week in May, and I noticed that Happisburgh was only a few miles away. I thought the village might provide some interesting subject matter for the photographer.

I had no idea what to expect visually other than the “Road Closed” sign that features in all the media. Arriving late in the morning I clambered across a pile of earth blocking an old field gateway to reach the cliff top. Directly below me a flock of sand martins were excitedly excavating nesting burrows in the sandy escarpment facing the sea. They barely noticed me at all and only made themselves scarce when a kestrel cruised by. This photo-op felt like a real bonus; the only drawback being the strong and distracting shadows of the birds created by the sun beating down from a clear blue sky. The sand martins were frantically landing and taking off again; you could see tiny showers of sand falling from burrow entrances, and a close examination of the photographs shows a pattern of scrape marks made by their claws on the cliff-face.

By the time I got down to the beach it was about 1pm. and the sun was high in the sky, creating some very harsh light: definitely not the time of day for the landscape photographer to be at work! All sorts of debris lay on the sand; bits of tarmac complete with double-yellow lines, a manhole with the cover missing, sections of brick wall and reinforced concrete. Electric cables trailed from the cliff top and pipework stuck out at strange angles. A brick septic tank was perched precariously close to the cliff top. And it all looked rather disappointing in the unforgiving light.

But a short distance further on – wow! Here were the skeletons of sea defences and two large rectangular concrete blocks resting on metal girders that emerged from the sand. I had no idea what they were but they looked bizarre; and wispy cirrus clouds in a deep blue sky added to the surreal nature of the scene. Normally successful landscape photography requires shadows to help give a three-dimensional quality to a scene. But here the almost complete lack of them seemed to add to the dreamlike quality of my surroundings. It was a one day in a hundred day.

Returning to the village I had a chat with the ladies at the “Sarnies by the Sea” sandwich shack. I said I had heard of Happisburgh for all the wrong reasons, but how did they feel? One said that she felt very bitter that the authorities were happy to let her village fall into the sea “like all the others”. This was the reaction of most of those I talked to, and you have to sympathise with them. One resident’s house had been valued in 2008 at less than the cost of a loaf of bread. Another villager explained that the concrete blocks are the foundations for a metal staircase which ran from the cliff-top down to the beach. It opened in 2003. The extraordinary speed with which the coastline is retreating, and the very low-lying nature of its hinterland, explains why official policy for this stretch of coast is “managed retreat”.

Unfortunately by this time the sand martins were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps nest-burrowing is a morning only job for them? I did find their activities illuminating, though. If a fragile creature like a sand martin can burrow into the cliffs using only their tiny claws what chance does the land have against such a formidable opponent, fuelled by climate change, as the North Sea?

NB : For more details about Happisburgh and coastal erosion there see the comprehensive Village website.

/http://happisburgh.org.uk/

The photograph on its homepage is worth studying. I’m not sure when it was taken but since then the caravan site on the far left-hand side has been relocated completely and I estimate that land equivalent to the outermost three rows of caravans has now disappeared.

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Two nights in a quiet place.

If I am in the Porthmadog area I have a favourite place to park the van overnight. It is a delightful spot on the banks of the estuary, overhung by oak trees, and no ………. I’m not going to tell you where it is! From there it is a short drive to the Cob, the causeway that runs across the Glaslyn estuary just south of Porthmadog, from which one can look inland to the Snowdon massif. This is surely one of the most iconic landscapes in the whole of Wales but strangely enough not a big seller as far as postcards are concerned. I’ve always wondered why: perhaps people just don’t notice it as they hurry along the main road across the causeway.

I’ve spent two nights at this quiet spot in recent weeks. One morning at the end of August I woke early, had a very quick breakfast, and drove straight to the Cob. I’m sure that one of these mornings I will catch the view from there to Yr Wyddfa in perfect conditions, probably with a low fog across the marshes in the foreground, but this was not going to be it. A bank of high cloud obscured the rising sun. After a short wait I drove on to Borth-y-gest, a village set around a small harbour just west of Porthmadog.

Arriving at the main car park about 8 a.m., and the only vehicle there, I put my head back against the headrest and promptly fell asleep. About ten minutes later I woke up and was aghast to find a parking ticket attached to my windscreen! The parking warden could easily have tapped on my window and asked me to leave; instead he must have crept silently up to the van, stuck down the ticket and made a quick getaway. Talk about a hit and run incident……..

Well, Borth-y-gest is an idyllic little place so after the initial shock had worn off I decided to make the most of a now sunny morning. I need to do a new postcard of the area so set off downstream along the banks of the estuary to see what I could find. The tide was high but receding and the best photograph of the morning came on my return to the harbour (above). It’s a classic “picture-postcard” image, perfectly lit, with good colour saturation; it won’t win any prizes but it will suit my purposes perfectly.

I spent another night at my secret place last week. Not so secret, I now realise: I’ve never had to share it but this time found a rather large motor-home already in occupation. Acorns falling onto the van roof and rolling groundwards woke me several times during the night and I was surprised to also hear light rain falling. I hoped that did not bode ill for the following day.

In fact it was still raining on and off at dawn but it looked like the sun was about to rise into a clear blue sky. These looked fantastic conditions for the photographer and I didn’t even bother with breakfast. There was nothing doing at the Cob (again) so headed straight for Borth-y-gest. Parking more carefully this time, I walked along the coastal footpath overlooking some tiny beaches and the still (but rising) waters of the estuary to the mountains beyond. A rainbow appeared out to the west, but it wasn’t until I began my walk back to the village that the most spectacular conditions were revealed. Brilliant “Godbeams” could be seen across the estuary as intermittent rain and cloud drifted seawards. They were even reflected in the waters of the estuary (See main pic).

It has been suggested that these were “crepuscular rays”; but strictly speaking this term refers to a similar phenomenon that occurs close to sunrise and sunset. Not wishing to split hairs, though, they are formed in the same way. I have always believed that if you follow the path of these rays upwards they will converge at the actual position of the sun, and this shows quite clearly in the photograph. And yet the sun is actually so far away (93,000,000 miles) that its rays on reaching us are virtually parallel. This appears to be an anomaly, to say the least. One website suggests –

“Next time you see sunrays, imagine them for what they really are, miles long columns of sparkling sunlit air highlighted by the darkness of adjacent unlit voids. Let the mind fly around and through them to give them solid form that replaces the flattish way we normally see the sky”

I still can’t get my head around it so if anyone can explain it in plain English, please feel free!

Later in the day I made for the hills above Harlech on the south side of the estuary. By mid-afternoon the atmosphere had completely cleared and the light was crisp and transparent. I took a series of images back towards Porthmadog and Moel Hebog (above). My quiet place is there, somewhere…….

Postscript : I successfully challenged my parking ticket.

The quote is from : https://atoptics.co.uk/atoptics/rayform.htm

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From the postcard to the minimalist.

But what about the photography, I hear you ask.

A photographer for many years now, the novelty for me of going out with the camera just for fun has long since worn off. Over time my photographic activities have become more focussed on a particular project, and since returning from Mallorca that project has been to add to my collection of possible postcards for future years. The most successful of such visits this summer was the classic location of Llyn Mymbyr, west of Capel Curig, at the end of May.

From the east end of the lake one can gaze across placid (or more likely choppy) waters towards the Snowdon Horseshoe. Halfway along, debris – brought down from the mountains by a long since disappeared torrent – almost cuts the lake in two, giving the lake its alternative name of Llynnau Mymbyr (Mymbyr Lakes). It is easy to walk to the channel joining the two waterbodies , giving views to Snowdon in one direction and back towards Capel Curig to the other. Being so close to the road the location is very popular with photographers, but it would also be well worth a decent walk to get there.

I had a feeling that something special might happen, and it did – eventually. The first morning was good, some nice light, good clouds and decent reflections. But perhaps I should have woken earlier……….. I may have missed the best conditions. I had business elsewhere during the day but returned for the evening. Again, conditions were good but not too exciting. As it was Bank Holiday weekend the campsite at the west end of the lake was busy with cars and motorhomes which provided an irritating mid-ground in front of the Horseshoe. Only in a wide-angle view would any of these images these be useable. I took my tripod around to the far side of the lake for a better angle and used a ND filter and long exposures for a different “look”, but the results were not quite what I was hoping for.

The following morning I woke early and conditions looked great: blue sky overhead but fog at ground level. I walked down to the lakeside and even at 5.40 a.m I wasn’t the first photographer around. In one of my first pictures you can see a figure crouched in the reeds by the water’s edge.

What a morning it was! The sun was already above the horizon, backlighting every feature of the landscape to the east. Mist was rising gently from the still waters of the lake. If these conditions happen at all, they are usually short-lived, but I was able to spend a good hour taking pictures in quite a relaxed fashion. I used a whole range of focal lengths from 25mm to 400 mm using both my main lenses, and got a tremendous selection of images….. if I say so myself…… ranging from the “postcard” to the minimalist.

It was the landscape photographer’s dream morning, and I was elated. But what of the other guy who appears in my first pictures? Within ten minutes he had gone. Shortly later I heard the sound of a drone flying above the lake and by the time I returned to my van in the layby his van had disappeared. I wonder how many locations he was visiting that morning, and how satisfying each one was?

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Firestarter.

*Conflagration on Mynydd Mawr, with the village of Y Fron in the foreground.*

Apparently this time of year is widely known as the burning season. This year, in particular, after ten days of continuous sunshine and desiccating southeasterly winds our natural vegetation is now tinder dry.

Last Wednesday morning I set off into north Wales on the last of this winter’s postcard delivery trips. I didn’t have a very full timetable of calls so by lunchtime I was in Porthmadog. I decided to have a leisurely sandwich and birdwatch by the artificial tidal lagoon on the edge of the town. As the water was high few birds were to be seen there but there was a nice selection of waders on Traeth Mawr nearby. Turning back towards the van I noticed a pall of smoke drifting over from the north. I phoned a good friend who lives in Nantlle, about ten miles in that direction as the crow flies. He was very concerned about a fire in the hills nearby that he believed had been set by a farmer the previous evening. It had been burning out of control ever since. I wondered if the smoke I had seen was the product of that fire.

After a final call in Beddgelert I continued northwards. A huge mass of smoke was rising vertically in the still air from the summit of Mynydd Mawr, and then drifting northwards. The mountain looked like an active volcano. But it didn’t really fit the description of the fire I had heard about. Turning westwards at Rhyd Ddu towards Nantlle, the fire was to my right whereas the fire he had described would have been on my left. Entering the village I could see a few wisps of smoke rising from the crags and moorland south of Llyn Nantlle while the main fire was now raging behind me. There were two separate fires.

My friend – an ecologist by training and with many years of professional experience – was outraged to see the second fire. He had just returned from Argentina where he had had a bout of Covid, and probably wasn’t in the best frame of mind to see both sides of his beloved Nantlle valley being consumed in a conflagration! We walked a short distance to get a better view of it. It was his opinion that both fires had been set by the respective landowners/farmers. Upland vegetation is burnt like this to kill the older, more woody stems of heather, producing more younger shoots, and more grass; in other words better grazing for sheep. But over long periods of time repeated burning and grazing prevents heather from regenerating and results in upland vegetation being restricted to coarse grasses that can resist fire but have little wildlife value. It is one of the reasons why there is now so little heather moorland in Wales.

I was anxious to get more photographs of the fire so headed off in the van towards the village of Y Fron, at a higher altitude than Nantlle. Cresting the brow of a hill the fire in all its destructive reality was visible – see the main photograph above. Four fire engines were present and I had a quick chat with one of the firemen. It was while they were attempting to tackle the original fire to the south of Nantlle that they noticed this second fire take hold. “Whatever can you do about it?” I asked. He spread both arms in front of him, fingers on both hands conspicuously crossed. He said it could have been started by bored teenagers or careless walkers, but I think we both knew who the culprit was. He said that farmers are allowed to perform controlled burns but that they “sometimes got out of hand”. I spent a few more minutes taking photographs before leaving the area.

I spent the night in the van on the open shoreline of Foryd Bay ; it is one of my favourite places in Wales. But around breakfast time another pall of smoke began rising into the sky to the south. I had enough time to investigate the source of the smoke and fairly quickly located it near the hamlet of Pant Glas. I parked up and walked towards the fire; a figure was visible, moving around near the base of the flames. Through my binoculars I could see him carrying some kind of fire-lighting implement that every so often he would dip into a plastic container of brown liquid. This was a job for my long telephoto lens! I could see he was slowly, methodically and calmly lighting fires in the dry vegetation, without a care in the world. He was completely oblivious to my presence and I took a whole series of photographs. I don’t know how far this fire spread but the BBC Wales News website referred to a wildfire “at Pant Glas” on that day.

Normally farmers can ignore the guidelines for “controlled” burning because they know no-one will ever see them. The most unprincipled can light destructive fires in the expectation that they WILL rapidly get out of control and be all but impossible to extinguish. But the expenses involved in the Fire Service attending these wildfires, including the cost of helicopter hire, are, unfairly, borne by the public purse. I have sent a batch of photos like the one above to North Wales police, and I believe that the identity of the man lighting this fire would be identifiable from them. How seriously the authorities will take them is another matter, because all too often unscrupulous farmers are given the benefit of the doubt.

Update : A petition asking the Welsh Government to ban so-called “controlled” burning has been started; please click on the link below to sign it.

https://petitions.senedd.wales/petitions/245129

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Something of value.

During a thirty year career photographing the landscape and more than a decade ago adding wildlife to my repertoire, I’ve also been maintaining a bit of a sideline.

Dead seabirds (mostly common scoter), Freshwater East, Pembrokeshire. February 1996. I spent a couple of days in Pembrokeshire after the Sea Empress oil tanker ran aground. Some of the photographs appeared on TV at the time.

While out in the landscape I’ve sometimes come across quirky, incongruous or downright ugly scenes which tell us more about our relationship with the landscape than most of my (or anybody’s) actual “traditional” landscapes do. As an early example, in the early days of Fuji Velvia (the late 1980’s) , I remember taking a picture of a pile of bright blue plastic pipes close to a reservoir in the wilds of the Ceredigion uplands; it’s probably still in a filing cabinet somewhere. At first I called these images “human landscapes” although I don’t feel that that description now does them all justice. Many are informed by my environmental concerns in a broad sense and some actually say more about us than the landscape. Some ask more questions than give answers.

Near Bangor, Gwynedd. July 2019. An exception to the rule: having seen this phone mast from the driver’s seat of my van, I revisited it some months later and searched out the best spot to photograph it from.

Throughout my life in photography I’ve been a big fan of the brilliant Joe Cornish and his contemporaries as well as the almost unique world-view of the late Fay Godwin; both have their place in the world of outdoor photography. Fay Godwin, it seems to me, began her photographic career specialising in traditional black-and-white landscapes. But as her consciousness developed about the damage we are inflicting on nature, so her images became more closely aligned to her environmental concerns. She disliked the description of “landscape photographer” that people gave her, despite the fact that she worked mainly in the landscape; she preferred the term “documentary”. I understand exactly what she meant; it’s unfortunate that in the photographic world the term landscape means only one sort of landscape.

*Near Trefenter, Ceredigion. March 2021*

Going back to my own human landscapes, I’ve often been able to sneak them into my books and exhibitions while no-one was looking! I can imagine that many viewers’ reactions would be along the lines of “But Wales is such a beautiful country, why photograph that?” It has long been an ambition of mine to put them all together and exhibit them. Over the years it’s been known variously as my ” Black and White Project”, my “Retrospective of Sorts” and my “Homage to Fay Godwin”. As a prelude to this (I hope), at the end of last year, I put together a one-off photobook of more than fifty of them.

*Pembroke castle and Oil Refinery, December 2009*

How this eventually came about is worth a mention. I’d been putting it off for years. I had had some very dispiriting criticism of the project from a photographer in the Joe Cornish tradition who I had previously admired tremendously. I whittled the selection down to about a hundred, including plenty of new work but some already published in colour. I converted them all to black-and-white, and had some cheap test prints made, but still couldn’t put them together. Then while browsing on the internet one day I saw a promotion from an online company offering £100 off one of their top-of -the-range photobooks. I responded immediately and was sent a coupon valid for 30 days. This was the impetus I needed, and within a couple of weeks I had the finished product on my desk. Compiling it was the most fun in photography I had had for years! The quality of the book was excellent except for one thing; it had been designed online and the mid-grey front cover with white and black lettering looked fine on-screen. But in reality my name in black was almost invisible against the grey unless you saw it at a certain angle to the light. I pointed this out to the printers and they offered me a full credit for the cost, amounting to £118.23p, most of which I hadn’t paid in the first place!

*Tywyn, Gwynedd. (June 2010*). *Taken while researching locations for* **Wales at Waters Edge**

The content of the book, when I saw it, was really quite an eye-opener. I realised most of images had been seen almost out of the corner of my eye, while I was actually intent on taking other photographs. Mostly other landscapes, sometimes wildlife and surprisingly often while I was driving from A to B and just saw something. Many of them are at places where I stopped, took a picture and moved on. I know I will never be back there again. I’m sure I’m not the only photographer who sees a fantastic landscape from the driver’s seat of a car, stops, walks back and the finds the potentially world-beating image has completely disappeared. My snapshots are quite different to traditional landscapes, however, where the quality of the light is critical and a significant amount of pre-planning is usually required. In many cases individual images have limited value on their own but in the company of a few dozen others, the photographer’s vision becomes more clear.

*Near LLanwchllyn, Gwynedd. September 2008. This could be described in terms of the media, or the message, or both. Not everyone gets both………*

The good luck didn’t stop at the refund for the cost of printing the book, either. The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth has quite a large collection of my colour work already. Just after Christmas I was strolling along the sea-front in Aberystwyth when I met its curator of photography, Will Troughton. After a bit of a general chat he asked me if I was working on anything at the moment. My usual response these days to that question is “well, er, no …….. not really…….” but fortunately I remembered to mention the retrospective/Godwin/b&w project. He expressed an interest and I arranged to meet him, book in hand. A couple of days after seeing it he phoned to say that he had “found some money” and would like to buy a selection of prints. The importance of the sale is not so much in the cash, but rather the recognition that I still produce photographic work of some value.

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Long past sunset.

The weekend before Christmas there was a break in the relentlessly cloudy and wet conditions that continue to plague us here in west Wales. While this allowed me to do some garden chores – getting a new load of logs under cover, for example – I was also able to visit the submerged forest between Borth and Ynyslas, about eight miles from here. My first visit was “on spec” after a birding walk on the Dyfi estuary. It was immediately apparent that a very large expanse of peat, together with hundreds, if not thousands, of tree stumps had been exposed after recent storms.

It was about half an hour before sunset and the tide was coming in, washing over the peat and through the stumps as it did so. From previous experience – see this post – I quickly worked out that timing would be better the following day as the advancing tide would be about fourty minutes later. Nevertheless I hung out there for a while and took a few pictures before the sun set.

I was back again the following afternoon. Although it had been a warm still day further inland, here near the mouth of the Dyfi estuary a cold easterly breeze was blowing. The light was extraordinary. The intensely clear sky was cloudless, bathing my surroundings in blue light, which I found quite unpleasant. The dark brown peat seemed to soak up whatever light hit it and become almost black. The breeze created countless ripples running at right-angles to the sun which put paid to any hope of any reflections. It was only when the sun neared the horizon that any relief came, in the shape of incoming waves breaking and being backlit with sunset colours.

Although my Olympus kit has remarkable image stabilisation, when one is considering exposures in the order of several seconds a tripod is indispensable. So this time I had my tripod with me and as the sun disappeared I set it up on a solid section of peat. I took a few long exposures but the tide advances very quickly here and before long the submerged forest was once more submerged! I determined to return the following evening.

The day of my third visit skies had been cloudless again but there was little wind; water levels were that much lower and there were still walkers on the beach. I explored a little but discovered that pleasing compositions were difficult to find. This figure seemed to add a sense of scale and I knew that I could easily clone him out if I felt he intruded on the timeless nature of this landscape.

The sun had sunk below the horizon before waves began to encroach upon the forest. When they did I took a series of images at shutter speeds of up to eight seconds. On an incoming tide one needs to work quite fast to avoid getting wet feet (or worse) and I had time for just a few exposures. It was actually the last one (main photo) that I found most satisfying, and the tree stumps are only a minor element within it. I happened to notice that a few rounded boulders lay within the peat and that they were “rimlit” by the extremely bright post-sunset sky. I quickly moved the tripod over to place them in the foreground and pressed the shutter.

After processing them I posted the above image online. There followed a discussion on whether it was more effective with or without the figure – it was probably about 50/50. Further, and more interestingly …….. is a landscape with a human figure actually still a landscape at all?

For more technical information on the Submerged Forest, see this article by John Mason, a local geologist.

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