There's not a days goes without me asking myself, how did I get here?
It doesn't matter where I am on the planet, I always feel like a visitor, or an accidental tourist looking in at the world.
There is a quietness here, not unlike the deserts of the Southwest were people tend not to venture outside in the middle of the day due to the intense heat. Here in the Midwest you won't see a single soul due to the intense cold, unless of course it's the crazy Brit with a camera..
I have been in the landscape photography game for a good while now, quietly working away on projects most people will never see. The Irony here is that before the evils of the internet took a large felt tipped pen to photography, my work was seen by thousands of people through gallery shows and in particular events like Paris Photo, San Francisco Photo and a few other great art fairs. It was a time when people used to leave their house to visit galleries, a cinema, a restaurant, and a friend. As for photography today, I get that people like being indoors, but there's a vast amount of lazy landscape out there. Before I go any further, the above image was made in -20c weather after walking a mile and jumping up and down a lot to keep warm.
I am often bemused by landscape vloggers adding Sunset Filters, or similar, to there landscapes. The fact that they actually film a scene and then shamelessly slap an array of filters and mountains of post processing in the same video no longer makes me laugh.
People spend more time now looking at computer screens of landscape than actually being out in the landscape. You only have to look at the recent Landscape Photographer of the Year (2021) to see every image looking like a cartoon (which I will not show here). That's a lot of post production, and a lot of effort. Taking out a distracting dog poo here, or a tree branch there is one thing, but when people start adding the time of day to a photograph, its lights out for Landscape Photography.
