A Different Aesthetic

I have been experimenting with processing mono images in a high contrast style. It’s an aesthetic I favour for urban photography, but it’s interesting to test it out in the landscape. The fog recently has provided me with the obscure backgrounds that I envisaged for this type of work, with just the tracery of the trees in winter to make these mysterious skeletal forms stand out from the grey.

These are the first in a series of images which will present my local landscape in new moods, and a new (square) format. I am also training my eye to develop this idea in the future using a 6x6 medium format film camera, my new (old) camera, a 1961 Rolleiflex 3.5f.

Fine art has been defined as “a visual art considered to have been created primarily for aesthetic and intellectual purposes and judged for its beauty and meaningfulness”. In this sense the concept of fine art is quite different to the decorative or applied arts.

These images are my personal attempt to use the elements of light and shade, tones, plus line and form to present the familiar as a a subject more curious and abstract.

“Art implies control of reality, for reality itself possesses no sense of the aesthetic” Ansel Adams