Field techniques – colour
Colour is important for both accuracy and emotional impact. Traditionally, colour balance was achieved using known film stock, normally balanced to mid-day sunlight, and coloured filters to adjust for actual conditions. This worked well but there were limits to its accuracy. The emotional impact of colour balance in landscape is profound. It gives us a clue to weather and time of day, and was used by artists like the impressionists and Turner to great effect, so for me it is important to record it accurately.

Digital photogrpahy combined with the right software gives a degree of control rather better than traditional dark room processing. In particular, the colour balance can be finely adjusted. To achieve this I use a grey card and also some colour cards of my own making for initial reference shots. I also make visual notes, working with a pocket book of colour charts that I have made with artists watercolours.

The benefit is that these colours are very familiar to me. I have a good, intuitive understanding of the difference between cerulean, ultramarine and cobalt blues, and careful notes on these are invaluable as a way of nailing down a particular colour. If I can pinpoint colours in sky, clouds, grass and soil I have a pretty tight set of references from which to fine tune the colour balance later.

Field techniques – focus and depth of field
In landscape photography focus is very critical. Most of the time you are looking for sharp detail over as much of image as possible, and in particular in the foreground. This – and the large sizes to which I like to print images – requires fine control over near and far focus. The only certain way to achieve this control is through experiments with camera and lenses, printing to a range of sizes and then analysing the results.

Careful manual setting of the camera in the field is the next step, and this is essentially the method that Ansel Adams and other fine photographers have used to get the very best and consistent results from their equipment and materials.

Equipment and processing
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