Seeing opportunity and getting of your fat @rse!

How many of us drive around, see something interesting and stop to take a photograph?

In these days of being so busy, it is not always that easy, is it?

I carry my camera around with me most of the time, and after a recent visit to a Peter Lik gallery, I have been invigorated by the landscape around me.

The reality is that we are mostly rushing around towards the next deadline that is simply to close.  What is the answer?  Leave plenty of time to allow for opportunity or change your mind set so that time is really not all that important.

Now the German landscape in my immediate vicinity is not the most dramatic and certainly not the kind that Peter Lik visits for his landscapes (sounds like excuses I know and perhaps they are).

The reality is that to do landscapes justice, you have to dedicate time and effort, more than most people (myself included perhaps) are willing or simply able to give.  It is sad and a little depressing to admit but like most photographers time is our enemy and quite profound as it is one of the primary parameters we work with on a daily basis.  We are always either fighting it or trying our best to manipulate it.

Now I am by no means a landscape guru by any stretch of the imagination but sometimes it is fun to get out on your own with a camera and a 4 x 4 and simply look for the opportunities.  There is a convention that says decent landscapes should be taken at sunrise or sunset and really most of the time these are the best times as you can get some amazing light but quite often these times can give you a pretty cliche’d image.  That is not to say a bad image, but for me they can lose impact if you feel you have seen them before.

We get so bombarded with imagery these days as there are so many cameras clicking away all the time, there ends up being some fantastic stuff out there but sadly often they are hidden among the mundane.  A quick look on flickr searching for landscapes and you will see what I mean.

Germany is a stunning country in so many ways and I plan to try to capture more of this, I will of course share with you too.

There are some more examples of my Landscape work on our website http://www.LIMEfotographic.com Please feel free to visit.