Category Archives: Nature Photography

The successful candidate will enjoy sharing stories and information about the ABQ BioPark via social media and traditional media channels.  A strong commitment to conservation and understanding of animal well-being is paramount. This position reports to the Marketing Coordinator and is part of the Guest Experience department. 

The ABQ BioPark consists of the Zoo, Aquarium and Botanic Garden and Tingley Beach.

This position is employed through Tryfacta staffing agency, not the City of Albuquerque, and is located at the ABQ BioPark. This full time position is limited to a two year term.

The Communications Officer’s duties may include, but are not limited to:

• Plan and execute the BioPark’s social media presence; including researching stories, interviewing area experts, writing, acquiring photo and/or video assets, posting stories and tracking performance.
• Working with the City of Albuquerque’s (CABQ) web team to update the ABQ BioPark’s CABQ website pages. 
• Research, plan, write and copy edit content for Press Releases, News Items, promotional copy, events and exhibit interpretation. 
• Coordinating with local TV, radio and print news media including escorting media visits, producing talking points and assisting with photo and b-roll collection.
• Monitor and track media stories about the ABQ BioPark.
• Develop print and multi-media education and marketing materials.
• Monitor and respond to social media comments and direct messages on behalf of the ABQ BioPark.
• Assisting with press conference logistics, set up and tear down.
• Assist with maintaining the BioPark’s photo archive; including tagging photos for accurate retrieval.
• Provide production assistance during photo / video shoots.
• Help pick up / distribute graphics and marketing projects around BioPark facilities.
• Familiarize and remain current on Association of Zoo and Aquarium (AZA) communication best practices.

A Successful Communications Officer will:

• Be familiar with modern social media platforms and best practices.
• Have a friendly and open personality and enjoy working with a diverse cross section of individuals from a variety of departments at all levels of government and job positions.
• Be a skilled photographer. Nature photography and location videography skills a plus.
• Be motivated to seek out and share conservation stories.
• Be familiar with and apply Associated Press style guidelines.
• Be comfortable working outdoors for short periods of time in variable weather conditions.

Preferred qualifications

Applicants must be 18 years or older and be physically able to lift or move up to 30 pounds (stanchions, photo/video equipment). Bilingual (English/Spanish) is a plus. Candidates must pass a security background check to be hired.

Work schedule: 

Full-time; generally Monday – Friday from 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Occasional short periods of weekend, holiday and evening work may be required.

Pay rate: 

$19.75 per hour.  This position is employed through Tryfacta staffing agency, not the City of Albuquerque.

To apply:

Please prepare a cover letter, résumé, writing samples and contact information for three references.  

Send this information to [email protected] with the subject line Application for Communications Officer with Albuquerque BioPark.  Applications must be received by January 6, 2023.

After initial review, we may contact you for links to any professional social media you curate, and if applicable, your photography and video portfolio as well.

Yosemite Valley. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Most of us travel through environments—either built or what we call “natural” —without realizing how much they have been altered over time or understanding why these changes happened. Readers of Changing the Commons: Stories About Placemaking by landscape architect John Northmore Roberts will come away with a new appreciation of the importance of landscape architecture to society, a profession whose title is often mistaken as a synonym for gardening. They will also become more aware of how, since the 1970s, movements toward social justice and ecological stewardship have been playing out in our physical environment.

You cannot get more iconic than Yosemite National Park. In three Yosemite Valley projects for the National Park Service (NPS), Roberts was tasked with restoring the balance between the ecological and built environments, as what we usually think of as urban issues had developed with the ever-increasing public use of the park’s wildlands. A tall order, as the improvements to visitor accommodations requested by the NPS also needed to protect the Merced River, wetlands, granite cliffs, meadows and forests while increasing ease of access to those grand views. Two of the locations were the Yosemite Village Day Use Area, the primary destination location for visitors and the park’s center of operations, and Yosemite Lodge, built in the 1950s as a destination motel near Yosemite Falls. Roberts was directed to find ways to relieve traffic congestion, realign dangerous road crossings, reposition and expand parking lots, install adequate signage, build new restrooms, and provide a pleasant arrival plaza with orientation and interpretive displays which Roberts situated so as to screen the parking area from visitors’ view. And at the third Yosemite site, Bridalveil Fall, where waters cascading down 600 feet of granite rock make it a favorite first stop for park visitors, many similar restoration requirements had to be addressed. Here the project team was also tasked with constructing new boardwalks to discourage visitors from treading off established trails, thereby disturbing the surrounding wetlands. Another intention was to make it safe for everyone to access the upper overlook at the Fall’s base, as the existing trail’s steep incline was difficult for many people to navigate, especially anyone with mobility issues. Roberts’ team proposed an ecologically responsible solution as it would not require heavy equipment to install and would thus minimize intrusion on the wetlands. He describes this structure as an elevated “self-supporting metal bridging system, tied to boulders for support, to climb at a gentle, accessible gradient.” The Yosemite Conservancy, a partner of the NPS, and NPS trails staff ruled against accepting this plan, considering the technology too radical a departure from park traditions. They eventually settled on what Roberts describes as “an intermediate-level lookout offering a good photo opportunity.” Roberts says the decision was made despite “a years-long consensus-based design process.” It exemplifies how differing concerns within communities can play a significant part in shaping environments.

Most landscape architects would regard these Yosemite projects as the pinnacle of their career, but for John Northmore Roberts, they are among many highlights of his ongoing professional history. For over fifty years, he has been active as a practitioner and college educator in the field of landscape architecture. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay area, Roberts’ landscape architecture work has been centered in Northern California. Roberts seeks ways to live with nature rather than dominating it. He addresses our ever-more pressing need to conserve the earth’s urban and rural communities and all their life forms, finding creative solutions to serve the 21st century and beyond. He takes full advantage of technological advances not available to Frederick Law Olmsted, widely considered the founder of American landscape architecture.

Changing the Commons includes twenty-five sites from the built environment of cityscapes to watersheds into the Pacific. Located in San Francisco, Alameda, Marin, Napa, Sonoma, Mariposa, and Humboldt counties, these projects demonstrate how it is possible to sustain California’s ecological and environmental health by adapting “existing conditions to a new set of circumstances.” Roberts describes projects that span private and public sectors, including “parks (national, state, regional and local), schools, libraries, institutional and industrial campuses, streetscapes and urban plazas, museums, housing and historic restorations.” While some of these sites are not as well-known as Yosemite National Park, Roberts’ designs have touched other iconic California places. They include Muir Woods and Muir Beach in Marin County, Crissy Field and Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and his home city of Berkeley’s popular 4th Street Paseo and its Central Library Gardens.

The standards and methodology Roberts details in Changing the Commons could be adapted to restore any environment.  Their holistic approach necessitated collaborations outside of Roberts and associates in his office. Depending on the design needs of each site, Roberts variously functioned as the project lead or as a sub-contractor to the principal architects, engineers, or urban and environmental planners. His collaborators have also included other landscape design colleagues or firms, hydrologists, biologists, federal and regional regulators, politicians, citizen and technical advisory committees, sculptors, artists, and skilled crafts workers, besides owners and residents within affected communities.

The patience and long hours devoted to understanding the unique ingredients and multiple requirements underlying the path toward the transformation of each project become quickly apparent. Roberts generally begins by paying attention to the history and culture of each place, considering its functional needs and those of the humans, animals, and plants that formerly or already inhabit the space or are projected to be its future inhabitants. He explains he tries to understand each place’s unique “physical, sensual, emotional, and cultural implications” to achieve what Roberts calls “placemaking.” When looking to work on public spaces, the next step is to draw up a proposal for review by a government or private governing board. If approval is won, the following steps involve meetings and negotiations with the community and officials or agencies who will be affected by any changes to a site. Roberts practices inclusive and democratic ways to progress, involving the locals in what he calls “Community Design” solutions rather than continuing those that would be exclusive and reflective of the “interests and values of the powerful.” Often these discussions involve compromises and revisions to the original proposal, but once agreements at this stage of development are reached, projects move toward completion.

Roberts began his professional career working in the landscape architecture firm of Royston, Hanamoto, Beck, & Abey, where his first assignment was to transform Fort Mason, which functioned as a U.S. Army base from the 1850s through World War II, into an urban park. Now under the National Park Service’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area, it also houses its headquarters in addition to almost two dozen non-profit arts and culture organizations who are permanent residents. Fort Mason’s location presents panoramic views of the San Francisco Bay, the Marin Headlands, and the Golden Gate Bridge. The plan required selecting which structures should be removed and which should be preserved, along with burying old concrete foundations, sidewalks, and slabs to reveal the full scenic glories of the site. Because Fort Mason is registered on the National Register of Historic Places, it was not immediately apparent that he could satisfy the neighborhood’s request to keep their beloved community garden. But Roberts learned that in the nineteenth century, military housed in one of the barracks had cultivated a vegetable garden. That provided the needed precedent for Roberts to get approval to create the Fort Mason Community Garden on a 2.5-acre segment of the land. Roberts is proud to report it continues to function, yielding a profuse combination of fruits, vegetables, and flowers every year. During the five years devoted to this project, Roberts eventually became the project manager. It is high testimony to the quality of Roberts’ ways of working that the NPS has continued to employ him on projects throughout his career.

Roberts observes:

“A protected bay, a fertile river valley, a waterfall on a granite face, or towering trees may give iconic identity to a specific place. But in each case, the underlying ecological systems and natural processes that sustain the life of a place are what create the conditions for such iconic features to reveal themselves, and are what interest me. From long experience I have found that water is the key to unlocking the secrets of such underlying natural systems. Nature and the built environment are in a continuous dynamic balance with each other, adjusting as conditions change. Water is at the heart of it and its treatment is the seminal consideration for the design of most places in this book. By following the water we can discover how to sustain the balance. Of course, in the end, nature will prevail. Entire civilizations have collapsed by neglecting the underlying ecological support systems for their built environments and it is often the water systems that fail. It is imperative for our survival and for the health of the planet that the places we construct nurture the long-term sustained ecological health of their settings and water is the key.”

This belief guided what Roberts calls a “…landscape-scale change…for the 6.5 mile, 800-acre river corridor through the center of Petaluma.” Historically, the town’s origins ten thousand years ago were related to the waters the indigenous Miwok people called Petaluma Creek. By the mid-19th century, it had developed into a thriving port, serving the agricultural areas of west Marin and southern Sonoma counties. Its downtown thrived around the need for supporting commercial functions. But as railroads, roadways, and trucking systems developed, the river had ceased serving as a commercial hub by the end of World War II. Roberts says it became “a smelly, dirty drainage channel.” Increased flooding episodes had resulted from development along its watershed, while the downtown lands adjacent to the river had also deteriorated. Recognizing “the importance of the entire riparian system—from fresh to salt water,” Roberts’ office reintegrated the Petaluma River into the life of the city, establishing “pathways and open spaces, recreational connections to the river, and restored riverfront vegetation.” Roberts says that for more than two decades, the community has accepted these guidelines to maintain a balance between the ecological system and urban life while developing “the Petaluma riverfront into one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most popular residential, tourist and commercial destinations.”

The city of Berkeley’s over sixty-foot high, 92-acre municipal garbage dump provided Roberts with one of his most frustrating and significant learning experiences. It turned out that the solution his design team offered was so ahead of its time that it failed to be adopted by the Berkeley City Council. Now known as Cesar Chavez Park, the former garbage dump is among the thousands of acres of flatlands created from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s by dumping garbage and soil from development sites onto the shallow San Francisco Bayfront’s mud flats, marshes, and beaches. The new land, above the garbage and next to the Bayshore freeways, was an ecological disaster because the landfill gases and leachate pollute air and water quality. Roberts enlisted a special team of collaborators to develop a plan for an “ecologically sustainable place directly connected to its natural setting.” Landscape architect Richard Haag who designed Seattle’s Gas Works Park on the site of a former gasification plant, chemical engineer Richard Brooks who is an innovative bioremediation expert, and other scientific experts in greenhouse gases and methane consumption, worked on finding solutions. They reasoned that it would be best to clean the site of methane rather than continue using the common methane flare systems, which burn off landfill gases and are a major source of greenhouse gas pollution. Instead, Roberts writes, they “imagined opening the landfill, grinding and composting its organic matter, blending it with the clay cap to create healthy new soils, and then regrading the site. In this way the soil itself might provide the active medium for cleaning the landfill of gas and water pollutants—not just for growing plants…. The ideas we proposed are fascinating and achievable. Indeed, they are now being adapted at other contaminated sites.” So although one community unfortunately passed on this proposal, its ideas are serving other communities and, by extension, the general health of the planet.

The City of San Jose’s decision to close Poco Way, a short through-street at McCreery Avenue north of Story Road and turn it into a cul-de-sac helped transform a neighborhood plagued by decayed housing and violent crime into a place so pleasant that there is a waiting list to obtain a rental with the San Jose Housing Authority. The design team, which included the architectural firm of Herman Stoller Colliver besides Roberts, gained input from the street’s various ethnic communities through workshop meetings. Central and South American, Cambodian, and Vietnamese immigrant families were among the neighbors who described traditional ways of living they would like to have supported by the new design, in addition to creating a safe environment. Destroyed structures were vacated and removed, and other existing housing was redesigned or renovated, with new units built in clusters. Dead-end pathways were eliminated where gangs used to gather and criminals sold drugs. This particular reconfiguration was a relief for women who had previously been targeted by assailants when each building cluster’s communal laundry was situated at the back of these dead-ends, now rendered safer by their highly visible central locations. The landscaping elements also included one of the community’s first requests, to plant fruit trees. A new community center and play areas fulfilled other popular requests. And all were placed around lush courtyard gardens and well-planted pathways opening onto a public street/promenade, narrowed to discourage unwanted traffic, and generously lined with trees. While proud of this transformation, Roberts cautions that although life on Poco Way was changed for the better, it will take vigilant city and resident cooperation to maintain it.

Many of the public landscape projects in Changing the Commons were initiated with goals to address pressing urban problems such as those described in Poco Way and Berkeley’s Cesar Chavez Park. The Library Terrace Garden in Golden Gate Park’s Strybing Arboretum offered Roberts a different focus. This site allowed him to enhance what he believes to be a great and necessary human service: a beautiful environment where visitors can benefit from calm contemplation, relaxation, or other healing gifts of time out of time. In the Library Terrace Garden, it was Roberts’ pleasure to find a way to integrate a cache of medieval stones dumped in Strybing Arboretum into his garden design. Carved by medieval stonemasons for a twelfth-century Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria de Ơvila in Spain, publisher William Randolph Hearst had eleven ships bring them to the Bay area in 1931. But the Great Depression made it financially unadvisable to reconstruct the monastery as Hearst had planned. Although many of the plainer stone blocks had been taken for use on projects here and there, Roberts described finding a master stonemason’s fluted column bases and keystones for vaulted arches remained, among other “irregular and astonishing shapes.” A local sculptor, Edwin Hamilton, reconfigured these treasures into a unique wall incorporating seating. It surrounds the perimeter of an outdoor terrace featuring plants from the arboretum’s Asian plant collection. While primarily functioning as an entrance courtyard to the Helen Crocker Russell Library of Horticulture, the terrace garden’s combination of cultures old and new also provides a distinctive space to stage public events besides facilitating individual enjoyment.

Roberts wrote Changing the Commons with his grandchildren in mind, which likely helped his writing maintain a straightforward, jargon-free, reader-friendly style. A handsomely designed volume, all of the project descriptions are accompanied by a generous offering of impressive color photographs, charts, maps, and graphs showing sites before/during/and after a project’s completion. Their inclusion makes it even more likely that readers of Changing the Commons will find their expanded understanding of the terms “built environment” and “natural environment” has changed the way they view and experience the world. And as Roberts wrote in the close of his dedication to his grandchildren “That may trigger questions about how other places, more familiar to you, have been made and empower you to think about how you can affect changes in your own environments. I would like that.”

For Millbury resident John Randell, local wildlife offer a glimpse into the natural world. “My love for wildlife was influenced by my uncle who taught me about birds and nature in general,” Randell explained. Wildlife of Worcester County and Beyond, a Facebook group Randell moderates, allows members to share photos, videos, and stories of sightings of bears, bobcats, birds, insects, and other creatures that call the region home. RandelI, a postal service employee of more than 36 years, graduated from Worcester State College with a degree in communications, and took some photography classes as well. Randell recently spoke with Worcester Magazine about the Facebook group, and shared thoughts on living with wildlife, including during winter.

December 22, 2022

Winter is a special time of year for landscape photography, and with the right preparation you can capture some spectacular images. Four leading landscape photographers share their expert tips for photographing winter landscapes.

29 Winter Landscape Tips from the pros

Colin Roberts

A specialist in landscapes and nature, Colin Roberts turned professional in 2005. He has received a number of awards for his nature images, including International Garden Photographer of the Year and the Royal Horticultural Society’s Photographer of the Year.

www.colinrobertsphotography.com

1. Leafless trees in mist or fog

Many deciduous trees have a stark beauty in their leafless form, and make worthy landscape subjects throughout the winter. Those trees growing on hilltops and ridges are usually framed against the sky, so they can be photographed in almost any weather. However, trees that grow in valleys or parkland can be difficult to photograph in isolation, especially if there are buildings or other trees close by.

The answer to this is to shoot them in a misty atmosphere, when the mist is thick enough to obscure the nearby surroundings. This effectively sets the tree against a blank canvas. Many trees have an irregular shape or a marked lean, so try viewing them from various angles in order to find the one that is most appealing.

Black and white works particularly well in winter. Image: Colin Roberts

2. Capturing falling snow

For a snow scene with a difference, try shooting while the snow is falling – it’s a great way to capture the wintry atmosphere in your winter landscape shots. The key is to pick a suitable subject, so avoid wide-open views where the snowfall effect is lost, and instead build your composition around a strong feature, such as a tree, bridge or small building.

Choice of shutter speed will determine how the falling snow is rendered, so relatively long exposures of 1/8sec or less will show snowy streaks rather than flakes. I prefer to stay at around 1/60sec to capture a slight sense of movement without overdoing the effect. Try to shoot away from the direction of the falling snow and fit a lens hood to help protect your element from stray flakes.

3. Working on snowy compositions

A snow-laden landscape is such an inspiring sight that it can be tempting to shoot rather randomly, with the result that none of the images really stands out. In these situations it’s more important than ever to work on your composition and not to shoot snow for the sake of it – we all know it’s better to come away with one or two great pictures than a whole batch of mediocre ones.

Remember to isolate the main focal points and use linear elements to add perspective and depth. Also, exploit the simplicity that a blanket of snow brings to the landscape. Employ a variety of focal lengths, but be careful not to overuse wide angles. There is so much white in a snow scene that the perspective of a wideangle lens can easily overdo it, pulling in large areas of featureless white space that cause the shot to lose impact.

Picking out small details and add extra impact to your images. Image: Colin Roberts

4. Winter details

Ice, frost or snow can transform the look of some natural subjects, bringing a short-lived beauty that shouldn’t be missed. Equally, even the most mundane man-made objects can look appealing or quirky when coated in crisp white snow.

So in cold snaps look out for wintry details like the shapes and patterns in frosted leaves, bubbles trapped in frozen puddles, or even snow-clad signposts and fences. A standard 50mm lens will focus close enough for most subjects, while a short telephoto will help you isolate details from a more comfortable distance. Of course, capturing winter details doesn’t depend on extreme weather – look for texture in tree bark, the intricate patterns in stalks of bracken, or the colours in moss and lichen – all of which can be shot in any conditions.

5. Shooting contre-jour

From November to January the sun never rises too far from the horizon, making it the ideal time to experiment with backlit subjects. Shooting towards the sun – or contre-jour, as the technique is known – is something we instinctively
avoid, but it can produce eye-catching results.

The best approach is to obscure the sun with part of your subject, as this will effectively mask its brilliance and reduce the risk of lens flare. The result is a dramatic high-contrast image that shows the subject in virtual silhouette. Tilting the camera down slightly will include any shadows that radiate from the subject into the foreground, giving a more dynamic edge to the composition. Vertical structures, such as trees, spires or lighthouses, make ideal subjects for this technique.

6. Planning for snow

A planned approach is a key factor in successful landscape photography. This is perhaps more true in snowy weather than at other times because of the dramatic effect snow has on subject matter, not to mention the fact that it can arrive unexpectedly. So to avoid venturing out at a moment’s notice on a snowy morning with no clear idea of where you’re heading, it’s crucial to make a list of suitable snowy locations so you’re prepared.

With an ordered list you can plan your itinerary before setting out, based on the conditions at the time. As always, safety comes first, so monitor local weather reports and be clear on the extent of the snowfall. A dusting of snow soon transforms hills and open areas, but woodlands need more of a thick-snow look to be appealing.

Early starts can present wonderful conditions in winter. Image: Colin Roberts

7. Make an early start

Early starts ought to get easier in winter when the sun rises later, although it never feels that way when you have the cold to contend with. However, the tortuous routine can pay dividends – for the light, of course, but also if there’s fresh snow on the ground.

Footprints and melting slush can all spoil a snow scene, so set out before dawn if you want pristine views of virgin snow. Available shooting time is extended because a blanket of snow raises ambient light levels by several stops, allowing you to start earlier. It’s also worth being on location as soon as you can in frosty conditions before the sun begins to melt away the beauty. Also bear in mind that frost lingers much longer in areas of shadow, so head for the high-points first and leave the valleys and hollows for later.

8. Go mono for snow

By its very nature, snow lends itself well to mono images. With so much colour stripped away and many features reduced to mere outlines, it becomes much easier to focus on shape and form. What’s more, many of the best black & white images are of high-contrast subjects, which deliver punchy monochromes with pure whites and solid blacks – so snow certainly fits the bill.

Isolated buildings or trees often have great potential in mono, as do snow-clad walkways and jetties. If you like abstract compositions, then black & white is always a good option, and no less so in snow. Try creating some simple graphic images by shooting patterns or lines that form in the snowy conditions, using a telephoto lens to crop out surrounding distractions wherever possible – less is more with this type of image.

Jeremy Walker

Jeremy Walker is an award-winning photographer specialising in high-quality landscape and location photography around the world, for use by advertising, design and corporate clients. A belief in ‘quality is everything’ serves Jeremy and his clients well.

www.jeremywalker.co.uk

9. Carry spare batteries

Always carry spare, fully charged batteries. Batteries hate the cold and will soon start to drop in power and efficiency. The colder it is, the more quickly the batteries will fade, so combat this by keeping the batteries warm. Don’t keep them in your camera bag, which will invariably be close to or on the frozen ground. Instead, keep them in an inside pocket and protected with a soft cloth.

10. Warm up batteries

If you are shooting in winter conditions and the light is fantastic but your battery has failed, completely turn the camera off and remove the battery. Try to warm the battery up in your hands, in your clothing or in any way you can (except a naked flame). Just a little bit of warmth could give you those crucial extra few frames so you don’t miss out on that special shot.

Power management is key to not missing out on amazing winter landscapes. Image: Jeremy Walker

11. Avoid using the rear display

One of the biggest drains of electrical power on a modern camera is using the monitor for everything – live view, image
review and even camera settings. In cold conditions, use the monitor as little as possible. You do not have to review every image or check every single histogram. Discipline yourself to using the monitor only once every three or four frames, and use the good old-fashioned viewfinder a bit more often instead.

12. Carry a head torch

A head torch will leave your hands free for the important stuff, such as shooting images or eating chocolate. Not only is it useful to help see the camera settings in fading light, but it will also help you to see your way back to the car – you may go out in bright sunny conditions and not even consider the fact that it will get dark later on. A torch is also a useful distress beacon if you get into trouble – use six long flashes followed by a gap of a minute and then repeat.

13. White balance

Be aware that shooting beautiful snowy landscape scenes with a blue sky will often lead to the shadows becoming dark blue. In the right image this is not a problem, but so often in a winter scene cold blue shadows do nothing for the overall feel of the image. Experiment with the white balance settings: take your camera off auto white balance and perhaps set it to 8,000K for a warmer feel. It will take some experimentation, but just try to get rid of those cold blue shadows.

Don’t let the bad conditions put you off heading out shooting winter landscape photos. Image: Jeremy Walker

14. Draw in the snow

If it has snowed and you have nothing to shoot, get drawing in the snow. Use the fresh snow as a blank canvas, from love hearts and smiley faces to snow angels. Consider the direction of the sun first so your artwork will be nicely lit from the side or behind, and try not to walk across your handiwork before you have shot it!

15. Shoot water

If you are struggling for winter subject matter to photograph and you cannot travel far, you will find that there is usually some form of water nearby, even if it is just a pond, puddle or stream. Water is a great winter topic because of the infinite amount of patterns and textures that are created.

Think close-up or macro rather than wide landscape. You could create your own puddles and effects by putting trays of water out overnight when it gets really cold. Put leaves (or anything!) in the water and see what sort of patterns, shapes and textures you can shoot the following morning.

16. Add scale

Use human figures to give your winter scene a sense of scale and place, and if they walk into your scene it’s easy to get rid of the footprints in post-production. A figure can be distant, silhouetted or colourful, but it will certainly help to tell the story within the image.

17. Be comfortable

Making life as comfortable as possible for yourself when out shooting is paramount. If you have room, carry a small Thermos flask filled with a hot beverage such as tea, coffee or soup, and carry comfort food such as chocolate or cake. Hanging around in the cold isn’t fun on an empty stomach.

The majesty of a winter landscape is sometimes best conveyed by a subject in the scene. Image: Jeremy Walker

18. Dress for the occasion

There is nothing worse than being cold on location – trust me, I know, because as I write this I am in Iceland. Use layers of clothing and not just one big thick garment. Merino wool is a fantastic base layer (look for the Icebreaker brand at good outdoor shops) and build up from there.

Footwear is just as important as coats, jumpers and jackets. With cold feet, you will soon lose the will to hang around and wait for the perfect light. Proper winter boots and two pairs of socks will go a long way to helping you have hours of fun standing around in the snow. Although wellies are good for keeping snow melt and rain water out, if you are using them in winter they must be of the Neoprene-lined thermal type, as standard wellies have virtually no thermal properties at all.

19. Use filters creatively

Flowing water with snow and ice in the foreground or background, or moving clouds in a winter landscape, are very fertile grounds for the use of neutral density filters. Introduce blur and motion, and experiment with patterns and textures that are created by longer exposures.

20. Snow shoes for tripods

Shooting in soft snow can be a problem as your tripod can just sink in, leaving you with a very short working height. Recent winters in the UK may not have seen huge snow drifts, but if you are shooting where snow is likely both Manfrotto and Gitzo make saucer-sized discs that fit to the bottom of each tripod leg, enlarging the footprint and spreading the weight. These are also useful for using tripods on sandy beaches to stop them sinking into the wet sand.

21. Solitary colour

Winter scenes can look a bit bare or bland if your are not careful – just far too much white emptiness. Try to introduce a small area of localised colour to give an image a bright focal point and lend some impact or mood to the scene. A single solitary colour, no matter what it is, will give life to the image.

Mark Bauer

Mark Bauer is one of the UK’s leading landscape photographers. Having become interested in photography while living abroad in the early 1990s, he is now renowned for his evocative images of the south-west of England.

Visit www.markbauerphotography.com

22. Look out for unique winter landscape opportunities

There are certain shots that are only possible in winter, due to the position of the sun. There is a very short window for some opportunities, with certain lighting conditions only lasting for a couple of weeks or so. As you may be restricted by the weather, you need to make the most of any opportunities that arise – and also be persistent.

Multiple visits to a location may be necessary. This can be tedious, but remember that you won’t get another opportunity at some shots for another 12 months. Use maps and a sun compass, or an app such as The Photographer’s Ephemeris, to help you plan.

See some of the best apps for photographers here. 

The low angle of the sun during winter can present some unique landscape images. Image: Mark Bauer

23. Protect your gear against the elements

The light and weather can be dramatic in winter, but such weather is not always good for your kit so make sure you protect it. There are plenty of commercially available weather covers, but a good DIY solution is a shower cap, of the kind that is supplied in hotel rooms. If it starts to rain when you’ve set up, pop it over your camera and lens, and then remove it when the shower passes. A chamois leather is also good for wiping down your equipment if it does get wet.

Snow clouds can add impact to a winter landscape scene. Image: Mark Bauer

24. Make use of moody skies in your winter landscape

The weather in winter is often dull, but that doesn’t have to mean dull photographs. On a cloudy day, there may not be dramatic light falling on the land, but there can be plenty of interest above it, with dark, stormy clouds rolling across the sky. In fact, so long there is some texture in the sky, it’s possible to create interesting shots.

Make sure you give plenty of emphasis to the sky in the composition, and include a clear focal point in the frame. Graduated neutral density filters are usually used to balance exposure differences between bright skies and dark foregrounds, but they can also be used for artistic effect, turning the appearance of a textured grey sky into a threatening, stormy one.

25. Head to the coast in bad weather

Rural landscapes generally look dreary in dull weather, but coastal shots can still be effective as you can make use of strong structural elements such as groynes and piers, and contrast these with the motion of waves and clouds.

Justin Minns

Since taking up photography, Justin’s images have been published in numerous books and magazines. He also runs one-to-one landscape photography workshops in East Anglia for photographers of all levels, with workshops for small groups currently in the planning stage.

Visit www.justinminns.co.uk

Early mornings allow for undisturbed snow to be captured. Image: Justin Minns

26. Where is the sun?

I’m sure we all have a list of locations we’d like to photograph, and if you’re like me there’ll be a particular time of year you have in mind for the shot. I usually plan around seasonal weather, when flowers are in bloom or crops are growing, but I also consider where the sun will be rising or setting.

We all know the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, but that’s only a generalisation. In the winter, the sun rises south of due east, and its position moves south each day until, on the winter solstice, it rises in the south-east before beginning to move north again. Some places only catch the first or last light in the winter months when the sun rises and sets in a southerly position, so make a note to visit these places in winter and catch them in the best light.

27. Shorter days, longer hours

For most of the year, the best light is around an hour either side of sunrise or sunset. Once the sun is high in the sky, the light can be too harsh and flat for a lot of landscape photographers’ tastes. On short winter days, however, the sun travels on a much lower arc than normal, providing us with a pleasantly angled light throughout the day. Of course, on some winter days you might not see the sun at all, so make the most of it when you do and shoot all day!

Cameras can struggle in snowy scenes, so don’t be afraid to shoot manual. Image: Justin Minns

28. Don’t listen to your camera

Advanced as they are, the meters built into our cameras basically assume that all subject matter is of ‘average’ tonality, measuring the light reflected from the scene and averaging it to 18% grey. Most of the time it’s accurate enough, but when faced with an expanse of white snow, left to its own devices your camera will underexpose it and turn the snow grey. So ignore what your camera tells you, and if you are using one of the semi-auto modes, dial in 1-2EV of positive exposure compensation, or if you are using manual mode decrease the shutter speed by 1-2EV and keep your snow white.

29. Keep your winter landscape simple

A fresh covering of snow removes all clutter from a scene, making it possible to find simple, graphic compositions, especially when working in mono when the palette can sometimes be literally black & white. Just make sure you get out early for pristine snow.

Featured image: Mark Bauer

Further reading

How to take great coastal shots and seascapes this winter

How to photograph black & white winter landscapes

Guide to fine art landscape photography

The best cameras for photography 2022

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While all landscape has, in the words of art historian W. J. T. Mitchell, a “remarkable capacity” to “open up false depths, selective memories, and self-serving myths,” few places are as intensively imagined as the Holy Land. The terrain associated with the Abrahamic religions has been fervently remembered, visualized, and prayed for, often from afar, for millennia—in everything from calls sung on Passover expressing hope to meet next year in Jerusalem to the psalm for the city’s peace to the story of Muhammad’s night journey and ascension to heaven there. Comprising parts of present-day Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, the Holy Land is a nebulous geo-religious concept that has been shaped and repeatedly transformed not only by religion but also by the political struggles of statecraft and conquest.

Those struggles stretch from the formation of the ancient kingdoms of the Israelites described in the Hebrew Bible to Roman, Christian, and Islamic conquests of Jerusalem thereafter, and into the rise of modern Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel. Many who mapped messianic projections of the Holy Land onto a physical landscape sought to remake the place as they had envisioned it, in ways often detrimental to those already there. While such broad historical arcs are often reduced to clichés of either eternal, timeless conflict or redemptive, millennial return, today, artists from Israel-Palestine deal more specifically with the contemporary consequences of these imaginings made real. Confronting the disjuncture between the lived realities of this place and how it has been mediated from afar, they scrutinize the relationship between material and ideological constructions of the Holy Land.

Modern technologies facilitated a transformation of Holy Land representations from distant visions to indexical representations: not only did the steamship and the railway make international travel far more accessible, but the invention of photography provided new kinds of images of the place. Jerusalem was first photographed by daguerreotype in 1839, the same year that process was announced to the world. An image of the city captured by Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet was reproduced as an engraving with aquatint in Excursions Daguerriennes, a catalogue of places high in the European imaginary commissioned by French optician and daguerreotypist Noël-Marie-Paymal Lerebours, alongside pictures of the Acropolis in Athens, the pyramids of Egypt, and Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris.

Jerusalem’s prominence in the earliest history of urban landscape photography also signals how such images further transformed other representations of the Holy Land that ultimately led to material changes to the urban fabric of Jerusalem. The widely circulated view of Jerusalem taken by Goupil-Fesquet (whose daguerreotypes are mostly lost, and known through the prints based on them) was shot from outside the Old City, slightly east and from a higher elevation, highlighting the city’s outer walls constructed by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and, above all, the Dome of the Rock. In the foreground, in front of the walls of the city, is a pastoral scene of a shepherd with sheep grazing on the hills, an idyllically composed detail almost certainly not captured in the original daguerreotype but added later, likely during production of the printer’s plate.

By the mid-19th century, the city of Jerusalem had expanded beyond the walls of the Old City, with suburban settlements radiating out from the city center. During the British Mandate that saw the United Kingdom take political control of the region after World War I, however, the areas immediately beyond the wall were carefully transitioned into green belts, in a process that would physically produce the pastoral landscape that European artists had first envisioned. This view of Jerusalem from an elevated distance contrasts with the landscapes of Palestinian artist Sophie Halaby (1906–1997), whose watercolors of the city and its surroundings made both before and after the formation of the State of Israel are generally devoid of iconic landmarks. Often painted from the windows and balcony of her home, they express a sense of intimacy, both with the Musrara neighborhood where her family lived until 1948 and with her East Jerusalem surroundings following their forced move to the then Jordanian side of the Green Line.

The photographers who arrived to document and distribute images of this sacred ground incentivized the religious to explore the Holy Land as both pilgrims and photographers themselves. The American Colony in Jerusalem was established in 1881 by a small group of utopian-minded Presbyterians from the American Midwest and later a group of Swedes, who became philanthropists in the city as they sought a Christian lifestyle within the Holy Land. They bought a building on the outskirts of the city (now in East Jerusalem) on the road to Nablus. (Today their communal residence is a hotel, a favorite location for international journalists and others who straddle the Israeli-Palestinian divide.) Elijah Meyers, a member of the colony, began taking photographs of the region, inviting other members of the community to join him. The sale of their pictures, focused especially on Christian scenes, ruins, and the local population, kept the colony economically afloat and provided an international Christian clientele with hand-painted photographic scenes of a land supposedly divorced from modernity. Members also collected other materials related to what they believed was the authentic sacredness of their surroundings, including examples of local flora and fauna, in a combination of museological taxonomy and spiritual witnessing.

Those 19th-century pressed-flower albums are the starting point for a recent project by Jerusalem-born, Jaffa-based artist Dor Guez. Lilies of the Field (2019–21) is the result of a two-stage photographic process. First, Guez photographed a series of American Colony pressed-flower albums, paying close attention to the remaining red and orange carotenoid pigment that over the years had seeped from the flowers onto a protective sheet of wax paper. Guez then produced a negative of that photograph, inverting the color scheme of the original and producing a cyanotype-like print. The project not only emphasizes the material traces or residue of the original flowers but also explores questions of veracity and romanticism in these individuals’ interpretations of the Holy Land.

While the American Colony pressed-flower albums were given names of Holy Land locations—such as Jerusalem and Jericho—the flowers arranged in compositions were not always native to those places. The American Colony was one of many groups to attach biblical meaning to the landscape, or to invent such meaning altogether. For example, George E. Post, a botanist at what is now the American University of Beirut and a Christian missionary, believed that scientifically studying the flora and fauna of the Holy Land would bring new Christian revelations. (Another contemporary artist, Jumana Manna, explores the contradictions therein in her 2016 installation Post Herbarium.) 

Jerusalem-born, Brooklyn-based artist Tali Keren probes how such understandings of the Holy Land have sustained modern Israel’s self-image as an “old new” nation state—and whose politics such religious imaginings ultimately serve. Her participatory projects and immersive film installations interpolate viewers into the ideological struggles reshaping contemporary Israel-Palestine. Keren’s Un-Charting (2021–) is an animated 20-minute video that explores historical and contemporary evangelical Christian visions of Jerusalem. The holy city appears in the work not as it is today, a dense aggregate of historical and modern architecture constituting a politically divided urban geography, but as a perfectly organized orthogonal grid.

This schema sprang from the mind of Richard Brothers (1757–1824), a British naval officer based in what was then the British colony of Canada. One of the founders of “British Israelism” (a school of thought declaring the British the inheritors of the Promised Land) and an eccentric proselytizer who declared himself  “Prince of the Hebrews,” Brothers spent years formulating his new Jerusalem based on his own idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible, including the Book of Ezekiel and its prophetic descriptions of heaven. Convinced he would conquer and rebuild the Holy Land in the manner of the crusaders who came before him, Brothers mapped out his utopian order through the spatial logic of a God’s-eye view.

In Keren’s work, Brothers’s vision of the new Jerusalem is rendered against a dark background as
a series of neon lines forming a checkerboard pattern of perfect squares. The animation zooms across this abstract city until the viewer reaches the exact center—a geometrically perfect Garden of Eden. Audio description of Brothers’s vision segues to the contemporary musings of
an Israel outreach specialist at an evangelical Christian church in Denver, Colorado, and her counterpart in Israel. As the two separately discuss the American churchgoers’ trips to Israel, and the folk dances they perform as entertainment for the Israeli military, Keren’s animation transitions to another landscape: a model city for military training at the Tze’elim base in Israel near the border with Gaza, built in 2005. Viewers are invited to trace the connections between the two sites and their material effects.

Keren’s earlier video The City’s Craftswoman (2015) follows a workday for Natasha Ostrovsky, who produces models for new buildings in Jerusalem after permits have been secured but before structures have been erected. As Natasha adds her maquettes to an enormous model of Jerusalem in the city hall basement, Keren illustrates how constant change structures a city touted for its timeless character—specifically by demolishing older buildings, particularly in the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and putting in their place new ones that have been approved by the Israeli government. Ostrovsky removes prior building models, carefully placing them in plastic containers, and slots in recently approved construction.

Because of discriminatory housing policies, Palestinian residents have a far more difficult time obtaining permits than Israelis and Jewish settlers, thus reshaping the city’s demographics and physical structure. Since 1947, when the city was still under British rule, all new construction in Jerusalem has been mandated to be faced with a light-hued golden limestone or dolomite known as Jerusalem stone. This material has imbued the city with a sense of timeless homogeneity that is anything but, as Keren’s film reveals. The model in The City’s Craftswoman parallels the God’s-eye view of the city from above in Un-Charting; both films illustrate the intensive desire to reshape the Holy Land.

Rather than look to explicit historical referents, Palestinian Danish artist Larissa Sansour’s film and photo works turn more speculatively toward the relationship between imagined pasts and projected dystopian futures. In Vitro (2019) is a 28-minute, two-channel film codirected with Søren Lind that turns a science-fiction lens on the Palestinian Nakba (the “catastrophe” of the 1948 occupation) and its role in the construction of memory. The black-and-white film opens with a major disaster befalling the city of Bethlehem: A tsunami of dark liquid rushes through the streets; within seconds the waves course through the interior of the Church of the Nativity, the best-known and most-visited site in Bethlehem. Soon the entire city is engulfed in flames, plumes of black smoke billowing into the atmosphere.

After this dramatic opening, the majority of the film takes place in a cavernous concrete shelter where Alia, a younger woman born in the aftermath of this catastrophe, visits an older woman named Dunia, who is confined to a hospital bed. As the two converse it becomes apparent that nature is beginning to regenerate, although it is not yet safe to travel outside; people move through subterranean tunnels. As they talk, Alia peers out the windows of their shelter to see signs of life: though still unpopulated by humans, the street outside is lined with small olive trees and other native plants adjacent to concrete structures enclosed in glass.

Alia and Dunia’s conversation is interspersed with images of Bethlehem before the disaster, as nuns, priests, worshippers, and laypeople go about their daily business. Brief shots of nuns wearing gas masks as they bravely walk the postapocalyptic streets of Bethlehem highlight the extremes to which the religiously devout might go to maintain their sacred practices, despite the risk (and implied likelihood) of death. As Alia comments that life will soon return to a semblance of normalcy, she notes, “even the worshippers have returned.” Dunia replies, “Many of them never left,” suggesting that some may have died because they refused to leave their holy sites when a plague swept through the city.

The arrival of the new faithful repopulating the city ultimately mirrors Alia’s own story. It is revealed that she was conceived in vitro and implanted with the memories of a previous era; like the plants she intends to grow aboveground, she unwittingly carries the seed of an “heirloom” generation. She poignantly describes this experience as being “raised on nostalgia.” What ensues is an increasingly heated debate between the two women on the meaning and imperfection of memory and its role in establishing a future. As they talk, the lines between natural and artificial, fact and fiction, come to the fore.

Whether or not Alia directly experienced her memories of the outside world, those imaginings serve an important function in the rebuilding of a society that exceeds her frustrated personal wishes and desires. A thinly veiled metaphor for the Nakba, In Vitro reveals the younger generation’s struggle to carry a memory of a past they never knew, arguing that these images in the mind’s eye are what matters in the present: as Dunia explains, “the past never was, it only is.” More than warning that the past informs the future, Sansour appears to argue that what we understand to be the past is an active part of our present, which must be constantly reconstructed. Dunia argues for the continual retrieval of memory because she understands that it is the core of building a society anew, for better or worse; Alia’s responses, by turns upset and equivocal, affirm her uneasy acceptance of the responsibility to care for the images of the past.

Bethlehem-born, New York–based Ayreen Anastas’s films m* of Bethlehem (2003) and Pasolini Pa* Palestine (2005) interrupt any sense of nostalgia by documenting the daily realities of life in Palestine. Serving as a kind of video map, m* of Bethlehem slowly reveals the social and political tensions of a city under occupation. Stationary shots around the city capture water heaters and solar panels dotting rooftops, pairs and small groups of locals walking the city’s avenues, and church towers interrupting the skyline but appearing unremarkable when viewed from back alleys. What first appears to be a compendium of mundane images of contemporary life in Bethlehem is soon disturbed by the artist’s voiceover.

Seeming to offer dictionary definitions without their accompanying headwords, and alphabetical lists of words without their attendant meanings, the film makes sometimes associative, sometimes arbitrary connections between the utterances, leaving the viewer struggling to grasp the relation between word and image. The voiceover begins to stutter, “ba-ba-baba-babel-babe-babel-baboon,” yielding other words: barbarism, barrier, barricade. The camera moves to locations outside the city center, including what appears to be a fortified Israeli settlement atop a hill. Papers nailed to trees presumably providing official notification—of eviction? destruction?—flutter in the distance. Shops and grocery stores close for business well before dark, likely as curfew is imposed. The m* in the title—the asterisk is a reference to the star of Bethlehem—could refer to a truncated map or withheld meaning.

In Pasolini Pa* Palestine, Anastas retraces the path of Italian neorealist filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini across Israel and Palestine during a 1963 trip to scout locations for his biblical drama The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). Seeking aspects of the divine in the landscape, Pasolini traversed the Holy Land—Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea—alongside a Catholic priest and a newsreel photographer. Much to his dismay, modernity followed him everywhere, with telephone poles and factories interrupting the images of biblical ruins in his mind’s eye. Anastas follows Pasolini’s footsteps in the present, critiquing the search for, in his words, an “archaic biblical world,” and revealing the complexities of contemporary life in Israel-Palestine. While Anastas pursues the same route as Pasolini, she distances herself from the filmmaker’s romantic gaze by both highlighting the contemporary landscape and interviewing subjects along the way: a Palestinian in the recently annexed Golan Heights shows off his Israeli identification card, and a man living on a kibbutz expresses feelings of disconnection from the community. Both offer a sense of unease and disillusionment about their place in an increasingly fraught and unstable landscape.

Pasolini eventually produced a documentary based on his travels, Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Location Hunting in Palestine) in 1965, but he never found his envisioned setting for The Gospel According to St. Matthew in the Holy Land. Instead, he conveyed his disappointment in the surroundings, asking how the gospels could have been written in such a landscape, which he described as “paltry [with] no scenography.” He eventually settled for an altogether different site—the scenic southern Italian city of Matera—reimagining the Holy Land once again, now almost wholly divorced from the place he visited. 

It is toward, and against, such visual fictions and their material effects that many of these artists today turn their critical eye. Like Alia in Sansour’s In Vitro, these artists grapple with the material consequences of nostalgia for a place remembered or pictured through the stories of others. While such visual fictions can be critiqued and analyzed, they can also never be fully disentangled from the histories that have given them form, and they continue to reshape the terrain. The question then increasingly becomes: which fictions will take hold, and whose interests and needs will they serve?  

Born and raised in Swansea, Wales, in the UK, Sean Pritchard has always felt an affinity for the waves both as a photographer and a surfer. Whether riding them or shooting them, Pritchard has traveled all over the world chasing his passion and even spent seven years as a resident in New Zealand.

In December 2022, Sean Pritchard was named the 2022 Carve Magazine Surf Photography of the Year for his stunning shot Shoot the Pier. It captures a surfer at sunrise riding a wave just before he dips under the stanchions of New Brighton Pier taken when Pritchard was living in Christchurch, New Zealand.

And the people of Appalachia have rightly felt maligned. Who would like to be treated like a freak show attraction? This is why it’s always a refreshing and welcomed thing to have people who are from there, raised there, give us their perspective. In truth, this is a welcome approach from anywhere, having the people who are from there share the voices of their neighbors, co-workers and families.

Photography can never provide a completely accurate representation of a place and people. But having the story or the project come from “one of them” adds much-needed nuance to the stories we’ve already been told and expands and enriches our understanding. Riley Goodman’s book “From Yonder Wooded Hill” (Fall Line Press, 2022) falls squarely in that category.

And instead of taking us on a tour of coal miners’ black-smudged faces and dilapidated trailer parks, Goodman’s book investigates the region’s folk tales. As he says in an afterword to the book:

“From my ancestral West Virginia and North Carolina to the Patapsco River Valley of Maryland where I was raised, my family conjured superstitions and stories to make sense of their world. Walking on opposite sides of a pole splits two people’s souls; it’s customary to pray over floodwaters, and proper etiquette in the presence of a ghost involves asking, ‘What in the name of God do you want?’ Growing up, I accepted this folklore as commonplace but came to understand with age that these stories were unique to a working-class, Appalachian culture.”

“From Yonder Wooded Hill” is quite different from a lot of the work coming out of Appalachia that I’ve seen. This is a very personal exploration of life there, intertwined with intimate knowledge of the stories its people have told themselves to help make sense of life. It’s something that we all do, no matter where we are from. We’ve all inherited stories and superstitions that have encircled whatever socioeconomic background we are from that have helped us plumb the depths of life.

I very much appreciate Goodman’s perspective and approach in this book. He gathers, and presents, archival images alongside collected ephemera and artifacts to form, as the publisher’s description of the book says, “a narrative that rather than noting a specific period, creates an ever-occurring amalgamation of time. By establishing this crafted world, Goodman invites the viewer to question the tenets of authenticity, leaving the idea of ‘historical truth’ in an undisclosed middle ground.”

The book itself is a pleasure to look at, from its green velvet cover (which has been proved to be a magnet for my cats’ hair!) to its excellent printing. It’s a multimedia tour de force that I would love to see in a gallery setting. The work seems to naturally lend itself to an installation where the tactile nature of the work would really stand out. Still, the book does a nice job of pulling the material together.

You can find out more about the book, and buy it, here.