RPS Landscape Group Newsletter, February 2016

NEWSLETTER FEBRUARY 2016 / VOL. 1 / NO. 1

CONTENTS 01 Editorial

By Jim Souper ARPS, Newsletter Editor

02 Welcome Group Chair Tim Parish LRPS welcomes members to the group and shares his thoughts on its first steps

03 Your Committee Who's who on the group's inaugural committee

Editorial Firstly a warm welcome to the first edition of the newly formed Landscape Group's newsletter. Thank you to all who have contributed.

The main features this month are a welcome to the newsletter and the group from Tim Parish, the Group Chair, and an excellent article by Karen Thurman on her 'On Your Doorstep' project.

04 On Your Doorstep Karen describes her Arts Council funded project which encourages people to photograph the beauty to be found in their own area

05 Events Details of the first group events

Events include field trips to Chichester, Suffolk, and the Gower Peninsula as well as a tilt and shift workshop and a long exposure day in the Brighton/Shoreham area (see Richard Ellis's images above and left).

This is the first of ten newsletters planned for the year, which will usually be published in the first week of the month, with a couple of breaks over the summer and Christmas holiday periods.

Contributions from group members are welcome. These might be ideas for regular features, articles about projects, reports on events or exhibitions you've attended for example - all ideas welcome! Please keep your copy to 500 words or less and include two or three images. It may not be possible to publish everything, so feel free to send a brief summary your idea before committing to the full piece.

The next newsletter should be out during the first week of March.

The deadline for submission will be Wednesday 24th February please submit to landscape@rps.org.

Jim Souper

NEWSLETTER FEBRUARY 2016 / VOL. 1 / NO. 1

Chair's Welcome Welcome to our first Landscape Group newsletter, and welcome to what I hope will become a large and very active group.

The first hurdles of getting the group off the ground have now been mostly overcome; we have gained over 160 members in less than a month and have a keen and active volunteer committee in place. We will be building up the events calendar for this year over the next couple of months so if there is anything you’d like to see in particular please let us know and we’ll see if we can put something together. We already have one member on the South Coast who is offering his guidance to local sites free of charge, a really generous move and one that I hope we can build on around the country in the future. We’ve also gained a wealth of really good photo galleries, most of which fall into the ‘traditional’ mould. It would be really good to see some more abstract work, or ICM / multiple exposure images – come on, I know there’s some amazing stuff being produced out there, please share.

As I’m writing this I’m sitting in a hotel lounge sipping a coffee and watching the rain and wind battering the windows into submission. Will or won’t the weather subside enough to give me a sunset tonight I wonder, or is it an early visit to the bar and try again in the morning?

I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m a bit of an obsessive planner when it comes down to long weekends away with photography as the main objective and I get a bit miffed when the weather conditions don’t fall in with my plans! That seems to have happened a lot more often over the last 12 months, whether its ‘global warming’ or just a natural weather cycle doesn’t matter, it’s still frustrating. I haven’t got fed up with the golden hours yet and although I generally plan ‘all weather / all light conditions’ backup sites and do get some nice images, I hate coming back from a relatively expensive trip without the key images I’d gone for. But is all that travelling really necessary?

I live a fair way from what I consider good photographic material or so I think, and talking to other photographers, it appears we all do! How can that be true, I know some of you live in places I’d love to take photographs in and pay a lot of money to travel to, yet some of you travel to my home patch to do the same thing. What’s going on? Is it all a case of the ‘grass being greener’? I think it probably is and, if we all look at our own local area with fresh eyes, I’m sure that you will identify lots of previously unseen opportunities for great photographs. Perhaps that should be my New Year’s resolution One of the group’s founder members and our current Secretary, Karen Thurman, obviously thought likewise, Karen and her husband, Mick, kicked off the ‘On Your Doorstep’ project, with funding from the Arts Council, taking images of sites which really are on people’s doorsteps. It’s a project that I find really thought provoking and makes you think about what’s sitting under your nose, what you pass as you head for the motorway to the next ‘super site’. Karen has written a piece on the project for our first newsletter, which I hope you find as thought provoking as I did.

We would welcome feedback on the journey so far so please feel free to contact me on ‘landscape@rps.org’ with any comments or suggestions for future events and activities.

Regards, Tim Parish LRPS Chair

NEWSLETTER FEBRUARY 2016 / VOL. 1 / NO. 1

Your Inaugural Committee

Tim Parish LRPS Chair

Richard Ellis LRPS Treasurer

Karen Thurman LRPS Secretary

Mark Reeves LRPS Web Editor

Paul Graber LRPS Events Co-ordinator

Jim Souper ARPS Newsletter Editor

Pauline Benbrook LRPS Committee Member

Peter Douglas Jones ARPS Committee Member

For pen portraits of the committee go to http://www.rps.org/special-interest-groups/landscape/about/committee-members

Free location guiding offered Landscape group member Paul Stone, who lives near Portsmouth (and who took this image), is offering his services for free because he wants to encourage group members to visit the area and because he hopes that other group members may similarly offer to act as guides in their own home areas.

Anyone interested in accepting Paul's offer should contact him at pjs28jack@googlemail.com If anyone should wish to offer to guide in their own areas, please send brief details to landscape@rps.org East Head © Paul Stone

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On Your Doorstep

by Karen Thurman LRPS How many of you spend time enjoying the beauty of nature on your own doorsteps? I know that for years I didn’t. I grew up in the concrete jungles of the Far East and the nature I saw was in National Geographic magazines and in zoos. I started photographing as a teenager - it was something I could share with my dad - and I fell in love with photography in general, but no one was more surprised than me when I fell in love with nature photography. Today I’m an analogue landscape photographer.

In April 2014, my husband and I discovered Glen Affric in Scotland.

We’re both well travelled but nothing has topped what we saw in that 10-mile area. We were inspired and photographed a lot. Every 10 yards there was something to stop for. We’d only planned to spend a week there, but ended up staying for five (and we’ve been back a few times too). Then we started showing the images we’d made to people in towns 10, 12, 15 miles away. People thought they were images of Canada. We were surprised by how many had no idea of the beauty on their doorsteps. So we decided to change that by exhibiting what we’d seen and photographed.

Cascade, Monsal Head

One location/exhibition turned into seven and a fully-fledged, 18 month long, Arts Council-funded project, “On Your Doorstep”, was born. We chose non-iconic places - industrial locations, commuter belts, etc, drew a radius of 20 miles around the location and photographed the woodlands, streams, canals, coasts, fields and parks we found. All the photographs we exhibited were taken within a 10-15 minute walk from a car park or roadside; we didn’t want people to think they had to hike for miles to find the beauty we saw. Two of the three images shown here were taken from car parks. The third was a 15 minute amble away. We spent a month in each location photographing and preparing the images, which we exhibited the following month.

In addition, we invited people to send in their own images. We put all of them on our website and the best were also shown in our exhibitions. We really stressed the it’s not about having the right camera gear; it’s about getting out, enjoying what you see and capturing that. In each exhibition, we made sure to include images made on our smartphones as well as the DSLR and large format film camera.

Chapter one of the project finished at the end of 2015; chapter two “Forests” begins in 2016. The focus of my work will narrow to concentrate on forests and the conservation/restoration projects being undertaken, but the wider public engagement will continue as before.

We invite people to wander in their local green spots, to travel through their countries, discover the magic of nature around them and send in their images. There are three easy rules: (1) images must be the senders’ own (2) they must be images of nature and (3) they must have been taken in the senders’ country of residence. We’ll publish the best ones on our website and in our new free magazine On Your Doorstep which debuts at the end of March 2016.

For more information see www.thurmanovich.com or email karen@thurmanovich.com

River Affric, Glen Affric

Stream, Dodd Wood All images © Karen Thurman

NEWSLETTER FEBRUARY 2016 / VOL. 1 / NO. 1

EVENTS Chichester and West Wittering Meet Saturday 2nd April

Gower Peninsular Weekend Saturday 4th - Sunday 5th June

Meet at 10:30 am at Chichester Cross, in the centre of the City.

Free to all RPS members and their partners, but you MUST let Paul Graber know by 21st March via paul.graber@ntlworld.com if you wish to take part.

Two hours urban photography, followed by lunch and then move on to West Wittering, where the intention is to do some long exposure photography and finish with sunset.

A weekend exploring the Gower Peninsula, one of the first places designated 'An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty' under the Act of 1949. The Gower is both beautiful and unspoilt, with many historic features located over an area that measures just sixteen miles by seven miles wide.

For further details and booking contact Peter Douglas-Jones via peter@douglas-jones.biz.

Dedham Vale Meet Sunday 17th April

Long Exposure Coastal Exploration Sunday 4th Dec.,10:00am - Sunset Shoreham and Brighton

Meet at 10.30 a.m. at Flatford Mill Car park (charge £3.50, see nationaltrust.org.uk/flatford) Free to all RPS and their partners, but you MUST let Pauline Benbrook know if you wish to take part by 28th March via pauline@benbrook.fsworld.co.uk Dedham Vale is an area of outstanding natural beauty in Suffolk (Constable Country). Photo opportunities include Flatford Mill, Willy Lott's Cottage, Bridge House and the beautiful meadow scenery along the River Stour.

Tilt/Shift Lens Workshop Saturday 7th May, 9:30 - 4:30 At the Anglian Water Bird Watching Centre, Rutland Water.

The workshop will cover a short amount of basic theory and then concentrate on the practical use of the lens movements to enhance landscape photographs, initially in the classroom and then out on location around Rutland Water.

The workshop will have a maximum group size of 12, with 2 instructors and you don’t need your own lens to attend.

The workshop should appear on the website shortly and can be booked online.

Meet at the car park on Shoreham Old Fort Rd, BN43 5HL The day will start at Shoreham harbour, making images of the harbour structures and the harbour wall. After two hours the group will drive along to Shoreham beach and make images of the posts and breakwaters as well as break for lunch. The day will finish on Brighton beach with the opportunity to photograph the old west pier at sunset.

Participants: Max 8 To attend.

Please email Richard Ellis sre868@gmail.com Cost: RPS Landscape SIG member £0, RPS £5, Non-member £10 In addition to the charges above parking costs will be ca £8 – regrettably parking in Brighton is very costly (£5.20 for 2hrs).

For further details of all Landscape Group events please visit the group's event page at http://www.rps.org/special-interest-groups/landscape/events

Leather & Sheep's Tor from Sharpitor © Tim Parish

NEWSLETTER FEBRUARY 2016 / VOL. 1 / NO. 1