Featured Photographer - Richard Revels FRPS

Richard Revels FRPS

The view of the capital of the Falklands, Stanley, from a FIGAS plane shortly after taking off from Stanley Airport. If you have a window seat, select the cleanest area of glass in the window and take a number of pictures, as you may not get another chance.

I doubt if many RPS Landscape Group (LG) members have travelled to the Falkland Islands with their main objective being to take landscape pictures of those wonderfully wild groups of islands. There are, however, plenty of wildlife photographers I know who have made visits to photograph the wildlife there, with some pictures winning awards in various international exhibitions. While my main interest is usually the wildlife of most places I visit, I do however also like to take plenty of general views and landscape pictures so that, after returning home, I have a good range of pictures of each location visited for my photo library, that are available for printing, publishing, and inclusion in my digital shows.

So I regard the landscape pictures that accompany this article as mostly decent record shots of the Falklands, rather than classic landscape pictures. However, having seen my pictures, I hope that some LG members will be tempted to make a visit (when Covid-19 restrictions allow) to these wonderfully wild islands and, if visiting landscape photographers put in the time, I am sure that they will get some stunning pictures of the Falklands that will grace the pages of the Landscape Group magazine for years to come.

Visiting the Falkland Islands is not as easy as going to most destinations, as flights there, and also the accommodation, are very limited, so you will need to book well in advance. The Falklands are about 8,000 miles away in the South Atlantic, some 250 miles off the east coast of Argentina, South America. About 240 separate islands of varying sizes make up the two main island groups of East and West Falklands, with the capital Stanley and the main airport at Mount Pleasant being on the Eastern mainland.

A number of the larger islands have farms that have accommodation for visitors and, once the Coronavirus restrictions have eased, I am sure that fully-vaccinated visitors will be made very welcome, as during recent decades the income from visiting photographers has been a welcome addition to their income. My main reason for visiting the Falklands has always been to photograph the wildlife and that will differ slightly from island to island, depending on the terrain and if the island has any rats that arrived on board the ships with the early sailors. Rat-free islands will have many more small birds nesting on them and efforts are being made to eradicate the alien rat populations on all islands.

A rookery of Rockhopper Penguins and King Cormorants on Saunders Island, showing both the birds and the habitat in the landscape picture

A view along the coast of Carcass Island showing lichen covered rocks on a sunny day, making it a colourful sight. Carcass is one of the most attractive islands I have visited.

I have always travelled there by plane from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, with the flight taking about 18 hours to reach Mount Pleasant airport on the Falklands. En route, there will be a refuelling stop of about 2 hours on Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic and, although there is little opportunity for photography during that short stop, it is, for me, a very welcome break, where refreshments and other items may be purchased and some exercise taken, in an otherwise rather long and uninteresting journey that is mostly over the sea.

After landing at Mount Pleasant airport and collecting our luggage and getting through customs, we are bussed into Stanley some 20 or so miles away, where we are dropped off at our hotel. After booking in and freshening up, there’s usually time for a walk either around town or along the waterfront before the evening meal. The following morning, after an early breakfast, we are again picked up by minibus and taken to Stanley airport, which is on the outskirts of town, where, after checking in, we fly off in a small FIGAS Islander plane to whatever island we are staying on for the next few days. These FIGAS planes are the main means of travelling from island to island and, if you can get a window seat, there’s a good opportunity of photographing the islands from the air as you travel to each location so I always have my camera ready and try to get a window seat when boarding the plane.

While the weather there can be rather windy, on my visits it’s usually been fairly dry, with often good sunny spells and some days there is hardly a cloud in the sky. However, on other days it can be very changeable and it is capable of producing all four seasons in a single day, with usually brief, but often heavy, showers of rain, hail and even snow passing over the island. So taking waterproofs with you is advisable if walking any distance from shelter and, with the ozone layer still rather thin over that part of the globe, it is best to cover all exposed skin with sunblock.

My first visit to the Falklands was in November 2003, when I joined a wildlife photography tour run by David Osborn FRPS and his sister Dawn Osborn (also now FRPS). They led two groups of five or six photographers to various islands and visits were also made to one or two mainland locations after returning to our hotel in Stanley, a day or two before the flight back to the UK was due. David had visited the Falklands several times before so knew many of the best ‘hot spots’ for the wildlife and he, of course, had also arranged all the accommodation, catering and transport to each location. Falkland Holidays can also arrange your visit for you if you wish, including all flights, for a small fee.

The remaining posts of an old jetty on Carcass Island seen in this picture had gone when I returned the following year. Like many other alien plants, the yellow flowers of European Gorse have spread from where they were first planted and are taking over the part of the hillside.

With the Falklands being a British Protectorate, you can spend your UK money in all the shops and, should it be needed, the National Health Service is also there, including a hospital in Stanley. I enjoyed my first visit so much that, despite the high cost of travel, I have returned there three more times and, on every visit, the wildlife and lighting differ slightly and I always end up with plenty of good new pictures. One thing that is beyond all photographers’ control is the weather at the time of the visit and, while some photographers take pictures in all but the worst weather, others prefer not to venture out when conditions become unpleasant but, usually, after a few hours, the weather settles down. Although the wildlife of each location will be my main photographic target, I am always on the lookout for good seascapes, landscapes and general pictures, as they all help to chronicle my stay, with rain, snow, hail, fog and wind all being as much part of my visit as calm sunny days.

Staying on an island for several days allows visitors time to get to know each location, so I make mental notes of areas that I can return to at a different time of the day that will allow me to get pictures in different lighting conditions. One thing to bear in mind is, when visiting the southern hemisphere, the sun will be in the north at mid-day and that caught me out for a while on my first visit down south. Although rivers were lacking on the islands I have visited, there are ponds of varying sizes on most of the larger islands and the coastal areas are very varied, with often colourful lichens covering many of the rocks. Some islands also have areas of sandy beaches, including some with white shell sand and most coastal areas are very photogenic in good lighting conditions.

With few people visiting the Falklands to take landscape pictures, any member of the Landscape Group who wants to visit somewhere very different from the usual places should be able to get a bucketful of excellent landscape and seascape pictures; that is, if they don’t get too distracted by the wildlife! Some, I expect, will end up with a selection of better landscape pictures than I have managed on my visits. With the varied features and nature of each island, I am sure that some LG members who wish to get an RPS Distinction could get all the pictures needed to make up a successful RPS Associateship or Fellowship panel on the Falklands.

Besides being on Carcass Island as shown here below, there are white shell-sand beaches and dunes on several other islands.

While travelling by car. we encountered a Stone run and stopped for a while to take pictures from the ground. These broken rocks come from quartzite ridges on top of hills and mountains. Plant growth along these slowly moving rocks is limited to a few species.

While travelling by car. we encountered a Stone run and stopped for a while to take pictures from the ground. These broken rocks come from quartzite ridges on top of hills and mountains. Plant growth along these slowly moving rocks is limited to a few species.

At this point I should point out that the Falklands are a place that you will either love or hate and any unenthusiastic partner who is “dragged along” when the weather becomes unpleasant for a while may become rather unhappy. However for photographers who love to explore wild “off-thebeaten-track” places, where other humans are few and far between, the scenery and wildlife can be out of the top drawer. When travelling in the more remote areas it would always be advisable to go with a colleague who will be somewhere in the vicinity in case of injury, as on some islands you may not get a signal for your mobile phone (or you could not when I was last there), should you need to call for help. After every one of my visits I leave with the intention of returning again to photograph and enjoy the wonderful wildlife and views.

Sometimes I am asked what my favourite image of the Falklands is and, if I have to choose a general view (rather than wildlife), it would be the sunset over a whale skeleton taken on Bleaker Island. This is a very sad reminder of the past, when the Falklands were a major whaling station and many tens of thousands of whales that had been killed at sea were brought there to be ‘processed’ for their meat, oil and blubber. I have no idea how that whale skeleton came to be there. Thankfully the widespread slaughter of whales stopped many decades ago.

Richard Revels FRPS