Patterns of the Outer Hebrides

Isle of Harris Seascape Portfolio

Since I started being more serious about photography, I’d become increasingly convinced about one simple aspect: our planet is filled with incredible beauty, and photography enables humanity to see it. I clearly remember when all this wonderful madness began sprouting in my life. It was right about the moment in which I was able to see reality in a way that was absolutely impossible for my eyes and brain to process it. This is when I fell in love with this magnificent discipline.

This brief collection of photographs is a highly curated synthesis of what the Outer Hebrides represent to me in a deeply aesthetical way. Each has a specific color, each has its own meaning, and I can recall everything that I felt before and after pressing the shutter button. Everything slows down, and while it is breathing all the light in front of my eyes, I feel the whole magnificence of the earth entering my mind.

Beyond the technicalities around the craft, landscape photography aspires to reduce the absolute vastness of a place into a single visual entity which holds together time and space. The human species is drawn to exploring as a natural thing, therefore landscape photography feels somewhat comfortable and even logic to me. Nature isn’t simply waiting for people to being registered with their cameras. On the contrary, the great challenge of a landscape photographer is to condense the world into a captivating visual fragment.

Achieving the aforementioned goal requires above all patience. This is because one needs to scout before doing a somewhat accurate plan for capturing the perfect shot. After all the math has been jotted down, natural light needs to reach the desired sweet-spot. In parallel, composition and exposure are fundamental for making a landscape photograph that will matter for the rest of your life.

Par excellence, nature opposes any means of control. And that includes arranging elements. We need to move around in order to organise chaos and transform nature into the beautiful composition that’s in our mind. Understanding nature – and being drawn to exploring all the contextual elements that make up these huge canvases – is a basic skill for capturing it in a storytelling fashion.

Landscape photography is way more than recording the world in such a beautiful way that will trigger aesthetic experiences in the viewing audiences. Which is by itself a huge goal to be honest. No, landscapes don’t stop there, they end up building a relationship with the photographer, hence the moody colors that you can see in these photographs. Every single shot turns out to be unique and unexpected. And that is nothing but the best humbling experience I can recommend to any explorer.

We don’t own landscapes, they express themselves as they please and we are just drooling voyeurs thinking about slightly expected results. But, in the end, nature is the author of these photographs. The most poetic thing about this experience is that even when surrounded by other photographers, no landscape will look equal, we all end up having a unique piece of art in our hands. In this is something worth sharing.

Photography is limited and can’t express all the wonders of exploring nature; but it is a great way of showing others our world and why it matters to keep it safe from our own hand. If we don’t start taking serious action about taking care of our planet, these images will be the only witnesses we will leave for future generations to come about how graceful our planet was.

Articles:

A amended version of this article has been published in the Fuji X Passion Photography Magazine December 2019 issue. Moreover, it was selected for the “Best of 2020” issue of Fuji X Passion.

A 2×2 portfolio has been published in the On Landscape Photography Magazine in the June 2020 issue.

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