THURSDAY 21st April 2022
The Inner Landscape
ANDY PHILLIPS
At very short notice, Andy Phillips agreed to give his ‘The Inner Landscape’ presentation over our last Zoom meeting of the 2021-2022 season. Like other speakers we have invited over the past two years, Andy is from quite a distance away (Chorley, Lancashire) and it would have been impractical to have him visit under normal circumstances. He began his talk by introducing himself, he is both a professional landscape photographer and tutor, and although his talk was actually about still life, Andy did start his slide show with beautiful landscape images taken in the Arctic Circle, Iceland and Scotland, particularly Glencoe and The Outer Hebrides, explaining as he went along, how his ‘smallscapes’ evolved from these massive landscapes. He talked about the lenses he uses for landscape photography and explained how he searches out the ‘non-chocolate box’ images. He also has an interest in and teaches infra-red photography and he showed several images taken in Lancashire with his dedicated infra-red camera. With the landscapes taken care of, Andy then got down to the main event of his talk. His inner landscape is a specific type of still life as every image taken is lit by natural light only and the subjects bought (or in the case of flowers grown) on a very small budget. Within the first few images he shared with us, Andy showed that even a photograph of a weed can look good if taken under the right light conditions and then post processed with good textures. When he started this type of picture taking he set out to photograph an everyday object in his kitchen to produce a ‘wow’ factor picture. He talked us through the basic equipment he used to achieve the beautiful images he shared with us and stated that anyone can attain exactly the same without too much expense but plenty of patience – just step out of your comfort zone but ‘keep it simple’.