No blots on his landscapes

Leading landscape photographer Charlie Waite reveals his fine-art approach to the craft, at two of his favourite haunts in Wiltshire. Niall Hampton joins him on location

Photographing landscapes is a bit like fly fishing: you never know exactly what you’re going to get – and you may not get anything at all. But being outdoors, surrounded by the serenity of nature, is more than ample a reward for the time spent in pursuit of your quarry.

This thought is going through my mind during a socially distanced afternoon spent in the company of one of the UK’s finest practitioners of landscape photography. Charlie Waite has been shooting some of the world’s finest landscapes for four decades; I dabble in this genre myself every now and then, as I do with fly fishing. I’ve never landed a fish, but I don’t look back on any of the many hours spent trying to do so as time wasted.

For Charlie, landscape photography is as much about the pursuit as it is about the reward. “The reward is trying to produce an image that will evoke for the viewer something of what you experience,” he enthuses. “And thinking of the criteria of judgement that people use: does it awaken something in me?” To see first-hand how he applies these principles in the field, Charlie suggested that

DigitalCamera visited a couple of his favourite locations in his home county of Wiltshire, which he has photographed regularly during his career. We start off at Mere Downs, setting up at the exact spot from where he captured one of the most memorable images in his recent BehindthePhotograph anthology of career-best images.

Facing us is a patchwork of varying colours and shapes, thanks to fields containing different crops – oil seed rape, grass and hay. Charlie has brought a print of the image with him, which is just as well, as the lighting conditions are very flat.

“If today had turned out as we had wished for, we’d be on the edge of our seats,” he says. “When you see an image with a reduced colour palette it’s wonderfully refreshing, calming and serene. So you could say that what we’re looking at now needs a bit of sunlight, a degree of conditioning.”

In situations like this, when something in a scene isn’t quite right, Charlie doesn’t advocate photographing it only to have to fix elements of the resulting image afterwards: “Personally, I would rather wish that something had existed [rather than having to be salvaged later]; for me, it’s satisfying to be able to say that’s how the image actually was.”

This approach means that Charlie can spend many an hour waiting for the diverse elements of a scene to align themselves before he thinks it’s worth firing the shutter. But, as his celebrated body of work shows, it’s a discipline that clearly pays dividends. “The real enjoyment of landscape photography is that you don’t think about food, drink or refreshment – you’re fully immersed,” he notes. “And even if you fail to capture the image that’s in your mind’s eye, then at least you’ve had a proper go.”

So how does Charlie discover the locations that have the potential to make great photographs? For him, it all comes down to two guiding principles. “If you were to arrive at a particular destination, think about where the impulse lies, the thing that made you stop, stand and look in the first place,” he suggests. “Once you get into a situation where you’ve settled, ask yourself which bits you like and don’t like. Locate the areas that are what I call redundant, as they’ve got to be excluded.

“The second thing to do is to reduce the photographic composition to the absolute minimum – because the more I can do within the frame is where the real satisfaction lies.

Then you can start thinking about the light, which for Charlie is one of the greatest joys of landscape photography: “Look at the whole scene and ask yourself where you want the eye of the viewer to go and where you want your eye to reside; this is something I believe can be determined by the distribution of light. Then when you show the image to someone, you can say, ‘Yup, that’s a lovely sky,’ as you’ve really orchestrated the relationship between the sky and the land to your satisfaction. And this is where I think the joy for landscape photographers really is to be found.”

One tip Charlie offers for making the viewer of an image “gasp like you gasped” when they first view the scene is to turn through 180 degrees for half a minute or so, then try to recall what attracted you to the scene.

“If you can do that, if you can turn your back and describe what you’ve been

Look at the whole scene and ask yourself where you want the eye of the viewer to go

looking at, that means you are fully acquainted with the content of the image.”

In the days of shooting film, Charlie practised this technique by putting a Polaroid back on his Hasselblad medium-format camera – these days, thanks to the Hasselblad CV II 50C digital back, he can check on a flip-out LCD screen.

Our second location of the day is Win Green, the highest point of the Cranborne Chase Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which offers visitors spectacular panoramic vistas. The one we’re particularly interested in is the view north from the slope adjacent to the car park. Here, the steep sides of a natural bowl lead one’s eyes into the topographic patchwork of the fields below.

In the foreground, a border of lavender describes an anvil-like shape, within which lies a large field containing a light-brown crop. Two lines of trees fan out from in front of us, and there are clumps of trees scattered in the land between the top edge of the lavender and the hills towards the horizon. It is certainly an attractive scene, but today’s flat lighting isn’t creating a photogenic perspective. Charlie has captured this scene before, though, and talks us through how he would approach it.

“Try to acquaint yourself with as many elements and component parts as possible, so that when you see the finished result, you can see what you originally saw,” he explains. “I feel quite strongly about that – you don’t want someone to distrust your photograph and then realise that you hadn’t composed it with a discerning eye.”

And talking of eyes, Charlie leaves us with one final useful tip: “Squint to evaluate the brightness range. This is a quick way to see whether it is too great for the capacity of the sensor or film to record.”