Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky's outlook on landscapes is very inspiring as it doesn't look at a typical landscape of nature. He photographs urban landscapes. His work caught my eye as it looked like what I wanted to replicate in the photographs I was taking, it was very symmetrical and orderly in the way the images looked. 

He has a way of making industrial landscapes something to take notice of whereas if you lived near them you wouldn't look twice at them. The image below is another image of his that stood out to me as the lighting on it is really beautiful. Again it has the symmetry in it that I would like to recreate in my work. I like the idea of things looking quite baron but also like there is something worth looking at in the image. 

Today Helen and I went on a walk to see what we could take pictures of for our last few pieces of film. I was looking to stick with a similar theme as to what I want my final prints to look like. 

The image above is one that I quite liked the look of as it fitted in well to what I want my images to look like. When I'm printing I might crop it a little so there is less of the ground and fence in the image. The image below is another one that I think will really come out well. Although I think I will crop that image too so I get more of just the building in the middle rather than all the grass in the foreground but I will see what it looks like once I have made a contact sheet of the negative taken on the 5x4 film as it might look different. 

Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore has been a widely published photographer for the past forty years. His landscape work stood out to me because he uses similar patterns that I have found in my work. 

In the image above he photographs buildings which is something I want to concentrate on. When people say 'Landscape photography'  people usually think of pictures of things like mountains and nature and things like that. However I decided to look more at buildings in urban landscapes. 

I'd like my images to all have a certain similarity to each other in the way they are composed. I like the idea of capturing a lot of sky in the image with something in the centre which is a focus point of the image with minimal ground in the image, like Stephen Shore's image above. 

I also want to try and get a sort of symmetry in my images, not so it is obvious, but more so there are similar shapes on both sides of the image. Like the one above, it is not perfectly symmetrical but it is in the sense that there is a centre point of the image in the middle (the double doors), and then a single door on each side which creates the symmetry. The symmetry is also in the second image with the furthest hill in the background being the focus point of the image, with a hill on either side of it. Even in the first image, there is a look of symmetry as there is one small building in the middle, and then a high rise building on either side. 

Frank Gohlke

These images I picked from Gohlke's website stood out to me as there are a lot like a few of the shots that I have taken already. They have an idea of isolation in them which I really want to put into my work as I think its a really interesting way to compose images as it just gives you one things to focus all of your attention on to. 

Robert Adams

Robert Adams work is very dark in the way it is shot/printed however I think that it adds a sense of individuality to his work. I think the contrast between the light grey sky and the ground which is a lot darker, completely black in some places, makes the images stand out more than if there wasn't this amount of contrast. This is something I will look into when printing my final images.

I really like how the clouds stand out in these images, I plan to go out and shoot on days that are cloudy so I can try and get a similar affect as I think it adds texture to the image. I think it also really helps give the image depth.

Andreas Gursky

In these images I found by Andreas Gursky, I really liked the way that there was a very clear divide between the sky and the land. Also in the bottom image I think the straight lines in the image give it a very strong structure which I would like to try and introduce into my landscape work. The images have a very "documentary" approach to them which I find quite interesting, I think with my work being in black and white, if I decide to include some of these ideas of composition it will make my work look even more like documentary images.