Photography News 14

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

MASTERCLASS: WATERSCAPES David Noton For the next five months we’ll be tapping into landscape photographer and Canon ambassador David Noton’s fount of expertise to help you and your club bag the top prize. To kick off, we’re quizzing him on water

David’s top tips FAST OR SLOW? “I’ll put up the ISO to really freeze motion to show waves breaking or I’ll use filters to slow down shutter speeds if I want to slow things down and express a bit of motion.” “If I’m concentrating in on tight waves breaking on a rocky headland, I might go for a really long lens perspective using either the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 or the EF 200-400mm f/4 lens.” VIEWFROMAFAR

Ever in pursuit of the perfect picture, there is hardly a place on earth that hasn’t been seen through the lens of David Noton’s camera. He developed both a passion for photography and an insatiable appetite for travel during his career in the Merchant Navy and he’s now been in the business of travel and landscape photography for almost 30 years. “Landscape is the subject that has always captivated me and always will do,” explains David. “I think photography is a prompt that takes us into environments to experience situations and sights that we would probably never get to in normal life. As such, it’s a life enriching experience that I feel really passionate about.” This year alone, David’s travelled to Argentina, Brazil, Iceland and California always following his nose and going where inspiration takes him. One of his most recent trips took him to the Jura Mountains in France after a French photographer told himabout the striking autumn colours: “Down in the limestone gorges of that region I had such a fantastic few days of self-indulgence, just concentrating on the photographic potential offered by the combination of the rivers there and the autumnal colours,” recalls David. He spent days within just a small area, not moving more than a few hundred metres to really get to know the place and bring out the best of the landscape. This epitomises David’s shooting style; he makes a plan and he perseveres with it. “You need a plan or an idea,” he begins. “You can’t just hope to head out of the door and stumble across brilliant photographic opportunities. If you’ve got a good idea it’s worth sticking to it even if it means going back to a location time and time again until you get the very best picture that you possibly can, because quality over quantity always works.” Being in the business of landscape photography, David is no stranger to photographing water, the theme for this round of the competition. It’s a theme

SEE THEWHOLE

SCENE “A Canon EF 14mm f/2.8 wide-angle lens is a handy tool

particularly if I’m wanting to incorporate a lot of sky into the image when there’s

ABOVE The coast at Budir with the mountains of Holsfjall and the Snaefellsnes Peninsula in western Iceland. CanonEOS5D Mark III, Canon24-70mmf2.8L IIUSM, 1.6secsat f/11, ISO100.

a dramatic sky that would benefit the composition.”

EOS 5D Mark III. Usually fixed to the front of it is a 24-70mm lens which David calls “a workhorse lens that’s just so useful in so many afferent situations”. As well as entering and winning a string of competitions in the past (he’s won awards in the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year three times), David has also been on the other side of the table too, making him well placed to dish out a bit of advice on what makes a winning image. “I know from when I’m judging competitions that what really stands out is when someone has been imaginative and come up with something that’s a bit different,” he says. “You’ve got to remember that the lens points both ways and that a successful picture should say something about the person who shot it as well.”

that’s visited time and again by photographers, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t scope for creativity. “It all comes down to looking at the surface of the water and thinking about how you want to express it. Do you want to show the anger of huge waves breaking on the coast? In that case you’ll want to go for a faster shutter speed to really freeze the motion and show every drop of water or spray, which is a very powerful thing to do. Or we can experiment with slower shutter speeds, ranging from fractions of a second to show just a hint of motion through to exposures of 30 seconds or minutes which will transform surfaces of water into seas of milk.” To capture those stunning landscapes that he’s become synonymous with, David uses the Canon

STRIPPED BACK “We are surrounded with images with really high colour, colours that have been boosted too much in post-production. I really encourage people to be subtle and restrained in their use of colour, I think sometimes a real use of minimal colour can be so powerful.” CREATIVE FLEXIBILITY “The Canon EOS 5D Mark III is an incredibly flexible tool capable of amazing quality, not just that camera

π To find out more, go to www.davidnoton.com.

TheVision

but most modern Canon DSLRs are

Handily for us photographers, David Noton has put onto paper what makes a successful image in his new book The Vision . Get inside the mind of one of the country’s best-loved landscape and travel

capable of delivering incredible quality if we photographers do our bit right.”

Youneed a plan or an idea. You can’t just hope to head out of the door and stumble across brilliant photographic opportunities

photographers to learn how David creates those winning images from conception through to clicking the shutter. It’s all illustrated with examples from David’s impressive back catalogue of work and can be bought from his website. π To find out more about David’s book, go to www.davidnoton.com/product/539/ The_Vision.

ABOVE The Mawddach estuary at dawn, Snowdonia, Wales. CanonEOS5DMark III, Canon 24-70mmf/2.8L IIUSM, 1/25secat f/18, ISO100.

Issue 14 | Photography News