Droning on about the Ribble Valley
The Ribble Valley
And why I shoot it by drone.
I bought my first drone - a DJI Phantom 4 - for the express purpose of photographing my local area from a different angle. When I'd get to a stunning location or find a subject that I wanted to photograph, my first thought was always 'If only I was somewhere else...', and that was becoming a bit depressing.
Pendle Hill - It's Green. So very, very Green.
The place I photograph the most is the Ribble Valley and it's surroundings. It's a beautiful area comprised almost entirely of endless countryside and rolling hills, a lattice of interwoven rivers, streams and brooks and clusters of ancient forests and woodland. But it's a classic example of a beautiful place that, for the most part, just isn't that photogenic. Sure, it doesn't help that it's perpetually overcast, but there's also very little that's overtly striking in the area.
The hills are all gently sloped and understated, the trees are all very, very green, as are the fields that stretch across the valley floor, criss-crossed with green hedges and ancient dry-stone walls. The moorland that stretches across the tops of the hills, whilst lovely to look over, is essentially an infinite swathe of foot-high interlocking shrubbery. Every aspect of it feels like it should be a fabulous area for photography, and yet herein lies the problem. Nothing stands out. The whole area just sort of blends into itself when captured in a 2 dimensional photograph.
As far as I understand it, landscape photographs work best when they have a clear subject that the viewer is lead to by the features of the terrain around them. How the photographer goes about that is where the art resides, be it by leading lines and golden ratios, colour contrast, framing or whatever. But finding appropriate compositions is so much harder when there are literally no interesting features standing out in the landscape. A green tree doesn't stand out in a green field in front of a green hill.
Blacko - Using other techniques like high contrast and super-long exposures to find interest in an otherwise monochrome scene.
A New Perspective
Bowland-by-Bowland - Drones can shoot from a perspective that nobody has previously seen.
This is where a drone comes into its own. It's so easy to put a drone into the sky and start hunting for new compositions that nobody short of the Planet Earth team could even contemplate shooting before. A top-down view of a copse of trees? Scrap the helicopter. A downward looking panorama of a sweeping landscape? No need to climb a non-existent mountain anymore. All you need is a ham-fisted moron, like me, with a flying camera robot. Suddenly every road and river is a leading line, every lake is a rippling mirror of colour, and every cluster of green trees is now the potential subject of an infinitely more interesting image.
Of course it's not all perfect. My Phantom 4 and little Mavic Pro are little more than flying mobile phone cameras, fixed aperture and focal length, devoid of any concept of dynamic range and all those magical benefits you glean from high-end lenses and camera bodies. But the technical specifications of images are only ever interesting to other photographers. Anyone else looks at an image as - just that - an image, a photograph, a picture. "Does it look pretty or interesting?" "No, but it's got pin sharp all the way across the frame!". Excellent, nobody cares.
Chase Jarivs wrote a book called 'The Best Camera is the One You Have With You', a statement subsequently commandeered by photographers to dismissively backhand people who ask them what camera they use to make their photos look so good. It's not especially true, and likely not originally intended to be, but it has a place here. Would I rather throw the drones away because they don't produce images that can be blown up and printed on the side of a bus, or would I rather simply accept their limitations and take the opportunity to make images from compositions that could only be taken if you had a handy helicopter 10 years ago? If it means that I can once again enjoy images I shoot in the Ribble Valley, I'll take the drop in pixels any day.
Stocks Reservoir - Leading lines and a vista that couldn't be taken in any other way. It even picked up some mist rolling down the valley in the distance that I could never have otherwise seen.