Quotes by
Pete Bridgwood

I often find it useful to consider landscape images as comprising three areas, foreground, middle-ground and background. While our human perception tends to focus more on foreground details and objects in our near vicinity, the camera makes no such distinctions. Foreground rocks that the photographer could reach out and touch while at the scene are rendered with the same presence as distant clouds in the final image. When visualising, I think it pays to try to see background and foreground details with equal importance.

I see the photographic image as a three-way relationship between the subject, the viewer and the photographer.

As photographers we can communicate emotions in the blink of an eye, through our imagery. When words elude us, we can tell the whole story without actually saying anything.

There is a certain valid moment for every wave.

Deciding on a composition when framing a scene is an exercise in subtraction. Unlike the painter who starts with a blank canvas and builds up his image by the addition of paint, as photographers we work in the other direction.

Landscape photographers are crepuscular creatures, we tend to function most creatively at twilight, be it dawn or dusk.

The joy of creative landscape photography comes from encapsulating the soul or spirit of the location and communicating that captured perception to the viewer of the final print.

In the final analysis, art is all about freedom, freedom to interpret, freedom to express and freedom to create.

For me, pre-visualisation is a more meditative loose gathering of ideas, an indistinct dreamlike possibility, a process occurring before we are in the presence of our subject. Visualisation is a more concrete mental image formed while on location and able to view our intended scene. Visualisation is all about seeing like a camera, an imaginative photographic translation of the real world before us into a detailed final result.

When we release the shutter, we fuse together the static and dynamic elements of a scene, they are momentarily and permanently combined, fixed into a consilient whole which is greater than the sum of its parts.

For those of us with a predilection for wild places, it can be rewarding and refreshing to turn our attention to the urban landscape. The majority of our audience will have an innate perspective of the metropolitan milieu, buildings and their component parts have an expected size and shape. Our artistic honesty is therefore unmistakably apparent, but a consequence of this is that ambiguity can be all the more powerful.