“The patience of Job” may be the single most important skill a landscape photographer learns.
Many factors that produce impactful landscape photographs are beyond the black and white film photographer’s control. The relative simplicity of the basic processes involved in film-based black and white photography are deceiving. In reality black and white film photography is a visual abstraction of a world that exists almost entirely in color. The film photographer’s toolbox for making these black and white abstractions contains just a few simple tools. The challenge is not so much in the use of these tools but in finding the conditions in which they may be most effectively employed.
Time of day and year, light direction and quality, weather and atmospheric conditions, are among the many uncontrollable factors that challenge a landscape photographer….yet with keen observation, luck and experience, the landscape film photographer’s ability to recognize the favorable emergence of these factors allows the capture of a scene unique to a time and place that resonates not only with the photographer but with the viewer of the final print.
Patience enters the equation when “waiting for the light,” “waiting for the weather,” or waiting for some other uncontrollable factor to improve before the time is opportune for image capture. Every landscape photographer, sooner or later, waits to no avail for favorable conditions that never materialize. However, patience is eventually rewarded, for example, at the end or beginning of an overcast day when the sun’s rays momentarily break under a cloud cover and strike a natural scene with dramatic directional light.
Though not known for landscape work, famed French photographer, Cartier Bresson, coined a useful phrase, the “decisive moment,” that applies not only to photo journalism, but to many great landscape photographs as well. Landscape scenes are thought by many to be static and immutable, yet each passing moment differs from the last…light, shadow and weather conditions endlessly change to produce an infinite range of unpredictable outcomes.
The photographer’s controllable decisions involve camera positioning, lens focal length and filter selection, depth of field determination followed by exposure and placement of the key scene brightness values on a previsualized tonal scale. All of these controllable factors bear directly on the negative’s ability to translate to the finished print the scene the photographer previsualizes at a moment in time…and, the ultimate emotional impact of the image on the viewer of the print.
In summary the black and white landscape photographer has no opportunity to introduce Photoshop enhancements into the creative process. Once exposed the negative is capable of producing silver halide prints that fall within a limited range of visual interpretations, none of which approach the dramatic changes possible with digital photography in combination with Photoshop. Black and white film-based landscape photography is in the final analysis a minimalist approach to imaging the world around us.