As a 14-year-old boy on our return from Canada, I remember looking down from the circling Jumbo Jet at the patchwork of fields that make up England’s green and pleasant land. It seemed a toy landscape in contrast to the huge open spaces of Canada. In Europe the rural landscapes have been shaped and maintained by man for centuries, even millennia, to such an extent that the old stone walls, rustic barns and church steeples are as much part of the environment as the trees and hills. Age generally mellows man’s input and the rural architecture of a region becomes deeply embedded in its character and culture.
For all the challenges of deserts and ice caps some of my favourite trips have consisted of loading up the motor and drifting through the rural heartlands of Europe. On a long haul flight difficult compromises have to be made with what can be taken, and I often opt to travel light with just the DSLR system. So on these road trips it’s such a relief to load up virtually all the gear I own, including the heavy artillery.
I’ve been wedded to the panoramic format for some 17 years. I first hired a panoramic camera on trial and was so bowled over by the impact of the big 6x17cm transparencies for landscape work that I immediately bought one. Since then it and its successor have been round the world many times. As yet there’s no practical digital alternative to the big ‘pano’ and I still love the impact and quality of the format. The camera itself is big and bulky, but not particularly heavy. It’s also delightfully simple, with no electronics and not much to go wrong. Having said that it does demand a different, more rigid way of working, I have to be meticulous in the way I put together an image and operate the camera. I strongly believe you need to be diligent whatever camera you’re using, but with the panoramic it does take a while longer to set up and deploy. This can be a good thing, imposing a more disciplined regime on the business of making an image, and when you see a print from this format enlarged up to several feet wide it makes it all worthwhile.
“Location searching in such regions can and should be a real joy”
In Europe the classic regions of Provence, Tuscany and Andalucia take some beating, but of course there are many, many other equally bucolic and enticing areas. Indeed part of the attraction of such trips is getting off the beaten track and discovering for yourself rural backwaters not mentioned in the guidebooks. By their very nature these are environments lacking in any particular challenge of survival or access. As always, location finding is crucial. I’ve often found myself in a region I know is attractive, with much photographic potential, but I can’t seem to express it in an image. It’s extremely frustrating, and it happens all too frequently. A mental block can develop, the harder you look, the less it all comes together. But persistence usually pays off. The location searching itself in such regions can and should be a real joy; if it becomes a chore then something is not right. Cycling and walking are my preferred ways of finding my spots; driving is OK but it’s all too easy to whizz past a scene without even noticing it. I just can’t work out though why all the randonnées seem to incorporate lunch in a sun-dappled square. All in the name of familiarization, of course.
ITALIAN SUMMER
Day 10:
Our Italian Campaign is going well. Like the Vandals and Visigoths we marched into Italy via the Brenner Pass from Austria. We’re giving sacking Rome a miss this time but are blazing a trail of exposed images through the country, leaving in our wake vacated campsites and decimated pasta dishes. We’ve plundered the Dolomites, Lake Garda and Verona and are now pondering our next conquests. A change of plan was decided last night over our vino rosso; we’re heading on to Tuscany. We’ve been many times before, but now we’re this close, we can’t resist it. It hasn’t gelled here in Emilia-Romagna and another wasted day could result in a loss of momentum, that curious fusion of circumstance and frame of mind that determines just how productive a trip is. After a brief visit to Maranello we bomb down the autostrada and set up camp in Chiantishire. The entire population of the Netherlands is on the campsite with us but this is great. From our tent we look over a valley with vineyards, pointy trees and villas, just beyond the German’s cycling shorts drying on the line.
3.144.47.208