Robert H Clark Photography

I had a recent conversation with a friend over the subject of composition, and how specifically do I compose my images. It is not exactly a soup question, not easily quantified or simplified into bullet points, and is a subject that leads very quickly down a deep rabbit hole. Without going into a lengthy diatribe I think this image may quickly point to what I look for in an image. Simply stated it I look for the light first and then I compose - or better yet, shape - the image around it. This simple structure takes on a different meaning in the way the side-light and shadows create the depth and dimension. Working quickly off the tripod I created a series of “sketch” images to determine the position of the other elements, from the road, to the clouds, and even where the darks and lights would go to create the figure-ground separation of tones.

It has been awhile since I have had the opportunity to sit down and process some new work. I just finished up my 2019 Spring in the West Virginia Highlands Workshop and now heading into the last few months before the Iceland Workshop. I have already begun the planning for 2020 and 2021 Workshops which promise to be exciting options including a return to Iceland, and a foray to Scotland and Portugal. So, stay tuned for those announcements.

I visited an old friend today. The Red Barn, as I have come to name this place, is a location that I have photographed on many occasions and in all kinds of light. The morning light in the Spring and early part of the Summer is the most dramatic as the rising sun illuminates the south-east face of the barn, arguably and fortuitously, one of the more interesting sides to photograph. At this time of the year the owners allow the fields around the barn to go to seed and the clover and grasses grown to around waist height. The resulting textures create a very strong foreground element and I love how the barn seems to nestle into its footers as the grasses embrace it.

It is only a month away from my 2019 West Virginia Photography Workshop, details HERE, and I managed to get away for a short one-day trip up to Canaan Valley for a meeting and the chance to scout a few locations. Spring rains often bring heavy flows to the waterfalls but not on this morning which is not the end of the world and actually allowed me to work on some different compositions. When you have photographed a place extensively it can be easy to get lazy with the compositions instead of stopping to really look at the possibilities - specifically new possibilities.

As I write this post I am emerging from a self imposed break from photography. It is necessary I have found to help recharge the creative batteries. My grandmother once told me that too much of a good thing was, well it’s too much. I certainly did not understand that as a child as I just wanted all that fun to keep going. This is not to say that I don’t like a lot of good things as an adult, but when all of the adult pressures mount up it is hard to retain the necessary focus.

For me photography is a lot more than just taking the image. It is more than just the camera, the equipment, and the lenses. What I have come to realize in the last few months, and in fact through all of the past few years of experimentation, is that I love the craft of not only taking the image but bringing it to life through an artful process. To that extent I have rekindled my love for the digital darkroom, much in the way I loved the analog days of film processing and making the print.

This mornings dawn brought with it a lingering fog and the fresh air that only comes from an overnight rain. It has been some time since I have ventured out to perceive the world through the lenses of my camera. Too long really, and while work and other commitments are the culprit, I can confess that the imposed break has been good.

Goðafoss waterfall is located on the river Skjálfandafljót in north Iceland, the fourth largest river in Iceland. Although the main waterfall is the most visited and photogenic I actually found the lower falls more interesting. Just downriver from the main falls, the river narrows and is forced into a slot between volcanic rock formations. The small drop is slightly stair-stepped and creates several channels as the glacial blue water shoots through the slot. The sound is deafening and the sheer power of water hydraulics is on display.

I might well have referred to this image as the “Return of the Muse”. I have been quite busy with the office part of photography setting up the logistics for two workshops and have just neglected the joyful, and simple, pursuit of making images. You cannot predict when the muse will appear and in many instances it is when you least expect it.

Let me state the obvious, from a photographers perspective, that it is important to always carry a camera. I do whether I shoot or not as being prepared is a 100 percent proposition in my way of thinking. When light happens and you are without the tools, well you get the idea.

Iceland is a country of immense beauty. In my mind it is one of the most diverse landscapes in the world despite being and island country. It is volcanic and glaciated and it is these singular natural forces that have largely shaped the landscape. From windswept volcanic planes, to the mountainous highlands, fjords, coastlines, glaciers, and myriad rivers and waterfalls, it is a place that presents one with so many photographic opportunities. The islands location in the Northern hemisphere also brings almost continuous light, with an extended twilight in the summer, and much shorter days in the winter, which affords one the opportunity to see the dancing Northern Lights. It is also a place of extremes, especially regarding the weather, which can change hour by hour. And in fact that is the old adage in Iceland that if you don’t like the weather, just give it an hour. The countries population of around 360,000 is out numbered by the sheep, and the number of visitors and tourists who flock there. The sheep of course are permanent residents. It is one of my favorite places on this planet.

Let me start by saying that I do not intend for this post to be a giant primer on long exposure image making. Nor is it a justification for the techniques over a more traditional approach to capturing a scene. A great deal of my current landscape or architectural work is not specifically long exposure. But in the right conditions - environmental and type of light - I appreciate how it can bring a kind of hyper clarity to the subject that is uniquely contrasted against the soft rendering of sky and water.

By the time Road F35 changed from paved to gravel the landscape itself had changed. The thermal zones of Geysir gave way to a landscape that was open and vast, punctuated by table top mountains and grassy volcanic plains. My traveling companion Adam and I were bound for the highland region of Kerlingarfjöll to begin an 11 day workshop scouting trip. The wind was picking up as we drove deeper into the highlands which certainly became an issue for us later that evening, but for now we were content to marvel at the landscape and moderate weather. After cresting a small bluff, the road dropped into a sweeping grass covered valley, and I saw sheep moving off to the right. Ahead of us was the large table top mountain, Bláfell with a wind driven cloud sitting over the summit, giving the appearance of an erupting volcano. I was thinking that there was an image to be made here.

Well, it is New Year’s Eve, 2018. This has been a fairly busy year with some personal growth and certainly a few “firsts” for me relative to photography. I co-led my two annual photography workshops this year with my two pals, Martin Radigan and Vern Pattterson. This was the third year for our Spring, and Fall, West Virginia landscape workshops and we had some great clients and photographers join us as we traipsed around the West Virginia Highlands.

The concept of place, and our connections to place, are powerful expressions in how we view our world. The Black Church at Búðir is one such location, that for me, expresses a powerful sense of place and identity. On a recent past blog post I wrote about this church located on a windswept point in a harsh landscape For me the church emotes a sense of hope, civility, and simple community which I think is a fitting concept for a Christmas Eve post.

I am off today. A blessed reprieve from the office and the learning curve that has come with a new position. Sometimes the brain just goes on overload and requires a day of nothing. The weather seems to support my mood as well. It has been a tough several weeks that saw the failure of all of my back-up drives and the loss of thousands of RAW files dating back over 15 years. I did not lose them all which is fortunate, and I did not lose my Photoshop master files which is another blessing. I do not have a diagnostic answer for the failures but I was running an older laptop-based system, not enough RAM, too much reading and writing to drives, and not running Disk Warrior repair as often as I should have. Well, it is what it is. A wake up call to retool a bit and perhaps I needed to let some things go and open up more space in my life.

Breiðamerkurjökull is an outlet glacier of the larger glacier, Vatnjökull, located in southeastern Iceland. Emerging as a tongue of the Vatnajökull, it ends in a small glacial lagoon, known as Jölkúsarlón. Breiðamerkurjökull is among the largest glacier tongues in Iceland and the flow of ice has a southerly direction away from the main icecap Vatnjökull. Over time, the glacier has gradually been breaking down and receding, increasing the size of the lagoon. Up to the turn of the 19th century, the glacier tongue advanced to within 200 metres from the sea but has retreated considerably, especially after 1930, creating the greater part of the Glacial Lagoon. At the ice calving site icebergs break away from the tongue of the glacier and begin a slow drift in the icy waters of the lagoon. Slowly the ice drifts to mouth of the lagoon and eventually reaches the ocean.

Sometime after my first trip to Iceland in the summer of 2017, I developed an interest in a cultural event that happens regionally around the country in September, known as the réttir. As we drove around the island, I noticed the ringed pens that looked like wheels with spokes and after an inquiry about their use, was told they were sorting pens to separate sheep after the fall roundup. Of course sheep in Iceland are prevalent. In fact they are everywhere from open pastures, up in the highlands, on hillsides above waterfalls, to grazing along the ring road.

Kerlingarfjöll is located in the central highlands of Iceland, north of Geysir, and nestled between the Langjökull and Hofsjökull glaciers. It is a landscape of incomparable beauty, with mountains painted by the remnants of winter snow, that rise up from a barren volcanic plain.

This quote by the author J.B. Jackson is never too far away in my thoughts when I am in the landscape. The concept of place, and our connections to place are powerful expressions in how we view our world. The Black Church at Búdir is one place, that for me, expresses a powerful sense of place and identity. Sitting on a windswept point in a harsh landscape, the church emotes a sense of hope, civility, and simple community. It is a building that is perfect in its simplicity, unadorned, vernacular, and free of extraneous decorations, it resonates with life.

Of all of the incredible locations we visited in Iceland in 2017, Vestrahorn in Stokksnes, was the one place that literally brought me to tears. I have never seen such a view where mountains, coastline, black sand dunes, and sky all combined to create such wonder. There were compositions everywhere I looked and at times I just framed and shot, reacting to the light and my own visceral feelings. It was truly magic.

I took quite a few photo walks, which my fellow shooter, Kevin Brookes, and I often referred too as "photo-parkours", while working on a multi year project in St Louis. This is the last shot I made, on my last trip, and my last last parkour through the city. I think its uplifting, (sorry about the bad pun). There was quite the festival happening in this plaza in the city center with music, the Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile, and these balloons.

The subtlety of our rural landscape takes some time to understand and appreciate. I know for a fact that it took me quite a while to not only appreciate the light, textures, and forms but to actually find a joy in peeling away the layers. It is not the grand "scape" like many of the western images I shoot, but I like the challenges of finding compositions nuanced by subtle light striking the dense patterns of grasses and leaves.

In 1986, while working on my Master's thesis in architecture, I made a research trip to New Delhi. During the near 24 hours of continuous travel I made a brief stop in Frankfurt where I saw, and held, my first Leica camera. As a poor, and married graduate student, I could not afford it, but knew even then that I wanted one. It is hard to believe that it took me 32 years to get one. And even harder to believe is that it was prompted by my desire to return to the simple challenges of making images - reliance only on the exposure triangle and manual focus.

This is another in my continuing series of personal explorations in the subtle landscapes of my hometown. There are times when I tend to lose my way relative to my photographic work. It is somewhat inevitable as I tend to look at a lot of images, and in doing so, succumb to the flotsam and jetsam of viewing so many photographs. Just how many beautiful sunsets over misty mountains can one take. It is my fault of course because I only have myself to blame. No one is making me look at all these images and all I have to do is stop, put down the phone, and shut down my use of Instagram.

This image is from a series of photographs I am working on that embraces the subtle landscape of my hometown area. At anytime when I suspect that fog is in the forecast I will be out looking to make images that the quiet moments of a rural landscape. Fog brings lower contrast to the light as well as subtle layers that add dimension and form. This is one of my favorite locations to explore this kind of atmospheric condition. Here at the Poffenberger Farm, at Antietam National Battlefield, the grasses have grown tall around the old barn and along the gravel lane to the main house.

I am fascinated by bridges. Some of this comes from the notion of how they are engineered, how they actually connect to solid ground, and the idea that these spans connect land masses separated by water, or simply space that could not be connected otherwise. Some may find them an intrusion in the landscape but they present a certain kind of contrast that I find photographically interesting.

I have made a number of trips to St Louis, over the last four years, and this may rank as one of the best sunrises I have seen in that time. During this trip the weather did not cooperate for the first few days but on my last morning in the city the sky, and reflections, finally came together. This image was shot from the far end of the South Pond which provides one of the best reflection points for viewing the Arch. The Arch grounds, and the museum have been under a major renovation for the last four years, and the grand opening will be on July 3, 2018.

I have a good friend, and excellent photographer, who recently said that he thought I preferred black and white image making over color. I was not sure this was true and in fact a review of my various social media feeds showed that I was probably split down the middle on the use of color versus black and white. I think that what he was referring too was that I tend to push certain types of images into black and white while others go to color. I shoot landscapes predominantly in color whereas my street, architecture, and even my portrait work strays over into black and white. I do not have a formula for all this and the decision often comes down to the type of light I was shooting in and whether the color tones in the shot would convert well to a dramatic black and white conversion.

Seeing light, and understanding its effect in regards to the capture of an image, is something I have endeavored to work on for many years. When I moved from film to digital I struggled to understand how to manage light especially since I had somewhat reached a level of understanding on how to shoot with Fuji Velvia and Provia, and what filters I needed to moderate the process. So a new journey in discovery began. My landscape work has always been a "considered level of fussiness", much like in my film days, and when I attempted to translate this into street and portrait work I found it just not work as well. Or at least I was not satisfied with the treatment and the way I might convey a story.

Hi everyone. Well, there has been a bit of buzz surrounding the new release of Fuji's pro-level mirrorless camera - the X-H1. Personally I vacillated as to whether I would add this camera to my current kit, which includes the Fuji GFX 50s and a Fuji X-E3. Much of my work revolves around medium format landscape photography with some occasional diving into street and portrait. Though I have carried a Fuji X-T2 and an X-Pro 2 in the past, I sold them in order to make the leap to the GFX. I found over time that I actually missed my X-T2, in terms of being a quasi back-up body along with my GFX. Additionally, when I am shooting on the street I do like to have a second body so I can use two different prime lenses.

My experience in Iceland surfaces frequently in my memory. It is like a constant shadow that tags along on a sunny day. I try not to get to high or low about trips, or to set any expectations for that matter, simply to set aside any possibility of disappointment or preconceptions. I like to plan, but then set that aside in my subconscious, so I can just be open to the experience. The fact is this trip totally blew away my preconceptions as we traversed the island from waterfalls to glacial lagoons, with each bend in the road revealing another stunning location. Rain or shine did not matter. In every cloak it wore Iceland was beautiful.