Friday’s photo often follows me around and this is no exception. We were staying up at Hogsback last week for my grand-daughter’s first birthday. Wild Fox Hill (where we stay) gives lovely landscapes, particularly views of the clouds, sky and night stars over the three Hogs. For those who know Hogsback this picture’s taken looking over Winding Lane with Tor Doone on the left and the three Hogs along the skyline. It’s a five minute exposure using a Live Composite base setting of half-a-second – so 600 exposures are superimposed. I used two filters. A neutral density filter (ND8) so that I could take a long exposure in the early evening and a circular polarising filter to capture the colour gradients in the clouds and the evening sky. It was windy as you can see from the blurry trees in the foreground and the cloud shapes.
RODDY FOX
Roddy is a self taught photographer whose first camera, a Zeiss Ikon, was bought in 1974 from a second hand dealer in Glasgow. Through the forty years since then, he's taken landscape photographs with Pentax, Olympus and FujiFilm systems for his teaching and research as a geography academic at Kenyatta and Rhodes Universities. He has always been inspired by great nature and landscape photographers such as Nick Brandt, Beth Moon, Obie Oberholzer and Hans Strand. Since taking early retirement he has been able to pursue his passion for photography, published a photobook ’Symmetry in Nature’ and held three solo exhibitions at the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa.
His landscape photography is about light: often at low angles, of forests, mist and clouds, the night sky and lightning. He prints on different media depending on the affects he wants to produce: brushed aluminium for reflecting angled light; Hahnemühle German Etching paper for soft diffusion; Ilford Metallic Gloss for vibrant night pictures.
His conceptual photography uses mirroring and merging of layers to explore patterns, motifs and the feminine in nature.