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Charlie Waite Back to Blad - part 2 of 1 2

by Charlie Waite Published 01/08/2015

'You have to try and outwit the light.' Adds Charlie: "There is no doubt that light is about 95% of the shoot to me. It is the catalyst. You have to have a love affair with it. If you are not acquainted with its qualities, its character and its capricious behaviour you'll quickly fall victim to its whims.

"So you have to try to outwit it. You have to have patience and persistence and the capacity to feel enriched simply by the pursuit of perfection. If you don't wait for the moment you can end up being haunted by the spectre of what could have been.

"I once sat halfway up a ladder in a French field for five days just waiting. It is an obsession. Landscape photography is a very remote, isolated and bloody lonely existence at time ...but what makes it all worthwhile are those revelatory occasions when you click the shutter and the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end - and you think it's all there happening just for you. It's like an exchange, a dialogue between you and the landscape itself. There is just such joy to be had in witnessing the way light plays on surfaces; the way it both reveals and conceals. And of course it is actually possible to orchestrate the lighting of a landscape - given some friendly, compliant cloud formations."

"When you see something beautiful materialising before you and you've got your camera - right there is an opportunity to express your own personal response to your world. The resultant image must have parity with what you experience, emotionally, romantically and dramatically - and if the image doesn't actually comply with what was your pre-visualisation, you will inevitably end up disappointed."

Charlie's stated ambition has always been to "turn Britain into a nation of landscape photographers" - and it appears to be working. He's the author of around 30 books (most of them shot on old Hasselblad cameras), an international mentor and the founder of Light & Land - a premier landscape photography tour company - offering one day workshops, and longer residential tours in the UK and abroad for photographers of all ages and skill sets.

And now Charlie has added 'Hasselblad ambassador' to his impressive CV. He explains: "I used classic Hasselblad cameras, including a 503, 501CM and 503CX exclusively from 1979 right through to about 2005. I had four lenses and I was as happy as Larry. They were always completely dependable - but then the digital revolution was born and I was left bemused and wondering what to do. Eventually, my old Hasselblads were exiled to the attic as we started to see 20MP DSLR cameras evolving in the market. I did retrieve one occasionally because I knew that a 6x6 tranny, drum-scanned, was still going to outperform anything else at that time." He adds: "I did then migrate to DSLRs but when I heard about the new CFV-50c digital back I decided to investigate. I called Hasselblad and acquired one.

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1st Published 01/08/2015
last update 09/12/2022 14:51:26

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