Location Photography - Exterior Brief

The following is the work I have done for the exterior part of our location photography brief. The brief was simple: Choose which sort of location photography you like most and produce ten photographs. To me, the choice was very easy. Being a photographer that favours landscapes to any other sort of locations, I decided that a landscape was going to be the location in which to produce my end result.

Before setting off on my shoot, I decided to think about what photographs and photographers have really made me think about how I take landscape photographs since starting my course. Photographers like Joe Cornish, Josef Hoflehner and Ansel Adams are all up there in my top list of people that inspire me when looking at their landscapes. From Hoflehner's dark, underexposed black and white photographs to Cornish's colourful, almost unreal and dreamlike looking images. They all contain parts that I would like to use in my own work at some stage. I would like to think some aspects can already be seen in these photographs I took.

I set off towards the Yorkshire Dales in Yorkshire (England, UK), where I discovered this beautiful, almost rain forest looking waterfall which had a stream leading towards an even bigger waterfall.

Because my photographs are all taken in one location, I have tried to take a few shots of the same subject from different angles. By doing this, photographs that initially look almost the same, actually have several different aspects to them. None of the images have been edited, apart from small amounts of cropping in the final ten images to take away a branch or a leaf here and there. These are the ten images I produced.
 

Unfortunately I can't provide any test shots, simply because there aren't any. So much time was spent making sure the settings were correct for the intended photograph, that the only other photographs I have available from that day contain squirrels, birds and one drainage pipe. Being together with a friend, who is also a budding photographer, has probably helped. We were simply able to discuss what our thoughts were on the matter of settings etc. and the resulting photographs are shown above.

I'm quite happy with my work, but I possibly could've made the water smoother by choosing a longer shutter speed. I think a longer exposure would've made it silkier, which was ultimately what I intended. Another thing is the tight cropping on some of the shots, although I think it works well and I'm not sure changing it would've improved my shots. Variety is another thing that perhaps is missing. But because I intended to shoot a series of photos instead of idividual shots it isn't much of an issue for me personally.