Charlie Waite is one of the UK's best-loved landscape photographers.
He started life as an actor, but fell in love with photography in the 1980s.
Since then, his work has been published in around 30 books.
He also runs photography workshops and holidays with his company Light & Land,
and launched the hugely successful Landscape Photographer of the Year competition,
which is now in its tenth year.
I spoke to him in his Dorset studio about three of his images.
Hi Charlie, thank you for inviting us here today.
We're going to be talking about three of your pictures,
and I understand this first one was taken in the Lake District.
It was, and it was one of those occasions
where the previsualisation and the planning came together.
And eventually, with a little tenacity, determination and hope, it happens.
It's a very enjoyable process.
So for you, part of the experience is the being there as much as taking the picture?
It's so true. If you're not fully engaged with the whole business of being there,
you'll definitely be the poorer for it.
Was this picture taken late in the day?
It was mid-afternoon on an autumn day, so the sun was quite low.
I think that's the great thing about looking up.
Our students at Light & Land never used to look up
to see what the relationship was between the sky and the land beneath.
Once you can orchestrate 'up there' with 'down here', you're really in business.
The brain and the eye are an amazing double act.
What lies behind the impulse to want to make a photograph?
It's an amazing rapid scanning process.
And then you think, 'Yes, I'll do a photograph here.'
What did you have to deal with technically?
Filtration has always been a part of the entire photographic process.
What you're doing, very subtly and with restraint, is using filtration
to produce an image that has parity with what you've already produced in your head.
In this case, a subtle graduated filter - 0.45 I think - just slightly prevents
this paler area of the sky beckoning the eye of the viewer.
You don't want some bright bit of sky saying, 'Come and look at me.'
It has to be about this, doesn't it?
But you're really trying to produce an image with a sky that equates to what you saw.
It's so rewarding to be able to orchestrate your filtration,
your exposure, as one entire entity on its own, made up of different considerations.
And when you get the result back, in the way that you did with a transparency,
you looked at the transparency on the lightbox
and you say, 'That's what I did, and I got it right.'
With this next picture, there are two things at play.
The panoramic format is notoriously difficult to get right, and also you're in Bolivia,
so you have to get it right.
So tell me about this one.
There's a certain amount of good fortune involved.
Firstly, altitude sickness.
Which has nothing to do with photography, but on that occasion it did.
It was a horrible period of bad weather, coupled with me not feeling well.
And when I recovered, the weather recovered.
I went to a little island in the middle of Lake Titicaca,
and found this rather delightful thatched structure - but there was nothing else.
I wasn't quite sure what to do. I needed something else.
The wind was just beginning to get up, and enter stage left was a boat. With a sail.
And it was a blue sail. Not pink, not green, not yellow, but blue - the same blue as Lake
Titicaca.
It was a diabolical bit of good fortune.
And then the relationship was secure between the triangular sail of the boat
and the triangle of the thatched roof.
You were at altitude and the light is different from when you're photographing locally.
So what sort of filter did you need?
Yes, altitude gives phenomenal clarity, plus it had rained for several days,
so a very mild graduated filter is always handy to have.
And a polarising filter, but not used too much.
A polariser is a bit like alcohol:
great at the time, but the next day you don't feel so good!
So I always think a polariser shouldn't produce a violet or indigo colour.
You have to use it with great restraint.
In fact, all filtration should be used with restraint and care.
When you talk about using the polariser with restraint,
do you mean you didn't rotate it fully?
Yes, knock it back a little bit.
I always think it's a good idea to take a polariser and look through it
before putting it on the camera.
Because a polariser will have an effect on something somewhere, all of the time.
A polariser will have an effect on any surface that reflects light.
It could even be the thatch, or the top of my head!
Even a reed, a piece of foliage - anything.
It increases contrast to a degree, so it has to be used very judiciously.
It's a good idea to see what your polariser is doing at a particular rotation,
and ask what effect it is having elsewhere.
And then try to find a happy medium.
So would the area of graduation have been on the clouds or lower than that,
because you have the sail to consider, don't you?
Yes. In an Alpine setting you would use a soft grad,
but here the grad hasn't clipped the top of the sail.
It's just nudged the tops of the clouds,
which thankfully were all on the same horizontal line.
This last shot that we're going to talk about is fairly local to you.
How important is it to have places nearby that you can visit in any conditions
and at any time of year?
It's very important. I wish I could discover more little secret places.
I think one thing that's rather magical
is finding a particular vantage point that one likes
and enjoying seeing it in different performances.
I have a phrase I rather like, 'Nature suspended in one of its most perfect performances.'
It requires late afternoon sunlight and it's got to be very early spring,
and needs low light.
Any landscape photographer would say that oblique light is always really handy
for trying to create shadows.
The relationship between highlights and shadows is terribly important
in terms of dimension and depth.
So shadows play a huge part in landscape photography.
What was the light doing on this occasion? Was it moving quite quickly?
It was moving quite quickly and that's rather enjoyable.
You have to consider the relationship between sky, light and landscape,
and when you have fast-moving clouds and wind at high altitudes,
you can utilise the sky in a particular way.
I felt the contrast needed to be increased between the amphitheatre and the background.
Which worked very well because I don't think it was obtrusive - it was a genuine shadow.
I don't think you can use a graduated filter of any strength to masquerade as a shadow.
A shadow has to be a shadow and a dark sky has to be dark already.
It's foolish to suggest that a sky that has no rain in it did have.
It's impossible to produce.
You want to use a graduated filter to enhance what already prevails,
and to increase it very slightly.
It was already a dark sky, full of rain - in fact, it is raining in the distance.
So I wanted to be able to use a grad very subtly.
And actually - there's no harm in this - I brought it down slightly over the horizon.
It's a good idea to try this before putting the filter on the camera.
Hold it up to your eye and move it up and down,
and familiarise yourself with the effect it's going to have.
It's so much more rewarding to be able to observe and witness and analyse
and determine where you want to place your graduated filter.
So you cook the meal all in one go, you come back and - in the way we did with transparency
- you say to your printer, 'Print as is.'
Print it just as you would have done with a transparency.
And I think that's hugely pleasurable.
It's been very interesting to talk about these pictures and learn a bit more about them.
Thank you very much.