JOHN ALEXANDER LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY - Sully Sur Loire en France

In the last few months, or even the last year I have neglected my landscape photography. Most of my work now involves weddings and rural sports photography, portraiture with a few parties in the mix. I find this sad, and thought I would blog of why landscape photography is one of my favourite aspects of my business.

Yes, one contemplates suicide as the alarm sounds, which you have set on the highest volume so you definitely wake-up, even though you have woken up intermittently every hour worrying that you won't. With blurred eyes you see the clock reads 03:45. You are reminded that a 45 minute drive, half an hour walk in the dark, and an hour wait for that perfect light, which most likely will never appear, is on the cards and it's probably a lot easier to stay where you are. These negative thoughts always run through my mind as I read the minuscule numbers presented on my alarm clock.

I constantly have to force myself to think positive and in the words of Nike "just do it". To personalise it, I recommend adding a selection of strong adjectives within the phrase somewhere. Then, when your alarm sounds at 4am, shout it, while leaping up out of bed in an offensive manner. It really works (if your single that is), it also works if you want to become single!

Once some sort of un-nutritous item of consumption has been semi-digested, I get in the car drive towards my destination. In this case 'Sully sur Loire' en France.

I reached the exact position of where I thought the photograph should be taken from, which I had decided the previous afternoon. I varied it slightly as there was a little wind, blurring the reflection of the castle. I moved until the castle was reflected in the sheltered part of the river where the reflection was near perfect. A couple of otters swam past me as I was setting up my tripod, unfortunately it was still too dark to take any convincing photographs of them, I tried of course with my wide angle lens on manual focus but a blue blur with 2 blobs couldn't even pass as an abstract.

I waited for the first of the sun's rays to cast a subtle orange hue onto the east side of Sully Chateau, using the linear perspective of the trees running along the river to lead the viewer into the photograph. As the sun's rays began to get stronger and more contrasty, the clouds had moved and it had lost the atmosphere of earlier in the morning, after taking a few more compositions I packed up pour manger une baguette.