No blots on his landscapes

Leading landscape photographer Charlie Waite reveals his fine-art approach to the craft, at two of his favourite haunts in Wiltshire. Niall Hampton joins him on location

- Charlie Waite

Photographing landscapes is a bit like fly fishing: you never know exactly what you’re going to get – and you may not get anything at all. But being outdoors, surrounded by the serenity of nature, is more than ample a reward for the time spent in pursuit of your quarry.

This thought is going through my mind during a socially distanced afternoon spent in the company of one of the UK’s finest practitioners of landscape photography. Charlie Waite has been shooting some of the world’s finest landscapes for four decades; I dabble in this genre myself every now and then, as I do with fly fishing. I’ve never landed a fish, but I don’t look back on any of the many hours spent trying to do so as time wasted.

For Charlie, landscape photography is as much about the pursuit as it is about the reward. “The reward is trying to produce an image that will evoke for the viewer something of what you experience,” he enthuses. “And thinking of the criteria of judgement that people use: does it awaken something in me?”

To see first-hand how he applies these principles in the field, Charlie suggested that Digital Camera visited a couple of his favourite locations in his home county of Wiltshire, which he has photographed regularly during his career. We start off at Mere Downs, setting up at the exact spot from where he captured one of the most memorable images in his recent Behind the Photograph anthology of career-best images.

Facing us is a patchwork of varying colours and shapes, thanks to fields containing different crops – oilseed rape, grass and hay. Charlie has brought a print of the image with him, which is just as well, as the lighting conditions are very flat.