Developing an instinct for when the light will be good is one of the secrets of creating dramatic images, LPOTY winner Will Davies tells Damien Demolder
It might be considered by some to be a poor show of manners to win the top prize in the Take A View Landscape Photographer of the Year competition on the first time of entering, but perhaps Will Davies’ move to the USA has made him forget about gentlemanly sportsmanship and fine traditions. His only saving grace perhaps is that the winning image shows God’s own South Wales in glorious sunlight and describes the gently undulating countryside spread out before him from Pen y Crug with great show of patriotic adulation. Beating thousands of more seasoned landscapers to the top spot, Will’s photograph carries a number of hallmarks of his developing style and shows us both the way he works and the elements that catch his eye.
Although Will grew up in Wales in his teenage years he was more interested in golf, pubs and rugby than in the spectacular landscape that surrounded him. It was a move to East Africa with the international development organisation he worked for that opened his eyes to the natural world, and to photography.
‘I live in Washington DC at the moment,’ Will tells us, ‘where the immediate landscape and wildlife opportunities are a little limited, but when I was 27 I moved to Ethiopia.
It was about 2007 and a couple of years after digital SLRs had become a bit more mainstream. I wanted a camera to take on trips, so got myself a Canon Rebel XT (EOS 350D in the UK). I’d moved there on my own, so I had plenty of time at weekends to do what I wanted – and I wanted to travel around to see the country. I also wanted to be able to capture pictures of the people, the landscape and the wildlife to share with people at home. It’s pretty easy to take good pictures in Ethiopia as the high-altitude scenery is stunning, and once I started to get a few decent pictures of it I really got the photography bug. From there I moved to Kenya, which is where things really took off for me and wildlife photography. When you can drive to the Masai Mara at weekends it’s hard not to get a bit obsessed with photography.
‘I’d had a film camera as a child but I wasn’t very interested. The instant feedback you get with a digital camera though made a lot of difference to me. I could see what I’d just shot and would occasionally say, “Wow – that’s pretty good!” I could see when I made mistakes and immediately see what was wrong, which gave me the chance to correct things and to learn a lot more quickly. It was the first time I was taking pictures that got me excited and which I felt I could share with other people. It helped that the standard of postcard and travel photography in Ethiopia at the time wasn’t very good, so it gave me a lot of confidence in what I was creating. At the time ther
