Peter Moore – Profile
I am a passionate outdoors man and landscape artist working in the medium of photography. The great outdoors is where it all happens for me. From a very early age, my father took me hiking and camping in the mountains in North Wales, the Peak District, and the Lake District. He taught me to appreciate the landscape and to get up early. Dad gave me a Praktica camera. I had to look down on a ground glass at an image that was inverted from left to right. I didn't know it at the time, but all of this turned out to be good practise for what was going to follow in later years.
Since then I have travelled far and wide with my cameras in the UK. In the 1990’s I worked for a Californian based company. Following a sales meeting in San Jose, I took a holiday in Yosemite with a rucksack full of 35mm camera gear. I discovered the fantastic glaciated granite scenery and the Ansell Adams Gallery. The beauty of his images blew me away. I just had to see more of America. Since that first trip I have returned to many wonderful destinations of the American West, sometimes with over 45 pounds of equipment on my back. My photographic style has also been heavily influenced by Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, Galen Rowell, and Freeman Patterson. I have a love for geology and this comes through in my images of the land, especially the desert vistas of the American South West. I have now been making professional quality landscape photographs for around 20 years.
Planning and Lighting: I strive to depict the landscape at it’s absolute best. To achieve this I meticulously plan my trips to coincide with the best time of year for a given location. I prefer to travel around the time of a full moon: this gives me additional subject interest and provides moonlight when hiking out to a pre-dawn shoot. My favoured lighting is the so-called magic hour around sunrise and sunset, when shadows are longest and colours are warmest. I also like to capture images in the very soft and revealing light around dawn and dusk.
Quest for Quality: My desire to make larger prints of the highest quality, led me through a trail of Mamiya medium format cameras from the C220, RB67 to the venerable and old work horse, the Universal Press. When that camera was stolen I decided to move up to Large Format. I bought a 1950’s vintage Linhof Technika 4x5” camera and I attended a photographic course in Wales with Peter Davies and John Nesbitt, 2 seasoned large format photographic artists. I was hooked by the fantastic reproduction quality achieved with large format and with the ultimate control afforded by individual sheets of film. As I grew to understand the ways of crafting landscape images with the large format camera systems, I moved from the Linhof to a Wista and finally settled on a beautiful 4x5” camera made by Keith Canham in America.
Quest for Control: While using large format cameras I studied and implemented the Ansel Adams Zone System of exposure and development to give myself the greatest degree of control of subject tones in my black and white work. I then translated the technique to my colour transparency work. By examining film manufacturer’s data and by getting to know the technician at the local processing laboratory I explored the effects of deliberate exposure compensation combined with pushing and pulling the E6 development process. Optimum combinations were established to deal with a wide range of lighting conditions from the high contrast of full sunlight through to very low contrast seen during dawn and dusk.
Keeping Pace, Digitally: even in these digital times, my prefered capture medium is large format film. I scan all 4x5” transparencies at high resoultion and all the Fine Art Prints are made direct from the digital image files on state of the art high-end machines. My 35mm film cameras have now been replaced by 2 Nikon digital SLR cameras which I use to craft selected colour, black and white and tinted images.
Infra-red: I first discovered the amazing tonal renditioning delivered by black and white infra-red film in the 1980s. However, infra-red and Large Format do not mix well, so my infra-red work was temporarily paused. That is until 2 years ago when I converted a Nikon camera to “see” in infra-red only. The convenience of shooting digitally in infra-red is now a joy. I am now working regularly in this medium.
Panoramas: With the advent of software to stitch multiple pictures together my long time love of panoramic images has come to fruition. I now construct gallery quality high resolution panoramic images that are capable of huge enlargement, to 2 metres wide and beyond.
I was educated through to an honours degree in Physics. I now make my home with my family in the South of Warwickshire in the heart of England.
To see more of my work please click here to explore the Galleries.