Marc Adamus – A Master Craftsman
It’s strange that I’ve admired a photographer for so long and yet never actually paid him tribute. I look at Marc Adamus’ work regularly and highlight it as one of my favourite all time photographers, I share his name and URLs with anyone who’ll listen to me for long enough without falling asleep. His work really does stand out for me, and the quality of his work is only surpassed by his dedication to his work in making that perfect image. One of the reasons I hold Marc above many of the other landscape photographers out there is because Marc uses a 35mm SLR for the majority of his work. This for me is a breath of fresh air, and gives me the opportunity to hold his work up to all the neigh sayers who hold that only Medium Format or Large Format can possibly be used for successful landscape work.
As I understand it (and please correct me if I’m wrong people) Marc packs up his stuff with a tent, and goes hiking across the lesser seen parts of the USA for weeks or sometimes months at a time, taking all the time he needs to, in order to make the image he wants. I first caught a hint of this dedication from watching a program about Charlie Waite (another of my favourite landscape photographers, almost certainly the subject of another of my blog entries in the near future) where Charlie has been known to wait many days for the right conditions, rather than accept those which are offered to him, just to make that single image right. Most elite landscape photographers I’ve watched seem to include luck as a major factor in their images, but I think that the increase in tenacity that these elite craftsmen exhibit offset the amount of luck required considerably.
I understand that “the rest of us” don’t have a week to wait for the weather, the light, the landscape to all come together as a whole to create the image we seek, and most of us are limited to working with the best conditions we can find over the course of a few hours or perhaps a day. But I wonder how much our images might be improved if we were to wait, to take time to look at our composition for not just half an hour before pressing the shutter, but for days, studying the scene, how the light falls on the landscape, how the different times of day reflect that light. I wonder how our appreciation of that particular shot, that event, that image would develop and mature. In the same way the Constable would not have been happy with a sketch, I suspect in the same way our landscape masters (Adams, Rowell, Wolfe, Waite, Cornish, etc) would not happy with an opportunistic snapshot.
