Plas Crug, Aberystwyth

University building, Plas Crug

Old school, Coedlan y Parc

Plas Crug Park, gateway

Into the light

Not retouched - just an overgrown path on  a sunny day (foreground in deep shadow)

The prospect of distant hills

Hills shape our worlds. It's so natural in Wales to have high ground marking the horizon that I feel a little lost in England's wide open plains. These photos try to capture the romance of hills as being already separate from the here and now as well as being the way out for those that wish to leave. Every now and then you here somebody claim that in medieval times, most villagers never left the parish, but that's probably untrue: I saw a statistic that 25% of the medieval English population would visit London at some point.

Pen Dinas from the north

Cwmpadarn Lane looking south

Metal

Some people say that wind turbines are engineering structures which have no place in natural (or apparently natural) landscapes. Much the same could be said, of course, for those bridges, windmills, cathedrals and Stonehenges that did so much to clutter up our landscape. But my view is that we have conditioned ourselves to ignore the presence of pylons, aerials and telegraph poles. Here I try to memorialise them as part of the urban scene.

The WAG building's cylindrical wind turbine

Looking east towards the Aberyswyth Univeristy

Negative space: the gaps between things

I like to see views as shapes, or areas of texture and colour, which fomr patterns in realtion to each other. Trees are particularly complex -they can be a bland undifferentiated block of colour, or frail fractals of individually-toned leaves. It's surprising to find how often the sky is obscured - you'd imagine it was always there.

Sycamore and Scotch Pine: diiferent shapes, denisteis and colours

A short walk - Aberystwyth/Llanbadarn, 8/6/10

Llanbadarn Road, Llanbadarn. (hue altered)

Nettles and beech leaves are almost indistinguishable.

Llanbadarn Road, Llanbadarn.  The bush on the chimney breaks up the orderly shape of the houses.

Science Park, Cwmpadarn Lane, Llanbadarn, looking southeast to monument on Pen Dinas.  I like the zig-zag of the tiled roof on the left and the corrugations on the right.  Strange how the damp mark on the gable end matches the shape of the tree.

National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.  Although the stack buildings

lack the monumental pretensions of the facade, the details of the brickwork stop it being just a rectangular block.

About the skyline project

Whenever I am working with photographs, I find myself cropping heavily ven pictures which have been composed and framed carefully; especially with colour landscape photography, there is too much clutter, and I like to simplify things down to basic shapes and textures.  As I walk around urban and rural places, I find my eyes drawn to the horizon; it is the glimpses of sky and the negative spaces formed by silhouettes of buidlings, structures and trees that create the mood of a place.

In these images I hope to present photographs that evoke their specific locations.