Amateur Photographer Magazine

 How to be the next Landscape Photographer of the Year - The winning photo

Thursday 2nd July 2009

Landscape Photographer of the Year Gary Eastwood reveals to Bob Aylott how he scooped the UK's biggest photo prize


Gary's award-winning image from Take A View
Canon EOS 5D, 24mm, 1/50sec at f/8, ISO 200

Standing at the end of the stone jetty where he shot his award-winning picture, Gary Eastwood says collecting the country's biggest landscape accolade, along with a cheque for £10,000, has been an incredible whirlwind.

His image, 'Barney on a jetty', bested 20,000 other photographers to give 39-year-old Gary, from Hove in Sussex, the prestigious title of Landscape Photographer of the Year 2008, in the Take a View competition organised by landscape supremo Charlie Waite.

Gazing out to a stormy English Channel, Gary, a high-tech business journalist, explains that he only took up photography four years ago after he 'came across Charlie Waite's website and fell in love with landscape photography'. The following day Gary bought a Canon EOS 450D and enrolled in a one-year, full-time photography course run by Brighton and Hove City College, where he gained a BTEC national certificate in photography.

Even though he is largely self-taught, Gary says the course gave him a good background in studio lighting and traditional darkroom work.

'It certainly gave me a foundation for my photography that has become extremely important in my landscape work,' he says. 'As a freelance journalist slaving over a keyboard all day long, I was looking for a hobby that would take me out of the house'.

Charlie Waite gave Gary the news of his award via a mobile phone call from one of his workshops in Italy.

'I thought it was a wind-up until I heard all the students laughing in the background. I was stunned,' Gary says.

It was the first time he had entered the competition and Gary says that he would have been delighted with just a shortlisting.

Even though his photograph of his windswept dog Barney was a unanimous winner with all the judges, Charlie admitted at the time that the decision could be controversial with many of the traditionalists in landscape photography. 'A complete outsider that came storming in from the south coast and won,' was how one judge described the picture.

So why does Gary feel that his candid, editorial-style picture vaulted him to top dog? 'This type of photo is accessible to ordinary photographers,' he explains. 'The big classical landscapes taken in popular locations with large-format cameras are out of reach for most amateur and even professional photographers', he says. 'The possibility of getting a picture like mine is available to anyone. It captures the mood of winter on the coast and with a family pet in the frame, everyone
can relate to that'.

Gary always carries a camera when walking his dog but says he didn't intend on taking any pictures the day he got his winning shot.

'It was a grey, horrible day, but when the light broke through the clouds it all became worthwhile. For 15 minutes I photographed the jetty with windsurfers in the distance.

'Every time I changed angles Barney walked right into the scene. I moved him out of the way a few times but then it dawned on me that it could be a nice shot with him in it. So I gave up trying to cajole him out of the frame and experimented with my composition, concentrating on using Barney as my subject. He really brought life to this image.

'When I pressed the shutter I wasn't thinking “Wow this is a great picture”,' Gary adds. 'But later when looking through the 50 images on my computer, it was quite clear that one frame stood out from the rest. With the great combination of Barney and the dramatic light, I recognised that I had a good picture.'

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