OLTRE IL MURO: ARTE e FOTOGRAFIA: HANS KRUSE

giovedì 5 marzo 2015

HANS KRUSE | PHOTOGRAPHER

“My name is Hans Kruse and I'm an experienced landscape and nature photographer from Denmark. Landscapes have been a special addiction for many years. Landscape pictures worth looking at are not so easy to take and many of my first landscape pictures have been deleted for the same reason, but I saw many great landscape photos from the masters and felt it could be learned how to take these magnificent photos. As with everything it takes a lot of time, effort, money, pain, etc. to get beyond the beginners stage and start to master a given area. I learned that in my former professional work in the IT industry and how much it took. There is a saying that it takes 10.000 hours to become an expert in a given field. Doing photography is in that respect no different than any other craft. It's not just about technology like which camera system you have and what tools you have, it's much more about learning to see with your eyes and select carefully what you want to show. Select what works from what doesn't work is a critical element to work on before you even lift the camera view finder to your eyes. Selecting the time of year, the time of day, the weather conditions, the details are critical elements of getting a photo that is worth looking at. Technical understanding and mastering necessary techniques are essential to present your vision into real photos. For a landscape photographer I believe it is essential to travel a lot to get inspired and spend enough time at a given location to get some really good interpretations of the landscapes available at that location. A new landscape can open your eyes in a way unimaginable and it can inspire to see known landscapes in a new way. I also enjoy shooting wild life in nature and I will typically every year make some trips for that sole purpose.

No matter if you shoot landscapes, wild life, portraits, street life, etc. you need to pay a lot of attention to composition, light, selection of scene and basically decide what is in the picture and what is not. That process is essential to get good photos and will require you to walk around a lot to get the viewpoint that will allow you to frame the subjects in an interesting and possibly pleasing way (and not necessarily the aspect ratio of the camera!). Training in seeing can be difficult as it is a process of being critical to your own work. One way is to participate in critique forums where you post your images for critique and critique the work of other photographers. Sometimes such critique can give you thoughts to how to progress in your photography and also frustrate you when the critique doesn't give you a real hint to how to move on. It is also quite useful to logon to internet bookstores like Amazon.com and search for photo books about the big masters and often they can be found at a very good price and have enormous value for you vision.

I have photographed for many years since shooting b/w film and develop in the dark room, however the most intense period has been in the digital age where I would have the full control over the process from taking the image, post process it on my computer and eventually print it in high quality. For me the creative feedback loop of taking images, look at them and repeat the process to get what I would like to see, has been so more productive in the digital age and so much more efficient.

I organize photography workshops in interesting and beautiful places. I'm doing this since I believe that workshops is a very good way to bring together photographers at different levels to get inspiration from meeting other photographers and being presented with some great scenes already preselected when the workshop was organized. This reduces some of the complexity of taking landscape photos, since given an already great landscape and good viewpoint the "rest" is simply taking the picture, however that does including deciding on the specific composition including choosing the lens to use, framing the image and deciding the technical parameters for the shot. This is great fun and an experience on many levels. The total dedication to photography for some days from (sometimes very) early mornings to late evenings can be a real eye opener and an experience that will last for years in memory. I'm currently organizing workshops in Italy in the national parks of the Dolomites, Abruzzo and in Tuscany. Information about available workshops can be found here.

I started my photo workshop activities with the first Abruzzo workshop in October 2008 and since have had around 200 participants in Abruzzo, Tuscany and in the Dolomites including 2013 and around 50% of the participants were repeat customers. The format of the workshops have been fine tuned over the years and the feedback from the workshop participants have been very good.

A key element in my workshops is that I always research each location thoroughly to make sure that my guests will have the best possible shooting locations, the second key element is repeated photo critique sessions and going back to the same areas to shoot again to learn from previous efforts. The final key element is to have a good experience and fun on the workshops where we share a lot of time together in the cars, on location, in the working room and at the meals. I also offer extra days free of charge before the workshops and add post processing tutorials.

The locations are carefully selected for landscape beauty and for variation. Also for 'robustness' to weather conditions, nothing is worse than a group of photographers sitting indoor for days not being able to shoot anything. This has never happened on any of my workshops. Especially the mountain areas have a great variation in weather and what would normally be considered bad weather can turn up with wonderful photographic opportunities.”