One of the landscape photographers I follow, Charlotte Gibb (charlottegibb.com), describes intimate landscapes as “…photographs that derive their subject matter from the smaller details within a larger scene.” And if you look at the intimate landscape images on her website, they are indeed a slice of a larger, grander vista. While I have enjoyed her images, including those smaller slices of landscape, I did not feel this genre of landscape photography was something I should practice; however, after recently discovering photographer Ben Horne (benhorne.com) and being impressed by his large format (8×10 view camera) images of incredibly intimate segments of the landscape, I am rethinking that decision. Ben’s image of a maple leaf embedded in winter ice sparked a memory of an image I captured six years ago in early December of 2014.
Winter’s Interlude
The above image is what I have come to call a “micro landscape,” a really tiny rectangle of a larger scene. The day before this photo was taken, I snapped a quick photo through the sliding door of our lake cabin in northern Wisconsin (see inset below). Although the inset only shows the two images I have included in this post, the next day I recall opening the sliding door and taking three different micro landscapes — and they have remained forgotten in my Lightroom library until I saw Ben Horne’s maple leaf in ice photo six years later.
Pine Twig and Snow
DavidSuessImages 