Darren Spoonley

Sharpness is one of the first things many photographers judge in a landscape image, but it is also one of the areas that caused me the most frustration when I was starting out. I used to come home convinced that I had captured strong images, only to load them onto a larger screen and realize the foreground was soft or the distant detail was not as sharp as I thought it would be. At the time, I blamed gear more than technique.

There is a moment I've become very familiar with over the years. It usually happens on the drive home, just after I've packed the camera away and the light has long since faded. It's that quiet realization that nothing from the day will make it into a final image. No keeper. No portfolio shot. Nothing to process. For a long time, I treated those days as failures. I would mentally replay decisions I made in the field, question timing, and sometimes even question whether I had missed something obvious.

Trying different genres of photography can be both challenging and rewarding, especially when you either feel like a change or when the seasons force your hand. But have you ever considered infrared? As a landscape photographer, I love being outdoors, and I also enjoy the early starts and late finishes. However, the summer in Ireland and the UK can be quite inhospitable, with 4:30 a.m. sunrises and 10 p.m. sunsets, and photographing during the long, harsh-light days is far from ideal.