sinwp rss feed for PI Articles

articles/Landscape/woman-landscape

Woman on Landscape

by

When you're a landscape photographer, immersing yourself in your favourite surroundings is a great way to produce your best work, and Lynne Douglas had done exactly that. Now settled on the beautiful Isle of Skye, after moving from Glasgow, Lynne has the opportunity to get out and photograph the stunning surrounding landscape every single day.

"I used to live on the northern outskirts of Glasgow so it wasn't too difficult to get out to places such as Loch Lomond, but whenever I wanted to photograph landscapes I would spend all my time travelling," Lynne tells me when I ask what made her move to the remote Isle of Skye. "Getting to locations by dawn meant getting up at about three o'clock in the morning. It would just be me and the dog in the car and then on location, before returning home when the rest of the family would just be stirring!"

In the end it was Lynne's daughters who suggested the move to Skye. "My heart has always been further north and I loved photographing and travelling around the Hebrides. So my husband and I decided that this is where we should be." Having now settled on Skye, Lynne is now working on plans to build a gallery space in the tiny hamlet where she lives. "My husband is a builder so he's agreed to build the gallery for me; we're trying to live the dream rather than just thinking about it!"

Living in the landscape that she loves means that Lynne can really focus on her photography; "Lots of people travel to locations to take a photograph, before quickly leaving again. They only get one chance to see it in just the one kind of light. Some of the photographs I have in my portfolio have been taken dozens of times. I often revisit the same landscape in all different kinds of light and capture it over and over until I get something that really speaks to me." Lynne's work is about capturing the essence of the locations that she photographs, sparking emotions rather than just documenting the landscape. "The colours of the place can make a huge impact on the photograph, and they change with the seasons and the weather. I used to photograph a loch that was local to me, sometimes it was bright green in colour, but at other times it could be covered in mist with very few details."

But Lynne insists that landscape photography isn't all about moving to remote and classically beautiful places. "You just have to go out lots to take photographs and keep going back to locations that you like. After a while you'll begin to narrow down what it is that you really love about that place." But although she makes it look effortless now, landscape photography has not always come easily to Lynne: "When I first started out I kept seeing the big picture. You think you have to try and capture the whole thing and you can't. So instead I started to try and find things in the landscape that stood out. For me it's colours, the low light of mornings and early evenings are when you get the beautiful shades just melting into each other. Sometimes you'll be lucky and sometimes you won't, but if you keep going to a location that you love eventually you'll get a great shot."

Lynne's ambition to open a gallery is at least partially fuelled by her experience of exhibiting in New York. "I was contacted out of the blue by a gallery who had seen my website and asked if I'd exhibit over there. It was my first exhibition, so to be asked to participate in a group show abroad gave me such a lot of confidence. You start to believe that somebody really likes your stuff!" 2015 will see Lynne exhibit at gallery@ oxo in London as part of an all-women landscape photography network; "There was a landscape photography exhibition by an all-male group of photographers, so there was a feeling amongst ourselves that we should get together and do something too!"

The Alternative Realities of the Female Artist

It was a blog post by Lynne with the above title that really drew me into reading just about everything she has written on the subject of being a photographer who is also a woman - I'd highly recommend reading her blog for an insight. "Studying Georgia O'Keeffe and Julia Margaret Cameron made me aware of how these women had their art almost completely ignored, meaning that they came up with something completely unique." Lynne also has written several times on the subject of the rarity of landscape photographers who are women, speculating as to why this could be. Her writings have been met with an overwhelmingly positive response with people volunteering their own theories on the subject too. "The impression that I got from my readers was that nearly everybody thought that women were less confident about their work and not as pushy which is why sometimes they can miss out on opportunities for publicity."

Being a woman who shoots landscapes has its upsides too, though - Lynne's apparent rarity as a landscape photographer led to her being asked to represent Zenfolio at Focus On Imaging in Birmingham. "When I worked on the stand for Zenfolio I was inundated by women talking to me because they needed websites for their photography businesses, but almost all of them were photographing babies or portraits. Over the five days that I was there I only met one or two other landscape photographers who were women." Being at Focus led to a chance meeting with the managing director for Lee Filters where Lynne mentioned to him that their book on landscape photographers didn't have a single woman within its pages. Sure enough they put that right in the next edition that came out, before featuring Lynne's work in the first copy of their popular e-magazine! Perhaps there is some truth that 'if you don't ask then you don't get'.

" We have to challenge the fact that many people see the default photographer as male," Lynne tells me. "When I started working in science, people had the same assumption and women are still outnumbered in both fields." Challenging assumptions that people make is difficult, but Lynne has a plan: "I've been trying to pull myself away from doing the traditional landscape shots. It's not that I deliberately want to go in a different direction, but my mind seems to think in a different way. I try to make more intimate landscape images that are quite minimal in appearance." By stepping out and away from the world of the traditional, male-dominated landscape photograph, Lynne is proving that it is possible to do something different and also make a name for your work at the same time. www.crionnaphotography.com



Updated 27/04/2026 16:44:22 Last Modified: Monday, 27 April 2026