Based in New Zealand, my background is in painting, and my day job is in art education, with a teaching focus on a foundational approach to linear perspective. While studio drafting can often be a slow, methodical process, photography, like plein air painting, is highly reactive. We’re presented with fleeting windows of changing light and movement, and we must decide what to do with them very quickly. The immediacy is what makes it so exciting to me.
Because of my formal artistic training, I often compose my photos with painting (and painters) in mind. This comes down to the way I expose, play with colour and tonality, and treat scale and perspective through my experiments of compositing multiple telephoto exposures into a single image.
My inspirations include George Inness, William Trost Richards, John Singer Sargent, Albert Bierstadt and the Hudson River School artists, as well as the large format cinematography of Ron Fricke, and of course, Ansel Adams.
Peter Henderson