Less is More.

Smoke. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Taken along the highways of the Emirates in the middle of the Arabian desert I have become obsessed with trying to capture and convey the emptiness and sparsity of the landscapes I encounter. Believe me, when you live in a city like London where there is something everwhere you look, the horizontality and simplicity of miles of sand is eye-opening and in some ways, therapeutic.

Lazy. Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

I gave myself the challenge of trying to capture that. I’m doing this by reducing irrelevant objects in the scene and simplifying the image by focusing on just the environment and the subject, letting the colour and tone of the photograph dictate the reaction to that subject, resulting in a sparse look.

Mound. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

I realised I really needed to refine and rethink the method by which I actually captured my images. The standard rectangular camera ratio is sufficient for capturing the land or the sky, but what I want to do is enhance and intensify this relationship, so I figured I could acheive this by making sure they were all exactly half-ground, half-sky vertically, cropping to a ratio of 2.35:1 horizontally which is a standard cinema anamorphic format.

I’ve always been facinated by images with cinematic qualities. Even though at present I can’t put it into words, I know what a cinematic image feels like as opposed to an image straight from a camera.

I’ll probably come back to this when I can explain this better…

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