About Martin Henson

"I was born in 1952 at a place called Adel Mill Farm in West Yorkshire, UK and was brought up with all my family there, mum, dad, brother, sister, granddad, aunts, uncles, a wonderful time of my life, from those younger years of living on the farm a great appreciation of our countryside was learnt. I now live in a place called Horsforth also in West Yorkshire, I work from home in my digital darkroom and do all processing and printing from there.
My first camera bought for me when I was 12 years old was a Kodak 120 roll film which I still have. It was a Bakerlight box camera, fixed lens and leaf shutter but it took large negatives and was a bit hit and miss in quality, but it started my interest in photography, thanks Kodak. I now shoot with cameras that 20 years ago would have been space technology, an assortment of lens and the obligatory tripod, going back about 6 years I was working in a wet dark room producing my work from film and loved every minute of it. My first claim to fame was when I won first prize in a local show and this gave me the inspiration to enter more, I have won various competitions over the years mainly in B&W and had pictures published in nearly every popular photo magazine on the market. I first started into B&W developing and printing and slowly moved to color but I was always drawn back to monochrome as the preferred medium, for me its simple but effective, dramatic not garish, and for landscape can't be beaten, look at the old masters, timeless wonderful photos, the only problem for many that produced work from their home darkrooms is what to do with all the prints, you can only hang so many on the house walls and I suspect like me we have them all in boxes in cupboards somewhere in our homes, this has all changed now with high speed Internet and the production of images so different now, that leads to ~~~~
The Digital Era
For me it was a steep learning curve, a real pull from film, darkroom and photo paper, but I gave it a go and now I am completely devoted to digital, I struggled as many did with B&W conversion because over the years I had developed a style of my own which at first I could not reproduce in digital B&W, but eventually by reading books, visiting forums etc have finally got the same look to my Landscapes as I did in the 'old days' plus the added advantage of being able to show not only friends but people all over the world my images and not collecting dust in a cupboard.
Our Landscape
Will trekking the hills, dales and moors I have come more aware of the landscape we live in, we don't own it nor do we dictate to it, nature will do what it has to in the most spectacular ways, I am humbled by its power and beauty, I have witnessed amazing light shows, wondrous cloud formations, nature living in complete harmony equipped to cope with the elements, we as humans feel powerful in this technological age but out there we are just another part of life's cycle, a grain of sand in a vast arena, I try to capture this sense of power and scale in my images not as the camera sees it but my own interpretation through inspiration on being a witness to events I have been privileged to see."
Martin Henson's website:
http://www.digital-monochrome.co.uk