The Saskatchewan Prairie Light Photography Festival kicks off across the province this month. Among the highlights is a display at the Godfrey Dean called Spectacles of Nature by Winnipeg photographer Hans Arnold. The exhibit involves a variety of landscape photography from Arnold's travels.
Arnold says that the show came together after the publication of his book Up North: Manitoba's Last Frontier, collecting images from around northern Manitoba, and he says it was a region he wanted to capture as it was today.
"When you look at the pictures in my book, it gives you a really good idea of what the people who are living up there are putting up with, how beautiful it is, how diverse it is through the seasons."
He says that he's always looking for scenes, and the photos he displays connect closely to how he felt in the different places where he takes the photo.
"I really want to show in my mind's eye and capture and show an image of that area in terms of what it was like. Encapsulate one picture in terms of what one area is, and I look for that."
Arnold's says that when he sets out to take photos, he wants to capture a place and a mood, and he says he works with music as well in order to set the right tone for the images he wants to take.
That approach continues to the end result, and Arnold says that he approaches post-processing with the same goal, to capture the mood he was in and what he felt the scene was when he took the photo. As a result, he says that the processing is chosen to increase the sharpness and intensify the color, but still have it represent what he saw in front of him.
"When I photograph, I'm in a mood, I'm in a certain frame of mind... So when I take these pictures and put them on the computer and look at them, they should look the way I felt. I use software to make the picture look the way I felt."
Arnold also hosted a photography workshop on the weekend, and he says his goal was to teach people how to take better photos and what they need to keep in mind as they work with the equipment they have to capture an image.
"Photography basically has four ingredients and that's light, color, shape and composition. I use those very strongly, every time I take a picture. The result is that the picture has those four ingredients and they always equal simplicity," Arnold says.
"That's what I'm teaching people, to actually think about a photograph, not just to snap it, to make a picture, not just to take a picture."
Spectacles of Nature runs until February 15 at the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery. Admission is free.
