All images by Neil Burnell. Used with Creative Commons permission.
Already have a scenic location in mind for a landscape photography shoot? You might want to get some ideas for it from today’s featured series. If you haven’t tried shooting landscapes and seascapes in minimalist monochrome yet, you might get some tips from UK-based fine art photographer Neil Burnell on how to achieve this elegant style.
The Chrome Coast series is the latest to join our roster of beautiful minimalist landscape (and seascape) photography. It features the scenic fishing town of Brixham, where Burnell is based, and turns out to be perfect for this monochrome style. Aside from natural elements surrounding the beach, there are also a handful of architectural structure that make interesting foreground and background elements to the photos.
Minimalist photography may sound like simply breaking a scene into bare elements, but that’s just one way of doing it. As we’ve learned in many of the previous minimalist landscapes we’ve featured, the main goal of this style is to put the emphasis on select elements throughout the frame. These could be shapes, patterns, textures, and even silhouettes. Shooting in black and white helps photographers take out the distractions and simplify the scene even further. In Chrome Coast, we see all of these at work perfectly in all the photos.
Some photographers like bumping up the contrast for this visual style, and that often works really great for singular subjects (like a lone structure standing tall against the waters) and strong silhouettes. For Chrome Coast, however, it’s great that Burnell went for a clean, moderately contrasty look and let the variations in tonality take center stage. It allows us to see the grays as well instead of just blacks and whites, which in turn gives us more details to appreciate.
Check out Neil Burnell’s website and Behance portfolio to see more of his work.