I shot this environmental portrait with my trusty Voigtlander Bessa T and a 25mm f4 Skopar lens. Thanks to the subject, Pemba Sherpa, I managed to pull off a successful trek to strengthen a story on climate change in the Himalayas which I was shooting for Hollandse Hoogte Photo Agency.
Pemba is a great character of the Everest Himalaya of Nepal and I hope that this portrait does him some justice.
In the years 2005-2008, I spent quite a lot of time working in the Everest Himalaya of Nepal. Returning with a large portfolio of work on 10MP Nikon DSLR and also many on 35mm film and a couple of digital compacts.
I recently found some time to scan in many of the 35mm frames and have also been re-editing the digital captures as well. I hope to have finished this mammoth editing task in the coming months, mostly for a book project.
In April 2005, in response to a story idea for Hollandse Hoogte Photo Agency, I flew for three hours over the Everest Himalaya to photograph the large glaciers which litter the area to see how climate change was affecting them. I shot some on a high-quality 6MP sensor and others on fine-grained 35mm film. I recently found some time to scan in these remaining film frames and most of them have now been edited into the colleciton – though several still sit in the queue (as is the case with other work shot on 35mm film in the Everest region during my year up there in the late 2000s).
Most of these images are scanned on a high-quality 3600dpi scanner and are free of dust and blemishes. For more information on my extensive film and digital archive stretching back to 1990, please visit the stock image archive page.
I often think landscape photography is a little like a writer writing poetry. Most landscapes have no commercial or editorial value and especially so if they are black & white.
Though, I never stop shooting landscapes, if only as a personal memento of my extensive travels. This image is part of a great portfolio of landscapes I took recently while climbing up Ben Vrackie in the Scottish Highlands for a post on a travel guide blog I now edit.
Scotland’s landscape, like much of the northern latitudes of the British Isles, is magic to photograph (if you know what you are doing) and I am thinking about putting these landscapes into a limited-edition coffee table book at some stage in the coming years.
Landscapes reveal themselves to the photographer and have a mystical quality when the picture magically comes together. Much like the combination of words that make up a poem. While I can probably write passable poems, I prefer to do make one with my eye and I hope, if you see this blog post, that you connect with that as I do when I see it and click the shutter.
In the 19th Century, many Victorians saw something in the Scottish landscape which connected them with the divine and this movement was labelled ‘the Sublime’. I don’t disagree…There is something about much of the Scottish landscape which is very much sublime in a way that is not immediately apparent, making it, I suppose, truly sublime. If I managed to capture just a hint of that, then I would say this photograph may have worked.
Having recently relocated back to Scotland, I am now based in Perth (pretty much in the centre of Scotland) and will naturally be beefing up my archive on Scotland – which was already considerable from travels in 2010-2011, though was mostly lost when my laptop and external hard drive were stolen in Seville in 2012.
With the new database for Atlas Photo Archive now established, I have been busy uploading a lot of new and old images to make them available to picture researchers, editors and graphic designers.
As I am now also editing the travel magazine/guidebook ScotlandTravelGuide.info (STG for short), I will be shooting a broad range of stock images ranging from adventure sports to well-known landmarks and landscapes.
I recently got news from Alamy that my collection is being deleted. For no logical reason I can discern…Hence the images will no longer be available to license on that system in January 2014. You can now license increasing numbers of the digital collection on the new searchable stock image archive database.
This image was shot in the autumn as I trekked out of Namche Bazaar and shows the wonderful landscape surrounding Nup La, the first large peak as you ascend up the Mount Everest Tenzing-Hillary trail (or Everest Base Camp Trail as many term it).
Sagarmatha National Park has some of the most amazing landscapes I have ever seen and once above the treeline at 4,000 metres it does feel a bit like being on another planet. Photographing at this altitude is not easy and when I took this image I was carrying a 28kg rucksack.
I have many other great landscapes from the Everest region and if you are looking for any for your creative projects, then please contact me via email on lightroomphotos [at] icloud.com or jonstmchl [at] gmail.com
I can also now offer mono images as platinum limited edition art prints. Please email for prices.
Jonathan William Mitchell Writer / Photojournalist Blog 