|
Close this window to return to Quinte Arts Council Directory |
|
William Bickle
1405 Clearview Road, RR#2, Roslin, Ontario
K0K 2Y0
I feel very motivated to do more and better and feel very much that the best is yet to come and don’t think there is any photograph that I’ve ever done that I would say is on a level with an Ansel Adams or an Edward Weston. For me they remain a kind of benchmark that I aspire to. I would like to take pictures that move people in the way they did, or make people think about why they live the way they do. There is certainly a long, long way for me to go. But I’ve never been scared of disappointing. Mother Nature is a ferocious God in that she gives with one hand and takes with the other and you have to learn that you will not often get what you set out for. It’s very often the case that however hard you plan, you always need to be able to think sideways. The best-planned shot sometimes works as you had hoped, but when it doesn’t, often a better solution arises behind your back whilst you are not looking. It’s a very special kind of relationship. You are subservient to Mother Nature but at the same time she gives you opportunities you just can’t predict! I feel that my work is about reconnecting with nature and strongly that the only future is one in which we learn to live in some kind of harmonious relationship with the natural world, because the way we live at the moment is not sustainable for long.
I do almost everything on a Hasselblad CM Medium Format camera. I take as many lenses as I feel I would need on a shoot, might be two or three, but sometimes five or six, if I feel I need more scope on a shot. I try to get the best moment at any given time, the best perspective, the best composition, best timing. So I focus on one thing at a time. I don’t rush around trying to get lots of shots. I try and make every shot the best shot I can do. I’m unashamedly proud of my pictures! I love showing my work and generally get good feedback about it. I think it’s because I feel a passion about the places I shoot, I tend to go to places I like and that I have a feeling for. It gives me a chance to talk about the place as much as my work. Recently, I have been using a Digital Camera and find the results interesting. Digital quality is approaching the quality I have experienced using film. I have a great respect for other photographers and have been highly influenced by a number of photographers who have given me guidance, deliberately or otherwise, in the past. I’m confident in my own work but I hope I’m also scrupulously fair about others work. I try never to denigrate another photographer’s work!
My dream is to be able to make a difference. You can interpret that in anyway you like. I try to connect with Nature and the landscape but on a personal level and by doing so I try to express my own spiritual connection or experience of it. If I can do that and move others in that way, if it makes a difference to them then that’s my dream I guess. Perhaps I should just say that for me Nature and Landscape photography is a fusion of everything I love about living. Being outdoors, experiencing the seasons, the light, the colour. I enjoy the physical work aspect of it very much too. The exercise and the sense of being connected, at least slightly connected compared with what most of us are most of the time, to the natural world. I encourage other people to go out and have the same experience. William Bickle |
