I do not believe that a good photograph can be made without recognising that the landscape will always be more important than either you or the photograph you plan to make of it. Of course it has to be helped and supported by all the techniques of photography, but, when taking a photograph I know to be good, the sensation I always have is a modest one. It is an inner "ah", the knowledge that something is right. When this understanding is there, something strange happens to me. The heartbeat slows down, the whole metabolism seems to come down to the rate of the landscape itself, and the mind, almost as if coated with an emulsion itself, starts to soak up the meaning of the place. There is nothing casual about it. It is not a snatch.

Understanding grows as you allow the landscape to come into you. Passivity, not acquisition, is the key to this. A good photograph is a received photograph, an exchange between you and the landscape, in which - however unlikely this may seem - there is a dialogue between the two of you. It is simply courtesy to allow the landscape to speak.