I went to Snowdonia for a family holiday and snuck out one morning before everyone was awake to do some landscape photography. Snowdonia is genuinely spectacular, the kind of place that makes you wonder how the rest of the British countryside got away with being so bland. Crystal-clear streams, mountains that look like real mountains, water you could drink straight out of without much worry.
I took the Bronica ETRS with three lenses, two films, and roughly an hour before my wife would get angry with me. I came back with frames I am technically pleased with and emotionally indifferent to. This is an honest reflection on landscape photography as a practice, why I keep going out to do it, and what I am working out about why I am not in love with the results.
If you came here for camera kit talk, the Bronica ETRS performed beautifully and I will get to that. If you came here for landscape photography tips, there are better articles online than this one. What this article is actually about is something more uncomfortable: the gap between loving the process of landscape photography and not really loving the photographs.
What I shot
Two distinct locations, an hour apart, very different conditions and approaches.
Location 1: a lake (Llyn Padarn or similar, I am vague on the exact name) at sunrise, mirror-flat water, no wind, perfectly still reflections. I started with the 75mm standard lens on a wide composition with a rock as foreground anchor, then worked through several variations: a wider framing with the 40mm super-wide (“widescreen Snowdonia”), a longer perspective with the 250mm (“isolated detail Snowdonia”), and various long exposures stopped down to f/22 or f/32 to extend the shutter into the second-or-two range.
The Reveni Labs spot meter was telling me things like f/16 at 1/60th in the conditions, which is normal for sunrise on Kodak Gold 200. The long exposures pushed those into the f/22 to f/32 range at fractions of a second to a couple of seconds.
A duck swam through the frame at one point. I tried to get it sharp with the 250mm. I missed.
Location 2: a fast-flowing stream nearby, with bright sunshine starting to break through. I switched films to Kentmere 100 (in black and white, because the colour in shade was muted), put on the 250mm again, and tried to isolate small frames of running water with long exposures to get the smooth-water effect.
By this point I had about ten minutes left of my allotted hour. I shot four or five frames quickly, almost ended up in the water trying to find a vantage point, called it a day.
![PLACEHOLDER: a lake frame from the morning shoot at f/16 on Kodak Gold 200, showing the kind of result the Bronica ETRS produces in that light]
What I came back with
Technically: clean. Properly exposed (the spot meter does its job), well-composed (years of doing this should mean basic composition is automatic), in focus (waist-level finder on the Bronica with a stop-down preview gets you what you need).
Emotionally: indifferent.
There is no frame from that morning that I want to print and hang on a wall. There is no frame I look at and think “yes, that captures something.” The lake shots are pretty pictures of a pretty place. The stream long exposures are competent technical exercises. The duck got away.
This is the bit I have to be honest about. Snowdonia was breathtaking in person and my frames are merely fine. The gap between the experience and the photographs is large.
Why I keep doing it anyway
Here is what I am working out about my own landscape photography. The point of going out is not really the photographs. The point is being out there, alone, in spectacular places, with a camera as the excuse for the trip.
What I got from that morning:
- An hour of solitude in a stunning place
- The quiet meditative process of metering, composing, exposing
- Time away from family responsibilities (which I love, but which can be tiring)
- The genuine pleasure of using a Bronica ETRS in conditions it was made for
- A sense of having done something with my time other than sleep through it
What I did not particularly get:
- Photographs I am proud of in a “look at this image” sense
- A portfolio piece
- Something I would put in a print sale
This is fine. It is more than fine. But it does mean the photographs themselves are not really the point.
The problem with that
The problem is that if the photographs are not really the point, why am I making them at all?
I could go for the same hike without a camera and get most of the benefits. The solitude, the place, the meditative time. None of that requires film going through a Bronica.
So there has to be more to it. And I think what I am working out is this: the camera is what gives the trip purpose. Without a camera, “going for a walk in Snowdonia” is just a walk. With a camera, it becomes “going to photograph Snowdonia.” Same activity, totally different framing in my head.
The camera makes the trip count as work, in a way. Not commercial work, but creative work. Output. Even if the output is not very good, the existence of output justifies the time in a way that just-being-there doesn’t quite.
This may say something uncomfortable about how I value my own time. I am not sure.
What might fix the photographs
I have been turning this over in my head and I think I am getting somewhere.
The landscape photographs I admire all have something happening in them. They are not just records of beautiful scenes. They have weather, or atmosphere, or evidence of human history (ancient walls, abandoned farms, paths worn by generations), or stories implied by what is and is not in frame.
My landscape photographs are nice scenes. They are accurate depictions of beautiful places. They are not telling me anything.
The standard technical advice about landscape photography (strong foreground, considered composition, leading lines, narrative) is not really technical advice. It is advice about telling stories with images. Good landscape photographers are storytellers. Good landscape photographs are stories that happen to be set outdoors.
I am not telling stories yet. I am taking pictures of pretty places.
If I want my landscape photography to start being something I am proud of, I think I need to start hunting for stories rather than scenes. Find places where human history meets natural beauty (Cornish tin mines, abandoned crofts on Scottish hillsides, ancient stone circles). Or wait for conditions that change a scene into something dramatic (storms, fog, the rare strange light). Or photograph people in landscape, not just landscape.
This is a project for future trips. Snowdonia was the first real outing where I have framed this honestly to myself. The photographs are fine. The point is to do better.
![PLACEHOLDER: the duck-that-got-away frame, showing the kind of nature-photography moment the 250mm could capture if everything aligned]
The Bronica ETRS in landscape work
A genuine bright spot. The Bronica is great for this kind of work.
645 format is well-suited to landscape. Wider than 6x6, which sometimes feels too square for sweeping horizontal scenes, but smaller than 6x9 (which is too big to handle conveniently). The 645 frame is what 35mm wishes it could be.
The lens range is excellent. 40mm super-wide for sweeping scenes, 75mm standard for considered compositions, 250mm for isolated details. All sharp, all solidly built, all reasonably priced on the used market.
The waist-level finder works well for landscape. Looking down rather than through the camera changes how you compose. The reversed image takes some getting used to but encourages you to think about the frame as a composition rather than as a view of the world.
Spot metering with the Reveni Labs works. I have settled on this workflow for landscape: spot meter the shadows, spot meter the highlights, set exposure for whatever falls in the middle. The Bronica’s manual aperture and shutter dials make this fast.
The only real complaint: the long-exposure work pushes the practical limits of a 645 SLR. Mirror slap from the Bronica is noticeable, and although the mirror lock-up helps for the long exposures, you still want a stable tripod (which I will come back to in a moment).
The new tripod, briefly
I had a new travel tripod with me, a Punks something-or-other (I genuinely cannot remember the brand name). The selling feature: it packs up tiny, which is what I wanted for international travel.
It works for what it is. Sturdy enough for the Bronica with the long lens for short exposures, not really sturdy enough for the multi-second long exposures (you can see slight softness in those frames that suggests vibration).
For travel where weight and pack size matter more than absolute stability, this kind of tripod is the right compromise. For serious landscape work where you need rock-solid stability, you want a bigger tripod. Probably a story for another article.
What I learned about myself
A few things, in order of importance.
I love being in nature with a camera. This is the genuine motivation. Camera as excuse for being outside in beautiful places, alone with my thoughts.
My landscape photographs are not as good as my portraits. This is honest. The portrait work I do is closer to what I want from a photograph than the landscape work is. There is probably a reason: portraits have a clear subject, a clear story (the person), a clear emotional purpose. Landscapes need me to bring all of that to a scene that does not naturally provide it.
I need to look for landscapes with stories in them. Not just pretty places. Places where something happened, where something is happening, where the human and the natural intersect.
The technical work is fine. I am not failing at landscape photography because I cannot expose or compose or focus. I am failing (if “failing” is the right word) at finding the right things to photograph.
Verdict
The Bronica ETRS is a great camera for landscape photography. Snowdonia is a stunning place to do landscape photography. My morning out there was genuinely lovely.
My photographs from that morning are fine. They are not exciting. They are not bad. They just are.
I am OK with this for now. The point of the morning was the morning. The photographs were the excuse. But I am going to start looking for landscapes with stories, and the next time I write about landscape photography I hope I will be writing about images I actually care about rather than images that are merely competent.
If anyone reading this has the same mental block I do (loving the doing of landscape photography but not the results), please let me know in the comments. I would be curious whether this is widely shared or whether I am alone with it. Either is fine.
For now: Snowdonia, the Bronica, an hour of solitude, three rolls of film. Worth doing. Worth doing better next time.