Joe Cornish: Eye for a magic moment

The landscape is his life. Not through the graft of farming and keeping livestock on these unforgiving pastures, but by capturing it all on camera.

When most of us encounter a spectacular snowscape, the impulse is to whip out the camera. Press the button, here's the picture. That's what Joe Cornish does too. So what's the difference between our snap – destined for the family album, or in forgotten My Pictures in the computer – and a dazzling, many- faceted Joe Cornish image which will have people cooing over it at an exhibition?

Well, you could start with commitment. In practical terms, it's a commitment to lug a heavy field camera and a big tripod up and down hillsides which even sheep find tricky. "I have to use a tripod, it's

akin to easel painting against a quick sketch," says Joe.

And then there's the commitment of investing your whole life into the pursuit of distilling the essence of a landscape into a photograph, a lifetime's mission that has no end, even when a bitter wind is blowing directly from the Steppes.

"It's been the best winter of my adult life, I've loved it. I mostly remember winters as being a massive disappointment. I was four for the last bad one in 1963."

There is some serendipity involved when Joe finds himself behind his big camera in exactly the right place at precisely the right time. But mostly it's down to planning and to a certain extent, instinct.

"You have to seize the day, be alive to the moment and feel the potential of the light. You develop antennae. Over the years all sorts of things get stored in your brain which inform your subconscious judgments.

"Your perceptions are altered by visual stimuli and walking is a form of therapy – it draws you out so you're not so egocentric. When you're walking along, the brain is rifling through all these files from the past, informing your understanding

"I don't wait for hours, anticipation is the critical watchword. Mostly things work out very well because I always try to load the dice in my favour. You hope the weather will unfold in the way you want. You can never know for sure what is going to happen. Don't be disappointed, always hang on in there – 90 per cent of the time it doesn't work out. For great pictures that will stand the test of time, with every successful session there are eight or nine unsuccessful ones.

"On so many days when the snow is around, you have to go out to catch one of those wonderful clearances in the sky that give you such an exciting moment. It's on the edge of the weather, that transition between one type of weather to another, the edge of the time of day, possibly the edge of a cliff. The edge will give you an edge."

Joe, 51, comes from Devon and was trained as an artist. Photography soon became his passion. "The only other work I'd have liked to have done would have been rebuilding dry stone walls or footpaths." What did the North York Moors offer him that Exmoor, or other rugged parts of his native county, did not?

"I remember at the time fretting that Devon was not my kind of place, although I was really attached to Cornwall. Like most young people I probably wanted to escape. I always liked Yorkshire ever since I started coming here. I like the people and their attitude – it's very can-do – and they never made me feel an outsider.

"I probably first came to the North York Moors in the 1980s. My other half, Jenny, is from Middlesbrough and was brought up in Carlton.

"We were in London when children came along. We asked ourselves if we could bring them up outside London and we looked at the possibilities. Jenny's mum had originally been a farmer.

"She had married a doctor and she was still living up here."

Jenny is a yoga teacher and they have two children. "We thought there was not much point in having kids if you both go out to work."

In 1993, Joe and family moved to Great Ayton and he now also has a gallery in Northallerton. He lives within sight of what he calls the sentinel of the North York Moors, Roseberry Topping.

"It's a wonderful backdrop for a landscape photographer and Roseberry Topping is such a distinctive landmark. People relate to it personally.

"I've done a huge amount on the North York Moors in recent months. I have a commission for a new hospital in Middlesbrough where the wards and the buildings are to be named after places and feature on the moors.

"It's due to open in May and they're making a big effort to make the environment stimulating and pleasant.

"I'm doing 17 pictures, huge panoramic prints, it's fantastically fulfilling."

He uses film – which weekend snappers might consider a bit old fashioned. To a certain extent it exposes a professional landscape photographer to the vicissitudes of technology. Three years ago Fuji, the manufacturer of choice, discontinued one of their favourite films called Velvia. There was a rush on the remaining stocks and photographers bought chest freezers to store it in. Then Fuji brought it back.

"In the last six months I've been doing more digital photography. But I've still got a strong attachment to film. An original piece of film is an artefact that's connected with the experience of going out and the taking the picture."

The type of camera he uses costs about 2,500. "I have mixed feeling about the price of cameras. if you look at prices in the 1940s and 50s and relative prices of other goods, they were more expensive then.

"The ones I use are handmade. It's like a bespoke suit – they don't lose their value, a good wooden camera can be worth 70-80 per cent in 10 years' time. If you want to shoot that quality on digital you would have to spend a hundred times as much.

"I print most of mine in the studio on an inkjet machine. To create really good colour prints is a steep learning curve and I'm still on it.

"I usually work one day outside to two days in the studio, so 100 days of photography a year. Part of the point of trying to anticipate the light is that it's difficult. The success of your photos depends on it and the quality of light is optimised when the sun is low in the sky, so you have to be at sunset and sunrise.

"Dawn is at 4.20 in midsummer on the North York Moors. I have to get up at three-ish, so it's not my favourite time of the year, if you are working till 11 at night. May is great when everything is coming into flower, everything is beautiful. June is a very difficult month for photography.

"Taking pictures, your mood contributes to the whole event. You need to be in full resonance with the moment. You can't put you finger on it. You've got to have that sense of flow and control. You're not conscious of it at the time, it happens naturally if everything is right.

"It's as much about recording a mood, a feeling, a sense of hope, beauty. Land and nature offer an experience of connecting with the world we are really in. That's something that so often missing in modern urban life. We are social animals but there also has to be a context. Landscape allows us to work with that."

Joe is giving a talk at the launch of an event next week to launch an exhibition called Diamonds in the Landscape of work by photographers inspired by our National Parks.

"I thought which photographers would be appropriate to donate and everyone asked was willing to participate. So it's a kind of gift show."

It will run together with Take a View, showcasing the best from the Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards, the exhibition's first showing outside London. The launch is on Friday March 5 at 2pm, at the Gallery at the National Park Centre, Danby. Tel: 01439 770657.