Richard Ellis ARPS – Photographic Journey
I am an amateur landscape photographer based in Ascot, Berkshire, UK. I started out with an interest in photography at school and got a film SLR for my 18th birthday. I continued to shoot landscapes and travel into my early 20’s. Like many people, career and family then took over and my photography was primarily aimed at documenting my family growing up.
After retirement I started to pursue landscape photography more seriously buying a DSLR for trip to Iceland. For the last 15 years I have travelled around exploring beautiful landscapes. I was awarded my LRPS in 2015 and my associateship in 2018. My ARPS was based on B+W images of coastal structures.
I was a founding member of the Royal Photographic Society’s Landscape special interest group (SIG) and the chair for 6 years. During this time the membership grew significantly and it is now one of the largest SIG’s in the society. I was awarded the Fenton medal for my service to the society.
I have written two guides to locations in the UK: Cornwall and the Outer Hebrides.
My main interests now are coastal landscapes, printing and hand made books.
PROJECT: Porlock Marsh
Porlock Marsh is a place I had wanted to photograph for a long time. To produce an uncluttered image, it is best shot at high tide when the incoming tide isolate the buildings and trees. The scene was formed when the shingle bank was breached in a storm many years ago and on spring high tide the area floods creating a minimalistic landscape.
As I was aiming for a minimalistic landscape I decide to focus on the tones and use a B+W rendition of the scenes. After several futile attempts to photograph here I managed to find suitable weather conditions and high tides timed to coincide with sunrise and sunset. In October 2025 I set out full of anticipation to try and capture this iconic landscape.
Approach
The scene is quite compact comprising a number of trees which have died as a result of the salt water ingress onto the marsh and an abandoned barn which used to be several hundred metres away from the sea. The skill with this scene is to find ways of isolating the elements and creating a pleasing composition given the tide conditions that present. I decided to produce a portfolio of five images in mono to capture the stark minimalistic beauty of this scene.
I had in mind that I was going to produce a quintych.
Shooting
As I did not wish to show the detail in the water the images were shot as long exposures with an exposure time sufficient to blur the incoming tide but not to lose all the detail in the sky. A key element in approaching this location was to position the camera so that the individual elements have minimal or no overlap creating space for them all to occupy their individual parts of the frame. I was fortunate to be able to go to the scene three times on different days and therefore to encounter a variety of tide heights and skyscapes.
Processing
The images were shot in raw and whilst I viewed them as mono images on the back of my camera, I imported them as colour role files and then processed them. Firstly I expanded the histogram so I had full black and full white in the image. Then I tackled the colours to ensure that I had maximum contrast from the minimal colours that were present. The main colours at the scene were brown-oranges of the dead grasses and trees and some bluish tones from the sky. Once I had used luminous and saturation to boost the differences between these colours I converted the images to black and white and then worked on the details of the individual scenes to bring out, for example, the reflection of the of the barn, the luminance of the sky and the contrast of the hills.
Final presentation
I decided to present the five images as a book end type of scene with the tall trees presented as squares and the rest of the images as 16 x 9.
Richard ARPS
Feb 2026
GALLERY – Richard Ellis ARPS
