CHRIS LOCKPHOTOGRAPHER
07980 766 197 |
BIO
Chris Lock has spent twenty years getting to know the landscape of Wiltshire and Dorset and recording its beauty in photographs. His interest in photography began while working and travelling overseas and, as a consequence, he is left with folders containing hundreds of slides that one day might be converted to digital images!
After moving back to Wiltshire in 2001, he began taking photography more seriously, initially combining it with his career as a primary school teacher. Chris’s first ‘serious’ camera was a Mamiya medium format film camera, but when the digital revolution came he invested in a Canon 5D digital SLR, and now uses this with a range of lenses.
Learning photography using a film camera gave him a good grounding in the technical basics. With only ten frames per roll of film, plus the cost of developing – and of course not being able to see the results immediately – he had to think carefully about each exposure.
Chris finds great inspiration in the local landscape. Although he loves the dramatic coastlines of Devon and Cornwall, and the mountains of Scotland, he feels that Wiltshire has its own unique beauty, and that, at the right time of day and with good light, you don’t have to travel far to find inspiring landscapes to photograph.
ARTWORK
I began producing my own greetings cards in 2008 and now have a range of nearly 160 designs which showcase the landscape, woodlands and villages of the local area. These can be found in a number of local outlets and also on my website. Alongside the cards I also sell mounted and framed prints.
My first Wylye Valley Calendar also appeared in 2008 and now – having produced the eleventh edition – I’m extremely grateful to all those who have supported the calendar over the years, meaning that sales so far have raised more than £50,000 for Wiltshire based children’s charity Hope and Homes for Children. Moving to Fovant in 2018 gave me new viewpoints to explore and I’m now also producing a Nadder Valley Calendar. Money raised from this will also be donated to the charity.
I am always seeking ways to convey the mood and atmosphere of the landscape. As such, I’m a big fan of early mornings. Not a fan of getting out of bed at 3:30am in mid-summer, or of scraping ice off the car in the dark on a winter morning, but a fan of standing on a Wiltshire hilltop as the sky changes in the minutes before sunrise, and watching the landscape being transformed by the first light of the day.
A two-dimensional image cannot always do justice to the experience, but I do my best!
Click on each image to view in full.