When viewing the prints of award-winning Blue Mountains photographer Peter Hill for the first time, many people make the mistake of assuming that their drama, mood, and impact must have been created via Photoshop or some other means of computer-generated manipulation.

Not so. Praised for his “real photography” by Paul Burrows Hon. AIPP in an Editorial in Pro Photo, Peter Hill eschews artificial creations of idealistic and over-saturated landscapes, instead preferring to rely on his skills with camera and lens on-location to capture his photographs; skills acquired over many years and starting with film cameras.

As Burrows wrote, “Peter has been trying to capture the elusive qualities of Blue Mountains landscapes, which has involved lots of pre-dawn rising, tricky descents into canyons and long waits in cold and damp conditions. This is because Peter creates his pictures in-camera–and has similar views to Ken Duncan about post-camera manipulation.

Apart from his refreshing and dedicated approach to the art of photography, the tools used by Peter to create his photographic works are quite unique. In addition to shooting with high-end full-frame DSLRs, Peter also shoots extensively with a specially modified B&W Infrared Canon EOS 5D Mark II.

In 2014 Peter was the first photographer in Australia to hold a solo exhibition comprised entirely of B&W Infrared photographs. Since then Peter has held another 5soloexhibitions, and in the past decade has participated in over 20 other exhibitions, including every Add On exhibition ever held. Several of his award-winning photographs now reside in the permanent collections of the Australian Museum and the South Australian Museum respectively.

In 2017, a B&W IR photograph Peter shot on his first trip to Iceland won the Landscape Photograph of the Year Award, beating thousands of colour photographs in the process, held by Peter Eastway’s Better Photography magazine. Eastway later interviewed Peter about his B&W IR photography and featured his work in a 6-page article(Better Photography, Autumn 2020 Issue, pp 62-67).

Peter writes ..

“I began my love affair with photography when I was 15. A cover of American Photographer caught my eye in a newsstand. It was an Ansel Adams B&W landscape image. I was smitten. I saved my pennies and bought my first camera in 1976. It was an Olympus OM-1-a manual 35mm SLR, which went on several trips to the Himalayas with me and which I still have. I usually shot with slide film, and I’m glad I did.

”I am no fan of creating works of art whilst sitting in front of a computer. I do not believe the art of photography involves manipulating compositions, over-saturating colours, faking the white balance, bracketing, focus stacking or similar digital-based contrivances. Too often I see a work of art labelleda “photograph” when it has been altered so much as to be nothing like the thing actually captured by the light hitting the camera’s sensor. Some, if not many, disagree with me, but my concept of a“photograph” is simple. A photograph is my visual representation of what I saw.

This definition means, for example, that I am not constrained to producing a colour photograph of the exact tones I saw, but it does preclude me from adding, extracting, or replacing elements of what I saw. ”In recent years, I have focused more and more on monochrome photography during all phases of photography–from visualisation tocapture to the framed print on the wall, and have had the opportunity to apply that concept in great locations in Iceland, Norway, Scotland, Italy and Spain a number of times, as well as back home in the Blue Mountains and elsewhere in Australia. Ironically, I have found that focusing on blacks and whites for a sustained period ends up producing creative benefits for my colour photography with light returning as a dominant factor.”