Chris Harland: The Art of North Yorkshire

Chris Harland is a Yorkshire artist who believes that his work - which is inspired by his love of nature - should be shared and available to all.

His medium of choice is the humble iPhone and yet few others can create such artwork; showing us that art begins when passion for the subject meets the expertise of the eye.

Chris concentrates mainly on his first love - the beauty of his home county, Yorkshire. His work creates a restful and rural feel that is rare in photography today.Some compare his work to John Sell Cotman, the nineteenth century painter who Chris agrees is an influence on his work.

The artwork below shows just some of the timeless scenes that can be enjoyed in the North Yorkshire area.

Chris is one of the foremost iPhoneographers worldwide. Thanks to the internet, he has a huge audience and here's where you can find out more...

If you'd like to learn more about him and his work, you can read a brief bio here.

At the moment, he shares his photography publicly on Flickr. Click here to see the works that are currently online.

Chris uses a photography technique that even amongst die-hard iphoneographers is a little different from the norm, His approach sets him far apart from popular notions of cellphone photography.Hipstamatic was launched as an app late in 2009 on the face of it as a simulated analog plastic camera from the 1970s.

Marty Yawnick, influential photography writer and editor of LifeInLoFi.com noted that it established the look of iphone photography - or more precisely what non-iphonoegraphers think of iPhoneography. It quickly became one of the elite iphone apps and directly influenced the look and feel of Instagram, the most popular of all photography apps.Chris, like a number of photographers who use the iPhone, quickly realized that the Hipstamatic provided carefully considered filters and films that perfectly emulated the kind of photography previously limited to specialist lo-fi cameras and careful darkroom techniques.

Chris has become a master of playing to the strengths and nuances of Hipstamatic and is thus able to capture scenes of breathtaking beauty in a way that seems to hold back time. His scenes, which rarely include elements that would date from our own time, seem to connect with past photographs, prints and oil paintings in a way that few photographers can achieve.

Yorkshire is host to some of the finest vistas and landscapes and its clear that Chris has a love of his home region that comes out clearly in his photographs. Hipstamatic - far from being a standard camera, is one of the most difficult of filter apps to master - which is why it still has the respect of the world's best iphone shooters.

Chris has several different 'recipes' to his work, which serve to make the best of the scene and the weather.Landscape photography in a location as rugged as Yorkshire and the English northern counties demands a lot of any photographer.

Many times I've walked the highest peaks and the longest valleys of the North Yorkshire Moors (host to most of the images on this page) only to find rain and snow and clouds. Chris's images are amongst the finest of his genre partly because he's made several trips to his locations before he's achieved an image that he feels worthy of sharing.

Most of our finest photographs I'm sure will identify with this particular photography challenge.Most of all I love Chris's work because he shows the best of a land I really love. His work is dramatic and elemental; in tune with the very best of England's landscape photographers and architects and worthy of comparison to his beloved landscape painters. Two centuries after the call to nature of John Ruskin, who held that "all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature" it is a privilege that we can share the work of Chris Harland, who walks in the footsteps of great local artists like Albert Goodwin and Arthur Reginald Smith.

I hold that his work stands well against the best of Yorkshire's imagemakers and it's high time that Yorkshire's tourist chiefs recognise the humble talent that we have here at the very doorstep of Yorkshire's supreme beauty.

Text © Andy Royston.

• For most of us, our phones go wherever we do. They are there to capture the moment at any time. It's no good having expensive photographic equipment that's back at home when you find the perfect subject for photography.
• Social media makes it easy to share your photographs from showing your latest to family and friends on Facebook to the professional iPhoneographer sharing work with fans.
• There are so many apps available for your phone - many completely free of charge - to help you edit and enhance your images
• Using your iPhone takes no special skills. In the old days, when I was at art college, it was an immensely technical matter. To take great images with your phone, you need a great eye and you can learn by trial and error.
• Unlike those days, there is no cost involved in taking wonderful photographs.

'Point and shoot' is all very well but why not learn more about the opportunities you have? The photographs you take will become part of your legacy - make them great.

Black and white Yorkshire photography from Chris Harland.