Why Pen Densham photographs waves at dusk on a 400mm lens at f/40

When I profiled Pen Densham's work last December, I noted that the Oscar-nominated filmmaker had developed a radical impressionist approach to photographing nature, but hadn't detailed his specific techniques. Thankfully, he's since got in touch and done exactly that.

What emerges is a methodology that's equal parts technical and philosophical, and more practical than you might expect.

Densham's wave photography begins with a lens that landscape photographers would consider absurd for the job. He shoots on a 400mm telephoto at f/40, using an ND9 filter to bring exposure times down to workable lengths at dusk.

The compression of a long lens turns individual waves into layered planes of tone. The narrow aperture keeps forms sharp even through motion. And the ND filter lets him extend exposures into half-second territory as the light fades. At which point, panning with the movement of the water turns waves into streaks, sculptures and abstract shapes he couldn't have predicted or planned.

"I can shoot rolling waves at dusk with the amount of light I can get through a digital camera and hold focus," Densham explains. "But I'm also shooting them maybe half a second and panning with them, so they become streaks and they become sculptures."

He waded chest-high into the Hawaiian ocean to make his first wave images, holding a Panasonic Lumix LX2 – a 10-megapixel compact with a large rear screen and no optical viewfinder. The absence of a viewfinder was the point: it freed him from bracing the camera against his face and keeping it still, letting him respond physically to the rhythm of the water instead.

Move the camera; ask your body why

Long exposure times or intentional camera movement are central to a large number of the images Densham makes, and he's specific about how to think about it. The question isn't "what movement should I make?" It's "what does my body want to do?" he explains.

For his tree images, for instance, he moves his hands during exposures to evoke the energy he feels in the subject. For water, he lets his arms follow the flow. For his India street work, deliberate shaking creates multiple synchronized impressions of a single figure; something closer to a Francis Bacon painting than a travel photograph.

"I'm looking at the intuition of what does my body want to make the image of," he says. "I wait until it tells me what it wants to do."

Edit by feel, not by formula

His post-processing workflow is deliberately unglamorous: Apple Photos with two or three plugins. No Photoshop, which he considers too technical to stay creatively fluid in.

He does, however, run noise-reduction software multiple times because each pass both sharpens and smooths the image, and the cumulative effect can reveal something unexpected. He also transfers settings from one image to a completely unrelated one, purely to see what the collision produces.

Crucially, he leaves images for several days before returning to judge them. What looked wrong often looks right. What looked finished often needs one more adjustment. The green cast he hated yesterday becomes, with a small warmth correction, the thing that gives a picture its atmosphere.

These are not small pictures: Densham's selected works are typically printed at six to ten feet wide for the fine art market, where the interplay between sharp and soft areas becomes part of the work's power. The crisp elements anchor the eye; the blurred passages invite it to dream. A ten-foot piece recently sold through one of his representatives and is now hanging in an office lobby on Madison Avenue.

"I chase things down by feel," he says. "When it comes together, I literally choke up. That's how I know." For photographers accustomed to workflows built around precision and control, that's a provocative standard to shoot for – in every sense of the word.

Pen Densham's photobook, Qualia, is available as a free digital download