specialist fine art landscapes new zealand

Fifteen years of professional fine art photography on, and now based in New Zealand and also becoming increasingly recognised as a fine artist, Bruce Mortimer's exquisite landscapes have evolved from simple professional colour landscapes published in landscape calenders and small limited edition colour prints, to his contemporary style-specific specialist vertical and horizontal panoramic photography with a sense of location, art and style but without losing the simplicity that generally makes the best landscape photography creatively succesful. Since 2008 Bruce Mortimer has built on earlier experience as a fine artist and now considers exquisite oil paintings to be his primary final expression. Mortimer's art is underpinned by a love and understanding of landscape, combined with a long history across 20 countries using top class photography to express this love. His deeper understanding and connection comes from a university Honours degree in Geology (awarded first class in 1990), and extensive travel in some of the most photogenic landscapes in the world, including North America, Southern Africa, South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, the latter being possibly considered the ultimate destination for landscape artists and photographers.
His current stock of New Zealand photography is undeniably his best photographic achievement yet (an achievement which provides the material for his oil and pastel paintings); a range of both colour and black and white panoramic landscapes covering much of New Zealand geographically, but with an emphasis on quality, viewpoint and individually recognisable style. Panoramic photography is perhaps a natural choice for landscape, but often used by photographers with a more conventional style in the horizontal format. More unusual amongst photographers or artists is Mortimer's excellent use of the vertical panoramic format, creating incredible depth and creative use of focal points combined with an almost Eastern artistic appearance and high end presentation. Even more unusual amongst either fine artists or landscape photographers, is that Bruce Mortimer is capable of doing both (photography and fine art painting) at a high professional level. His long history of selling fine art photographs during a time when it was a fringe medium at best bodes well for his future as a top landscape fine artist. Bruce Mortimer sold over 2500 fine art photographs between 1995 and 2007. Vertical format images have certainly become his style (at least in photographic terms), and the multitude of worldwide owners of his limited edition photography have purchased more vertical compositions than horizontal, and a significant portion of Mortimer's first black and white landscape photography coffee-table book was dedicated to these vertical panoramic photographs.
This gallery site incorporates both vertical and horizontal panoramic photography, as landscape often loosely dictates the use of one or the other. There are also both black and white photographs as well as colour photography displayed here, and of course landscape paintings. Although a lot of Mortimer's photography in recent years has been limited edition black and white photography (photographed using film and then printed by hand in a traditional darkroom on photography paper), he has never lost his equal love of colour photography in capturing landscapes, and digital techniques allow compositions not previously available to the user of film to be captured on digital media. Thses color photographs now also provide solid creative reference for his paintings, but when presented as limited edition photography, these colour panoramic photographs are printed in New Zealand using a Durst Lambda printer, and are framed (where requested) in the same archival way as his silver gelatine darkroom black and white photographs, and with a similar small edition for each image to retain the exclusivity of Mortimer's photography.
The panoramic photography is also available for use in the publishing, advertising and design industries, by the purchase of relevant usage rights of any particular New Zealand panoramic image. Navigating to the relevant page on this website will link the user to Bruce Mortimer's specialist New Zealand stock landscape photography site, img nz.com (image New Zealand), which allows the user to choose photographs by (for example) location, style, colour, subject. The img nz site is strongly biased towards panoramic format photography, as is this site, but with relatively little emphasis on limited edition photography prints, which has been Bruce Mortimer's main method of presentation both historically and in New Zealand.