I filmed Cows 2 just off the road near Cresswell in Northumberland, not far from Drift Café, a place I used to stop at regularly. What’s on screen is a single static landscape shot, two and a half minutes long, locked off, no pans, no tilts, no zooms, just a small herd of black and white cows wading through a flooded pasture under a heavy grey sky.

Why a Static Landscape Shot

It would have been easy to chase movement, to follow a cow as it shifted position or pan across the water for variety. I wanted to resist that instinct and see what happens when a static landscape shot is simply allowed to run.

Held still for long enough, small things start to register that would otherwise pass unnoticed. A cow pauses and looks up. Ripples spread out from where one has shifted its weight in the shallow water and slowly settle again. At one point the wind suddenly worries the water, sending ripples and then a patch of cloud shadow moving across the surface. Distant birds cross the grey sky above the dunes. None of this is dramatic on its own, but it’s worth watching for.

The light that day did a lot of the work too. It was overcast, and the diffused grey sky gave the whole scene a muted, silvery palette, with only the odd patch of earthy brown breaking through. The water in the foreground caught faint reflections of the cows and the sky above them, while the animals themselves, black and white against all that grey, stood out clearly. Behind them the ground rises gently into dunes, and above it all the sky takes up more of the frame than anything else.

Filming on a GH2

I shot this on a Panasonic GH2 with a 12mm lens, wide enough to hold the water, the cows and the sky in one frame without distortion creeping in at the edges. I recorded in 1080p at 24fps, aiming for a natural, filmic cadence rather than anything sharper or more clinical. The GH2 was already a few years old by 2016, a Micro Four Thirds camera first released back in 2010, but its hacked firmware, unlocking higher bitrates than Panasonic ever intended for the stock model, made it punch well above its price and age for a static landscape shot like this one.

I’d originally bought the GH2 as a second camera, mainly for B-roll while I was using something else for the main work. It ended up becoming the camera I reached for most often when I was out walking with a camera around Northumberland and Newcastle, small and light enough to carry without thinking about it, but capable of pictures I was genuinely happy with. I first used it properly while filming ~Flow, and it stayed in regular use for years after that.

There’s an underlying tension in the scene itself that I didn’t fully notice until I’d watched the footage back a few times. The cows stand right at the edge between dry ground and water, on farmland the flood is slowly taking over.

These clips are part of an ongoing series I shoot while walking through Newcastle, Gateshead and further afield. You can see more on my Newcastle & Gateshead Landscapes Instagram, or in my wider Landscape & Environment work.