Sarah Kinsella

Sarah Kinsella is a travel and nature photographer. Living in England, she has also worked in China and lived in Crete.

Her childhood was spent in India, living in Visakhapatnam on the East Coast. School was a three day train journey away in Ootacamund in the Nilgri Hills, including the famous narrow gauge rack and pinion Nilgiri Mountain Railway or ‘Toy Train’ (a Unesco Heritage Site) which climbs the 46 kilometers  from Coimbatore to Udhagamandalam Station at 2,203 meters in five hours. Aged 13 her parents left India and she travelled to the United Kingdom on the SS Mangla from Calcutta and travelled to the United Kingdom via Sri Lanka, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, Greece and, after crossing the Atlantic, tramping around the east coast of America from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Brownsville on the Mexican border.

This early peripatetic life engendered a fascination and appreciation of different cultures and landscapes and an eagerness to explore and have new experiences. She has continued to travel extensively and more recently she has toured Borneo, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Holland, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Malta and Gozo, Portugal, Morocco, Kenya, Zanzibar, Peru and Cuba.

Influenced by Colin Prior, Charlie Waite and David Ward, Sarah shows the beauty and diversity of wide open spaces. The use of changing light is a feature of Sarah’s work together with depicting how the different seasons affect the landscape. She immerses herself in the landscape and removes extraneous clutter to reveal the essence of a view.

Lately she has turned her attention to the United Kingdom and is documenting landscapes are closer to home. Britain is incredibly beautiful with wild and unpopulated hills and valleys and breath-taking landscapes.

She often uses the panoramic format to mimic how we visualise a scene. When we stand and look at a landscape people’s eyes swivel from side to side to take in the whole vista and this is what generates a perception of place and an emotional response.

She enjoyed going on photographic workshops but after an illness which left her with asthma a course leader suggested she shouldn’t come on another of his workshops as she was holding the other participants up. Once she recovered her equilibrium she realised that this was a business opportunity – not everybody wants to or can climb hills and mountains and walk for miles to take photographs. This germ of an idea grew and she decided to study for a degree in photography.

With the single mindedness of one who has never learnt the dividing line between perseverance and pig-headedness, she enrolled on a New Horizons course, then a Foundation Degree at Mid Cheshire College in Northwich and finally a BA(Hons) course at Batley School of Art (part of Kirklees College).

She now runs workshops for people who don’t want to undertake strenuous hikes up mountains before they can take images. There are numerous beautiful locations where you only have to walk less than 100 yards on even ground to find a photogenic vista.