Karen Frenkel
Karen is a professional landscape photographer and writer living in the Peak District National Park. With her ever growing collection of around 12,000 images, 7,000 of which are of the Peak District, she is one of the leading landscape photographers covering this area. The other areas covered in her library range from Patagonia in Chile, Pakistan, Philippines and across to Corsica, Spain and the Italian Dolomites.

An initial career as a research chemist financed her real passion for travel, the outdoors and landscape photography. With a move back to her native Derbyshire in 1993 and inspired by the beautiful scenery of the Peak District, her landscape photography skills, instilled into her by her father at an early age, were developed further. At the age of 12 she had been given her first SLR camera and loved to follow her father onto the hills and back to the darkroom to watch the pictures magically reappear back onto paper.

In 1996 following the success of many picture sales both to the public and publishers, she gave up her work in chemistry and started a full time career in landscape photography. Karen's photographs regularly feature in magazines, books, calendars, cards, posters and advertising material. Her work is divided between illustrative and her more interpretative style which is better suited for fine art prints.

In 2000 her first book, The Rambler's Guide to the Peak District, written by Roly Smith, was published by Harper Collins and is illustrated entirely by Karen's images. The work was highly commended in the Year 2000 OWG Photographic Awards. Since then she has been asked to work on other books which are currently under publication.

In addition to her published work, Karen runs a small, handmade greetings card business based in the Peak District. She also gives illustrated talks and sells some of her work as hand prints to galleries.

Most of Karen's work is taken using 35mm Nikon equipment and also Mamiya 6x6 and 6x4.5 medium format cameras, primarily using 50ASA Fuji Velvia film. This film gives very fine grain and saturated colours for optimum quality landscapes. Consequently, a sturdy tripod is needed for most of her work. She prefers to use natural light and only a minimal use of filters, namely polarising, grey graduate and warm-up filters if necessary.

Karen Frenkel's website http://www.karenfrenkel.info/

Exhibitions