Capturing the essence of the island's defences

Shooting the perfect black and white landscape takes perseverance and patience - and you should never be afraid to break the rules. Guernsey Press photographer Adrian Miller explained to Zoe Ash how he captured these haunting images TWENTY years ago Adrian Miller was asked to photograph a series of Martello towers for a book written by a local author.

So when the Guernsey Press team embarked on a series of photographic essays, Guernsey fortifications were his natural choice.

For Ady, this was a chance to get back to what he loved: black and white landscape photography.

'Visually it has a lot more impact. When you take the colour out you are just left with the content and it is much easier to focus on the texture of the building,' explained Ady.

He wanted to create dramatic, almost threatening images of the coastline.

Fort Grey, Castle Cornet and Vale Castle were an obvious place to start.

Ady must have photographed Castle Cornet 100 times, but he knew he had hit the jackpot one April lunchtime when he was driving along the seafront.

'I was on the way home and there was this really eerie mist hanging around the castle, it was really exciting. I wanted to photograph it from Fort George and I was just hoping that the mist wouldn't be gone by the time I got up there.

A few seconds after I had taken the shot, it was gone.'To a degree, this project was a waiting game. Everything had to be perfect and nothing was more important than the lighting.

'With each of these shots I've gone back a few times until the conditions are exactly right,' said Ady.

In earlier days, as a keen amateur, he would sit for an hour-and-a-half waiting for the exact moment to capture the perfect sunset.

Light exposure was key to achieving the moody shots Ady was looking for.

He wanted dramatic skies and wasn't going to settle for anything less.

'There has to be cloud in the sky to get any kind of detail. It's no good if it is just blue sky or completely overcast.'

He shot all the photographs on a digital Canon 1D with a wide-angle lens. The raw images were colour and they were desaturated and worked on using Photoshop.

'As I was taking them I was already thinking about how I could work on them and improve them,' said Ady.

He bracket exposed to make sure the sky was exposed correctly: otherwise it would have been over-exposed and all the detail would be lost.La Prevote was the most challenging subject.

'It was difficult because it was against the sun. I needed to expose it so detail was still there in the foreground and the sky.'

The shot of the St Peter's tower has a creepy, wartime feel to it, almost as if a bomb had just gone off, with the mist acting as smoke. All the photographs in the series were taken this year, the one of Vale Castle being the most recent.

There is a general rule of thirds when taking a photograph. Everything from the horizon to the subject is taken at a third or two thirds up or down the picture. It's thought to be more pleasing to the eye, but this doesn't happen in the shot of Rousse tower. It shouldn't work, but it does.

'It's good to break the rules sometimes,' said Ady.