My friend Libby Hall, who has died aged 81, was a talented street and press photographer, writer and collector.

Her collection of thousands of vintage dog photographs was published as four books by Bloomsbury between 2000 and 2007, then acquired by the Bishopsgate Institute, which called it “possibly the largest number of canine pictures ever gathered by any single person”.

Libby taught herself photography from Popular Photography magazine after receiving a Box Brownie for her seventh birthday. After leaving the Rudolf Steiner school in New York at 16, she worked for six months in the photo lab at Life magazine, then at Village Voice as distribution manager.

At 18, she moved to Vienna, where she took the photographs of which she was most proud. A friendship with the American photojournalist Walker Evans helped her refine her technique.

Having moved to Suffolk in the mid 1960s to work at AS Neill’s Summerhill school, she documented life in her local pub, the Engineer in Leiston, in a series of photographs following the opening of a nuclear power station in nearby Sizewell.

Libby was born in New York to William McKinley Osborne II, a newspaperman, restaurateur and clerk, and Charlotte (nee Cameron), a designer and antique-store owner. The family, by Libby’s account, flitted between Manhattan, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine.

From 1960, while living in Vienna, she began a four-year relationship with Arthur S (Anand) Lall, an Indian diplomat and writer, and was subsequently briefly married to Peter Wood. Meeting the writer John Berger in a Genevan supermarket in 1964 began a lifelong friendship. I met her later through writing Berger’s biography. But it was while she was a press photographer for the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star) in London in 1966 that she met the political cartoonist Tony Hall; they settled in Clapton, east London, and married in 1973.

Following her marriage, Libby wound down her professional photography career. In later years, she took Open University courses in geology and science, and became an expert on Arnold Bennett’s novels.

After Tony’s death in 2008, she had “Stop! Do not resuscitate, living will extant” tattooed on her chest. Her diagnosis with end-stage idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 2017 did not dim her sense of humour, her curiosity about the world or her ability to travel it in her imagination. Shetland was her last great fascination. Though she knew she would never visit, she fell asleep every night listening to Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham’s song By Dundas Loch.

“Mine has been a good life measured out in dogs,” she wrote in her memoir, self-published in 2019. Her last, Pip, lives with her stepson, Andrew, and his wife, Laura.

Andrew and her brother, Billy, survive her.

Are you the type of landscape photographer who visits a location once and then head off to other new locations, never to return? Or are you the type that returns to a location over and over? Revisiting a location presents significant opportunities for the landscape photographer.

As a landscape photographer, I like to revisit locations to help increase the odds of walking away with a portfolio-worthy image I am proud of. The repeated visits help me learn the area, find strong compositions, and determine what environmental conditions are helping create a unique photograph.

Advantages of Revisiting

If you revisit a location, it affords several advantages over just visiting an area once. You learn simple logistics that make subsequent visits easier and more efficient: which overlook is best, which trail is best, where to park. All of this helps make getting to the most promising spot more familiar and straightforward.

When approaching a scene for the first time, it is easy to get overwhelmed. I frequently find my senses overloaded at new locations. While I have techniques to help slow me down, I often take the “obvious” shot instead of really working the scene to find an interesting composition that tells a story.

I can think and process more reasonably if I revisit the scene on the second and third visits. My compositions improve or become more interesting because I am more in tune with the area.

And finally, the environmental conditions change on other visits. On first visits, the newness of a location makes everything seem like it is excellent. But was the light really the best? Were the clouds cooperating? Does fog or rain make the place even more unique? The more times you visit a location, the odds of you witnessing and recognizing special conditions increase, likely leading to stronger, more interesting images.

If you visit a location once, it might seem impressive initially, but is it just the “newness,” or is it the right conditions and composition lining up simultaneously?

My Recent Experience

I recently visited Arizona, specifically the Superstition Mountain area. I will likely be in this area several more times in the coming months, and I had considered this initial trip a scouting trip. Learn where the trail heads were, view the area from different angles, and get a feel for the area, so that on future visits, I increase my odds of success in capturing a great photo.

Upon my arrival, there was one park that I wanted to visit right away. Its location to where I was staying was convenient, and from my research, it seemed to offer lots of potential. But I needed to get a feel for the logistics: entry passes, park hours, trailheads, and what it looked like in person.

Over the course of three days, I visited, scouted, and photographed the area five times. On my first morning, I visited the park to scout what I thought was a promising trail. I made waypoints during my hike for return visits, and since it was overcast, I also took a few pictures.

The very evening of my first day in Arizona, I returned to the park for sunset and used my waypoints to reach a spot for photographs quickly. I was treated to amazing colors on the rock walls and felt good about my scouting.

The next day, I returned for sunset. I chose a slight variation of which trail I took to get a different angle. In addition, the sunset that evening was incredible, and I had different colors on the rock walls to photograph.

I returned for sunrise the next morning. That trip wasn’t the most fruitful, but I again visited a different area of the park and learned more about good angles and objects for the foreground that I could use for the more optimal sunset time.

And finally, I visited one more evening, using what I had learned on previous trips and then getting lucky with a rare rainbow over the scene. Simply by revisiting the location, I increased my odds of experiencing a more unique scene.

Why Revisit

Revisiting an area helps you become more in tune with the location, from logistics to refining your compositions. It also helps increase the chance you will witness some truly unique scenes.

How about you? Do you revisit landscape photography scenes? Do you find it helpful for your photography?