BYWAYS. Photographs by Roger A Deakins

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Deakin appears in The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane, whose TV documentary The Wild Places of Essex includes scenes shot at Walnut Tree Farm. Two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins has two projects this season: His fifth film with director Sam Mendes, “Empire of Light,” and “Byways,” a coffee-table book of his black-and-white photography spanning 50 years of world travels.

I’m not the author of the film, obviously—I’m working for a director and with anywhere up to a couple of hundred people—but I do think you stamp your point of view, your taste, on the work you do. Deakins’ two current projects are as personal as can be — one to him: a book of 50 years’ worth of his black-and-white still photographs, “ Byways”; the other to auteur Sam Mendes and his new film, “ Empire of Light. After art college in Bath, I was working as a photographer for a small arts centre in north Devon when the National Film School opened its doors. The book is also an account of those he meets along the way, from the unfriendly school officials who despatch him, dripping, from the river Itchen at Winchester College, to an extraordinary vignette of a fenland eel-man. Others in the book are from trips with his wife, former script supervisor and current collaborator James Deakins, to New Zealand and Australia, plus images from filming locations such as Berlin, Budapest, and New Mexico.I confess to feeling something like jealousy reading the record of Deakin’s wonderful, friend-filled existence, at once liberated and rooted. There are men with tractors, people with sheep, dogs with jobs, a determined fellow carrying dried brush on his back who brings to mind the cover of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. His British colleagues have honored him with 11 nominations and seven wins at British Society of Cinematographers events.

This shot was taken of Salisbury Plain (central southern England) at dusk at the end of a scouting day for locations, and the tree is shown at the end of the film 1917. What does one of the world’s most sought-after cinematographers do to relax when he’s not scouting, planning or shooting a movie?Join Oscar-winning Make-up Effects artist Howard Berger and veteran film journalist Marshall Julius for a book signing of their new publication Masters of Make-up Effects: A Century of Practical Magic. Do you feel that there’s a line to be drawn between the work you do as a cinematographer and your experiences taking photographs?

He did not win for No Country For Old Men in 2007, perhaps because he competed against himself that year with Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. What's so attractive about Deakin's book, and what makes it such a wonderful travelling companion, is – apart from its pin-sharp descriptions and deep humanity – its subversiveness. While not the biggest box office hit of Deakins’s career, the use of vignetting and unusual light sourcing in Jesse James gave the film a warm reception among cinematography enthusiasts. Byways is the first monograph by the legendary cinematographer, best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes, and Denis Villeneuve.His preference then, before the advent of digital cameras, was to shoot black and white film; he would process the negatives himself in a darkroom set up in the basement of his Santa Monica home. Waterlog, the only book he published in his lifetime, topped the UK best seller charts and founded the wild swimming movement.