Gradations on the Salar de Uyuni

It was the first time I’ve seen water on the Salar de Uyuni.

Vera, Tommy, Pete and James on the Salar. Just a few inches of water, but more than enough to allow for perfect reflections in the evening light.

Always choosing to go in the dry season, there are never any guarantees that the season will be exact. In a way, I take delight when the weather is not predictable - whether it’s due to El Niño or something else, temperatures fluctuate, things change, nothing is ever quite the same.

And so, this year, we found a small patch - maybe 5km square, on the Salar which still had water left over from the wet season. Around two to three inches deep. Just enough to allow for beautiful reflections, and not too much to cause waves that would disrupt the calm of infinity when one walked around the location.

I rather enjoyed feeling as though I was walking on water.

I also rather enjoyed studying the smooth gradations in the sky and water, and the enormity of space. So much so, that I found the set of images I edited this year, and indeed what I initially chose to shoot in Bolivia - were more towards my own preferences of ‘less structure, more space for tones to stretch out with gradual variance’.

I originally thought I did photography for the experiences it brings. But as much as I think that is true, it’s not entirely accurate. I think I’m drawn to colour, light and the gradation of time. Not so much the actual subjects of the photos, but the quality of light, and how the tones slowly morph and gradate from one luminosity to another.

When one strips the more conventional subjects out of the scene that we (mistakenly) assume to be the reason for our photographs, we find gradation of colour and luminosity is really at the heart of our picture making.

Mirage

I’d like to thank everyone who bought my new e-book. I’ve only just realised it’s been a couple of decades in the making - it was only possible to write it now, after all the experiences and thoughts I’ve had over the past few decades of editing and working on my art.

One thing leads to another. Stepping stones. Small steps. Gradual progress. Compound interest. Slowly but surely we develop. Patience and self awareness are key.

Got so much to do. But I’m breaking up the drudgery of three months worth of accounts with editing images from my recent travels. Like this shot….

Mirage on the largest salt flat in the world. The heat and air bending light on islands that are 30km away.

I enjoyed Bolivia this year very much. It’s an old friend now. Seventeen years since I first started coming here. I know it very well and have spent a lot of time engaging with it.

What I love about repeating places is that they are seldom the same. Something happens you’ve not seen before. They can surprise you.

I enjoyed shooting the mirages on the Salar this time round. We also had the salt flat partially flooded...

New images from Bolivia to be published later in the year. They’re all edited now, but I have a backlog of work sitting in the queue to be published when the time is right.

Editing Masterclass - Creating 3D Perception

I’ve just released a new e-Book.

Creating 3D Perception teaches the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’. It is not a technical book. It covers concepts you can use to impart a sense of 3D to your images without having to reach for global contrast.

With a few simple, easy-to-remember techniques, you can train your eye — and your editing — to give images a compelling sense of depth and dimension.

This concise e-book distills my editing experience into three core concepts:

  1. Using tonal gradations across a scene

  2. Separating foreground and background luminance

  3. Employing contrast differences to create the illusion of three-dimensional space

You'll learn why a soft gradient convinces the viewer's eye far more than a hard one, how brightening a background can make your subject appear to step forward, and how the luminance of surrounding areas can make the same subject look lighter or darker without touching it at all.

These ideas may seem obvious once you know them — but I can guarantee that they are not so obvious until you do. Few photographers edit with this kind of intention. This book gives you the 'why', so that every edit you make has a clear, considered purpose.

This e-book has been formatted and written in a deliberately concise way, with each lesson distilled down to a page to help with the learning.

immediately applicable to any landscape image.

Specifications: 33 pages.
Format : Electronic e-Book. Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

Buy

How far should one go?

I have long considered the editing stage to be just as creatively important as the capture stage. For those of you who have been following me for a long while, you know that I like to work in the digital editing domain much like a traditional black and white printer would in the darkroom: I like to dodge and burn the images to bring about my own visual aesthetic.

I also use these techniques to help lead the eye around the frame and to enhance the main subject, while maybe trying to subdue less important areas of the scene.

In my view, most folks focus their attention on the capture stage and have the belief that this is where the majority of their improvement in photography will be made.

I have long held the view that editing is not cheating and that it is a creative area where we have more of a chance to express our own unique vision. But perhaps more importantly, it’s where we learn about what works and does not in our compositions. Editing is much like working on a puzzle: as we work through the edit, we are learning how the image is constructed and how it fits together. And more importantly, where it doesn’t work and why it doesn’t work.

Paying attention to the things that don’t work is important. But there’s a tendency to reject and discard failed images without asking oneself ‘why’ they didn’t work.

Editing teaches us to find good source material. By that, I mean good compositions. Scenes where the tones do not clash. Scenes where the edits will ‘flow’. Bad compositions tend to make one struggle to work with them when editing: If the source is broken, then you cannot repair it. Get the source right, and everything else will fall into place. But one can only learn what kinds of source images work best while trying to edit them.

So editing is a skill that needs to be learned, and it is just as important as our fieldwork.

However, editing is a skill that cannot be learned overnight. Or within six months or a year. Much like we are never finished learning to compose out in the field, we are never finished learning to edit.

It is a continual move forward with improving one’s eye. Because if one cannot ‘see’, then one cannot edit well.

Boundaries are important. If you do not know you have boundaries, then my suggestion is that you haven’t pushed your work far enough yet. Everyone has boundaries, and if one is not aware of them, it’s because you haven’t found them yet, and you are more likely working in safe, familiar ground all the time.

To me, one of the biggest skills I have had to learn, is ‘how far I can push the edit’. It’s like stretching a muscle you didn’t know you have. Most of us don’t know what the limits are of our physical abilities, and the same is true with how far we can take our work.

We need to find techniques and tools to help us expand our work. For instance, I now know that the eye is lazy and will convince me that I’ve got a dynamic picture. But when I use a reference image to compare against, I can often see that I have not pushed the edit as far as it could go. Looking for things that take you beyond your own comfort zone is important.

I’ve got some techniques I use all the time, because I’ve learned over the years, that often when I think I am finished with an image, I can sometimes only be half-way there.

An unexpected gift at an unexpected time

I passed on these huts for many years. I’d like to think I just wasn’t ready. Well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I got round to shooting them, and I shot them when I did, because that is when it was time for me to shoot them :-)

Recently, I’ve noticed that I am playing more with man made structures. With these huts, I found that the corrugated roofs almost looked like ploughed fields - a landscape on their own. Especially when the roofs had frost on them, as they do here.

Busy film processing.....

80 rolls of film to process this week in my home. I’ve just set up the film hanging racks. It’s been maybe around two or three years since I started to process film myself and it is still very much a learning experience.

There’s something very satisfying about being in control of the entire process from shooting to printing. But I must confess I still have issues with the film curling once it’s up to dry on the hanging racks you can see in the photo above.

I’ve got a humidifier set up this week to see if that will help, as I believe the curling happens because there are different surfaces on each side of the film and one dries quicker than the other.

I’ve been meaning to write for a while now about my experiences with the film processor I bought. I got an Analogico Dev.a film processor which on paper looks to be ideal. I did however buy it one year into them releasing it and had a hunch that I might be an ‘early adopter’ and to expect teething problems. This has turned out to be true more than I had imagined, but I have found Analogico’s support to be first rate and they always get back to me within a few hours. Always with a solution.

Perhaps at some point, I will buy a newer machine from them, as I think the one I have is now full of so many custom fixes to keep it going. So many things have broken over the time of using it, and always they have encountered the issue before and have a solid reliable fix for it. I am sure that when I do get round to getting a brand new machine, i’ll maybe look back at my first one as an early prototype.

I also had issues with the film developer I was using. If I am not mistaken, I think it’s quite hard to process E6 films in a drum processor and the best way to get even development is to use true inversion (in other words - shake the drum around every once in a while to ensure even coating - this is not possible when the film is sitting in a drum that is fixed onto a spindle on the machine).

I’ve got it tuned as best as I can, and I’m quite happy with the results now.

3 inches of water

This was the first time ever for me, to see parts of the Salar de Uyuni flooded. My guide said that the best conditions were when the water is only a few inches deep as it meant when walking around, no waves would be created. You don’t need a lot of water to create reflections.

I don’t think I’ve ever had the exact same conditions on any of my tours or workshops when I repeat them. I appreciate that for many, coming to Bolivia will be a once in a lifetime visit, but I often like to think that if a place resonates in some way with you, and you have the urge to go back, you should follow it.

I’ve found certain landscapes to be teachers. They just keep on giving. Bolivia is where I first started my unconscious journey towards simplification in my images. It is an old friend these days. It is now seventeen years since I first came here, and I have not tired of returning yet.

In terms of personal development and style, this can only come through visiting the places that resonate with you, and that give you something that others don’t see.

There are far too many people going to the same places and shooting the same things. This is very normal and natural: when we are learning to photograph we tend to gravitate to the locations and compositions that inspire us in other people’s work. But if one wishes to foster a personal style, I think it has to come from finding ‘your own’ places. Rather than following what everyone else is doing, find what interests you, and go with it.

I’ve had a long relationship with many countries and locations in South America. I am aware that these places have contributed to my style of imagery and as I say - have been teachers. I am always thinking and dreaming of where I will go next and I think the best way to find your own path, is to focus on what you love. Not what everyone else is doing.

From Bradord to California Dreaming

The wonderful artist David Hockney as died today.

Hockney first made a real dent in my universe in the film ‘Tim’s Vermeer’ and in his book ‘Secret Knowledge’ where he discusses how he believes many of the great artists used technology to make their great works. He believes Da Vinci and many others like Vermeer used the Camera Obscura to create their great works.

Case in point: Vermeer’s uncanny 3D realism paintings which shone above his contemporaries in terms of looking like ‘photographs’, which, if Hockney is right : they are. The ‘Girl with the Pearl Earing’ is not only a beautiful work of art, but it could also be viewed as a photograph that is recorded faithfully in paint.

All of Vermeer’s paintings were painted in the same studio room, are off similar dimensions, and seem to show chromatic aberrations and other lens defects in the final work.

For me, Hockney, like most, if not all, the painters I love, were photographers at heart. The only difference was that they used oil and their memory and imagination to show others what they saw.

Many photographer's make the error of assuming that we all see the same things.

In a literal sense I don’t even know if that’s really true, and how can I know? For how does one know that the red of the balloon that they experience, is the same red that others experience?

We cannot know. And we will never know.

No, photography is not literal, and it never has been. In a way, it is a lie that was spun many years ago that the camera captures what is there.

Photographs are interpretations. They do not show truth, because truth is often a matter of perspective.

To me, photography is the modern way of paining. If Da Vinci was alive, I am sure he would embrace the camera. He would look at is for what it is: a tool for image capture, and one which will create almost anything depending on who’s hands it is in.

Indeed, Hockney himself played with electronic mediums to create and display his images.

All photographers are painters. All painters are photographers.

I do not know of one notable photographer that does not love painting. Indeed, if I remember correctly, Henri Cartier Bresson starter as a painter, and in later life returned to it.

I love the world of painting. Paintings are photographs in oil, or watercolour or acrylic. For painters are obsessed with light and shade, or colour or monochrome. Photographers, like painters, love a great composition.

Hockney’s paintings are studies in light, shade and form. They are highly individualistic. He was not afraid to show others how he saw the world, and in my view, that is what painters should do.

It’s also what photographer’s should do: show others their unique vision of the world.

13 seconds On the Salar with Pete, Tommy & Vera

From my recent tour to Bolivia. Magical view of the Salar during Sunset. Once sunset had finished I recorded this short video during twilight on my DJI OSMO. I love making short videos as memories of my trips and the OSMO is very small and uber convenient.

I’m just home now. Time to decompress after six weeks away. Film procesing next, and two months worth of book keeping and admin to catch up on.

Uyuni Train Graveyard Graffiti

Yesterday we visited the Uyuni train graveyard. I’ve come here many times but never made any photos. Yesterday it was a lot of fun to take some very quick images over 30 minutes or so with my little Leica M240, which after one month has already developed a fault - the LCD stopped working :-)

There’s something to be said about working very quickly. There’s a fluidity to it. Rather than every step being overly considered, I find myself being able to be more free with decisions.

Anyway, these little travel vignettes are perhaps just turning out to be a travel blog of sorts. It’s good to create these kinds of images in-between my ‘landscape’ work, as I find my photographic eye is kept engaged throughout the day. Particularly during the times when the light isn’t so great for working on my landscape images.