This past week I ran a workshop on the Isle of Eigg here in Scotland. We had a good variety of conditions to shoot in. My favourite part of the week was when we had very poor visibility (great!), very low light (even better!), and quite difficult to shoot in rain and wind (not so great, but part of the deal if you want to capture atmospheric light).
Image © Philippe Beekmans. This was shot on one of the 'worst' days we had during the week. Socked in with misty rain, I have often found my mood affected so deeply by the conditions that I have never ventured out. This morning turned out to be one of the more favourable ones for atmosphere and resulting work.
It was great to see the group embrace the conditions I took them out in :-) It can be an emotional hurdle to get over, if the weather affects one’s mood.
I think there is a disconnect between ‘how one feels’ while experiencing bad weather and how the images look. As a beginner I put the camera away during ‘bad weather’ and only took it out to shoot in ‘good’ weather. These days, I embrace all kinds of weather (there is no such thing as bad weather - just bad light).
Good light for me is soft, low contrast light. Bad light for me is hard, high contrast light. Weather is something I just have to push through in order to find soft light, which may happen on any kind of day, any kind of season.
Image © David Jarman. I remember David fighting to keep his lens dry to make this shot. It's quite difficult to make long exposures in wet weather, but a good chamois leather cloth is ideal at wiping away the rain drops during a two minute exposure as David did.
As a photographer, ‘bad weather days’ are just another dimension to our palette. If we shoot in different weather conditions, then we open ourselves up to coming home with a variety of images.
If we only shoot when it is dry, then our palette becomes rather limited, one dimensional even.
There are a few thing that stops us from widening our palette. First is perhaps our own comfort level when we are out shooting in ‘bad’ weather. The second one is our perception of bad weather. We tend to find low light levels, dark days and reduced colour affect our mood. It can be very difficult to motivate oneself to go outside if we are feeling low due to the weather.
One of my participants told me this week that he often feels quite miserable in bad weather. This is of course very common to find that the weather can affect how we feel when we are out shooting. I have often thought that there is a massive disconnect between what we perceive whilst on location and how we feel about the images we make. Rarely does one look at a scene of mist, atmospheric, frosty and think ‘I wouldn’t want to be out in that’. Instead we think ‘that looks really ethereal’. We think only of the aesthetic whilst reviewing images. But the ‘going out there to do it’ is an entirely different experience.
This is the hurdle we must get over.
Image © Philippe Beekmans
In a way, it is another level of abstraction we must work on: being able to visualise the potential of an image irrespective of how the weather is affecting our mood.
The first day I took the group out in this bad weather, I could almost sense the feeling that everyone was just wondering if it would be worth it, and as it turned out, it was.
These days I now find myself feeling quite inspired when I am in difficult weather situations. I often find myself thinking ‘I wonder what kind of images this will produce?’. The key is to dress appropriately for the weather. If you are warm enough and dry enough, then it’s much easier to focus on the job at hand.
We are there to capture different moods and textures with our camera. There is an emotional dance that happens each time I try to go outside. Some days the weather wins over me, and I do not go, other days I manage to conquer any depressed feelings that bad weather may be casting upon me. For when I do, I am putting myself in a position to capture something unusual and atmospheric.
Many thanks to: Philippe Beeckmans, Rostislav Gerasimov, Mary desJardins, Andy Coulter and David Jarmin for allowing me to publish a portfolio set of some of the images we worked on this past week on Eigg.