nostalgia

A feeling of nostalgia is hitting me tonight.

As I sit here, after spending the whole week preparing copies of my Altiplano book to be shipped out, I can’t help reflect upon the journeys I’ve made over the past decade or so.

I’ve said many times, that the time we spend outside making images, is a way of us marking our time. Photography gives us a great chance to stop and think about where we are ‘right now’, and then as time goes on, we can look back at images we created and they bring us right back to that moment.

Who we were, what was going on in our lives. Photography gives us a chance to not only relive the past, but also to draw contrasts with where we are now, who we are now, and how we’ve changed.

I can’t think of a better way of marking my time. Photography has given me a way of remembering the past, and of noting just how much I’ve done with my life.

And for that: I can’t help but feel rather nostalgic tonight.

I’m not entirely at ease with the emotion. I think nostalgia is sort of interlaced with a sense of loss. I think that’s ok though. Isn’t it? We must all accept that what water has passed under the bridge won’t return. What we experienced, what we felt and saw, happens only once.

For me, I think the feeling of nostalgia tells me one thing: to cherish every. single. moment. Who we are, are our memories. We are the culmination of everything that went before us. To revel in what we did, where we were, who we were, what we were doing, is such a precious gift.

Great times are often happening right now, except we lack the foresight to know it. You may be forming some of your most precious memories this year, except you won’t know it until much later on in life.

Well, I digress….. but it does have a point. I can’t help thinking about the amateur photographer I was, with a few friends around me who said ‘you should go pro’ (Don’t all friends tell you that?). Except I was daft (stupid) enough to believe. it. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s also been the best thing I ever did.

My Altplano book wouldn’t have happened without the past. I needed to go create some memories, and I needed to go and live. I went to the Altiplano of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile several times, so much so that I can mark my life by it. I know where I was in 2009, 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2016.

My Altiplano book couldn’t have happened without the culmination of experiences. As I said a few days ago, you don’t create work by watching YouTube tutorials, or by reading loads of blogs. You create work by finding out who you are. And to do that, you need to go explore.

That’s exactly what I did. I went exploring.

My Altiplano book couldn’t have happened any other way. And looking back, I realise it’s given me more than just a nice book, and some nice images: It gave me some special memories and markers for my life.

Nostalgia. Well, sometimes it serves us well :-)

The art of overlooking something

Sometimes I overlook images. I don't see them, don't recognise them for their beauty. It's a talent I have, one that I think most of us have to not truly see what is before us :-)

As part of reviewing work for my upcoming Altiplano book this year, I've been finding work that I can't quite understand why I passed it by. The images are very beautiful and yet I failed to embrace them at the time I was editing.

We all do it. Sometimes we don't see our work for what it truly is (this goes both ways - sometimes I think it's better than it actually is, other times I don't appreciate the beauty because I am so hung up on how I wanted the image to turn out, and don't accept it for what it offers.

There's a remedy to this: every once in a while, I go back to my older images and review them ( in my case - I look at the unscanned Velvia transparencies). I then focus on the work I didn't use and try to see if there's something there that I missed first time round.

I can guarantee I will find something for sure. Either because I was too focussed on other things to notice it, or I was simply too close.

One of photography's much needed skills, is the ability to review oneself. To do that, you have to be open to what you've done, accept the failures as much as the successes, and to be as objective as you can be.

Progress

Sometimes you just want to go back and rewrite history. Your older work feels immature and lacking.

If you feel like that, it's a good sign that there's been progress in what you do, because you are probably seeing issues in the work that you didn't see at the time you made them.

I've just had the uncomfortable task of going back over my older Bolivia work choosing images for inclusion in my forthcoming book 'Altiplano'. I think it's encouraging to note that I am uncomfortable with the older work, as I do believe there has been an improvement in my visual awareness, and hopefully editing skills.

There are maybe a hand-full of the 63 images that I intend to include in the book, that really need to be tuned a lot for one basic reason: way back when I started out, I didn't really know how to utilise the complete dynamic range of the print.

I think that review is healthy. But going over your older work endlessly trying to make it perfect isn't. Still, there are times when dusting off older work does give you the chance to reconsider.... but I often feel if the image is well known and much loved, it's best to leave it alone.

Let's see where my book preparation takes me......

Hit Rate doesn't matter

A good friend of mine recently asked me how many good images I shoot on a roll of film.

I can fully appreciate that it's just very interesting to know how often a photographer reaches success with his images - it might give an indication to the skill of the photographer, but it might not.

In my own case, I shoot a lot. And I'm very selective about what gets published. 

Borax field, Bolivian Altiplano, © Bruce Percy 2017

I don't think we should focus too much on how successful we are. Simply because I believe that experimentation is an important ingredient in the creative process and by definition, experimentation means being open to trying different things without fear of failure.

Let's consider that experimentation actually means. If you are experimenting, it means you don't quite know what the outcome will be like. This means that it could be somewhere between two extreme possibilities: a success or a failure. There's too much emphasis on failure being a bad thing. I think failure is a positive thing because you have to find out what you don't want to figure out where you need to go.

Indeed, I find that when I look back at my rolls of films, each roll is a chronological record of me working a scene. Take the transparencies shown below. There are four strips from one roll all laid out from start to finish from left to right. You can see that as the shoot proceeded I went from sunset to twilight.

If we analyse what I was doing, I think the roll of film breaks down to two major compositions. The first composition is using the peak of a volcano as a black triangle on the ridge of a borax field (it's not snow - this was shot in Bolivia). You can see I try the volcano peak on the right side of the frame at different focal lengths (it's bigger in the first shot and smaller in the next two). I then settle for the volcano peak on the left side of the frame. 

The 2nd composition is really about the black hillside in the distance. Again you can see I place the black hill in the background on different sides of the frame.

There is a theme going on with both compositions: I'm using a stark black object to frame against the white borax - these images are exploiting the tonal difference between black volcanos and hills against white borax.

A roll of processed 120 Velvia film, showing you the chronological sequence that the images were shot in.

The other thing to notice is that I am doing small shifts in the image sequence - changing the foreground slightly or using a different focal length to make the small volcano bigger in the frame.

I like to explore a scene, and take different compositions with different focal lengths. On the surface it may seem as if I'm making the same photo again and again, but I'm really looking for a perfect scene and this is the most important point: I have given myself permission to experiment.

When it comes down to the final edit, I think there are perhaps two images in this roll of film that I will compete and be happy with. I don't view the others as wastage of film, or failures: everything I've shot contributes to the final result. Consider them prototypes, or whatever, they all contribute to where I finally end up.

So with that in mind, I think 'hit-rate' is rather unimportant.

Shoot when you feel you need to shoot, consider if you are changing anything in the composition each time you click the shutter rather than just endlessly repeating the same shot, think about what might make the image stronger or weaker if you change something.

Borax field, Bolivian Altiplano, © Bruce Percy 2017

I think I am always shooting variations on a theme. Once I find my main composition, I will take around four or even an entire roll of film working the scene, experimenting, because I can't be a good judge of what I've shot until I get home, I'd therefore like to try out as many possibilities as I can. And that means discarding the thought of how many successful images I've made. It's really quite irrelevant.

Keep on experimenting and being open to trying new things. By it's very definition, experimentation means you don't really know the outcome of what you're doing. To truly experiment you have to be open to failure, because if you aren't open to failure, then you aren't experimenting. If you aren't experimenting, then you aren't growing.

Forthcoming Book

This year will see the publication of the second instalment of my Colourchrome book that was published last year. The new book will be of similar format: same dimension, but this time it will be a detailed monograph of my Altiplano images, interlaced with stories from my time at high elevation. The book will also contain some context towards the geographical and cultural region: Bolivia is a high altitude landscape and the land here is the way it is due to the environmental conditions and local farming.

Forthcoming book cover (prototype).

I've been photographing the Altiplano regions of Argentina, Bolivia & Chile for the past nine years.

I had hoped to publish a book on the Atacama regions of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina  several years ago, but the project just kept extending as I found each year that I went back to complete the work I would find more locations worthy of exploring.

A handful of images

The whole region would take a lifetime to photograph, so I came to the conclusion recently that it is a task that has no end in sight, and I should really draw a line where I feel there is some kind of personal natural conclusion.

Expect an announcement later in the year.

Cono de Arita, Puna de Atacama, Argentina. 
Image © Bruce Percy 2017.

A landscape full of light

This week I've just completed working on new images from the Altiplano of Bolivia.

The Salar de Uyuni - the largest salt flat in the world, contains a world full of light at sunrise and sunset. These images were shot this June on Hasselblad 500 series cameras with Fujifilm Velvia 50 RVP film.

Images © Bruce Percy, 2015

Over the past few months, I've had some time away from my busy schedule each year. I've been at home for most of the time, sleeping in the same bed and finding a routine in the day to day experiences of city life. It's been a real luxury for me to do this.

Having this time and space at home, away from workshops and tours, has allowed me to entertain working on some of my own images that I've been stock piling up for some time. It's been hugely rewarding (and of great relief) to be able to unburden my conscience by completing work from the Isle of Harris, Patagonia and now the Bolivian Altiplano. Having a backlog of work that is incomplete feels unhealthy: it creates a blockage of sorts in my mind, and stops me from moving forward with what I do. I like to leave work for a while before I edit it, to allow objectivity into the picture, but leaving work for far too long starts to invite a sense of procrastination and other complex feelings about your work. It's not advised. Trust me :-)

I love my work: I'm so extremely lucky to be able to go to so many wonderfully exotic landscapes each year. Many of these places have become friends - as my favourite landscape photographer - Michael Kenna has often said in his interviews - the more you return to a place, the more you get to know it, to open up a deeper conversation with it. I couldn't agree more.

With this in mind, I present to you my most recent images from the Bolivian Altiplano.

About the Altiplano

At high altitudes between 3,600m and 4,800m, the air is thin here. There is no humidity so temperatures drop below freezing at night. There are no roads to speak of - just vast desert interspersed with Land Cruiser tracks spreading out in all directions. Professional help is needed and indeed, sensible. The guides and drivers I use here know their way around the landscape, and can also be found to navigate the largest salt flat - the Salar de Uyuni by fixing onto the far off distant silhouettes of volcanos. It is a challenging place, and coming here requires a lot of planning and discussions since many of the tour operators do not venture out for the special hours.

About the new Work

I should stress that there were some preconceived notions about what I hoped to achieve on my visit this June. When I say preconceived - I mean that I can't help having visual ideas or dreams about what I hope to accomplish. They are really motivators to get my inspiration working and I'm quite happy to depart from them once on location. They are dreams, and as such, they are often quite broad and not too specific.

It had been two years since I was last here, and I knew I'd missed certain key locations if I were hoping to complete a rounded representation of what is here. Now that I've completed the new work, I realise that although I did indeed visit some of these key locations and realise some of the images I'd hoped to make, the new body of work is different yet again from anything I had envisaged.

Things never quite turn out the way you want them to. In the process of aiming for what I was looking for, I've been fortunate to discover beautiful locations and imagery that I couldn't have dreamed of before setting off on this journey.

This, I feel, is the best thing about photography: you always aim for something, and more often than not, the final results and experiences are more surprising than you could have ever imagined.

Special thanks

I'd like to express my deepest of thanks to the following guides and drivers who assisted me over the three week period I was at high altitude:

Drivers

Abel Valdivia Lopez
Armando Mamani Flores
Demetrio Chavez Vergara

Guides

Alvaro Oropeza Carbera
Marisol Maydana

Film processing

AG Photographic, who should be commended for giving consistent and reliable results. In an age where I've had to switch lab because of poor or contaminated processing, AG can be trusted to give me the standard of film developing I need.

Valle de Daliì

This week I've been working on the images I shot in Bolivia this summer.

I have a lot to say on the matter, but right now, thought I would share these images with you today. They were made in the Dalì desert - it's not a region you can get to in 4WD as it is now off-limits, to protect the region from car tracks messing it up. This means that you have to walk uphill for 2 hours from the roadside and because the altitude is around 4,000 metres - isn't easy going due to the lack of air.

My guide and myself started to walk into the Dalì region at around 2pm and didn't get into the area until just after 4:30pm. On my walk, I noticed that the sand colour would abruptly change from light tones to dark tones, and indeed, you can see some evidence of this feature in the pictures above - what might look like shadows on the surface of the desert floor is actually the variance in tone from one sand texture to another. 

The rock formations here are spread out over such a large distance, that its impossible to visit them all, so I really just had to opt for one location and stay there for the evening shoot. And what light / cloud formations we had. As much as I try not to pre-visualise a shoot before visiting a place, I had seen the Dalì stones from the side of the road and it had been a place i'd had in my mind's eye for some time. I often find that when I go back to somewhere I know well, I have a 'list' of things I would like to capture. You see, the first visit to any place often feels like you skim off the really obvious places, and each subsequent visit requires more effort, or you start to visit places that are more off the beaten track. That's exactly what I'd hoped for during my private time in Bolivia this year.

It has to be said that it is also the hardest place to 'be'. Photography wise it is quite easy because each morning and evening the light is often superb, but in terms of what the environment is doing to you - it's tough.

I found over the two weeks that I was living up at high elevation (3,600m to 4,800m), my lips got chapped, the skin on my hands started to blister from the overall dryness of the place and dust was never to far away from me most of the time. The temperatures range from -17ºc in the morning to 20ºC in the sun during the day (but the wind is always present and it feels much colder). The UV light is hard on your skin and your eyes, plus, each time you step into the shade, the temperature plummets.

But what a landscape. It is the place I'm most interested in and inspired in right now with my own photography.

Certain Landscapes have the power to Shape You

I’m sure all of us have had a positive encounter with someone, at some crucial moment, which has changed the course of our lives in some way.

Well, similar to this, I believe that some landscapes, when I've met them at a certain point in my own creative life, have changed the course of my own photographic development.

Seilebost beach, Isle of Harris, Scotland. Image © Bruce Percy 2014.  

Seilebost becomes a massive sand flat at low tide. It's this vastness and space that allowed me to see parallels with the empty landscapes of the Bolivian Altiplano - a landscape that has taught me so much.

I remember many years ago first visiting the Isle of Harris in the far north west of Scotland. I was struck by the beauty of the beaches there, but I had difficulty in translating the scenery into photographs that conveyed what I was feeling. I've had many encounters such as this in my photographic life where I've visited a place, and although I love it and find it extremely beautiful, I'm still at a loss as to how to photograph it (well). Making good photographs is not simply a case of finding good compositions and good light, but it's more than this for me: it's about finding an underlying theme - something which gives the body of work a sense of cohesion.

I tend to look at these encounters with the view that perhaps I'm not approaching the place the right way, or that perhaps I'm simply not ready as a photographer to get out of the experience what I feel is there. That doesn't mean I shouldn't try - it just means that perhaps I haven't the skills yet to convey what I'm seeing.

Take this case in point. It had been four years since I had last visited Harris. In the intervening years, I had photographed many ‘empty places’ that had taught me so much. I felt that if I returned to Harris now, I might have a better handle on how to approach its minimalistic landscape.

It was just a hunch, but I feel I've worked on my self-awareness enough to understand that what I am looking for has changed over the years. When I first started out making pictures, I was always looking for the iconic - for places that were easily recognisable, and also objects that are easily understood (trees, rivers, mountains). See 'association versus the anonymous' for more on this. More recently I've found I'm much more interested in the mood and atmosphere of a place rather than photographing known or easy to understand objects asI believe photographs can be extremely powerful if tones and colours are used to spark an emotional response. Well, that's how I see it anyway.

Laguna Colorada, Bolivian Altiplano. Image © Bruce Percy 2013

Laguna Colorada is a red lake at high altitude. There are no structures such as mountains or trees in this landscape to grab onto for security. You have no alternative, but to work with what it gives you - tones and colours only.

I show both these photos for one purpose: to illustrate that the Bolivian shot made in 2013 helped me 'see' how I could approach the Isle of Harris here in Scotland. Ok, you might want to discuss how both images are quite similar, and maybe you’re thinking I've just borrowed from a template of what worked previously. But I feel the similarity is due to much more than that.

Firstly, when I went to Bolivia, I was forced to work with tones and colours because sometimes there's not a whole lot else in the landscape to work with. 

(On a side note I fully appreciate that it can be quite daunting for many of us and I would not criticise anyone for feeling there was 'nothing there to photograph'. I feel so often I rely on easy to understand objects such as trees, rocks and mountains to give my photographs focus. But i've realised that the act of looking for recognisable objects in the landscape is sometimes just me looking for a emotional crutch, and what I'm really doing, is avoiding working with what i’ve been given).

Since visiting Bolivia and learning to work with empty places, the experience has had far reaching repercussions for my photography. I now find it much easier to approach empty places with confidence and to work with different climatic conditions. I often see parallels between one landscape and another and I utilise these relationships when I'm aware of them. For example, the black beaches of Iceland have taught me how to approach the black volcanic lagoons of Patagonia. I see parallels all the time now and I know this is because one landscape teaches me how to photograph another.

As for the Isle of Harris: I remember when I made the image you see at the top of this post. I was on the beach with my group of workshop participants, and one of them, Carlos said to me 'this reminds me of your Bolivian Altiplano shots', to which I replied 'Yes!'. Most of the time however, the connection isn't so obvious. It can often be an unconscious process where I realise many months or years later that there is a connection between one place and another. That's why it's taken me about six years to figure out how I think Harris is best conveyed. I needed to go to Bolivia first to be taught how to work with empty places before I could approach a part of my own country.

Some landscapes have the power to shape us. They can be road-signs to show us where we are going with our photography. It's just up to us to have the awareness skills to see the connection, or let the connection come to us many years down the line, and run with it.

Driving the Salar de Uyuni

I've been in South America for the past six weeks. Today I am flying home.

One of my Photo Tour participants - Geoffrey Van Beylen, kindly sent me these videos of us driving the Salar de Uyni salt flat after an early morning sunrise shoot in the middle of it. 

The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world. In the video you can see that we are spread into two Land Cruisers, and that we are heading for a volcano (Tunupa) in the distance. As you watch the video, the volcano doesn't get any closer, despite appearing to be rather close. It's about 30KM away from where we were in our cars. It's easy to get confused by distances in Bolivia.

Here is another one showing the deserts that we have to cross. The distances are large and the roads are often just tyre marks in the sand often. I wouldn't recommend trying to navigate these places on your own. I am often surprised by the knowledge that my drivers have of the areas. They know these 'roads' well, despite the landscape often consisting of many criss-crossed markings that have no road signs and no indication of where they lead to. 

I'm personally surprised that Bolivia is not on the 'map' for most photo-tour / landscape-workshop participants. Most folks haven't figured out yet that Bolivia is really 'up there' in terms of scenery and photography.

The Salar at dusk, Laguna Colorada at dusk and the Salar again at dusk, but this time shot from an island in the heart of the salt flat.

I also spent some personal time after the tours back in Bolivia for a week exploring more of the landscape and making some new images. I found some very surprising locations that are not on the general tourist trail that are very worthy places to visit and I felt I made some new images which I hope to include in a new book I'm currently working on.

As with all things, I tend to find that I go back to a place to 'complete' what I felt I missed the last time, only to find out there is a whole lot more. It seems that I could spend years working on a book of the Altiplano....and it would be tempting to do so. But I now feel I need one or two more trips here to finish off what I started back in 2009. Yep, I've been coming to Bolivia for quite a while now. The quality of the light here at sunrise and sunset is like nowhere else that I've been so far.

As part of my time here in South America, I also visited a new place - the Argentina side of the Altiplano, which at the moment is even less well known than Bolivia is, but is just as impressive, and different. This particular place has a landscape that is not unlike the central highlands of Iceland in my opinion, and also many other strange and wonderful locations. Perhaps that book on the Altiplano is going to take much longer than I had anticipated..... and I feel I need to go back to this region as well. So I'm already hatching plans to do so within the next six months if I can.

So much to explore, and so little time.... :-) But I feel I've found 'my landscape', a place that I have room to grow as a photographer. The world may be getting smaller, and sometimes it may feel as though everywhere has been photographed to death, but in reality - we haven't even scratched the surface of what is out there.

I had a great time with my groups in Patagonia and Bolivia. Many thanks to all whom spent time with me (including you too Brian ;-)

We are masters of self-deception

For a long while now, I've been saying that I feel there is little difference in approach between post-editing (I dislike this term), and the initial image creation. Well, there is a difference - the difference is that we treat them differently. The difference is in our attitudes to how we consider and reflect during these two states of being.

When I'm working behind my computer monitor in my studio, I am looking at a photograph. When I am out in the field making images and looking through my viewfinder, I am also aware that I am looking at a photograph - only, I have to go through some kind of abstraction to do this. I've been doing this for a while now, that I see no difference between the making of an image, and the editing of one. They both require the same skills: ultimately it boils down to noticing shapes and tones and elements within the frame. Whether they are 3D real objects in the real world, or a collection of shapes and tones on a screen is irrelevant. Or so it should be.

But consider the image in this post. I've got two versions of it. The original, and an edited version. The difference between the two is that in the edited version, I've removed the break in the cloud in the top left-hand corner of the frame as well as its corresponding reflection in the salt flat.

It's all very easy to see how this image could be improved by removing this 'blot' in the image, and so often I find that books or articles on websites show us this technique, but none discuss how we should train ourselves to notice these distractions or 'flaws' at the point of making the exposure. Which is to say, most articles discuss how to 'fix' an image, but few discuss how to avoid this error in the first place. Because by avoiding it, it means we have a better awareness of what is going on, and thus, have a keener eye for making better images.

Back to my original point: I see no distinction between editing back in my studio, and the creation of the image whilst out in the field. I've discovered that all the time I've invested in working on images and editing them at home has improved my eye to notice distractions like the break in the cloud at the point of exposure. In general, when I am out in the field, I am thinking not about clouds and sun breaking through, but more about tonal relationships and relationships between shapes in the landscape. If my eye is well practiced in this pursuit, I would notice the break in the clouds and figure that it is distracting. I would not make the exposure, either waiting for the break to dispel, or re-composing as best to remove it all together.

But as much as I hate to admit it: I'm not infallible. I still have a long way to go with my own photography, because photography is all about awareness, and I sometimes let a little issue like this break in the clouds slip through the net. I would say that I often notice issues like this whilst in the field.

I think this is definitely one of those cases where living with a new image for a few weeks, or in this case, several months, has allowed me to grow irritated by this anomaly. What appeared to be ok to me at the time I first edited this image, now rubs me up the wrong way. This has only happened because I've had time to live with the work, and eventually begin to see it for what it is, rather than what I tricked myself into believing it was.

So there are perhaps three things to consider in this post:

1) Always leave some time between the shoot and the edit before you work on the images, as this will give you greater objectivity

2) Once edited, live with the work for some time, so you can learn to see all its facets, it's perfections and imperfections. This too, will give you greater objectivity, and you will learn a few things about yourself in the process. For me, I learned that I still don't often see all the issues in an image until much, much later on. I still have a long way to go in closing this gap between image creation and the editing stage.

3) Noticing the break in the cloud while looking at the image a few months down the line, has taught me to be more observant to these issues while out creating the images in the field. My time behind my computer has taught me what to look out for and observe more while making the original capture. As I said at the beginning of this post: there should be little difference between our time behind our comptuter screens and our time out in the field. We need to be able to interpret scenes as scenes, whether it is real and in front of us in all it's 3D glory, or whether it is a 2D representation on our computer screens. We are dealing with shapes and tones always. There is no difference. What we do and learn behind our computer screens should feed back into our time out in the field. That's why I abhor the term 'post-processing', because it encourages the attitude that there is a distinction between the two. There is no distinction. There is only shapes and tones.

The only difference between the two states of 'being' is that we think there's a difference. We are masters at deceiving ourselves.