Kingdom

I’ve been meaning to write some reviews of three books I received recently, but due to work commitments, I’ve just not got round to it until now. I have the new book by Paul Wakefield to review (big fan of Paul’s landscape work) and also a new book by my Romanian friend Dorin Bofan. Which is also a very beautiful book. I hope to get round to writing reviews of these two titles over the summer.

But today I’d like to start with Norman McCloskey’s Kingdom book which I received late last year. I wrote to Norman at the time (I did not know him) to congratulate him for such a beautiful design. I have never seen a book with such a beautiful gold cover!

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It was clear from the first page that Kingdom is a work of love. Norman is clearly very much involved in his part of Southern Ireland, and I got the feeling that he has spent many mornings and evenings, out roaming around Kerry to make the images that are presented in the book.

I also enjoyed very much his (extensive) introduction. Often intros to books are short affairs, but I thought he gave a very detailed account of why he focussed on Kerry, and also his life there.

I always prefer books to be highly focussed on a particular subject. Rather than just a collection of images from around Ireland, Kingdom is definitely a love letter to Kerry.

From speaking to Norman, it’s clear that this part of Ireland has become his back yard, a place that he has grown into over the years. Finding the right landscape for your work, is key for personal development. It is something that I strongly believe in. If we are able to find a place that keeps inviting us back, and we find our work seems to go from strength to strength, then I think we should keep returning. We have found a landscape that matches us in terms of giving us growth in what we do, and meeting our abilities. This is what I liked very much about Kingdom. Norman had felt no need to and buy a plane ticket: he had it all here right in front of him and so he’s worked this landscape, and it has become part of him.

I’m delighted to have a copy of Norman’s book. Apart from being a beautiful object, I just think it has a simple conceptual aspect to it: here is a man who loves his own back yard, and if you give him an hour or two, he will take you for a tour of it in this very book.

You can find out more here.

One parting thought, before I end today’s post:

In my view, all keen landscape photographers should collect photographic books. I can appreciate that many landscape photographers are always looking to learn something from a book, so they may focus on books that are tutorial based. But from my own personal experience, I have learned so much from delving into someone’s imagery. There is nothing quite like becoming absorbed in the pages of a nicely printed book, and printed images always trounce websites in terms of showing more detail.

I have an extensive collection of photo books at home. Some of them are so precious to me, that when I feel I am losing inspiration for photography, I will dig out one or two titles that are a key reminder as to why I got into this in the first place. But mostly, because they satisfy the soul.

Retrospective

I’m acutely aware that if one has an audience, that audience are always one step behind you. One of the best ways to illustrate that point is with my photographic books. Books are always based on the past. They can never be an illustration of where you are right now.

In my own case, the last three books I’ve published have been planned for about five years. We knew we were going to do Altiplano, Hálendi and then Sound of Snow. In that order.

This had always been the plan except the last two books came out rather quickly because I had the free time this past year to focus on the design of them. Had it not been for the pandemic, both Hálendi and The Sound of Snow would probably still be vapourware, and so when they would have finally become physical objects, the images within them would be even older than they are now.

This is just a ‘placeholder’ image. This is not the design or intended cover of any retrospective book I end up making.

So in this way, photographic books are always historical. They are a statement of past events.

I am now up to date: the cupboard is now empty of ‘completed projects’.

Which brings me on to thinking about a retrospective. A book that will cover the last decade or so since I ‘went professional’ for want of a better term.

I don’t just want to do a book that has a collection of images only. I’m more interested in telling a story.

So I think the book will try to convey the development and progress of my imagery over the past 10 years.

I’m very aware that certain landscapes have been teachers. And that in order to photograph one kind of landscape, I had to do my homework elsewhere first. I could not have known how to approach the black deserts of Iceland if I had not photographed the Altiplano of Bolivia first. Similarly, I could not have known how to develop my photographs in winter landscapes had it not been for working on luminosity / tonality in the black deserts of Iceland. My Japan imagery was built on top of my experiences of working in the vast black deserts of Iceland. And so on…..

So this is where I think I would like to take such a book. A chronology of epiphanies perhaps. As I often think that if one is developing, there are often times when we hit a new level of awareness, where things come together and begin to make sense.

Thinking this way, and realising that the whole thing is a path of progression, I can’t help but come to the realisation that every point that has come before, has been taking me to where I am right now.

Sound of Snow Deluxe Edition Still Available

Thanks to everyone who bought the book so far. It has meant a lot to me at this time, since I am unable to run workshops or tours right now, the book contributes greatly to my current income.

The standard edition of the Sound of Snow book is now sold out, but I still have copies of the deluxe edition available- which comes in a soft white cloth slipcase and a choice of one of three prints.

Biblioscapes Interview

Euan Ross has a very nice website and podcast about photographic books called Bibioscapes. If you are passionate about photographic books as I am, you should check it out.

Recently he interviewed my book-designer Darren Ciolli-Leach and myself about our decade-long partnership. I hope you enjoy it.

Halendi Image Reviews | Video 8/13

Reserve List?

My new book Hálendi sold out this summer upon announcement. I do have some spare copies I am keeping back - in case some orders go missing in the post, or get damaged. Once I know everyone has their copy, I will release the remaining stock of 20 books.

Should you wish to be on the waitlist, please email me.

Hálendi book review 6/13

Although I do feel I’m giving away a surprise element as to what’s inside my new book ‘Hálendi’, I do think the discussion I had with Sam Gregory was quite fruitful. For me, I was able to get clarity on some of my motivations. It’s often when talking to others that you realise ‘you know something that you didn’t know you knew’ :-)

Image Proofing.....

I’ve got the sequencing of the images completed for my next book, and the text is mostly written. We’re just working out the paper and cloth materials for the publication. Book projects always take longer than anyone would ever realise.

Here are some image proofs. I print everything to make sure it’s right before it goes for print. Often noticing things in the print that I didn’t see on screen, it’s a great sanity check. When I do notice something in the print, it’s often interesting to me to note that I can now see it on screen. But never the other way round.

Completed Image Proofs

It took about three weeks to complete the images for the Hálendi book.

You may be wondering what I had to do, other than just put them in a good order and print them? I rarely print all of my work, it would just be far too time intensive for me to do this and I realise when I publish them on the web, they are about 90% of the way there. Or they way I like to look at it - 100% there, but when I come to print them, I’ll notice things that need to be tightened up and the final image will now be 105%. That extra 5% is the ‘excellence’ in what we do - that extra bit of ‘going a little bit further with the work’.

Truth be told, if you care about your photography, it’s something we all do - we agonise over the smaller details.

Proofs are a way of verifying to me that the images are right. But there’s more to it than this. These proofs will be sent to the printer as a hard-copy - to tell them ‘look, this is what we expect to see in the final print’. Sending files on their own is not enough as each offset press has their own custom ‘colour management’ or maybe ‘no colour management’ in place. So the hard-copies are references for them.

But I find that going through the slow progress if printing 100 images is immersive and instructive. Although I had done an initial image selection and sequencing, I still found about 10 images were dropped from the final book and about 5 or 6 images were added in their place. Sequencing was tightened up as I felt there was a broken flow to the work as you walk from one page to another.

Seems I had to print them to find this out. Seems I needed to go through each image tightening up the tones and colour casts to ‘marry’ with each other to notice find it out also. Seems I had to live with the work over several weeks of printing and editing.

And rarely did I find an image just went straight to print. Every one of them needed work done to make them sit on the page. In some instances the image was too dark, too light, too soft, too hard, lacking contrast, requiring contrast reduction.

Printing always teaches me about my deficiencies. The way I interpret transmitted electronic light from a computer monitor is not the same way I look at light reflected off a piece of paper. I seem to ‘see differently’ and I know it is not a unique trait that I have, but one we all have.

So what’s next? Well we’re still about six months away at least from a printed book in my hands. The book artwork has to be finalised and the materials chosen for the book. We’ve had some price quotes through for soft-back and hard-back books. This is always a trade-off as I don’t have a large audience, so a smaller print run is important, and with smaller print runs the costs go up if you want to go hard-back. Quite a bit. So we will see.

Then when we send the final work to the printer, I would like this time to turn up for the actual printing to see it in progress.

I am going to go quiet now on the book. The rest of the process isn’t that interesting for most, so it’s time for me to talk about other things on this blog.

Page Sequencing & Balancing

A few days ago I began work on proofing the images for inclusion in my next book. As suspected, I’ve found loads of issues with the images once printed. Some of them it’s to do with the blacks and white points of the images, but also, clipping that is incurred by the reduced gamut of the paper I’m proofing onto. I am finding I am having to calm the higher tonal registers to allow the image to sit on the page without any flat-wall-clipping occurring.

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I knew I would have a challenge ahead of me, in terms of sequencing the work. In the proof snapshot you see above, I spent a lot of time matching images to each other so that images on the left and right page compliment or sit well with each other. For me, this is about choosing the right images to begin with. Then once I have them sitting next to each other (I use View / 2-up vertical in Photoshop to view two images side by side, I can notice if there are luminosities that jar between the two side by side images, or colour casts - perhaps in the blacks that work against each other. For instance, one black desert may have more blue in it while the complimentary image that is to sit on the opposite page may have more of a reddish black. These things can sometimes be ‘tuned’ to sit better together and other times, I just find that the image doesn’t work when its colour balance is tuned away from its current colour temperature.

To me, this is ‘mastering’. I am trying to get the entire set of images to sit well together, and for that to happen, it’s never really about subject matter, or geographic location. It’s all about whether the tones and colours (or perhaps for some of you, monochromatic tones) that matters. Images have to sit on opposite pages in a way that they work together as a set. But the work also has to flow through the book as well.

I’m really enjoying this process. Images that I thought were nice, become something special when I print them out and notice further adjustments and enhancements. It’s like putting the icing on the cake.

Printing is indispensable in really getting the best out of your work. And it is giving me a lot of confidence in knowing the work is as good as it can be for publishing in my forthcoming book.