Once more, with feeling

I’m in the process of text revisions for my forthcoming book. I’ve come to realise that part of the creative process is repetition. Of endlessly going round and round the same material, auditioning it, fine tuning it, re-auditioning it, re-tuning it again, and again. And again.

There must come a point when the revisions get smaller and smaller, until there are no more revisions left to do. That’s when I let things sit for a while. Forget about it for a week or two, and then - review. Again.

That was the process for the Altiplano book. I think I stopped writing the text about 9 months before it was completed. We had so many revisions, so many alterations due to realising the flow wasn’t quite there yet. We also had translators turning the English into Spanish. It was a long haul.

With the forthcoming book, I’ve been working on the introduction by my guide / driver today. His English is amazing (as all Icelanders seem to be) and his knowledge of his own back yard is second to none. It’s been fun reading about his experiences, and how we started to work together - particularly about the interior tours we do.

I’ve also got some essays that need to be expanded upon. It’s a lot of fun thinking about the concepts for a book.

Oh, and we’re hoping this one might be a hardback this time. We will see.

Cloud Inversion, Torres del Paine, April 2019

I love bad weather, snow storms, rain and fog. Temperature inversions are also pretty neat.

Most times that I am in Torres del Paine national park in Chile, we tend to see a temperature inversion from one particular viewpoint in the park. This year, we saw it happen on two consecutive days, but it is often so fleeting that on the second visit, I almost made the decision to keep driving as there seemed to be nothing special happening. But the clouds came in thick and fast and it wasn’t long before the entire valley below us was hemmed in with a thick cloud.

My guide Sabine and some of the group participants from this year’s Patagonia tour.

As you can see from the group photo above, the cloud was below us. It acted like a ‘sea’ in some respects. And it kept changing over the course of the hour or so that we were there.

I made a series of shots using a telephoto lens and a 2x converter for my Hasselblad film camera. I had the equivalent of a 250mm lens on, and sometimes I used a combination of 2x and 1.4 converters stacked together to get in close to the peaks of the Cuernos (horns) of the Paine massif.

Being highly selective on what you choose to put in the frame is of course one of the key points in composition. So too, is what we choose to leave out. It would have been so tempting for me to make vista wide shots of the valley with the entire range peaking out of the sea of cloud, but I chose instead to narrow right into what I consider the ‘signature’ shapes of the Torres range.

I was also attracted to the whispy, flowing s-curved shapes of the clouds as they moved horizontally across the frame. I felt these would add a degree of ‘elegance’ or ‘simplicity’, to add compositional flow to the shots.

There’s a tendency to dream up in one’s head what I’d like to see. In my mind’s eye, I was hoping for a shot like the one below, where perhaps the clouds would part at such a point and show me just the central part of the signature region of the Torres mountains. I did get the shot, but as you can see - it’s quite grainy. I love this grainy effect, but it’s really caused by me pushing the contrast extremely hard in the edit to try to bring out the mountains. They were very very faint in the original transparency.

Working in low visibility is advantageous. It’s also a guessing game and can lead to many many surprises.

I often feel that most of us are uncomfortable with images that are vague, unclear, or just lead too much to interpretation. Coupled with that, there is often a tendency to stress the point. If we feel something is nice, we tend to exaggerate it for fear that others don’t see what we saw.

Being able to edit images to still maintain a degree of subtlety is hard. But if you can pull it off, it probably signifies that you’re more confident, less likely to try to stress the point to your audience. You trust in knowing that the photograph is as strong as it needs to be, and that your viewer may not need to be hand-held through viewing it as much as you would have tried to do in the past.

Working with vague, undefined, hidden landscapes is wonderful for this. Besides, I’ve always enjoyed a story that gives me room for my own interpretation.

Some things don't sit well, while other things do

Gut instinct is one of the best tools we have as photographers.

How about you? Do you listen to how you are feeling about something when making a decision, or do you just plunge on regardless? To me, listening to my gut is Karmic. What goes around comes around. If you’re not feeling it, probably it’s due to the idea not being for you. Or it’s simply a bad idea. If you are feeling it, then most probably it’s what you want to do. So you should follow it.

If I could give any simple advice about the creative process, this would pretty much be it.

Creative flow (part 3 of 3)

Today, if you have time, I would like to suggest that you pick 3 photos from your recent efforts, and set a time limit to edit them. Just work on them quickly, take almost no care in precision of the work, just let yourself go with whatever happens while you edit them. Rather than applying a lot of consideration just apply the edits broadly.

Accept the following:

1. Anything you do that you didn’t intend : look at it and consider whether the unintentional is interesting / offers up something you might like to go with. If so, then go with it.

2. Accept that the work is transient. Disposable even. It’s just a task to see how fluid you can be.

This is all in the nature of seeing how fluid you can be. How creative you are, and whether the work comes together quickly. Don’t judge yourself too harshly on what you create, just try to see if you create new work, and to see if it offers up something you hadn’t done before.

if we are able to remove any sense of preciousness about what we do, we may be able to tap into a degree of fluidity. Not everything we do is going to be good and we need to get over that. It’s more important to just keep creating, rather than measuring what it is we do. Creativity is fluid, and it ebbs and flows. Some days your work will be average, boring even, other days it will be something else.

I feel we often over judge our work while we are creating it. I think this can lead to stagnation. This is why I think having no undo feature in your editing software may be liberating. It teaches you to just ‘go with whatever happens’, to understand that you are in a performance.

Performances are transient things - they are what they are while they are happening. If you can consider what you do as a performance, one way of doing something for just the moment you are in, then I think you can free yourself enough to let your creativity flourish.

Creative flow (Part 2 of 3)

Yesterday I asked you ‘what would you do if you had no undo?’

My own views are that creativity is a mixture of part performance and part control:

1. Performance - free flow, getting into the zone and just going with a flow. Less thinking, more intuition.

2. Control - noticing things in the performance that you like / don’t like, and tuning the performance accordingly.

I think there’s too much focus on the control side of creativity, and much less on the performance aspect.

Having an undo is part of the control aspect of creativity. I would like to put forward an argument that by avoiding using the undo feature, you are in the ‘performance’ aspect of creativity. Stop your flow to hit the undo button and you are breaking flow.

I sometimes feel that there is a need to over-produce work, that photographers want to have all options available to them, so that if they make a mistake, they can back up and correct it. But by having this ‘escape option’ available all the time, we’re less likely to just run with where the work is taking us.

If you were a live musician then you would be very used to your performances varying from one concert to another. But when we have endless options to go back and correct what we do, I think we can lose a lot of spontaneity in our work.

But the problem is much wider than this. I think that when we have too many options and a way of backing out, we never really ever commit, or finalise what we’re doing.

I hear too many points of view these days about trying to remove the need to commit to anything for as long as possible. For instance, just recently I heard an argument about not using grads in the field because they are ‘baked into’ the shot and cannot be undone later. It’s a terrible argument because it is trying to avoid introducing mistakes.

We have to make mistakes. Mistakes are part of the creative process. Mistakes allow us to find new directions through the unintended. We can often be surprised by what we’re shown when we do something we didn’t intend to do. Mistakes are part of experimenting. Creativity is all about experimentation, and experimentation means we do not really know what the outcome will be.

Mistakes also tell us that we need to work on improving our technique.

Avoiding any commitment, any final decision in what you do to the very end is, well, just a false view that you have endless options and therefore greater control. Too much control and the performance suffers. Spontaneity is removed and the work suffers.

Creativity is a mixture of performance and control. We need to be loose enough to find new things, and know when to hone and shape (control) what we’ve found. We also need to know when to let go and surrender to wherever the work is taking us.

Creativity is about keeping up a flow in one’s work. That can only happen when we choose to commit, choose to complete, and choose to move on.

I’d suggest avoiding using the undo feature for a while. See where your decisions take you.

Creative Flow (part 1 of 3)

Today i’d like to ask you a question: What if all the tools you use had no undo? What would you do, if each time you changed something, you couldn’t undo it?

What if you had to stand by each decision you made, whether it was the choice of focal length, the choice of grad filter, exposure, or choice of parameter change in your editing software?

View fullsize

My latest set of Harris images, edited in one day, to try to be as fluid as I could.

Do you think having no undo feature, no way to change your decision would be beneficial or detrimental to your creativity, and creative flow?

What do you think?

I feel alive when I create new work

I’ve just completed work on a new set of images. Well, to be honest, I have a backlog of around four portfolios worth of images right now, so the shooting has been done. I just need to edit and arrange the work. The new set of images were shot in May this year, but it’s only this week that I’ve had the free time and space to review the work and edit it.

Lençois Maranhenses, May 2019.

For me, I feel alive and strong when I have finished new work. It’s always very empowering to find that I’m now sitting on top of a new set of images. There’s a freshness to it all: these are new! I’ve not seen them before, nor have I lived with them for many years…. they make me feel present, and they make me feel as though what I am doing is fluid, free, and on-going. Not creating any new work for many months gives me the feeling of being static, done, and tired.

“You’re only ever as good as the last great thing you did”, is a quote from a Prefab Sprout song. I’ve always remembered it, because it’s a reminder to keep creating, keep going forward. Keep producing new work. It’s the only way to feel that you ‘are’.

I ‘am’ a photographer when I create work. When I don’t create new work, but just go over my older work, I am no longer a photographer: I’m a curator. Curating one’s work is fine, but the reason why we do what we do, is to feel alive, and we feel alive when we are creating.

Keep creating. Keep moving forward.

Don't get a job

Malcolm Gladwell has often been misquoted that you just need to apply 10,000 hours to become great at something. He didn’t really quite say that. In his book he talks about those hours being quality hours. In other words, some people are great self-learners and if they apply themselves the right way, they can improve. Others spend hours on something and never get any better.

Well, I hate to put particular formulas on the arts, but I do think you have to be driven, and passionate and I think most people who are great at what they do, most probably found that they spent all their waking free hours doing what they do. It’s not guaranteed to get you there, but certainly putting the work in goes a long way towards it. And conversely, spending little time on it and applying little effort is going to get you nowhere fast.

I like Eno’s belief in (admittedly a very old interview) where he says that getting a job will just get in the way of what it is you are wanting to do.

Well, I’m not going to argue with this, but I’m not exactly telling you to drop your job either if you want to improve as a photographer. My point of showing you his video, is that I think to be a better artist, you need to immerse yourself in what you do.

His argument isn’t really to ‘not get a job’, but more about ‘using your free time more efficiently to spend on your passion’. Or perhaps ‘re organising your life so that you can spend more time on the things that are important to you’.

How many of us are time efficient? How many of you have heard others say ‘I’d really like to do that but I don’t have the time’. I’ve always felt this is a bit of a cop-out argument. If you really want to do something, you tend to find a way don’t you? You can’t not do the thing you want to do, because you so badly want to do them. So when I hear ‘I’d really like to do that but I don’t have the time’, I’m hearing that they have different priorities (which is fine).

If something is that important to you - you make the time, you find it some way, somehow. You just can’t not do the thing you are burning to do.

I also think that in the process of re-arranging your life to spend more time on the things you value most, things just start to change, and it’s almost as if the universe starts to give you more of what you want.

Staying your ground, while everyone thinks you're wrong

About four years ago, I left Facebook, because I felt that it was getting in the way of my own inner aspirations. I was slowly but surely, starting to feel that I had to please my audience with what I posted, and that was making me very uncomfortable. Images that I thought were my best, I found would sometimes be received less enthusiastically than I had anticipated, while others that I thought were either very traditional or average would get more interest than I felt they deserved. I started to feel as if I was letting my audience dictate to me what I do as an artist.

I know they of course weren’t deliberately putting any pressure upon me, but I did start to wonder : “Just how much attention am I paying to others points of view about what I do?”

And that’s not good.

I’d been interested in Lencois Maranhenses in Brazil for around 5 years. I had a hunch there was great potential there for photography, yet when I searched on google images, I found very few inspiring images of the place.

We are living in an age where photographers are crowd gathering in certain key hot-spots around the world now. This is an example of everyone following everyone else. But you can find your own landscapes, your own place if you decide to go against the current trends and look elsewhere.

But it’s what most of us do. We value our own work based on the validation we get from others. And I think this is a problem we all have to overcome to some degree, if we want our work to be individualistic, rather than looking like everyone else’s work.

You see, I believe that to create work that stands out from everyone else’s, you have to go it alone. Pandering to trends or what others think, ultimately will dilute who you are. You become a mix of other people’s ideas and you lose yourself in trying to belong.

It all comes down to confidence.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about the importance of confidence in one’s own abilities. Confidence is required to be brave enough to do things that no one else is doing, and to maybe just ignore that just because everyone else is doing something, you don’t need to follow suit. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that I tend to have an aversion to going where everyone else is going. I despise trends to the point that when I start to find everyone wants to go to the same places as I do, I’d much rather stop going there, and find somewhere new to go to.

Being creative is about being willing to go in directions where no one else is going, or to mix up styles in a way that haven’t been attempted. It’s about trying to work outside your normal parameters of what you usually do.

Creativity is also about not giving a damn what others think, because most of the time, most others opinions are based on what is generally accepted. Show someone a new idea and you’ll find it often take time to be accepted. Being first at doing something is rarely rewarded in the arts.

This is why I feel that looking for acceptance on social media platforms doesn’t work, because these platforms work by the lowest common denominator : images that the majority will like, tend to do well. Which means to get any attention on these platforms, you have to create work that appeals to the middle road. As a result of this, your work becomes safe, and predictable, and again, you lose yourself in a sea of ubiquity.

Whereas being individual in your work means you’re probably not going to do appeal to the masses. Instead, you’re going to appeal to an underground group of people who like your particular thing.

This means you’re not going to get big like counts, and some folks just won’t get what it is that you do. So you have to toughen up, and that’s where confidence comes in. If you can build in a degree of belief in yourself, then you’ll feel more able to ride out the knocks and lack of acceptance you get from those that are looking for something more middle of the road.

But having confidence will enable you to be more committed to staying your ground even while others around you may think you are wrong.

Acceptance by others, often equates to conforming, fitting in, and most probably going down a well beaten path to accomplished mediocrity.

If you’re looking to find a style or find yourself in what you do, you have to learn to let go of needing other people’s validation. It takes guts and a degree of bravery to be different. But being different is the rarest currency you possess, because no one else can do you, like you can :-)

Letting go of completed work

When is our work finished? When do we decide it’s done, and put it to bed? When do we move on?

These are difficult questions because often, truth is hard.

It’s very hard to let go. Not just of our completed work, but of everything. But I believe that it’s necessary, let alone paramount to staying healthy, to do so. At some point, what we have poured our efforts into, has to be shelved in the ‘done’, or ‘past’ shelf. Otherwise we never move forward and more importantly, we never create the space required to let the future come in.

But when does one know when work is complete?

I think the answer is: it never is.

Work is never complete. But we have to realise at some point, that we’ve gone as far as we can go with it. Perhaps an older self, a version of us much later in the future may know how to take it further, but the truth is - if you’re feeling you’re at the end of the road with the work - then it’s complete.

There’s a tendency to overwork stuff. Spoil it. Part of your skillset as a photographer is to know when you’ve done enough, and to understand when the time is right to let go.

For me, I don’t like to dwell on my older work. I seldom look at it. I think for me, it’s more the creation of new work that inspires me, rather than dwelling on what I already have created. By not looking at my older work, I feel I’m allowed to free myself from the past. You see, revisiting what you did, and endlessly toying with it - is just far too unhealthy in my book. It smacks of someone who’s got no new ideas.

There’s a line in a song by a British band called Prefab Sprout that goes:

‘You surely are a truly gifted kid,
but you’re only as good as, the last great thing you did’
- Moving the River by Prefab Sprout

It’s a line that’s stayed with me for most of my life. It’s a reminder that tinkering with images and never leaving them alone, means I’m stuck in the past. I’d much rather be out there creating new work, and discovering more about what i’m capable of producing. Everything I create is a vignette. It’s only ever a shadow of what could have been. I know I’ll never complete anything, so everything I do is unfinished. Rather than get wound up about it, it’s much healthier to assume that everything is a prototype, a moment in time, just a moment. It makes it less precious, and allows me to move forward.

Letting to let go is hard. I hope you don’t think that at any point in this post I suggest it’s easy - for you - for me. It’s just hard. But it is necessary.