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.

Busy Landscapes

It's very difficult to make good images of busy landscapes, and yet we are often drawn to places with too much going on.

The Cuernos (Horns) of Paine & destroyed forest, Chilean Patagonia, 2015

I know of no other craft where one starts with complexity.

In just about any other pursuit, we start with the basics and move up from there. If you take up juggling, you don't start with three balls, you start with one. So it is with photography: each object that is added inside the frame of your camera is like adding another juggling ball to the mix. And if you're juggling balls, you need to know where they all are at the same time.

Yet when we look around our surroundings, we have an amazing ability to filter out most of it. Our vision has evolved to allow us to focus on the things that we're interested in, and exclude those that we're not. This may be really useful in everyday encounters, but it's a disability when it comes to interpreting scenes for photographic possibilities.

So often have I come home and found that the image did not convey what I saw. As a beginner, I would be surprised to discover additional objects in the final photograph that I had not seen at the time of capture. I've gone through over 20 years of trying to improve my awareness to see what is really there - to overcome my instinct to filter out things in the scene.

As I've developed my compositional skills, I've come to realise that beautiful scenery does not automatically equal great imagery. I've also had to accept that there are some things that can't be photographed well. Some places are too big, or have too many things going on in them to capture in their entirety, and what often works better is to take a subset of a location because it makes for a more powerful image than the entire scene does. An example of this is that I've often found that to reduce an entire waterfall down to just a few segments of it - may be more powerful than a photograph of the entire waterfall.

When we put too much in, everything becomes diminished or at best, confused. Consider it another way: if you were writing a proposal for your work, you would never try to discuss several points at the same time, as things would become confused or the points you are trying to covey would become lost. Instead, you would cover each point in its own paragraph. Well if we use this analogy, a set of images is akin to a proposal, and each image is akin to a paragraph in that proposal.

The skill of a landscape photographer, is to be able to take a location and distill it down to a few elements that convey a clear message. The final photograph may not be an accurate impression of the place, because there's been a degree of interpretation applied. Which is fine by me, because that's what photography is all about, in my view.

I knew when I made the image in this post that it was a busy scene. I had already reduced it down to two basic elements as I saw it: the background mountain range and the foreground branches. But I still felt there were unresolved issues with the composition: there's just too much textural information everywhere in the scrub and this detracts from letting my eye move freely between the foreground branches and the background mountain range. In addition, I also felt that the branches might get 'lost' in this textural complexity because tonally, they're not too dissimilar.

My point is this: I knew there was too much complexity. But I also knew that as much as it wasn't perfect, I could live with it. And this in itself, is a whole different ball game from when I used to come home and wonder why my images hadn't come out the way I had seen them.

Association versus the anonymous

I often feel there's too much emphasis made of association.

Landscape photography requires us to be able to abstract: to reduce meaningful objects down to their graphical forms. Rather than thinking about trees, rivers and mountains, we should be able to see them for how beautiful their forms are. Rather than seeing 'mountain', we may see  'pleasing conical shape', rather than seeing 'tree', we may see 'pleasing wavy flow through the image', and rather than seeing 'river', we may see 'beautiful s-curve through the frame'.

Scarista, Isle of Harris, Scotland November 2014, © Bruce Percy. But you didn't really need to know where it was did you? ;-)

But I think this only happens for some of us, and for the majority of us, we photograph things because we know them. If I show you a chair, you associate with it, because you know what a chair is. If I show you a tree, then most people see a tree, because it's what they already know.

To find a beautiful composition, we need to be able to see the relationships between objects, not in terms of what they are (association) but how they graphically fit together. Perhaps the tree and the mountain have similar shapes and there is empathy? Perhaps the tones in the river compliment the tones in the tree? If we do this, we make our imagery stronger, because it has more foundation in the arts than it does in real life.

But there is more to this problem than simply being able to abstract objects down to their basic elements of form and tone. Our problem goes much deeper than this. I'm guilty of finding myself on many occasions making pictures of a place, not because the light is beautiful, but because the place itself is iconic. In fact, sometimes the light at the iconic place is not so special and there is better light elsewhere, yet I still choose to photograph the iconic place.

I've had to ask myself why is it that I do this? Well, I think the reason is simple: we are attracted to what we know and the power of association is a very strong force to deal with. We seek what we know, because we find safety and comfort in it.

So my question to you is: what would you rather do? Would you prefer to photograph an iconic place in boring light, or photograph an anonymous place where the light is beautiful? I think you may say the later, but the truth is, I think many of us often do the former. I'm certainly guilty of it.

When it comes down to it, a photograph of an anonymous place in beautiful light is more powerful than a photograph of an iconic place shot in boring light. But despite believing this, I seem to always gravitate to what I know over what is photographically better.

Being a landscape photographer is sometimes about overcoming our human instincts to go with the familiar and this is certainly one example where our being human gets in the way of better photography.

My first Digital Darkroom Workshop

I'm just home from leading my first ever "Fieldwork to Digital-Darkroom" workshop, which entails marrying what is done out in the field with the post-edit stage. My course is based on my e-book - 'The Digital Darkroom - Image Interpretation Techniques'

Still very much a work-in-progress e-book, but I feel I'm getting a better sense of what should be included now that I'm teaching digital-darkroom interpretation skills.

The course was run at Adrian Hollister's Open Studio environment in the north-west of Scotland. Adrian runs many workshops with such notables as Joe Cornish, David Ward, Eddie Euphramus and the wonderful Paul Wakefield. His studio has six iMac computers, all colour calibrated and it's on the door-step of some wonderful landscapes which are within a 30 minute drive. Perfect venue for running such a workshop.

I've been wanting to run a course like this for a very long time, because I feel that the editing stage is often considered as an almost secondary, isolated task, something that is unrelated to the capture stage. 

Adrian Hollister's Digital Darkroom Studio, Mellon Charles, Wester Ross, Scotland

I firmly believe that the fieldwork and editing stages are interrelated. Our editing sessions teach us about things we didn't notice at the time of capture and they illustrate to us what we need to be more aware of in future - if we choose to make the connection! Similarly, once we know how far we can push and pull images in the digital-darkroom, we are in a more informed position whilst choosing certain subjects, contrasts and qualities of light. There is a symbiotic nature between the two, and so for me, the word 'post' as in 'post-process' discourages our thinking into believing both tasks are unrelated, when they are not.

In fact, I abhor the phrase 'post-process' because it makes the entire editing stage sound like a functional, emotionless act. Images become something you could just stick in a washing machine, turn a few dials and let it run on auto. Which isn't the case. Editing requires much awareness - of tonal relationships, of competing elements, of flow throughout the image.

And adjustments made in the digital-darkroom should be made whilst noticing how our emotional response is affected when we change tones and contrasts in the work. It is much to do about 'feel' as it is to do about technology.

So I made a point that this week's workshop would not be about teaching photoshop, or teaching Lightroom. Anyone can do that in their own time, and that kind of knowledge is easy to get. No, what I wanted to teach was how to interpret what you've captured - to see and take advantage of themes present within the composition, to notice tonal relationships between subjects within the frame, to see that each image has an underlying structure that almost spells out how it should be edited to bring these motifs further forward. 

The digital darkroom is a creative space, one where we can bring out the essence of the motifs we discover in the image. That's its primary function for me. I do not see this as a way for fixing bad images. A bad image is always a bad image. We have an expression here 'you can't polish a turd'. Instead, I see it as a way to bring out the beauty and essence that can, with a bit of interpretation, be found in a good image.

But interpretation is a skill, and like composition, has to be earned and improved over the lifespan of our involvement with photography. There is no manual for this, just an improved ability to read an image, to understand what is going on, and to know your toolkit (software) well enough to be able to bring forward your interpretation.

So I was curious to see how my group of participants would edit their work after five days of guidance and continuous feedback. I definitely saw improvements in most participants work. Certainly in the daily reviews I would notice that all of the participants had observations and awareness of what might be done to help remove distractions, or bring out themes within the work, but what I had not envisaged was that some of the group would be far too subtle with their edits and I think there are a few reasons for this.

Firstly, each one of us has our own aesthetic. We have our own tastes. Some photographers are more interested in the verbatim. What they see out in the landscape is what they want to capture, and so the edits will be done with a lot of sympathy for how they perceived their reality.

Secondly, some will under-edit because of a lack of objectivity. Ideally we need a few weeks between capture and edit. I always find that if trying to edit work straight away is hard because we're so often attached to an idea of what we wanted to convey and if the image is not successful in this regard, we may feel it is not a success. Leave it for a few weeks and you will come back to it with a fresh eye. If there are any motifs of themes within the image - you're more likely to work with those because you're more open to see other things where you were not at the point of capture.

Thirdly, I think under-editing happens through a lack of confidence. Too scared to adjust the image too much because the photographer feels they don't have enough skill to know what to do. But I also think it may be because they feel they may lose something in the process, and could be holding onto how the image looks now, and can't see beyond that to another destination.

It's this that interests me most and I must confess that I feel there is no clear answer. Editing is a skill that is derived from many years of self-improvement. If I look back at my own editing abilities, and consider images I shot 10 years ago, I can see that often I knew there was something missing in an image, but I couldn't put my finger on what it might be. I see tonal errors in them where at the time of edit, my abilities were so untuned I thought I saw beauty. Where I was perhaps overcome by the strong colours of my chosen film, I now see a clumsy edit.

Digital-darkroom skills take a lifetime of continuous self-improvement. We have to put the work in. But we also have to be smart about it. Simply cranking up contrasts or saturation across the board is a clumsy way to edit work, and it should be something that doesn't happen so much as it did when you began your editing career. But things only change if you take the time to consider and reflect on what might be the best way forward to edit your work, and self-awareness is something that has to be built upon over time.

I found my Digital-Darkroom workshop did help my participants. There were moments where I felt I had led my horses to water, only they were unable to drink, because if they can't see it themselves, then I can't force them to. Improving editing skills can't be rushed, but certainly a week in the field and behind a computer with a photographer you like the work of, may help bring about an improved sense of awareness, and that's what I believe happened this week.

Bracing Myself

In just a few days time, I will be thrown back into Winter. Each February I spend two weeks above the arctic circle in Norway's Lofoten islands, and each year it's just like a winter reset.

Made after several days of looking at this scene. Sometimes I like to let a view sit in my mind's eye for a while before I know how I think I want to capture it.

It can be a bit of a jolt to the system, to have to go to Norway at the end of January. While winter is starting to show signs of loosening it's grip here in Scotland ( the days are gradually getting longer), it's not the case in the Lofoten islands up above the arctic circle.

One of the ways I cope with this, is to review my images from Lofoten. It helps me get my 'head into gear' for the trip ahead. My mind is filled with mountains and that beautiful northern light for days before I arrive.

I think there always has to be a 'settling in' period when we venture out with the camera. Go somewhere so different from where we've come from, and it can me physiologically challenging.

But today I've been thinking about the image at the top of this post. It is the view from my friend Camilla's spare bedroom. Camilla lives in the beautiful town of Reine, and her home is situated on the very edge of Reinefjorden. It's one of the most amazing views in the world as far as I am concerned, and it's a place where you can constantly study the shifts in light and season.

Making the photo you see here was hard. Simply because each time I looked out my bedroom window, the view seemed to suggest that although there was something beautiful happening every second, trying to capture the essence of it, would be a challenge.

I think some locations can be quite intimidating on that front. They're just so enigmatic, that the act of trying to start, to begin to make photographs of it, can be quite daunting. Start on the wrong foot and you might just screw up. Take the wrong approach and you might find you feel dissatisfied with what you create: often I feel there has to be a right time and it's best to just leave things until it feels right. So I left my camera in the bag for a few days.

The pressure was gone.

I just enjoyed what I was seeing and this in turn allowed my mind to become immersed in Lofoten. I found my mind and my dreams of what I was seeing began to sink into my emotions over the coming days until it eventually became second-nature. 

I started to understand, to anticipate what the winter storms were going to do to the view I had in front of me. I knew by now where the snow showers were going to go and what parts of the mountain scenery would be obscured and it was at that moment that I took up my camera and started to make photographs.

Simplifying Composition, 2nd Edition, almost done!

Since becoming a full-time workshop leader in 2008, I feel I've experienced and gained so much more than I ever imaged I would. One aspect of this, has been my own development as a teacher. It's been a great experience for me to teach others - sometimes intense, often a lot of fun, very sociable and highly rewarding. 

2nd edition - a complete rewrite

One of the biggest privileges of being a teacher is that it's not just your students that learn. You learn too.

I feel very privileged to  regularly have the opportunity to get a better understanding of many of the core competencies of photography, simply by having to teach them. I now look at each workshop I do, not just as a place to teach others, but also as a space in which to strengthen my own understanding of what I do and why I do it.

It's been quite some journey and every now and then I like to look back and review things. See where I've been, how far I've come.

Way back in 2010, I published an e-book titled Simplifying Composition . It has been one of my most popular titles and I've used it as the basis of my workshops here in Scotland for many years.  

This year I've been feeling that it's about time the e-Book was updated to reflect where I am now as a teacher. Because of this, I've gone back to scratch and rewritten it.

I'm pleased to tell you that the first draft of the new edition is now complete. Other work commitments aside, I hope to have the new edition released early in the new year.

Your own voice

 This week I was interviewed by the UK photographic magazine 'Black & White Photography'. It was interesting to find out that they were particularly interested in my isle of Harris photos below. 

During my chat with Mark Bentley, we got on to the subject of style and that of finding your own voice.

Isle of Harris images as requested by the Uk magazine 'Black & White Photography'. I'm always surprised by the choices others make when choosing which images of mine to use for publication.

I've learned that I can't guess how some of my images will be received, and I never hear the same things about them. This has taught me that I just need to listen and trust my own intuition first and foremost. I can't anticipate what others will like or dislike about my work, and the only person I need to satisfy is myself.

I've worked with many participants through the years on my workshops here in Scotland. The subject of finding a style is never far away from our daily critique sessions, so it's only natural that I should have formed some views on this.

To my mind, a voice is a unique thing. to be recognised, you need to stand out from everyone else in some way. So I think the main characteristic of those who create very personal work is that they have a deep trust in themselves to be independent and do their own thing.

Anyone who does something unique does so,  because they do not to pander to trends or others opinions. Take it from me: I hear opinions about my work from others all the time and there is so much variety in what others tell me, that I've come to the conclusion that if I tried to follow it - I'd get lost pretty quickly. Instead, what I choose to do (note that I'm the one choosing what to do here) - is listen to the stuff that makes sense or enlightens me in some way.  The rest - the stuff that I feel doesn't make sense or can't see any value in, I just take as someone else's opinion. Interestingly, I find that most of the time, others opinions usually tell me more about them, than me.

No one else can live my life or make my creative decisions for me. The only person who knows where I want to go with my photography is ultimately me. I can glean some advice from others but in general, the impetus to do anything in my work has to come from within. 

So here are my thoughts on finding your own voice.

• Your own voice, is something you find when you go it alone.
• Your own voice, is something that only you can find.
• Your own voice, is something that comes through a process of self enquiry.
• Your own voice, is something that becomes apparent over time.
• Your own voice, is something that comes to you when you listen and observe the changes within you.
• Your own voice, can't be found by being part of the derivative. Follow others and you quickly get lost in a sea of ubiquity.
• Your own voice, is something that happens when you are free of current trends.
• Your own voice, is something that comes when you don't try to please others.
• Your own voice, is something that comes when you are free of expectations.
• Your own voice, is something that comes when you are free of ego.
• Your own voice, is something that comes when you know yourself (i.e your capabilities and limitations).
• Your own voice, comes when you stop copying your influences. Embrace your influences and use them as the basis for where you start, but don't get tied to them.
• Your own voice, comes when you do your art for you and you alone.

In a nutshell, you need to have the courage to follow your own path, and above all, believe in yourself.

The memory of a colour

While I was in the Fjallabak region of the central highlands of Iceland this September, I encountered a number of vast black deserts. I've been in vast landscapes of nothingness before, such as the Salar de Uyuni salt flats of the Bolivian altiplano, and also the pampas of Patagonia.

These places are captivating endless nothingnesses that make the eye hunt and hunt for something to latch onto. At least, that's what I think happens when humans encounter something so vast and featureless.

One of the many black deserts of the central highlands of Iceland. Black can come in many shades and hues, as I discovered.

This was nothing new for me. But what was new for me, was that I discovered that black isn't really just black. There are many different types of black desert to be found in Iceland. One of them - near the volcano Hekla, is so jet-black (it feels as if nothing can escape it's pull) that you realise every other black desert you've witnessed has to a large degree - some kind of colour to it.

There's a lot of psychology at play when it comes to interpreting colour.

Bruce Frazer's excellent book on colour management. Every photographer should read this.

For instance, I've been reading Bruce Frazer's fantastic book 'Real World Colour Management', and in it he describes the psychological factors involved in how we interpret colour. Colour is as he describes it 'an event'. It is light being reflected off a subject and viewed by an observer.

We have what he describes 'memory colour'. For instance, we know what skin tone looks like, and we all know the kind of blue a blue sky should be. We know 'from memory' how these colours should be. There are psychological expectations that certain colours should be certain colours. 

I think this applies to how I perceived the black deserts of Iceland. If i say a desert is black, we think of it as jet-black, even though it might be a deep, muddy brown-black, or a deep muddy purple-black.

I think most of the time, many of us simply go around looking at colour but not 'seeing it'. We use memory colours all the time with little thought to what the real colour of an object might be.

For example, last year during a workshop, my group and I were all working in very pink light during sunrise. Knowing that the entire landscape was bathed in a pink light, and that many of us don't notice the colour cast so obviously, I asked my group individually what colour the clouds were. Half of the group correctly said that the clouds were pink, while the other half incorrectly said that they were white. My feeling on this matter is that those who said the clouds were white - were attaching a memory of what they think clouds should look like. They were, in other words, not really noticing the colour of the object at all, but just attaching a common belief that clouds are white. This is a good example of memory colour.

But let's go one stage further. This might actually not be colour-memory at play though. It could simply be our internal auto-white-balance working. It's known that the human visual system is very good at adapting to different hues of white light. If we are in twilight, we may not see the blue colour temperature of the light on the landscape (but we sure would notice it's twilight if we take a photo on a digital camera and look at the histogram - there will predominantly be a lot of information in the blue channel, and very little in the red and green channels). Likewise, if we are sitting in tungsten light at home, our visual system adapts and tunes out the 3000k warm hue that we're being bathed in.

I think I was applying 'colour memory' to the black deserts of Iceland - I wasn't aware of the subtle differences in hues between one black desert and the other, because I had just attached a memory of what I know black should be (all blacks are black right?).

Being aware of the subtle differences in colour is hard work, because our visual system has evolved to adapt to whatever context we exist in. If we are sitting in pink sunrise light, we tune it out. If we do detect any pink at all,  it's in the more obvious region of the sky where the sun is. That's why most amateur photographers point their cameras towards the sun at sunrise (I tend to point 180º the other way, because I know the pink light is everywhere, and the tones are softer and much easier to record).

If I see clouds, I assume they are white because my visual system has its own auto-white balance. If I see skin tones, I use colour-memory to assume all skin tones to be the same, regardless of what kind of light the person is being bathed in. For example, if someone is standing underneath a green tree, there will be a degree of green-ness to their skin tone which I won't see, because of colour memory.

We lie to ourselves all the time, but our camera doesnt. It tell's it like it is, and I think this is the nub of todays post: being a good photographer is about being as colour-aware as we can be.

This is not an easy thing to do, because we are hijacked by our own evolution: our visual system tunes out colour casts all the time, and we also apply colour memory to familiar objects. We expect certain things to have certain colours, and as a result, we tend to ignore the subtle difference that the colour temperature of the light we're working in can have.

As I keep saying to myself as I work on my new images from Iceland "Not all black deserts are black".

The Art of Being Quiet

I've been wanting to say for a while now, that I'm sure some of you may have noticed that my blogging activity isn't as frequent as it used to be. Through working a lot on my tours and workshops, things have gotten very busy for me. I find that I need  to get time away from my business, as well as time alone each year to find my own inspiration. There is only so much that you can give before you start feeling that you need to keep something back for yourself.

Space in a photograph conveys silence and silence can often be beautiful.

So I'd much rather write on this blog when I feel I have something of merit to say, and when I feel recharged enough to say it.

If I think about some of my most favourite pieces of music, they often contain moments of silence. Silence is a creative way of conveying calmness, or pause for thought. In photography, space in an image conveys a sense of calmness or silence and I find silence in photographs very moving. 

I'm aware that there is a trend to blog and facebook/tweet your every waking thought, but I find very little beauty in doing that. I don't wish to bombard you with noise, because sometimes that's all I may have to offer you.

Besides isn't there an ugliness in this kind of constant intrusion? And a beauty in silence?

Sensory Numbness?

I'm on the isle of Jura on the west coast of Scotland this week for some private time away from running my workshop business.

It's so quiet that we've been discussing how just the little noises seem to be the main background soundtrack to life here. For instance, the water in the nearby stream and the wind rustling through the leaves of the trees and of course the bird song, are our new audio backdrop.

And this has got me thinking about a time I used to visit my dad, when he lived on the isle of Seal (an even smaller, quieter Scottish island). Where he lived, there was no city-noise - no noise pollution to speak of. When things get so quiet, you tend to notice the smaller sounds.

I remember one night hearing a car which sounded like it was maybe just outside the house. My dad told me it was perhaps a mile or so away and this made me realise that in towns, the background-noise levels are so high, that I've gotten so used to filtering it out, to not pay attention to it.

The same can be said about light. At my dad's house, with no street lights - it was so dark outside -  that I couldn't see two feet in front of me. I had to go back to his house to get a torch so I could go and fetch something from my car just outside. Another time I was visiting, the moon lit up the landscape for miles and I could see without any need for a torch.

I think that when we live in cities, we are bombarded by light and sound pollution. So much so, that we spend most of our time filtering it out. We learn to become sensory-numb to our surroundings, otherwise it's simply too much to handle.

In landscape photography, having a keen sense of visual awareness can help improve our compositions. I've noticed over the years of running workshops that many participants tell me it takes them a day or two to get into the mode of 'seeing'. I'm wondering if it's because we have taught ourselves to filter things out whilst living in cities and when we venture into nature, we have to reverse that, and pay attention to even the smallest visual detail. This takes a lot of effort and 're-learning'.

While I was running a workshop on Eigg, we had the sun rising behind us. Everyone wanted to go that direction (I personally hate shooting into the sun or towards a sunrise or sunset), but I maintained that we stay where we were, as during sunrise and sunset, the colour temperature all over the sky is really beautiful - not just in the direction of where the sun is. My reason for staying where we were was because the tones are easier to shoot at 180 degrees to the sun.

I think it's very easy to latch on to the obvious blazing sunrise or sunset colours, and to believe that the colours are only evident in the direction where the sun is, but if we take time to consider the softer tones around the entire sky, we can see that they are evident everywhere. Only we tend to filter them out. I think this is a case in point of us looking but not 'seeing'. In other words, we are filtering out qualities in the landscape because they are too subtle for our overly de-sensitised nervous system.

Before I finish this post today, I'll tell you one more account. Last year while running a workshop on the same island, we were looking at the clouds being lit up by the sunrise and I asked each member of my party what colour the clouds were. Half of them stated that the clouds were grey while the other half correctly stated that the clouds had a magenta colour to them. It's interesting to see that some of us have to work hard to notice the subtle differences in tone and colour around us.

In our everyday encounters, we are very seldom asked to consider colours, or subtleties of tone. I think this is perhaps why many of us love photography in the first place - because it allows us the luxury to spend time thinking about aspects of the world around us that we rarely get a chance to enjoy.

Being a good photographer has always been about 'seeing', not just looking. I wonder if our city environments are teaching us bad habits by encouraging us to adopt a level of sensory numbness?