Beyond Words at Stills Gallery

One of the UK's leading photographic book shops - Beyond Words, is going to be at this years Edinburgh Festival.

I love good quality photographic books, and because of this, I'm keen to help support small specialised book stores as much as I can. Amazon can maybe compete with price, but there's something to be said about speaking to someone who has a breadth of knowledge about photographers, knows their work really well, and also knows about their published work to date.

Neil has a great selection of photographic books. For me, it's like being let loose in a sweetie (candy) store. I find this one of the best things - being able to find out about other artists and their work.

If you're going to be in Scotland during August, you can find Neil & Co from Beyond Words with a host of books for browsing (and buying) at Stills Gallery (23 Cockburn Street, EH1 1BP) from Tuesday the 8th to Saturday the 13th of August (11am to 7pm).

Making time.

Today I've been printing some of my work. Having a fully calibrated system at home has given me great confidence in my work from concept to final print. It's just great. I don't like to go over my older work too much as I feel that what's done is done. But printing some of these images today from my favourite island here in Scotland - Eigg, I have been considering something that Brooks Jensen covers in his fantastic book 'Letting go of the camera'.

Brooks discusses how a lot of budding photographers are keen to get out there to make images, but never seem to have the time - time as we all know, is a precious commodity. Brooks suggests that many photographers use their busy lives; family & work commitments as a way to explain why they never quite get round to creating that body of work they have always meant to do.

In his article, Brooks also discusses famous photographers, and how he, tends to view them as people that lead exceptional lives, which he knows is incorrect, because as he points out; Ansel Adams would have mown his lawn from time to time and even taken the trash out. In other words, as much as we put some very talented people on a pedestal, and like to think that they create work because they are different from us, they are still human, and still have all the time constraints placed upon them that we have. They too have family commitments and work commitments (yes, pro photographers don't spend all day meandering about making great art).

If I look at my own life at the moment, I'm aware that for the past two years, I've been so busy running a workshop business. I've not had as much time as I'd like to dedicate to my own photography.

But looking back at some of the images contained within my A2 print out today (See above), a lot of these were created during the tail end of workshops. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that although I've had less time to be on my own and make images, I've created some of my best images to date over one year simply because I was on location more often than not (admittedly, I had very little time while I was there, because my priorities were to run a workshop and spend as much time with my clients - but I did manage to make some of my best images all the same, because I was outside more times than I have ever been in any other vocation that I've held in the past).

A lot of us think that we need to go somewhere special to make images. We also think that we need to set aside some special time to do it in. Only when the circumstances are perfect - no pressing engagements, no work commitments, no family commitments - then we will be free to be creative. We believe that, until that time is here; we can't be productive or make good images, or tune into our creativity. We essentially put a limit on our photography before we've even set foot out the door!

I think when we give ourselves those sets of rules to be creative within, all we're really doing is procrastinating. It's been cleverly disguised as some valid reason, but it's just another form of creative constipation.

I'm sure that if we want to create art, we will do so, no matter what the obstacles are.

ps. I intentionally show you two images here: the first is the file used to print on my Epson 4880, reduced for the web, while the second is taken with my Lumix GF1 of prints generated from the same file (raw, with no colour applied - I fully appreciate that digital devices such as digital cameras are not colour accurate - but the tolerances here are small and ilustrate reasonably well the colour accuracy I have in my printer set up).

More December Planning

I'm almost ready to get the credit card out and book a flight to Norway for this December. I noticed on The Photographer's Ephemeris that there are no details for sunrise and sunset from the 11th of December onwards. This at first, was a little strange to take in, until I realised that the sun does not rise above the horizon and therefore, nor does it set. The place is in perpetual darkness from the 11th of December until the 3rd of January, as you can see here in this screen shot of TPE:

As you can see (click to see a larger view), there are no times for the sun (or the moon for that matter) on the 11th of December. So this means that I need to plan my trip to go a little earlier in December.

Personally, I wish to experience the perpetual darkness, so having perhaps most of the week with some sun, and maybe a few days of perpetual darkness is something to plan for.

But what about the twilight time? I love shooting in twilight and my friends in Lofoten tell me that it never really gets absolutely black, so let's study TPE for twilight:

As you can see (click for larger view), there are recordings for twilight. I'm interested in Civil twilight as that is the twilight where objects are discernible to the eye. You can see that on the 11th, although there is no sun, civil twilight begins at 9:12am and finishes at 14:48 in the afternoon. So I have 5 and a bit hours to shoot in twilight.

So what is actually happening to the sun throughout the day? With civil twilight, the sun is -6º below the horizon, so let's look at TPE's details tab:

You can see that the sun is around -6º below the horizon at 9:11am in the morning, and the sun gets a little higher than that until it starts to dip around 2pm. The yellow part of the curve is the angle of the sun throughout the day. The blue curve is the angle of the moon throughout the day. So if we look at the graph, we can see that the sun never gets above the horizon.

But the good news is that I have around 5 hours of twilight to shoot in. Very worth hanging around for, and not heading off home early, like I initially thought.

Lofoten in December

Due to unforeseen circumstances, I've had to cancel my personal photographic trip to Lofoten this week. But the good news is that I will be going back in December for just over a week to do my own photography. I feel that some places are an ongoing project and Lofoten has certainly captured my imagination in that respect.

Looking at The Photographer's Ephemeris for mid December, I see that twilight begins a little before 9am (how civilised), and ends around 11am, giving me two hours to shoot in the moody light I like each morning and each night. Sunrise starts and 11am and Sunset is at 12:30pm, meaning the sun is above the horizon for an hour and a half. Twilight begins from 12:30 and ends around 3pm.

I don't know about you - but for me - this is a perfect photography schedule. Not up too early (I'm not an early riser by habit), and all the great light happens in a condensed period of time.

I can't wait.

PixelGenius - Sharpening

For years folks have gone on about the perils of sharpening images. Some completely over do it, while others don't do it at all. It is a religion for a lot of photographers, and I must confess, until recently, was one of them.

Way back when I first started using Photoshop, when I was a newbie to digital imaging, I would sharpen everything I scanned. It was exciting. It made the images look really impressive. What I didn't know at the time was that sharpening can have side effects on the quality of your images when it comes to resizing them at a later date. So as I became more aware of sharpening and its issues, I began to not sharpen anything at all.

For those of you who do not know what sharpening is, I must stress that it is not a feature that adds detail to any image. It is a feature that gives perceived improved resolution by adding contrast to the edges of objects within the frame. Over do it, and the picture can start to look hard. Halo effects can be introduced too if you're not too careful. IMHO, it takes a long time to perfect the amount of sharpening and ratio of sharpening effects that should be applied to an image. This is directly attributable to our ability to look at a photograph (it takes years to be able to read a photograph on a technical level) and also, the quality of the monitor we use to apply the sharpening with.

A few months ago, while I was researching printers and workflow - which I am extremely happy with, I was introduced to PixelGenius. It is a sharpening plug-in for Photoshop and it can help you make a good print an excellent print. It can also help you sharpen your images for the web too. I've had amazing results from using the product to sharpen for web and of course, with inkjets too.

Where I was once deadly against sharpening, I'm now all for it..... with some caveats:

1. My original files are left unsharpened. 2. I duplicate my TIFF scans and resize to the medium I want to use them for 3. I sharpen after resizing, not before

There are several reasons to use sharpeners such as PixelGenius. They help overcome issues with scanners and digital sensors creating soft images. In digital sensors, anti-aliasing filters soften the image to reduce moire patterns. Not all device captures are perfect, so Pixel Genius has three stages of sharpening:

1. Capture Sharpening 2. Creative Sharpening 3. Output Sharpening

As the names suggest, they have preset sharpeners for the capture medium. I use 6x7 medium format film, and I find the '6x6 positive film sharpener' fantastic for this.

The creative sharpeners are used in the same way we use dodging and burning. You dodge an image to bring prominence to that part of the scene and you burn in areas where you want to make the area darker and therefore lead the eye away. The same is true for sharpening. Sharpen the entire file and your eye may be distracted by objects that have too much detail in them (yes, that's right - too much). By applying creative sharpeners to certain areas of the scene, you can lead the eye towards, and also away from certain areas of the scene.

And finally, the output sharpening algorithms are fantastic for helping you get the best jpegs for web and the best results for sending files to your inkjet printer. If you're not doing anything like this, then your prints aren't half as good as they could be.

If you'd like to read more about Pixel Genius, then they have an excellent user manual which is available for free on their web site.

Sharpening is a creative part of the image making process. It is just as important as contrast masks and dodging and burning. By reading the PixelGenius user manual, you'll not only get a good education on sharpening and why you would want to use it, you will also get an introduction to a plug in that simplifies sharpening for you, making it easy for you to get great results, while cutting down the possible chances of making bad mistakes with your image editing.

Photo books as an investment?

This past Saturday, the Guardian news paper here in the UK ran an article about Photographic books. To summarise, they suggested that buying photography books from unknown photographic artists is a good way to invest for the future.

I would agree that certainly, limited edition copies of photographic books are very collectable. Whether they will help you in your retirement is another matter.

If you haven't guessed yet, I'm a bit of a collector of photographic books. (I just bought Bill Schwab's 2nd edition of Gathering calm to sit nicely against the first edition, and I also bought Rolfe Horn's 28 Photographs). I find them immensely beautiful objects to own, and a very absorbing way to appreciate someones work. Just a few months ago I reviewed Michael Kenna's Huangshan book, which I still think is one of the most beautifully printed books I've ever seen. Printed on high end Japanese uncoated art paper, the photographs take on a spirit and a feeling I could never get from browsing a web site.

To digress a little, my own book is being printed by the very same printer, and they have let me know that there was a lot of time and effort that went into sourcing the paper and inks for Huangshan.

Anyway, I digress. Huangshan is almost sold out (it was limited to 1,000 copies) and prices on the web are rising steadily. It's only been out for 4 to 6 months.

So I'm wondering - maybe there is something in the Guardian's article. But ultimately, I would prefer to collect books because I love them, appreciate them, and enjoy getting lost in their contents for a few hours now and then. That to me, is priceless.

ps. If you're interested in any of these books, you can get Gathering Calm from Beyond Words book shop, but I think that Rolfe's book is now out of print. Best to ask Neil if you do enquire or go look on Abebooks (second hand site), but expect prices to be high for books on Abebooks due to the collect-ability of photographic books i've just been discussing.

Understanding Light

I'm really excited to let you all know that at the end of the week, Understanding Light with the Photographer's Ephemeris, will be released. Notification about the release of this eBook will be first notified through my monthly news letter. If you're not a member of my news letter - you can subscribe on my home page.

Both Stephen Trainor (the creator of the Photographer's Ephemeris) and myself have been working on this eBook for quite some time - it's been quite a journey, initially starting off with me trying to put something together last year about the application, and then Stephen getting involved. We both feel it's a really good read now.

If you don't know what the Photographer's Ephemeris is, it's a really useful application I use to plan some of my landscape photography shoots. It provides information on sunrise and sunset times, twilight times, angle of sun and direction of sun throughout the day too. If you'd like to read more about it - then please go to Stephen's web site where you can also download the free desktop edition of it.

It's also available for the iPad and iPhone - my favourite version is the iPad version, which is great for taking with you while you're out and about.

Anyway, just a little heads up to keep an eye on your inbox this week for news of the eBooks release.

All Quiet

I just thought I'd post here tonight, that my blog has been pretty quiet of late.

I'd just like to tell you all that when you see little activity on my blog, it's because I have to focus my attention on other issues. In other words, what might appear to suggest little or no activity, in reality is the opposite. I've been spending a lot of time over the past few weeks working on my book. The text has been proof read, double proof read, and now going through a third proof reading. The ISBN numbering and publishing has been registered with Neilsons here in the UK. The art work has had to be revisited. Images have had to be optimised for off-set press and prefaces have to be written by very special people.

I'm off to Norway on the 25th of this month, I'll be away for 2 weeks and I hope to have some new images to share with you then.

Anyway, I guess I'm just aware that I've been pretty quiet of late. It's not intentional. It's just that there's a lot going on in the background.

Evolution, Progression

I've just been spending a bit of time re-organising the contents of my web site. It's allowed me to review my own work quite a bit, and notice that there has been a progression - maybe considerably over the past two to four years.

I tend to spend a lot of time considering how things are. I have a streak of introvert about me which causes me to re-evaluate things on a frequent basis. Many people I feel, simply go about their lives without really considering just how far they've come. We do tend to spend a lot of time in the past and a lot of time thinking about where we want to be, but seldom do we really actually manage to sit comfortably in the present and enjoy it for what it is. I think that's what photography allows many of us to do: remove all the clutter from our minds - bills to pay, memories of past events, dreams of the future, and just exist.

But I think as photographic artists, we should take time every now and then to re-evaluate just what sort of photographer we are. I'm certainly aware that my style has been heading towards a more simplistic approach over the last few years. I also think my choice of colours is toning down a bit too. Maybe that's just a current thing for me. One day you feel you want to go one way with your work, another day you may interpret it in a very different way, simply because of how you feel.

We are dynamic after all.

Things are fluid, always in a state of change, and style can progress, stagnate as well as retreat back to an earlier style. Nothing should be cast in stone and I think we should be willing to forgive ourselves for any errors we have made. Because they're not really errors. We feel, we react, we produce work. Another day we are a different person and we respond and react in a different way.

So I've been going back over some of my earlier work and I'm almost tempted to bin a huge section of it. It embarrasses me to some degree. What I felt was good, I now feel a sense on unease about.

There is also, a temptation to go back and rework some images, but that way, I feel - lies madness. I'm not overly keen on music artists that I like revisiting their earlier work - simply because it smells of someone who can't leave something alone, and who can't move forward (even though I do believe every artist has the right to do whatever they feel with their own work).

But I mustn't be too hasty. It is, after all, this older work that has allowed me to do the re-evaluation I've just been describing. It is the basis for me noticing that my photography is constantly evolving and (hopefully) progressing.

And that is a good thing.

Postscript: A note about the first image you see in this article. Near the river outlet to Jökulsárlón lagoon in south east Iceland, bergs enter the sea. Each day there are different shapes and sizes of bergs littering the black sand and the view out into the atlantic. Occasionally you see some seals in Jökulsárlón lagoon and out in the sea too. It only occurred to me today whilst posting this image, that the little seal-sculpted out of ice is a nice metaphor for the seals in Jökulsárlón.

Further, the last image of Skógarfoss was my attempt to improve on the standard view that I keep seeing in everyone's portfolios of this location. Often I feel the foreground is a little boring, and with such a huge wall of water, what are you supposed to do with the composition? So I actually waded out into the ice cold water to get this curve in the foreground. I just felt the black sand on its own wasn't particularly captivating enough. I'm always looking for a bolder statement. Aim for 100% and you'll maybe get 70%. Aim for something extra special, and you may just get something better than 'ok'.

Iceland 2011

Only shoot when you feel inspired by what you're seeing.

But what if you're feeling so crappy, that it's hard to muster up the effort to get up and go out and shoot?

Of course there can be many reasons for not going out to shoot images. Work pressures, family commitments, a bad cold, of simply not feeling inspired to go out.

I always felt that if I was feeling uninspired, then it would show in the final images. That's true to some extent. When I was an amateur photographer in my early 20's, I'd be so keen to go out and make images, that I'd convince myself that something magical would happen between me clicking the shutter at a rather mundane scene and the final transparencies coming back from the lab (these were the days when you didn't really know what you'd get back, because film always looks different from what the human eye can see). But I'm of course further on in my photography, and I've come to recognise when it's not happening. I a nutshell: I know when to stop, or when to not even bother.

But I find it so easy to talk myself out of going to make images. 'It won't be any good', or 'I feel pretty bored', or in the case of this recent trip to Iceland 'I feel like my head is going to fall off with the cold, so I'll just stay in my tent'.

This is, to some degree, a form of procrastination.

I'm sure now, having seen the results from my trip, that I could have done more. I know I could have done more and I also recognise that although having a bad chest infection didn't help me feel that great, it didn't damage what I was feeling for the landscapes around me. It just stopped me from continuing on with my journey and cutting it short.

But every cloud has a silver lining, and I've learnt something about myself and my photography. I've learned that a form of pessimism can creep in when i'm not feeling great. It colours my outlook and any realistic barometer that I have (call it skill, intuition, whatever). I've also learned that if I keep going (not driving my health into the ground), but work towards making images, something will come.

Travel photography is hard work. I put 200% into making images when I'm away. I think most people who want to make good images in a foreign land don't really appreciate this fact. Travel photography is a major commitment and it takes a lot out of you.

Rewarding though it is.

ps. The Iceland portfolio is now on-line if you wish to have a closer look.

pps. Click on the contact sheet above for a nicer view.