Easter Island 2016

This week I'm on Easter Island. It is my third visit to this island since I first visited back in 2003. A lot has changed in the thirteen years since I first came here.

Image courtesy Richard Cavalleri, tour participant 2016 

I think returning to a place can be very rewarding, for a few reasons.

The first and most obvious one, is that by returning, you get a another chance to capture what you failed to capture during your first visit. To fill in the missing gaps on what you thought was possible. And of course, you get to dig a little deeper. Each time I've returned to a place, I've found my knowledge and understanding of it just gets a little richer and my photographs seemed to touch areas of the place that I didn't encounter the first time.

But it's not just this aspect of revisiting a place that is rewarding. I've often found that each time I return to a place I have photographed before, that I find myself reflecting on who I was, what I was trying to achieve and also, just how much I've changed as a photographer since that previous visit.

My first visit to Easter Island in 2003 was at a time when I had only just been making photographs seriously for about three years. I still hadn't grasped what grad filters could do for my exposures, or indeed, how full ND filters could help smoothen down some of the textures in my photos. I was also very unclear at the time as to how far I could push the boundaries of my chosen film stock with regards to the quality of light I could photograph. There are numerous technical aspects that I did not know at the time, that I do know now.

Image © Richard Cavalleri. This is a cropped version of the first image in this post. Richard and I spent some time discussing aspect ratios and image-interpretation / editing techniques during our time together.

But it is more than this. Since that first visit in 2003, I've found that I've gained so much experience from photographing other terrains around the world, that I can draw upon this experience to help me photograph Easter Island in ways that I struggled to interpret. Back in 2003, I had found the terrain here extremely complex. I did not have the compositional skills to translate what I saw here. Nor had I the understanding about light to work with the landscape at other times of the day other than sunrise and sunset.

So I find myself looking back very much at who I was in 2003, not just in terms of what I knew as a photographer, but also in what I was looking for in the images I chose to create. This time round, I'm much more interested in the landscape and the more anonymous locations, rather than the statues.

I can't help but feel very grateful to have had the chance to revisit this amazing little island at spells throughout my photographic development. Each visit is like an 'intermission', a placeholder to notice the changes in my art.

I do think that revisiting places is good for the photographic soul. Some places just get under your skin, and don't let go. Some have unfinished business because you realise that you didn't have the skills to work with them the first time round, which is something I feel very much about Easter Island.

Many thanks to Richard Cavalleri for letting me use his image of the fifteen moai statues at Tongariki on Easter Island during my first (and last) photo tour here. 

Patagonia, May 2016

I'm on Easter Island right now, but as of ten days ago, I had just finished up running my Patagonia tour this year. I'm a film shooter, so of course I have no final images to show you as yet, but I did make one 'test' shot on my iPhone which you can see below.

Lago Grey, taken with my iPhone © Bruce Percy May 2016

I'm always on the lookout for patterns in nature and I'm always on the lookout for something new in a landscape I have visited many times. So this image fitted both criteria for me.

There is an embankment of sand that one has to cross to get to the waters edge, and on one side of it, I saw these frost patterns. I had never seen the black sand beach of Lago Grey with frost before. They are simply the indentations of people's footprints in the slope but what beautiful patterns they make! And also, I felt that the white frost with black sand was the perfect tonal separation that I'm always seeking in my images.

One last thing, it would have been so easy to exclude the horizontal line of the lake in the frame, as you can see from the image below - it was vital that I raise my Hasselblad (and iPhone!) to capture this line - it is a graphic shape that compliments the composition and yet, could have easily been left out.

Image showing my Hasselblad camera set up on location for the Lago Grey shot.

Patagonian Brocken Spectre

I'm in South America right now. About 10 days ago I was in Patagonia - in Torres del Paine national park where we experienced a brocken spectre one morning (see below):

The Paine massif - a mountain range that is around 9,000 feet high, rising out of the patagonian steppe, was shrouded in cloud one morning. We saw the outline of the mountain projected onto the foreground cloud from the sun behind the mountain range. What you are seeing here - is a 9,000 feet shadow cast onto a band of cloud between us and the sun. It was quite spectacular and I've never seen anything like it before. 

Many thanks to Clive Maidment for sending me the iPhone picture.

Patagonia's Calling........

In just a few days time, I will be heading back to one of my most favourite places in the world. I dearly, dearly love Patagonia and in particular Torres del Paine national park.

The Cuernos (horns) of Paine, from Lago Pehoe, Torres del Paine national park. Chilean Patagonia. One of my most favourite places in the world!. Image © Bruce Percy

I feel I have a deep connection with this place. I can't quite believe that I have been coming here since 2003.... more than a decade.

There is a spirit, a vibe to Patagonia that is hard to convey in the written word. It is something you have to feel for yourself. I find that some places that I visit, have a 'feeling', a 'smell' to them. There's something very timeless about Patagonia. It is a place where you can choose to disappear. With such wide open spaces, and such small rural communities dotted at such large distances from each other, I find I can let my mind roam.

I think we all want to be free. To escape, and to find somewhere that time seems to stand still. I think that is Patagonia to me. It is like an old friend, one that hasn't changed much over the intervening years. Patagonia is still very much the same place it was when I first visited it back in 2003. I find there's a comfort in knowing this :-).

So forgive me for feeling a sense of joy tonight for visiting this landscape. It is indeed an old friend. It is also a home from home - a special place for me, to just be :-)

This last image was shot on the very last day of my tour there last year. I know Torres del Paine so well and one of my favourite locations is towards the southern side of the park.

I stay with my group at the Rio Serrano village. In this shot - you can see the Paine massif ( a 2,884m mountain range jutting out from the landscape at almost sea level) with lifting early morning fog from the Rio Serrano pass. 

Sometimes when I'm in Torres del Paine, I see temperature inversions. It's hard to describe to people who haven't been there how otherworldly the place is. To have a mountain range like that jut high into the sky from sea level to 2,884m and literally have a different weather system at the western side compared to it's eastern side - is normal here.

I've seen snow and rain happen on the left-hand side of the frame while it's been sunny and dry on the right hand-side. I'm sure you get my drift.....

A photo can only do so much and the rest is really about being there to actually witness it :-)

And with that last thought, I wish you many happy photographic endeavours :-)

To label ourselves, may be limiting

This week I received an e-mail from a good friend of mine who at the age of 46 has discovered that she's got a talent for drawing and painting. She said that she had always assumed she was a musician and it's been a bit of a surprise to her to find out that she has this other talent for drawing and painting as well.

Blue Pond Shirogane, Hokkaido, Image © Bruce Percy 2015

The same thing is true of myself. For most of my early adult life, Music was everything to me. I played in bands, wrote music and worked with others at creating songs. I was so serious about what I did that I'd even been offered a publishing deal at one stage. I built a home studio to record all my music and if anyone had asked me up until the age of 33 how I would define myself, I would have said that I was a musician.

Until I reached burn out.

The interesting thing is that everyone else around me was always commenting on my photographs. "Bruce writes music, but you should really see his photographs". I took photography as a very incidental interest - I had owned a camera since the age of 22 and would make the occasional decent photo without really understanding how.

This was more a mind-set than anything to do with my true leanings. I had chosen to see myself as a musician and every other creative outlet was simply just for fun, and into that fun-category, I'd placed my photography.

Things keep changing, and I keep finding out new things about myself through my art.

Even though my friends could see that I had an aptitude for photography, I could not. I was blind to my own possibilities.

I genuinely believe that if something is right for you - it has a tendency to grow and take on a life of its own. I call it 'positive flow'. When I'm creating work, the best images tend to just come easily. Similarly, with anything in life, if it's right - it tends to have a natural flow to it. When it's not right because maybe the timing is wrong, or 'something' is wrong, it tends to jam, to get stuck. Good artists, I feel, know this. They have a natural intuition that tells them where to go with their work and how best to keep moving forward. It took me a long while to listen to that intuition.

Sometimes who we think we are, or how we see ourselves, may be outdated, Applying labels to ourselves can be limiting, while compartmentalising what we do as creative individuals is perhaps the most restrictive thing we can do.

These days, I try to keep things open. I prefer to see myself as a 'creative person' rather than as a photographer, because It allows my creativity to go wherever it feels it wants to.

With this in mind, I feel I am ready to embrace any new direction that I may go, because I understand that not to, would be a great disservice to my true self.

A Present

I got a present today from a friend of mine (thanks Ming!). 

A hot water bottle cover, and a roll of Velvia...... bliss! What else could a landscape photographer want in the (cold) high plateau of the Bolivian Altiplano?  :-)

A hot water bottle cover, and a roll of Velvia. What else could one want in the high plains of the Bolivian Altiplano?

Inspiration from Printing one's own work

I've just finished printing and mounting one of my prints for an order I received a few weeks ago. Here is the very picture - an 8" x 8" print of Cono de Arita in the Puna de Atacama of Argentina.

Cono de Arita, Puna de Atacama, print, framed.

When preparing images for framing, you should always use acid free materials. To not do so, would render the print prone to future damage. As time goes on,  the acids in the gum or tape leak onto the back of the print and can cause discolouration.

Here in the UK, I get all my supplies from Silverprint.co.uk.

Once you have a mount with an aperture cut into it, you should also have an accompanying backing board. Both should be made of museum grade acid free materials.

The next stage is to create a hinge so that the front board hinges to the back board at the very top. I use Lineco gummed linen hinging tape, which is acid free and extremely strong. You can get it here.

Once I have both front aperture board and backing board hinged, I then need to attach the print to the backing board. First I position the print on the backing board and move it around until it's centred in the front aperture window of the front mount board. Once I have that. Then, I attach two strips of acid free paper tape to the print in vertical orientation with the gum side up and attached to the back of the print. The vertical strips are going to form the vertical part of a 'T' shape with two horizontal strips attached to the top of each vertical strip. The reason for creating a 'T' shape is to allow the print to expand and contract with temperature changes and still be completely flat on the backing board. If you just attach the print to the backing board with one horizontal strip, you will find that the print will contract and expand at a different rate to the backing board as temperatures change in the room and the print will never be entirely flat as a result.

Image © www.reframingphotography.com

For the inscription on the front of the print, it's best to use a pigment ink liner pen, or pencil. Either of these will not fade, whereas a standard ink pen will easily begin to fade after just a few years being subjected to daylight.

And that's it.

It's been a while since I prepared a print for a customer. Truth is: very few people actually buy prints and I think that even fewer photographers buy anyone else's work at all  (but perhaps that's a subject for another post sometime in the future).  

I've always thought that the ultimate journey with my photography has been to have the images in print form. Making this print has been enormously satisfying for me. It has allowed me to reconsider setting up an exhibition.  I'm currently working on a 3rd hard-back book to be released sometime either next year or in 2018..... some projects are never finished and I'm finding that the Atacama regions of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina seem to be an exhaustive area for me to make photographs in.

Maybe when I get round to releasing the 3rd book, I can coincide it with an exhibition of my work over the past few years. Who knows, but one thing is for sure - printing my own images is a hugely rewarding exercise and it has given me inspiration to think about a possible exhibition sometime in the future.

For more information about mounting, this is a good page to visit: http://www.reframingphotography.com/content/mounting-matting-and-framing

Small adjustments go a long way

For me, improving my photography is really all about improving my visual awareness. 

The original image unaltered.

So in today's post, I thought it would be good to try and discuss how the tiny details can often make a huge improvement to the overall composition. The way I'm going to do this, is by cloning a tiny part of the above image out. Now before I continue, I wish to make it very clear that this post is not about 'here's how to clean up your images using cloning'. Instead, the point I wish to make is that by 'noticing small distractions at the time of capture you can strengthen your compositions'. The most effective way to illustrate how the above image may have been improved is by using cloning. But it's not a tool I would encourage you to use, except for maybe seeing where things could have been more tidy.

A side note: I would suggest that if you are using cloning to clean up your images a lot, then it might be an idea to ask yourself why you aren't seeing the problems in the first place. Failures are really an opportunity to see areas of our photography that require further improvement. If your visual awareness isn't good, then it will show in the tiny distractions you will see in your final images and if you spend time fixing the issue at source, you'll find you won't have to continually cover up the cracks later on. This is feel is at the core of our photography skill - being able to notice distractions (even small ones) at the point of capture, because they can help us strengthen our compositions by a large margin.

With this in mind, I'm going to show how much stronger the image would have been if certain distractions had not been present. I'm going to do this by cloning an area of the scene out. I use this technique in my workshops as a way to help improve participants visualisation technique - so they can understand that if these small distractions in the frame hadn't been present - the image may have been much stronger. Again, I'm not saying 'here's how to clean up your images using cloning'. Instead, I'm really saying 'let's look at how the image may have been stronger if we'd taken care of some of the distractions'.

Below is the altered image. I've chosen not to tell you what I've changed, because I think it would be really useful for you to look and try to find it. Suffice to say that if you do notice it, ask yourself why I maybe chose to remove that particular area and also ask yourself 'which photo feels the calmest?'. My belief is that when something is wrong or jarring in a photograph, we tend to feel it. And feeling things in your photography is key. Your gut should lead you in the right direction not only with how you choose to balance a composition whilst out in the field, but also in your choice of edits. Photography is an emotional art.

In this version, I've removed something from the image to 'simplify' the composition and hopefully make it stronger.

Personally I feel this edit is simpler, more elegant and I think the message is clearer. But you may be asking 'that's all fine Bruce, but how could I have removed the part of the scene while I was there, rather than use a cloning tool later on?'. My answer would be that you have to weigh up the errors you see at the time of capture and whether you can do anything to remove them whilst there. Perhaps if I'd repositioned the camera, the distraction may have been hidden by other branches? I do remember thinking there was no way around it - whatever I did - the distraction was still there. So I feel a sense of pragmatism was employed: I asked myself - can I live with it? Or does it kill the image?. In the case of this photograph, I felt I could still live with the distraction and you'll even see that if you go into the respective image gallery on this very website, the unaltered version is there. Because I felt that there was more working in this image than not.

So in general, here is my thought processes about distractions:

1) Can I reposition to remove it? And will it upset the balance of the composition if I do?

2) If I can't reposition without upsetting the balance of the composition, can I leave it in without it killing the image?

3) If the distraction is going to kill the image, then I would prefer to walk away and find something else to work with. Otherwise, I'm happy to leave it in.

4) Don't over-edit your work. It's fine to leave tiny errors in the picture if you feel the entire image still works. You can over-do cleaning things up so it's always a balancing game. Too much editing will leave the image looking very contrived. Too little and the image isn't fully realised.

So how does anyone go about improving their visual awareness? 

One way I would suggest, is to look at your work on your computer and ask what might have been improved if it wasn't present in the photograph. You can even go as far as cloning distractions out to see if the image would have been improved - but just to see if any improvement would have been made only - I'm not advocating you start to clone things out all over the place - that's not the point of the exercise - you're just doing it to exercise your visual muscle.

The simple act of imagining how an image may have been with something removed is a great visual technique to exercise regularly. If you do this while editing your work, it will become second nature while out in the field.

Visual awareness is all about asking yourself questions - by having a sense of inquisitiveness - at all times about what you're doing.  Rather than accepting a photograph doesn't work and discarding it, you can learn a lot about what went wrong by looking at the errors and asking yourself 'why doesn't this work?, what would have happened if I'd managed to get rid of the error?'.

I think that good imagery comes from going that extra 5%. if you can improve a good image by that 5%, it can be transformed into a very fine image indeed. It's up to you to notice and work with distractions whilst you are out in the field and that will only happen once you start to ask yourself questions all the time.

Making Things more difficult than need be?

I remember Daniel Lanois, the Canadian record producer and artist was once asked 'how do you record a good guitar sound'? to which he replied, 'first find a guitar that sounds good'.

As I've progressed with my own compositions, I've noticed that I tend to be very selective about the places I shoot. I don't choose them because of how famous they are, but instead, I choose them because of how simple they are, and how little work they require make an effective composition.

So in today's post, I thought I would show you an example of that.

Myself in the landscape, Hokkaido, December 2015

Last December I spent a week on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. The above image is included in this post to illustrate that the location I shot, was pretty simple to start with. This is my 'selectivity' at play - I choose certain locations because I know there will be little resistance or errors in the landscape that I will have to wrestle with later on. Like Daniel Lanois' statement about finding a good guitar sound to record, I too believe that finding a location where there is little in the way to correct is much better, than trying to make a difficult location work better once I'm behind my computer editing.

Below is the final image I made of this location:

Despite the simplicity of the location, I still felt there were many many options available to me at the time of capture.

Where one might feel that all I had to work with was a group of trees and a snowy hill, I felt I had to be very careful with the placement of all the objects in the frame. Despite this location being quite easy to make a decent image of, I think the real skill in photography is to try to improve upon 'decent' and look for that extra special something that will hopefully transform my images from 'decent' to 'great'.

For instance, I was aware of the background hedges that I had to try and reduce in the composition. I felt that including the hedgerow at the back of the image (that is clearly seen in the first image in this post) would have been too distracting to the main subject (the trees in the foreground). 

I also had to make sure that the foreground tree's branches didn't collide with the hillside (as subtle as the hillside is - If the branches had touched it - I think the image would have been reduced back down to 'decen't rather than something hopefully better than that). You can see in the first image to this post that my tripod is lying completely flat on the ground - that's because I realised I had to get the camera down low to avoid the branches touching the edge of the hillside.

My definition of a great location, is somewhere that I don't have to wrestle with the subject matter too much to make things work. I've been to many beautiful places that don't work as a photograph and I've learned that 'great scenery does not equal great photography'. In many beautiful places I may find distractions that I can't avoid. For example, If I had found that no matter where I placed my tripod, the branches always touched the edge of the hill side, I would have made a decision at the point of capture as to whether this would kill the image or not.

So ultimately, what I'm really saying is that with a location where everything is simple, you shouldn't have to work so hard to make it 'click'.

Keeping things simple is the best advice I've ever had. It applies to how I make all my decisions in life, and it should also be applied to your choice of location that you are hoping to photograph.

Of course, the real skill is to see distractions in the landscape and to know whether they can be lived with or have to be removed. That only comes with time and us working on our own awareness skills.

Landscape photography I feel, is often the art of subtraction. Of being able to isolate one tiny part of the landscape and make a strong photograph from it. But this can be achieved much more easily, if we work with very simple locations to begin with, and not the other way round, as is often the case for many of us.

Scots for wet weather

I'm in Reyjkavik tonight, ready to do some scouting tomorrow for the next few days. It's very wet here, and so I thought I'd teach you all a bit of Scottish.

In Scotland, when the weather is very wet, we often say it's driech (phonetic: dreech), or sometimes we may say it's drookit. I looked them up and they are actually in the English Dictionary. It turns out that both derive from old Norse. So I'm going to ask my Icelandic guide tomorrow if he knows how Driech it is, or how Drookit it's been, because Icelandic is pretty much old Norse. I'll get back to you on that.

Dreich |driːx|
adjectiveScottish
(especially of weather) dreary; bleak: a cold, dreich early April day.
ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense ‘patient, long-suffering’): of Germanic origin, corresponding to Old Norse drjúgr ‘enduring, lasting’.

Drookit |ˈdrʊkɪt| (also droukit)
adjectiveScottish
extremely wet; drenched.
ORIGIN early 16th cent.: origin uncertain; cf. Old Norse drukna ‘to be drowned’.