Momentum

For a long while, I’ve often had problems with creative-momentum.

Sometimes I find it very hard to get something started, and once I have managed to achieve a sense of flow to my process, I’m loathe to halt it.

I have found on many occasions that ‘life’ gets in the way of the set of images I’m currently editing. You know the stuff, commitments, an invitation to go out with friends, got to go to work, all of it was a hassle for me. Especially if I found myself at 3am in the middle of an editing session and I was loathe to go to bed because I had ‘just one more photo’ to edit.

Similarly, when I have stalled something due to commitments, I used to be worried that leaving it hanging in the air, unresolved, would somehow mean I’d lose something critical. I was terrified of not being able to pick up the threads later on, or worse still, find that the moment had passed and the passion I had felt for the work was, well, no longer there. It used to cause me a great deal of angst.

I think it all stemmed from a sense of fragility. Creating work is like a birth. But due to the many decisions that you can make (and make wrongly) the birth process is fraught with the possibility of things not reaching their full potential. It was hard for me to walk away from something I was in the middle of, hard to press ‘pause’ and then leave it for weeks while I was busy with something else. I hated it because I was always full of doubt as to whether I would like the work when I was able to return to it. Imagine finally getting back to something, only to discover it’s not as good as you had thought it was?

Then about four or five years ago, I just found I’d run out of steam. I had reached the end of a workshop year and the last thing I was wanting to do was work on any images. But I had a set of images, indeed many sets of images that I had shot that year, which were all now sitting in a pile in my home studio waiting for me to look at them, to appreciate them. I couldn’t face it.

So I did what I never do.

I parked them to one side and despite feeling that doing so, I’d never ever work on them again. I chose to put off working on them, because I’d much rather prefer to work on something when I’m feeling it than work on it when I’m not. It is perhaps the worst sin we can do as creative people: work on something when we’re not into it. It’s disrespectful, as we need to give our work the attention it deserves. I mean why bother spending $$$ and hours out in the field, if you’re going to be rushed at editing the work?

So I parked them. Some of them for months, and some were parked for a year. Others are still parked many years later.

I didn’t know when, or if I would work on these images. I just felt I needed to give them some time, and myself some space from them. Distance, as I’ve written many times before can give clarity, and also time for us to re-charge, get enthused about what we’re into.

And this is exactly what happened with some of the images about six months later. And then a year later I did it again. It was new territory for me to find out that I would still get engaged in work that I had created months, or even a year before. But I did, and I took comfort in knowing that just because I did not feel the need to work on the images straight away, it didn’t mean the work was garbage. It just meant the time was wrong. I learned that it’s best to let thing sleep if I’m not feeling it. And to just wait until the time I do feel like working.

My original fears of losing momentum on the shoot, of not remembering what it was that I was doing, or leaving the work for so long that I would have very little connection to it turned out to be false. I got into the work, but I did it when I was ready.

These days, I now have a pile of work sitting in my home studio, which I now trust myself to get around to at some point. I think that trust is the key word here. I trust myself. Because before this, I don’t think I ever did trust myself. I was too precious about my work, and felt that if I didn’t deal with it straight away, I’d loose momentum on it.

I now enjoy the fact that I have a backlog of work to work on. It means I have something saved up, something in the store. Just in case the well runs dry, or I can’t get out and shoot. I like that. It’s like being a song-writer that has a stock of songs to work on. So if there are days when I can’t come up with new melodies, I have these unfinished songs to work on.

Before I finish up today, I would like to stress that I am no procrastinator. But I do think many people are. Please don’t assume that I condone ‘putting off working at your photography’. If you are a procrastinator then I can see you easily take up my words as validation to keep on procrastinating. Today’s post is not for you.

If, however you are someone who works very hard, but gives yourself a hard time, most of the time, for not working harder, then I am glad you’ve made it this far in my post today. My message is really aimed at those that plough on regardless with their photography, and don’t stop to think that maybe they are over-worked, or not really in-touch with what they’re creating. By letting the work take a back-seat for a while, even a very long while, it may be the best thing for it.

As with anything, it’s a case of knowing when you’re in the creative zone, and when you aren’t. If you aren’t, then perhaps it’s best to sleep on the work for a few days, months or sometimes just file it away for some time in the future.

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.

Sensory addict?

Music, Photography, Art, anything that involves creativity, is a creative pursuit, and it utilises the same techniques and processes.

This month I’m at home. Which is in itself a rarity. My friends have forgotten my name, my mum doesn’t recognise me and she’s told me if I keep phoning, she will call the police. I’m joking of course, but I do a lot of travel, I do a lot of photography. I work a lot and I don’t have very long periods at home (mostly).

But right now, I’m at home for an extended period. And I’m avoiding photography like the plague right now. I’ve got my man-cave. It’s full of lots of nice music equipment and I’ve been busy working on some new music. I don’t claim to be any good at it, but it’s something that’s been part of me since I was 12 years old.

Roland System 500 modular system
Mutable Instruments modular system

I remember a quote from Peter Gabriel. He said ‘I need visual and audio stimulation’. I think that sums me up quite well. I need sound. I’ve always needed it. I wonder though, as a keen photographer, how important is sound to you?

My theory is that most of us aren’t just visually aware, or visually-addicted. We’re probably all sensory-addicted. Right? C’mon. Most photographers I know are (pleasantly) nutty. The simple fact that we are fascinated by pixels isn’t normal (but then, what is?). We obviously have an attention to detail. But is it limited to pixels alone? I doubt it.

Is sound important to you?

It is pretty important to me. But what about you? Are you a sensory-addict?

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.

Hokkaido?

I’ve got 1 space left for my January Hokkaido tour. I’m a bit surprised that no one wants to come. I realise that most folks don’t check my workshop schedule these days as they assume it’s always full. But I do have a space for Hokkaido this January 7th to 17th.

Hokkaido Island, Japan

January 7 - 17, 2020

Price: $7,595
Deposit: $2,278

Lone trees & minimalism, the quintessential Japanese landscape

11-Day Photographic Adventure

Reconnecting

Every once in a while, I lose inspiration, or just start to wonder if I’m really all that interested in photography.

As much as you may be alarmed to read this, it’s nothing unusual. In fact, I think that everyone, no matter how passionate they are about what they love, lose interest, or have doubts for periods of time. If you don’t, then I think you are either very unusual, or just not being honest with yourself.

Graveside Statue, Cimitero Monumentale, Milan, Italy. 2008
Image © Michael Kenna

I have been running a photo business for a decade now. No one really understands how it has been for me. I realise that some people may think that it’s been a great time and Bruce has had a real adventure (they’re not wrong - I’ve had a terrific time!), but the thing is, until you are in someone else’s shoes, you never really understand what it is they are going through.

Take it from me: turning your passion or hobby into your work is a double-edged sword. I don’t refute that there are the benefits that we all think there may be. Sure, I’ve had a great time, sure it beats doing a ‘real job’, sure it’s nice to be able to do photography all the time. But there is another side: the pressure of making an income, the pressure of delivering tours and workshops that customers have paid good money for. Pressure to make sure that everyone feels happy with what they got. That is quite a large-scope to handle, because every participant that comes on a trip with me has their own personal ‘take’ on what they’re looking for, and why they are there.

Anyway, I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m moaning. I really appreciate what I do, and I think it’s amazing that I get to go around the world, doing what I do, and getting to meet so many people from everywhere. It’s one of the most special things that has happened for me: I’ve also met some very special people over the years. Ones I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet if I’d stayed in my IT job here in Edinburgh.

But the fact is, turning your passion / hobby into your living, can, without any will in the world, turn it into some unwanted pressure. Something which, for the most part hasn’t happened to me. But the truth is: it has, on occasion been too much. There have been a few moments when I thought ‘I’m not sure I want to do this any longer’.

For a long while I couldn’t accept these thoughts or feelings. I felt I was being an absolute traitor to who I was before I started doing this. The guy who had so keenly abandoned a 9-5 job for this ‘dream job’.

But these days I don’t feel bad at all when I encounter these feelings. You see, they’re no different from the feelings we all experience. For example, no matter how much we may love our partners, we all have doubts. In my view, we would be very unusual if we never ever had any doubts about who we are with. Then there is our career. If no one had any doubts about the job that they do, or the friends that they know, or the life that they lead, they’d be more perfect and in their lives than not just the majority of us, but all of us.

Truth is: having moments of doubt is healthy. It means you’re ‘checking in’.

It means you’re present.

It means you’re here.

It means you’re in touch with where you are right now.

Life, and art are not black and white. Nothing is.

There is so much grey ground in what we do in our lives. Maintaining the same level of passion for something indefinitely is hard, if not impossible to do. Rather than worrying that it’s the start of the end, it’s much healthier to realise that any doubts or downturn you have is ‘just a moment’. Part of the ebb and flow of life. Just like everything else we encounter.

Anyway, my reasons for writing this today is because I’ve been ‘reconnecting’. Looking at photos that I love, and if you are a regular follower of my blog, you’ll know I’m an unashamedly Michael Kenna fan. So that’s why Iv'e attached the photo above. A statue in an Italian graveyard, photographed in such a way that anyone may assume it’s a real person. Michael is a genius.

I’m thankful for the photographers I love, because each time I feel I’m wondering if I should pack in what I do, I reconnect to my heroes (Galen Rowell, Elliot Porter, Elliot Erwitt, Robert Cappa, Bill Brandt and of course, the special talent of Michael Kenna). By doing so, they remind me why I am in this game in the first place.

By reconnecting every once in a while to the photographer who are my heroes, I am reminded why I do what I do, and why I’m grateful for it.

The Creative Process

I’ve been making photographs for over twenty years now, and during that time I have found the creative process to be an elusive thing to describe. How do we define something which at its heart is free-form? 

Creativity should know no boundaries, should have no rules. The results, however they are gained, should speak for themselves.

But how should one describe the creative process? Despite thinking that it is near impossible to do so, I think describing one’s own motivations, thoughts and feelings towards what it is that they do, goes a long way towards trying to pin down what creativity is.

I’ve put together a small e-book of just over one hundred pages, where I’ve culled my favourite creativity related entries from my blog. I often consider this blog a journal of some kind, a way of sorting out my ideas, of figuring out what it is that I just did, and why I did it.

There have been some minor changes to some of the entries to make the english more correct. A few posts have been almost totally re-written in an attempt to gain clarity. It seems that not all my blog posts are as lucid as I’d like them to be.

I hope, if you choose to buy this e-book, that you can appreciate that it is often hard to describe what one is trying to describe. Especially when it is about the nature of creativity.

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.