Enigma or resolve? I'd choose Enigma every time

I have always had a massive dislike for photographic captions.

I think there’s much more power in an image if it doesn’t have a caption. I mean, let’s face it -when someone says to you “I have something to say to you, but I can’t tell you”, you can’t help but feel a sudden, immediate need to know.

Enigma is a very powerful tool, if used well.

I’d much prefer to work out the puzzle, rather than have it explained to me. Which is why I have always had a massive dislike for photographic captions. Photographs are visual stories, and by that definition, they should be self explanatory.

Resolution: the act of removing any uncertainty in the work, in my view does not help the work. It just allows the viewer to get get off lightly. It does not encourage the viewer to become engrossed. As soon as the explanation is given, the viewer is now free to move on.

So i’d choose enigma every time. I think the work becomes more powerful if the viewer is left guessing.

Travel Insurance?

Since Covid broke in March this year, I have heard from many people who have told me that:

1. Their travel insurance company did not pay out for any cancellation.

2. and that many of the travel insurance companies are advising clients to make a charge-back against the travel company they booked with.

This all seems to suggest that travel insurance is a waste of time. And not only that, it suggests that travel insurance companies want us to pay them money for nothing in return. But perhaps worst of all, it seems to indicate that travel insurance companies have no ethics, and are advising customers to divert their insurance claims by making other companies pay them back.

If this is true - then what is the point of travel insurance, and why would any one continue to pay?

I’d like to hear from you about your insurance claim experiences. Did you find that the travel insurance company paid you back for a trip that you either were forced to cancel yourself because the situation was getting bad, or maybe you were already somewhere and the travel insurance company didn’t honour the terms?

Let me know - please email me your experiences.

Individuality

To me, the word ‘trend’ means ‘followers’. Being a follower in my book has never been cool. It just signifies people who have no thoughts of their own.

It also means ‘current’. And being ‘current’ means it’s already happened. It’s over. It’s done.

The best way to try to avoid being dated, is by not following trends.

And the best way of doing that, is by being yourself. Because no one else in the world is better at being you, than you are.

Thank You for buying my new book

To those of you who have been so kind to place an order for my forthcoming book, I wish to thank you so much.

Right now, the income from this book is more important than ever

Since March, my whole workshop business came to an abrupt halt. It is around 90% of my income. I make a very small amount from e-Books and prints each year, and the majority comes from tours and workshops. So 90% of my income has disappeared.

I do not see a future for me right now. I know I am not alone. Many of us are affected, or are going to be affected in the coming months.

I am anticipating that next year is going to be a lot tougher than this year has been for me, as I think tourism and travel are going to be impacted for many years to come. I think my survival is going to be dependent on publishing books, and on-line tuition.

I personally think that there has never been a more important time to patronise the arts. If there is an artist out there that you like, supporting them by buying something from their store (and not Amazon - since Amazon take most of the profits and the artist gets almost nothing), will help them a great deal.

Thank you!

So once again, I wish to thank you for buying my book. It’s currently one of the few life-lines I have right now, and I deeply appreciate the gesture, especially as I know that for many of you things are also not easy.

Hálendi Book Advanced Orders now available

I’m pleased to announce that I am now taking advanced orders for my new book.
This time we have changed to an Italian printer, and the book is a hard-back. It comes in 3 variants.

If you would like to order one, the edition run is very limited to just 300 copies. Just click on the button below to go to the order page.

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Black edition cloth cover

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Black edition slipcase cloth cover

My thoughts on on-line teaching

Back in April when I chose to offer on-line teaching, I was skeptical that it would be as effective as being in the same room as my student.

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Images by Fee Chin, used by kind permission. Fee is one of my on-line students.

Over the past month or so of working with around six people on a weekly basis, I’ve found that the teaching in many ways has out performed what’s possible in a classroom environment. Most of my students have excelled by the third lesson to a point beyond where most of my students get to on a 5-day course. I have a few explanations for this:

1. The first one is that I get one solid hour of uninterrupted time with a student. I do not get that amount of time, even though there are 7 hours per day in a 5-day workshop. Because my time is split between 6 people. Each at different levels, each with different problems.

2. The second reason is that they get a week'-gap to go away and think about what we’ve gone over, and review their work, and take time on editing it. This is not possible on a 5-day class - things are compressed - and I am trying to get people up to speed in 5 days as opposed to 1 hour per week for six weeks. The six week gestation period really makes a big difference.

3. I get to review everyone’s work before we meet. I usually spend a few hours going over everyone’s material and making notes so that when we meet, I have some clear direction and instruction for them.

4. fourth, working online has not been such a communication barrier that I had anticipated. The delays are usually minimal and the lines are often fast.

5. There’s more chance of things sticking and you retaining the knowledge, if the learning is reinforced over six weeks as opposed to 5-days.

The most important part of all of this is perhaps point 2. Stretching out a teaching experience over six weeks as opposed to condensing it into 5-days is much better.

Conversely, these are the benefits I see from the 5-day class:

1. We have shooting time together, and things we learned in the classroom can be worked on in the field in the evenings. We don’t have that option on the on-line class.

2. There is more time together for ‘random discussions’ and other things come up that maybe wouldn’t during a 1-hour one-on-one session.

There are a few things that come up as problems in the 5-day course, that don’t happen in the on-line class:

1. People get fatigued from trying to work and edit images for more than a few hours a day. Regular breaks are advised.

2. You need time away from the work to reflect. Each time I edit my own work, I like to shelve it for a few days because when I do look at it again, I am often surprised by themes, errors, potential opportunities that I had not seen the last time I looked at it.

3. Condensing so much into 5-days doesn’t give any space to reflect and let things sink in.

So there are pros/cons to both formats, but I am finding that on-line teaching is definitely as valuable as a traditional 5-day class.

I’m sure I will continue to offer the Digital Darkroom class in future (if / when things get back to normal). I’ve had participants tell me how useful it is, but I am definitely sure that I would like to continue with the on-line option as well. I enjoy it so much as I get to know each student’s drive and work better.

Indeed, many students have told me that the Digital Darkroom class is something they wish to repeat each year as a ‘top-up’ and I think that doing both can be a good combination. I suppose I’m just trying to convince any doubters that on-line teaching is a useful endeavour as well as the standard workshops. It’s just different.

Abstraction vs Classical

When I work on a composition of a subject, I tend to make around 3 major images of the same subject. In other words, I like to work the scene and for one subject I will maybe come away with three images that are hopefully quite different.

My view is that: there is no one single composition to be found. There are often many.

The image above is more graphic, more abstract than the scene below, which I consider to be more ‘classical’ in composition. By ‘classical’ I mean ‘expected’, ‘traditional’ or perhaps just a bit more conventional.

I would like to explain that when I made these two photographs, they were maybe a few minutes apart. On one of them I chose to include the sun in the clouds whereas the top image I chose to leave it out. I think that it takes courage as a photographer to remove a vital component of a scene in order to maybe focus or strengthen what you are doing. My own personal view is that the image above is stronger than the image below. It is more ‘quantised’, or ‘reduced’. I’ve reduced it down to a few black lines. The bottom image although containing those black lines isn’t as powerful because our attention is taken elsewhere (the sun). But more over, the bottom scene is clearly a photograph of a volcano in a landscape. It has a great deal of content. Whereas the image above does not have the same clues to give us context. It is less a photo and more like a calligraphic drawing with two black ink strokes.

Often when we talk about composition, it’s about the placement of objects in the scene, whereas i tend to think that tone and colour are just as important as the subjects. But I think to create more surprising work, we need to step away from classical thoughts. Again, to explain what I mean by ‘classical’, I mean ‘conventional’. And I don’t mean it in a positive way. For a while now I’ve had a real problem with conventions such as ‘rule of thirds’, etc. These are just conventions to get us going, but they are also a trap in taking us into a cul-de-sac of the mediocrity. Making compositions that people expect is just going to make your work predictable and boring. But you do have to start there - learn the basics, so you can ‘unlearn them’ later.

It’s simply not enough now to create a ‘nice composition’. I think my first image has the edge on the second because it’s slightly less conventional, perhaps a little more graphical. More abstract. It requires a bit more time to work out than the bottom image.

When you are composing, try to work the scene. Don’t just assume you’ve found your composition. Yes, it’s a nice composition but there are many more. Try to work the scene by moving around, and by removing some of the elements of the scene that you initially thought were vital. I think it takes a sense of conviction to remove that sun from the 2nd image and focus on the volcano. But I have often said that composition is more about what you leave out, than what you leave in.

Composing the sky

If you were to ask me what the most common composition errors I see in workshop participants images, I would say these are the main points that spring to mind:

1. The sky takes up too much area of the picture, for no good reason, except that it’s the sky.

2. The majority of the subjects that make up the composition live in the bottom half of the picture. So the viewer spends most of the time in the bottom region of the image. And as a result, the composition feels as though it is sinking through the bottom of the frame.

3. Some of the main subjects of the composition are bunched up too tightly towards the bottom edge of the frame, and in some cases are also falling through the bottom of the frame.

4. There is too much sky for no good reason. Except that it’s the sky.

Did I repeat point 1 as point 4?

Let me digress for a little bit.

Each time I have come round to publishing a new photographic book, it’s a long drawn out process of piecing it together. The text is usually what slows the publication date down a lot because it has to get checked. I now use a professional editor to verify the text because I have noticed a few things that repeatedly happen when I ask people to proof read the text:

1. The titles are never checked.

2. The words ‘of’ and ‘the’ are not checked. It seems that the eye scans the text rather than reads it and we tend to insert missing words into the text when we don’t find them. There is a little experiment you may have seen where someone asks you to count the number of ‘f’s and ‘t’s in a sentence and you get it wrong. Because we don’t parse the words ‘the’ and ‘of’.

Two subjects, not one. The tree is not the only subject. The sun is just as important as the tree is, and they balance diagonally opposite each other. Yet I believe that most viewers consider the tree the subject of the photo. The sun is just the sun. That’s not true - the sun is just as important a subject as the tree is.

But mainly, no matter whom I’ve asked to help proof read the text, seldom checks the titles. I almost went to press after 10 individual proof readings with a title that said ‘Bolovino’ rather than ‘Bolivian’ in the title of the text.

My reasons for mentioning this is that vision is a funny old thing. There is a lot of psychology to it that most of us lay people do not understand but scientists have begun to realise.

Perhaps some day I will write a book about the most common errors that I see in composition, as I feel there is some relationship of these errors to how the brain interprets. We look, but we do not see.

My point is, that the sky is just as important as the ground is where composition is concerned. But for some reason it is treated as something that just seems to fill up around half of the area of the rectangle for no other reason than ‘it’s the sky, and I just fill up half of the frame with it’.

When I am working with skies, they can often break of make a composition. I have found that they can contain motifs or repeating shapes that mirror shapes in the landscape and when that happens, they become a core component to the composition. Other times the sky may break the composition. Here are some examples:

1. There is cloud cover over one half of the region of the frame, while the other side is blank. This causes light reduction on one half of the frame while the other half of the frame is around 2 stops lighter. When this happens, the picture looks as though the grad was left on sideways.

2. Uneven skies can cause distractions - particularly if they are brighter towards the very edge of the frame.

Sometimes sky is just a space for objects to float in. Rather than thinking of an image as having ‘sky’ and ‘ground’, think of it as ‘canvas’.

In my own style of photography, I often avoid complex skies. I’m talking about skies with lots of clouds and tones in them, because they can be overly distracting to the main compositional features I’ve found in the ground. This is one of the reasons why I work in overcast light (apart from the light being very soft - a huge advantage), overcast skies tend to have little in the way of distractions to cause tonal inconsistencies or ‘bald’ regions of the sky later on.

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Simplifying Composition - on-line lessons

£175.00

Learn in your own time,
ask questions during a live Q&A event

Four 1 hour pre-recorded lessons
Live Q&A event for each lesson

Download, watch, re-watch each lesson as many times as you like.
Attend a live Q&A event for each lesson.

Price £175

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Indeed, I hear photographers tell me that Namibia is best around April because there are lots of clouds in the sky. If I were going to Namibia, I would be going when the skies are completely empty of clouds, because it enables simpler compositions.

Skies are important integral parts of the composition. They need just as much thought and consideration as the main subjects of the composition, and in some cases, can break the composition if there are overly demanding tones or shapes in there. Skies are also extremely difficult to work with because we have zero control over what they do. Whereas we do at least have some control over the main subjects by moving forward, moving backwards, or removing them from the compositions, but for me, skies are often problematic when they have a lot going on.

Give your skies a lot more thought if you can. Consider if they are brighter at one side of the photo, and whether they have some of the ore dominant brighter elements of your composition (sometimes white clouds may end up being the most dominant feature of your composition). So try to think of your skies as just the same as your ground elements: they also contain tones and shapes and they are just as important as the rest of the scene.

Notsuke

Sorry I’ve been quiet for a while.

But quietness is to be enjoyed. It just seems so rare these days. Everyone feels they have a voice now. But I think it’s just as important to know when not to use your voice. I have little to say, and so I thought I would just post a picture from Hokkaido this January. I’ve just completed work on my images from my Hokkaido tours. I’m very happy with them, and I think I will choose to hold off publishing them all at the moment. I wish to enjoy getting to know them first. On my own. And on my own terms.

A new mini workshop for you?

I’m running a 2nd online mini workshop this August. Perhaps this may be of interest to you?

sold out

Simplifying Composition - on-line lessons

£175.00

Learn in your own time,
ask questions during a live Q&A event

Four 1 hour pre-recorded lessons
Live Q&A event for each lesson

Download, watch, re-watch each lesson as many times as you like.
Attend a live Q&A event for each lesson.

Price £175

The aim of the classes

My aim is to give you a teaching format where you can review the material over the course of a week, and then submit questions in advance for a Q&A webinar. My intention is to collect questions before the Q&A webinar, so that I can prepare some good illustrations and answers for you.

The format of the classes

The format of how the lessons and Q&A sessions will be run may give you a better understanding of the teaching process:

• Each week (Sunday), a 1-hour video lesson will be available for download. This video is yours to keep so you can refer back to it as many times as you like.

• You have up until and including Thursday to review the video, and submit questions.

• Submitted questions will be answered on the live Q&A session on Saturday. 

• The following day a recording of the Q&A will be sent to you to keep.