Six Images update

Work on ‘Six images’ has been going well. I now have seven short videos finished. I have a further 4 left to do, and since I am on a workshop next week, work will resume on these once I am home.

Teaching can teach the teacher so much.

For the past two years I’ve tried several formats. The first year I tried to do the classes live, but there is just so much preparation, not to mention technical difficulties, and also nerves, It was difficult. Last year I settled on 1 hour pre-recorded classes, with a week to ask questions which I would then produce a further Q&A video about.

It worked well, but I am doubtful as to how many folks had an hour to listen to me drone on? :-)

So the format this time round is several 12 to 15 minute videos (that’s just the way they were turning out), and I think these ‘bite sized’ tutorials are more appropriate.

This is what I have so far:

  1. Editing in a Nutshell (a distilled version of all my digital darkroom stuff)

  2. Obtaining smooth tones & depth in your images (how to prepare your files for editing)

  3. Creating compositional focus (how to lead the eye)

  4. Creating 3D perception (photographs are 2D by nature, and so we need to use techniques to imply a sense of depth to the work)

And these are more or less the preamble :-) Foundation stuff. But I feel I got the message simpler in these. As I say: teaching can teach the teacher. I have learned so much about my own photography by having to sort out in my mind what I want to teach others. Sometimes you find yourself offering an answer to a question that you didn’t know you knew the answer to :-)

The last set of videos are per image. Each image takes around 15 minutes to dissect and explain the edits I applied.

I’m also hoping to put one further video together regarding ‘fine tuning’ the collection as a set. In musical terms, this is one of the main tasks of ‘mastering’. The mastering engineer takes all the songs for the album and ensure they sound consistent - similar volumes, similar tonality (some tracks may need more treble / bass or less). This is done so the entire set can be played right through with consistency. That’s what I do for my ‘set’ of images. I fine tune the tonalities.

I think I will have the last few videos complete in a few weeks.

I hope to offer this as a class towards the end of November / December, as I need to work it around my real-world workshops. Feeling very good about this work.

Editing on an uncalibrated system

This past April, I ran my Digital Darkroom class. We had snow, rain, fog, and just about everything else weather wise. I have a little place on the edge of Loch Maree that I use for compositions, and to get some material for the class.

Anyway, during the class, I work on one of the best digital projectors - a Canon Xeed. But I always find that although its shadow detail is quite good, it’s nowhere near the blacks that one can get out of a well calibrated monitor.

Richard McDonald and I made the image above. The left hand side one is the image that was edited during the class, and the right-hand edit is the same image ‘colour corrected, and graded’ on a calibrated screen at home.

I am always fascinated that an image I feel is ‘finished’, can in fact, turn out to be unfinished. I have this problem with my own work, which is why I like to let it sit for a while. The human eye is capable of lying to us. It is highly adaptable and will ‘remove’ colour casts, and also convince us that the luminance values in the image are sufficient, when in fact we may be only half way there.

Each time I do my own edits, I like to open them up and compare them with work that I know has the correct luminance. In audio mixing, sound engineers will often compare the mix of a song they are working on against a song that is already published and mixed well. It will show discrepancies in their mixing.

For me, I often find that my eye tells me things are bright enough when I may only be around 75% towards absolute white.

Image © Digital Darkroom workshop participant Richard McDonald

I think the revised edit of Richard’s image is much better. But I know I couldn’t have done it on the uncalibrated system - which is why getting your screen calibrated is vitally important, but also, I know I couldn’t have corrected it so soon to the initial edit. By leaving it for a while, I have been able to note that there was a distinct green cast to the image, and that its luminance values were a little on the muddy side.

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Oh, one last thing: note however that even though I was working on an uncalibrated system, the luminance relationships between each of the objects within the frame are intact in the original image. I did not need to do any drastic adjustments in the corrected version. I find this very interesting. It tells me that I got the relationships correct, even though I could not determine the true blacks and whites of the actual image.

Six Images - Online Class update

I’ve been working away this past month on my new on-line workshop that I am going to hopefully offer later this Autumn. The class so far has three videos made, and I think there will be five in total. Some of the videos are very short at around 10 minutes each. Just the right length to get the message across, and so that folks can replay them as a refresher, without having to commit too much investment in time and brain cells ;-)

The titles so far are:

‘maintaining smooth tonality whilst introducing depth and punch’

‘conveying a sense of 3D’

and

‘Compositional Focus through tonal editing’.

These are all primers that are useful before stepping into the longer video about the six images I want to discuss. Work is going well, and I’m now starting to feel that it is all beginning to tie up quite nicely.

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postamble:

Lastly, I have to say that producing videos is extremely slow and time consuming. If I get 10 minutes worth that is well recorded and edited done in one working day, I’m doing well. I have full absolute respect for those who produce YouTube content. The audience if fickle, easily distracted, and if they don’t post regularly, the algorithm buries them. So there is a treadmill there. It must be a lot of high pressure. I am sure that many of the 10 or 20 minute videos I watch take more than a week or two to produce.

There is also a massive learning curve in production values, storyboarding the video, recording it, and editing it. plus, you’ve got to be comfortable in front of a microphone. I’m still struggling with that one: as soon as I begin to record my voice, I almost inevitably get my words jumbled up, trip over myself, or find myself using the wrong word. So many retakes…… and after a while fatigue sets in. And the takes just get worse. So recording takes while rested, and fresh is advised.

My initial hope had been that I would now produce one video class a year. Initially I had thought about producing a portfolio class each year that covers a new set of work each time. Perhaps I might come back to that, but man, it’s very intensive, and requires a lot of planning.

I hope to have the new class ready by mid Autumn if all goes well.

South Korea

I am returning to South Korea this October. The last time I was there was back in 2018. So it’s been four years since that visit.

For me, most of the places I end up visiting come through personal connections. I’ve met quite a few people over the years on my workshops and tours, and I like to try to go with the flow: if someone suggests or invites me somewhere, then I try to follow the lead. Call me a hippy, but I think that when an invitation comes, there is usually a door to new possibilities ahead. I trust it and I have found over the years that this has mostly been beneficial to my photography / creative growth.

Prior to going to South Korea, I had never considered the country. This I find fascinating, because now when I look at the images I made there, I know they could not have come about, had I not accepted my friend’s invitation.

These images are so part of me now, that to imagine that I might have declined his invitation and never gone, is unthinkable. Such is the wonderful surprise of future possibilities (In my view, opportunities and possibilities are being offered to us each day, but it’s up to us to recognise them and to run with them).

When I did get to South Korea, I must confess that I hastily made the assumption that I would not get any photographs. Initially I saw little promise. This is because the parts I visited were particularly urbanised, or affected by man in some way. I found that we drove long distances and often times, the landscape was not obvious.

All I remember about the end of the trip was saying to my friend ‘well, I shot 18 rolls of film, so I must have something’. Even though I could not put my finger on any particularly strong images that I had made at the time, I had still shot film. I never shoot film for the sake of it, I always only shoot because I’ve found something that I think might work.

What had originally been an invitation to a country I knew very little about, and had not even been drawn to thinking of its landscape much, turned out to be a very positive experience. If this has taught me anything, it is that one never really knows when the next set of images is coming from’. We just need to put ourselves out there for things to happen.

So I’m looking forward to returning to South Korea. It will be a different experience this time (because it always is), and I do not plan to set myself up with any expectations. Because no matter what I may envisage, photography always tends to offer up something I hadn’t expected. My photographs are never quite what I thought they might be.

This is what I find most inspiring about photography. An invitation, and the conviction to go someplace, can lead to images that you had never thought possible. Each day out there with a camera, is a chance to find new ground, and to create something that never existed before. But once it is here, feels as though it was always a part of you, and you have been carrying it along inside of you for all these years..

Radio Times 1974

Nothing much to report today. As I explained in my recent newsletter, I have not received my film processor as yet, so I have not been able to work through my backlog of images shot this year. I expect it will take me a few more months once I do get the processor to get up to speed with it.

Anyway, I found this image in my folder of things that I think might be worth putting on this very blog. I am going to avoid the politics of this, but I would like to say that this is the cover of a well known British institution magazine that is still going strong. The cover is from 1974, and I do indeed remember being told that an ice age wasn’t very far away.

I love the graphics. The ‘RadioTimes’ font has always been deliberately ‘retro’, perhaps a hark back to the early 1920’s? And the actual graphic of the earth is very nice also.

I’m just surprised that someone had the foresight to scan or archive a copy of this magazine, and in colour too.

Adventures in Abstraction & Analogue Volcanoes

I love it when someone decides to make their own photographic book. I’ve had a correspondence with Stephen Milner for many years now. He is an Englishman based in New Zealand, and he got in touch last year to tell me he was putting his first book together, and whether I would like to write a foreword for him, which I have done (it is reproduced below).

I can think of no better way to describe the book, than have Stephen discuss it here:

You can now buy the book here:

I wish Stephen all the very best with his project, and I encourage others to consider doing their own book. There is something extremely satisfying in putting your own book together.

Foreword: Adventures In Abstraction & Analogue Volcanoes 

If I were to say the word ‘volcano’ to you, I am confident that you would instantly ‘see’ a cone shape in your mind’s eye. The shape of any volcano is instantly recognisable to all of us. They have one of the most iconic shapes of our world.

 In Milner’s images, he has settled upon using this iconic shape to unify his imagery. He understands that using form in this way can strengthen the work. For when we break down any image at all, they are constructed of the same basic building blocks of form and tone. Regardless of what we think we see, all photographs are representations, made up of these parts.

 Milner has also chosen to make these images by using film. In an ever-increasing age of convenience over any other consideration, this is a hard feat to maintain. Firstly, the photographer does not have any immediate feedback. There is no way to review what he just shot. There is no way to check that the compositions or exposures are right. His only tool at his disposal is his intuition. Trust in one’s own abilities, and the knack of visualising what one is capturing is key. Learning to ‘let go’ and ‘move on’ rather than fixate on looking for assurances is the nature of the game.

 As a film photographer myself, I enjoy this process very much. Rather than thinking ‘volcano’, I am encouraged to think about whether the subject has a strong enough shape to act as a foundation for the composition. I am also encouraged to abstract the scene. Rather than thinking of ‘scenery’, I am left to think about how the shapes of all the subjects within the frame interact. I am forced to ask questions such as ‘do the constituent shapes build a pleasing story that sits comfortably when viewed as a whole?’ For great scenery does not guarantee a great photograph.

 Make no mistake, there is, and must be a leap of faith in one’s own judgement when shooting film. One must commit and accept that there is no undo.

 I bring up these points for one reason: all well executed work brings forth the illusion that it was effortless to produce. I know all too well that the work within this book took a lot of time, and a lot of love to create. Milner has been busy.  What he brings forth to us, is a cohesive set of images that just seem to flow as if they were an effortless effort.

 He has successfully abstracted the volcano. For we do not see the hard work. Instead we are left to wonder about the many adventures he surely had along the way.

Burnout

I’ve been following Christian Henson for the past several years on YouTube. He is a music composer and also the owner of a company who develop sample instruments for Audio.

I really enjoyed this video from him today, as he openly talks about his burnout, and his own problems dealing with work and stress.

Just in case you are wondering why I am posting this: I am NOT suffering from Burnout. But it has been something that I have experienced now around three times this past 12 years of running workshops.

For me on each occasion when I felt I was reaching burnout, the solution was easy: I restructured my workshop schedule so that I get time off to recuperate. I now take each summer off - that is roughly around three months.

These three months off, is often a time where I seem to turn into a couch potato, or I go out daily cycling. I also find myself sleeping an awful lot. I am convinced this is needed, and it benefits my creativity.

During this time off, I have very very little interest in doing anything photographically. Initially it worried me that the lack of interest was burnout, but I now realise that as the summer begins to end, I am looking forward to my trips back to Eigg or Iceland in September.

Having this three months off keeps me sane.

Much like Christian, I would say that my own personality is similar: I never know when to stop, and my hobbies usually tend to become all consuming passions that I seem to turn into something quite serious. I’ve had to learn to take the foot off the accelerator, and also, to not feel guilty when I am not working.

Making great photographs may be something we all want to do. But I have had a very strong opinion for a long time now that just going out every once in a while and hoping that you’re going to create great work isn’t enough. Great work seems to be a combination of talent, and going way beyond what most folks think is normal. In other words, in order to create work that stands out from others, usually something has to be sacrificed. I would argue that those whom you admire - musicians, book writers, actors, athletes, photographers, all ‘have a bit of a screw loose’. They are not normal people. They more than likely sacrifice other areas of their lives and they can’t help themselves push themselves forward.

Being a photographer that stands out from the crowd isn’t just something that you get to by doing photography in the evenings or weekends. You get there because you’re willing to sacrifice things that normal folks wouldn’t.

As I said at the beginning of this post: I am NOT suffering from burnout. But I have done in the past, and I was relieved that I found a way out of it. I love photography, I love being creative, but I have seen for a very long time that there has to be balance in one’s life, and sometimes it’s ok not to be creating.

I realise for most of my audience this isn’t the problem. It’s perhaps that you don’t get as much time as you’d like to be creative. But everyone has their limits. Everyone has that point where they may stop and say ‘shit, I really loved this, but now I’m hating it, and I don’t know why’. There is an expectation that it should always be fun (false expectation), or that spending all your free time doing it will make it better (another false assumption).

Take a step back sometimes. Put the camera away. Stop looking at other people’s work on the internet. Go do something else for a while. All creativity needs its own time. That means NOT doing it is just as important as the times when you are.

Be kind to your creativity, which is another way of saying ‘take care of yourself, and also, be kind to yourself’.

wild-man

I’m just home from the wilderness.

It was a research trip where I found that one particular day of trekking is where all the drama and action is.

I am now hatching plans to return. Now that I have narrowed down my focus to one particular area, I am looking to return next summer.

I won’t say where. All I will say right now is that where I was, was in the clouds. It was beautiful up there, but challenging to photograph. So much mist, so much moisture forming on my lens and filters, and so much steam also.

I’ll leave it at that. Hoping to return next year, and have started to make enquires as to how to get to where I want to go, without doing any serious hiking in. That is what I had to do this past week : 55km trek. Was fun, but it was really a certain 12k region that piqued my interests and I know I am not done yet.

With all the said, I am glad to be back home. Being a wild-man for a week, with no showers, no internet, basic facilities, makes one appreciate modern day comforts.

Assynt Portfolio Editing Review Class

I’m in the process of working on a video class about this set of six images.

Last year I produced a portfolio editing class whereby you could watch me choose and edit a set of images that made up my Bolivia set from 2019. With this class, the work is already complete, but I thought it would be good to go through the edits one by one, and break them down, show each of the editing decisions, and also go into more detail about the curve adjustment made for each of them.

I hope to publish this set later on this Autumn time, but it is work dependent as my workshop schedule will be taking off this September.

Artificial Inteligence 3

I asked Stephen if he could ask Midjourney to generate some AI photos based on the criteria ‘Bruce Percy Iceland’, and this is what it gave him:

Crazy shit!

I’m thinking ‘yep, that’s what I’d be looking for’. I asked Stephen if he could simplify further, so he typed in ‘minimalism’ and ‘reduced detail’, and got these:

AI simulation of ‘Bruce Percy Iceland Minimalism’

Spooky. First off, I feel as though I am looking at memories I don't remember having. Some of the motifs etc used in these generations remind me vaguely of some of my own work, and also, of some known places throughout Iceland. I am sure AI has used elements from real photos of Iceland as well as my own images to do this.

AI simulation of ‘Bruce Percy Iceland’

As someone looking at work that has been generated based upon their own work, I feel as though I am looking at a parallel world of sorts. There are just so many traits of what I do, and what I like to go looking for in these artificial generations, that they leave me feeling a bit odd. I can’t associate with them on an emotional level because I was never there to create them, yet they feel and look like parts of Iceland that I would be interested in shooting, and compositionally, mirror to a degree what I do.

AI simulation of ‘Bruce Percy Iceland Minimalism’