Old tools vs new tools

Just recently I upgraded something in my home music studio. Except that it turned out not to be an ‘upgrade’ but rather, two weeks of frustration because things stopped working, and I was getting some intermittent problems with audio.

This has reminded me that I am just as guilty of being seduced by new gear as anyone is. The strange thing is that when it comes to photography, I rarely buy anything I’ve not used before. In fact, I am perhaps guilty of holding on to the things I know work well, to such a point now, that I have bought spares of certain objects because they are no longer in production.

I realised many years ago that by keeping using the same gear, things become so familiar that workflow becomes natural and seamless. When you know your gear inside out, muscle memory takes over, and you just do things without needing to think too much. Each time I have bought something new for my photography, I have found that it often interrupts it. Disrupts the flow, and in a sense: either creates a pause in what I’m doing, or worse: is a step backwards.

An unfamiliar piece of gear can really screw with your creativity.

I should have figured this out when it came to my little home music studio. I had built up enough experience to know what the issues were and how to fix them when they came up. With the new audio interface I bought, I was un uncharted territory. I experienced a myriad of issues that took me a few weeks to figure out. And even now that I feel things are working again, I’m aware that I haven’t got much experience with this new device, and can still possibly encounter more problems as I start to use it in earnest.

The same is true of photography gear. When I take on something new, I do so, fully acknowledging that I will have to live with it for at least a year before I have enough experience to know whether the problems I encounter with it are more a case of being unfamiliar, or if the tool is just either a bad fit for what I do, or has some design flaw I can’t live with.

Go gently with new gear is my view. If you’ve got your process working well and you like it, leave it be.

I’ll leave you with a little story. I once bought a new ball head, only to find the clamp wasn’t as secure as I thought it was, and enjoyed watching, in slow motion, as my entire camera fell off, and dropped right into a silt river. It was an entire Mamiya 7II body and lens. I went back to using my older ball head after that.

Notes on weather forecasting, and predicting the future

I’ve decided to admit to something :-)

On my workshops and tours, I must admit that it drives me nuts when folks start to tell me what the weather is going to do. I’ve had folks saying to me ‘we better not go out as it looks like it’s going to rain in half an hour’, to ‘Looks like Thursday will be a write-off’.

Most of the time I’ve found that forecasts are wrong, and even when I have gone out and it is wet: I’ve often got interesting and good shots :-)

The adage ‘if you don’t go, you don’t get’ still holds true in my book, and there is something beautiful in ‘not knowing’ about what the future will hold.

Forecasting as useful as it is, shouldn’t be used to rule our lives. Reading into weather forecasts too much can stop you from going out, and besides, you don’t know what the weather will bring you when you do'.

Most of my best images were created in what folks would call ‘bad weather’. Only recently, on the Isle of Harris, the ‘bad weather’ days turned out to be our best. We had reduced visibility with the backgrounds becoming veiled and ‘foggy’ due to the light rain we had.

Conversely, photographing in dry weather (oh how much of a reprieve this may feel after wet weather), is often extremely boring: one dimensional. Like a postcard. Dull.

So my advice would be : unless the weather forecast is telling you that a storm will wreck your new hair style : go. Go and see what happens (and leave that forecasting machine back at the hotel).

You just don’t know what you’ll get, and that is the beauty and inspirational part of it all.

Japan is calling.....

Tonight I have been busy planning my hotel stay in Tokyo. I remembered that a few tours ago, I stayed at a hotel in Tokyo that had a robot girl as the checkin attendant, and she was accompanied by two Dinosaurs. One of them was definitely a raptor. While I was checking in, I had to listen to the ‘roar’ of the ancient forest.

I checked though my notes, to see which year this was, and it appears to have been my last Hokkaido trip in 2020 before the whole world went mad.

So I decided I should go back again. If you are interested / curious, the hotel is called Henn na Hotel in Tokyo. Looking forward to it. This is SO Japan !

Isle of Harris, or Bolivia?

This past month, I ran two workshops on the isle of Harris. I took this photo with my iPhone while we were there.

One of the things that I’ve learned over the past 13 years, is that each landscape can be a great teacher. Had I not visited Bolivia in 2009, I don’t think I would have embraced the minimalism that is available to me on Harris. Prior to my Bolivia trip, I was shooting Harris like every other beach is photographed. But Bolivia taught me to use space in my photos, and now I seek it wherever I go.

The Hálendi Tour

It’s been a long while in the making. But next September, I’m running a tour that goes right through the interior of Iceland up to the north east, and then back. This tour will completely avoid the ring road of the country, and focus on taking us into the heart of the highland landscape.

I decided that as much as I love my Fjallabak tour, it is time for me to give it a break (I need to keep my inspiration up), and so what we’re doing next September, is that we will journey through the two main ‘roads’ (I use the term loosely). The Sprengisandur road is perhaps one of Europe’s most stunning journeys. River crossings, vast empty deserts, glaciers along the way. It’s a beautiful journey.

We do stop for the first couple of days around the Fjallabak region, at the start of the tour, as it is only a few hours outside of Reykjavik, before venturing further north on the Sprengisandur road. The north east of Iceland is one of my favourite places to visit. It has some of the more spectacular waterfalls of the country and the return trip will take us to spend a few days around the Kerlingarfjoll area of the central highlands.

I don’t think I could stop coming to Iceland. I think it has become a home from home for me. As I look back at my first visit here in 2004, I would not have envisaged that I would come back so often, nor how Iceland’s landscape would become a teacher for me. I have often said that certain landscapes, when visited at the right time in one’s own photographic journey, can become instructors, showing you a way forward. Iceland has been one of those places for me, and I think that the repeated visits, and learning more and more about the country over so many years, has given my photography more depth than I would have gotten, had I only come here a few times. I am hoping I will keep on returning.

Photographing ghosts

We all do it. We all photograph ghosts.

I have found myself often photographing the residue of something that has passed. By the time I have set up my camera: the moment has gone. And what I am actually doing is trying to capture something that no longer exists: the special quality of light that made me want to capture it in the first place has now gone, but somehow, I am clinging onto an impression of what it was, and not really seeing what now ‘is’.

There is a disconnect.

What we ‘see’ in our mind’s-eye, can cause problems for us. Because by becoming emotionally attached to a moment of great light and composition, we can fool ourselves into thinking it is still there 10 or 20 minutes later, when in fact it has long since passed.

There are two kinds of photographic ghost:

  1. the ‘love is blind’ variant. This is the ghost we conjure up out of idealism. We manage to ignore the faults and distractions in the scene and only focus on the parts we like. This is a condition that all of us face, where we lack objectivity in what we see.

  2. The ‘moment has passed’ variant.

Both of these variants, at source, have the same issue: we see what we want to see, and not what is actually there.

So how does one avoid photographing ghosts? Indeed, can one avoid it?

I have given this some thought and I think it is impossible. Firstly, human beings are terrible at recognising that the only constant in life, is change. We latch on to moments in our existence and tend to think they last for much longer than they actually do. Unless we are trained in Buddhism, or some such philosophical aspect that allows us to recognise that nothing is permanent, then we all suffer from the illusion of thinking that what we experience has more currency than it actually has.

I find it intriguing that I am often photographing something that is no longer there. I am always living in the past because there is latency in my central nervous system. My senses do not work in real-time: light enters my eyes, is converted into electrical pulses and fed down my optic nerves to my brain where there are further delays in processing what I just saw. Everything I see has already happened. Everything I feel to be happening around me is a memory.

So perhaps, we should accept that we‘cannot avoid photographing ghosts. Everything we witness has passed. Perhaps the best remedy is to learn to ‘let go’ of capturing what one saw, but recognise that at best, we may come home with a residual imprint of what we saw.

For me, I deliberately leave my films for some time. In a way, I’m trying to forget what I saw, and what my aims were. This allows me to ‘let go’, and to simply work with what I did capture, rather than working with the ghost of what I thought I photographed.

Low Mood

I’m on the isle of Harris in Scotland right now. We had particularly exceptionally bad weather yesterday. So bad that the sand was being blown around in the air, mixed with heavy rain. Yet we still got some images.

I have been thinking for a while that I wish to return to more darker images. Low-key or ‘low mood’ images can convey a sense of intimacy, atmosphere, or just a recollection of those dark days that we have all experienced.

Many thanks to Bert Vliegen for allowing me to share this image with you. It is his image with my edit applied.

My love for you

I bought a painting this week. It’s called ‘my love for you’.

I collect art. Sometimes it’s photographic, other times it’s paintings. I feel my life is richer by having art around me. And I’d much rather it wasn’t my art, as that is just what I do. So having other people’s art around me enriches me.

Anything that takes me to another place, is high currency in my book. This painting by Paul Barnes does this.

But there is a back story, and one I feel I must share, as it will perhaps be an insight into my photography and my life these past 13 years since I left IT and started to run photographic tours and workshops.

When I first started out running trips, I struggled a bit. I was extremely nervous meeting new people. Having to look after a group of folks for a week is a demanding job, and if you feel you don’t have the social skills or experience of doing this full time: trust me: it’s overwhelming.

A dear friend used to write to me each Sunday night before my workshops began, more as a good omen, to wish me well. I had found that her writing to me, helped me deal with the stress I was dealing with. I found I would not sleep properly before a workshop because my mind was running at 100%. She did this for about 5 years. That just shows you how much of a dear friend she is to me. She kept that up for so long.

Anyway, what has this got to do with this painting?

Quite a lot.

When I started out, one of my early trips was to the Assynt region of Scotland. It has been a personal favourite location for me for over 20 years. I grew up around this area photographically speaking. As an amateur I came up to Assynt at weekends. Since running my workshops for 13 years, I have consistently loved coming to the Ceilidh place in Ullapool, and use this great hotel as my base for the week.

When I visit the Ceilidh place, I always stay in room 4. And in that room there is a painting of a dog - a highly stylised painting, by the artist Paul Barnes. It has become something of a symbol for me.

I have stared at that painting for over a decade. Usually around 3am when I cannot sleep, for worry about how I’m going to look after six strangers for the week ahead.

So last week while I was at the Ceilidh place, I asked Jock - the owner, if I could buy the painting. I feel it has been with me through thick and thin, through my early years, and through all the troubles / doubts and worries I have had. Sadly Jock said no, for very understandable reasons. It is a painting he loves and of course, I respectfully understand where he is coming from.

So I chose to go look at Paul Barnes paintings that are available, to see if I could find something similar, that would have the same vibe as the painting that has been part of my workshop life this past 13 years.

Paul Barnes work is represented by a gallery here in Edinburgh and I saw the above painting was available. Stylistically, it has all the earmarks of the dog painting from room 4 in the Ceilidh Place. Sepia toned, a bit dreamy, out there, Barnes’ work is consistent. Beautiful and dreamy. He is a lovely artist.

And now, I own this. And it makes me happy. Because each time I look at it, it is not only beautiful, but it symbolises my life this past 13 years.

I think we often choose to buy art, based on some unquantifiable reason. I think the dog painting in room 4 has a character to it, that I see in Barnes’ other work, which has touched me in a way that I cannot quite explain.

—

The Ceilidh Place in Ullapool is in my view the best place to stay if you come up to the Inverpolly / Assynt region. If you do come: room 4 is the room with the dog painting by Paul Barnes. That is the painting that means so much to me.

I am not a photographer

It’s far too limiting a badge to wear.

When I first got into the arts as a kid, I was a painter. I had thought that painting would stay with me. As a boy between the ages of 5 and 12, I had not seen me doing anything other than painting. But at 12 I found music, and that engulfed me, so much so that painting was cast aside. Until around the age of 34 I did nothing but music, and then I hit a brick wall with it. Since then it has been photography, until around 5 years ago when music re-entered my life. I now spend a lot of my time working on music as I do photography.

I now realise that what I was doing in the past was putting badges on what I do. Or perhaps compartmentalising what I do.

I find auditory things just as inspiring as I do visual things. To me, they are one and the same. I can get as much inspiration from music as I do from looking at other’s photography. Truth be told: I rarely look at other’s photography these days. I think it’s a symptom of photography now being my ‘job’, or ‘vocation’. I feel I was meant to do photography, and I have little bandwidth left for looking at other’s work, and if I do have it, I’d much rather spend it on listening to music, which is where I get a lot of my inspiration from these days.

Surely, what photography does for all of us, is allow us to focus on one of our sensory perceptions in a way that we ordinarily wouldn’t? It is a rarity to be able to stop and stare at something for a prolonged period of time. To stand and enjoy it. That is the core of why we all photograph I believe. We are in pursuit of the visual without anything else getting in the way.

I find the same with sound. Being able to enjoy the quality of sound, or simply have the awareness of the sounds around me, is a kind of music in its own way. And yet I see parallels to what I do with my interest in the visual world.

Music is frequencies, and colour and luminance of tone are also frequencies. All visual and audio artists focus on the beauty of how frequencies interact. All musicians and photographers are observers. That is what we do. We study the interaction of light or of sound depending on which medium we focus on.

Website updates to portraiture gallery

I’ve been nudged to update / refresh my portraiture page on this very website. As much as I am just as passionate about making photographs of people as I am of landscapes, I’m aware that the majority of my audience isn’t interested in portraiture. Which is, in my view, a bit of a shame that we tend to compartmentalise what we like : to me, photographs are photographs.

The biggest problem I had with my portraiture webpage was that the images were too small. They are now much larger, so you can hopefully enjoy the detail of my subject’s clothing and perhaps see their spirit in their eyes more clearly. Additionally, whilst doing this job today, I came across a few images that I now wonder ‘why did I not publish these?’ Distance is a great thing, and I would it deeply enjoyable being reacquainted with these forgotten about images.

I am so keen to go and make some more street photos !

I have been focussing on landscapes only, for such a long time now, and although I feel my landscape work is much better than my portraiture, that should not be a reason not to enjoy making images of people. It is a great ‘escape’ from my passion for landscape work. Taking a break, a step back, or doing something different for a while is always good for the soul and I would advise to find some alternative interests to your photography. Time away from it doing something else, often reaps rewards when you do return to it.

So I am hatching plans now to go make some more people pictures this coming year.

If you choose to look at my portraiture web page, I hope you enjoy the images at much larger sizes (just click on them), and even if you aren’t that interested in portraiture, consider this: Portraits are really landscapes of the human soul.