Voice of the eye's book

I’m very honoured to find that I have been included in René Algesheimer’s curated book of photographers - ‘Voice of the Eyes’.

As someone who has produced a book or two myself, I am sitting here looking at a book that has 500 pages, and has very nicely written interviews with photographers that I know, and also, many that I have not been aware of until looking through this book.

A few hours have passed, and I am still buried deep with it, and there are a few photographers in here that I now feel inclined to check out more of their work.

René first contacted me about including my work in this book maybe three or four years ago. It all seemed like a pipe dream to me, and I wasn’t sure if his project would come to anything. And now, here it is, on my table. A small, but heavy / dense book with a lot of information in it. Each photographer featured in the book is given a decent amount of coverage with maybe three or four images each. It is the kind of format I was considering for a ‘retrospective’ I would like to do of my own work in the future - each ‘chapter’ of my own photography would have maybe three or four images and some detailed text about the location. So I think René design format makes a lot of sense.

If you’d like to know more about the book, or even buy it, then head over to https://voiceoftheeyes.com

Of course I’m going to tell you that it is highly recommended, because I’m in it :-) But apart from myself, I think there’s a lot of depth to this book. At over 500 pages, and enough photographs per photographer featured, and a decent set of questions to dig below the surface, it should keep you immersed for some time.

Highly recommended.

Patagonia is another old friend

I go out each morning to get a coffee locally, because I work from home and I find it too socially cut-off. Going out each day for that coffee allows me to meet other people and just have a connection with folks around me. It’s all good for mental health.

Today I bumped into a writer, who has been publishing books about ‘hidden’ Edinburgh and also ‘Uknown Glasgow’. Turns out that by trade, he is actually a lawyer, and that spurred on a discussion about ‘doing what you believe in’, rather than ‘doing something because you think it will make money’.

I’ve met this writer a few times before so he knows all about me, and what I do. Today he said ‘I presume that the trips you run, you do them because you love them?’, to which I replied that in my view, everything I offer, always started off as a personal trip to see what was there. I have never gone anywhere from the beginning with the idea of ‘checking it out for a future workshop’. I think that is just a bad idea. I’d much rather to to places that I am passionate about.

And then later on this morning, one of my clients Richard, wrote to me and said ‘I think I’ll come to Iceland with you, because you wrote so passionately about it’. Well, it wasn’t really my intention do to a ‘sell’ on Richard in particular. I just think that sometimes I feel I need to let others know that the trips I run, didn’t come from a need to make money, but they are often places that are very personal to me.

Iceland as I wrote a few days ago, has been part of my life since 2004. Patagonia is a year older. Torres del Paine has been part of my psyche since 2003. I was only about two or three years into making images as a ‘serious’ hobby at this point.

The thing for me about Torres del Paine, is that I knew the moment I was leaving that place, that I would be back. Although I had no definite plans to do so, and felt that this was a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience for me, I just had a hunch that it would feature as an important place for me, and so it has become that.

Some places draw you back, because you know you haven’t really managed to get under the skin of it enough. Or you know you’ve found some parts of the landscape to be elusive. You see things but aren’t able to capture them, or you know there’s a few more faces to the place that you still have to experience.

I have often thought that Torres del Paine is a place of many personalities. It is complex. The weather is so changeable, from sunny weather and t-shirt to downright difficult. It’s one of the major reasons why I think I can’t stay away from the place.

And it is one of those places that when you do go there, you always come away thinking you need to go back again because you know there’s a lot that’s been left unsaid.

I don’t think I will ever stop going to Torres del Paine national park. There are locations and places around the world that have become part of my world-home-view. I would be a very sad person if I were to find out I could not go back to many of the places I visit: Iceland, Japan, Patagonia, Brazil…. they are part of who I am I think. They have etched part of themselves in to me. I know this for sure.

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.

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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.