Visualisation doesn't stop at the eye-piece

Visualisation is your friend. By visualising where you want to be in six months time, or by visualising the kinds of images you may hope to get on a forthcoming trip, we can set in motion the act of turning dreams and wishes into reality.

I have often used mockups, to help me get a sense of where any new work is taking me, and how it may appear when finished. The trick of using mockups, is to feed off the excitement and any inspiration they give you, while allowing yourself the complete freedom to deviate from what they currently show you.

Caveat: The danger being that pre-visualisation can lock you in. If you anticipate a certain outcome before beginning any new work : you will inevitably be disappointed that the work is not going where you thought it should. Visualisation should be used carefully, and by that I mean you should understand that you are not trying to tell the future, you are simply trying to help steer yourself forward. Dreams are dreams, but real life seldom works out to match our dreams, but dreams still, are important.

Mock up of my new web page for images made in 2022. As you can see, I have filled in 3 portfolios at the moment, and as I add others, I will swap and change things around. The key to visualising like this is to keep things fluid and allow yourself to change anything at any time. Indeed that is perhaps the key to creativity.

Way back when I was starting up my workshop business, I would dream about the new tours and workshops I hoped to offer, and I would even set up fictitious yearly calendar webpage showing how they might look on my website.

Visualisation techniques like this can be incredibly instrumental in steering you in the right direction:

If you are thinking about it, then you are most probably moving towards it.

Conversely, the opposite holds true: if you don’t visualise, then there is no way forward.

The past year I felt very ‘stuck’ creatively speaking, because I was not able to get my films processed. Because I was not able to move ‘through’ the work, and complete it. You need to finish old work so that there is space and room for new things to come in.

The image above is a mockup of my new web page for images made in 2022. As you can see, I have filled in 3 portfolios at the moment, and as I add others, I will swap and change things around. The key to visualising like this is to keep things fluid and allow yourself to change anything at any time. Indeed that is perhaps the key to creativity in general: if you understand that nothing is ever ‘finished’ or ‘set in stone’, it gives you a lot of freedom, not just in terms of where the work is going, but also in terms of avoiding stern or harsh judgement of oneself and one’s abilities.

What I love about the new mockup page, is how fresh everything feels. I’m getting a little tired of my existing portfolio and it’s vital to keep things fresh in life and creativity. I am inspired to see how those empty portfolio boxes may be filled out over the coming months when I have time to work on my images from 2022.

Progress? Or just different?

After 13 years of running workshops to some locations I know so well, there is the tiny issue of running into the same compositions I have encountered in the past. Should I take them? Will they show some insight perhaps in terms of progress? Or am I just falling into a pattern where I am stuck on repeat?

I think these thoughts, as negative as they might appear, are perfectly normal thoughts to have about one’s work, if we continue to go to the same places over many years.

I know this particular set of Gneiss rocks well, and I’ve tried on several occasions to utilise it in my compositions. I would estimate that out of maybe a dozen attempts, I have only managed twice to use it, and be satisfied with the results. The most recent attempt was last November (image above) and the back in 2014 (image below).

I think stylistically I’ve changed. I am not the same person I was back in 2014, and although I am still very pleased with the older image, I think the newer one just shows that I’ve changed, and that is all it shows.

To compare oneself with your past is folly. You are just who you are now. So rating your current existence on this planet seems a bit pointless. But that doesn’t mean any comparison between old and new work is irrelevant. If you’re objective enough, and can handle the effort of doing it, it can maybe shed some light on what you are doing now that you didn’t do a while ago, and conversely, what you used to do, and don’t do now.

Seems I liked darker images a long while ago. But this is something I have been aware of for a while because I consistently do these comparisons on my work. I like to ‘check-in’ on myself to see where I am, and where I’ve been.

I try not to judge my older work. I just try to look at it from the perspective of ‘it is what it is, and was a statement about where I was back then’. But I have certainly had times to wish that I could go back. I think it is inevitable to see things in your older work that you don’t so so much now, but wish you still did. I’ve been aware for the past few years that my work got lighter and lighter, and in a way, I noticed there was a pendulum swing happening. I was feeling like I needed to go back and start visiting the darker tones in my work.

But wishing to do one thing, and actually doing it isn’t easy. I feel that as I start to re-introduce darker tones in my work, it’s coming from someone who has been to the other side of the luminance scale and he’s learned much that he can’t forget. The newer work feels more polished, but I’m not so sure that it has as much atmosphere as the original work. It was after all shot on a different kind of day, one with less drama, but the edit is more ‘tight’ in terms of object placement and tonal separation.

We can never go back, and I think we should just enjoy the reminisce. What you did, and what you were into, and who you were, aren’t exactly the same as who you are now. It is a reminder that all things are transient. And our photographic style / ability / skill is no exception to this.

The only thing that is permanent is change.

Salinas Grandes, Argentina

I loved coming to visit Salinas Grandes. I had originally planned to visit the region back in 2020 but obviously it had to be shelved.

I won’t go into it too much today, but suffice to say that I had many moments between 2020 and September 2021 where I thought my travelling days were well and truly over. I also thought my workshop and tour business was over too.

So to be standing at some of the salt pits on Salinas Grandes each morning and evening was something that I tried to drink up as much as I could. I distinctly remember saying to myself - ‘take it all in - you had moments where you thought this may never happen’.

It is a real delight to be walking through the images I just processed over Christmas. A year’s backlog of work, which I will get into when the inspiration and time make me do so. Right now, today it is Jujuy (Argentina province) day. I’m enjoying very much being reacquainted with the place as I always find myself reliving the experience when I do my deep dive image interpretation sessions in my little home studio.

obfuscation through rain and bad weather

Last November I spent two weeks on the Isle of Harris running two workshops. I go to Harris specifically in November for the ‘bad’ weather and have been doing so since 2010.

Yesterday I was discussing how I enjoy making pictures where parts of the scene become hard to read / understand, or are just reduced in some way.

Had the image above been shot in fair weather, the background island of Tarransay would have more definition, and in my view, that definition would be too much information for the photograph. By using rain and fog, distant subjects become soft and sometimes veiled in a way that make them more suggestive.

The forecast for the two weeks was not ‘good’. In fact, in the 2nd week, there turned out to be two or maybe three days where the weather was so wet that we wondered if we would get out at all. We did, and I think I would be correct if I said that the group agreed that these were often the best days for atmosphere in the images we worked on and edited during our day time sessions.

I’m not afraid of the rain for my camera. I am more afraid of shooting in boring light, which to me are those days where the sun is out and the contrasts are high. There is no atmosphere to speak of, and any sense of mood or dream quality one wants to put into their work won’t be there.

Atmosphere (read that as rain, mist, and generally bad weather) is perhaps the most attractive reason for shooting landscape photographs in Scotland. My country has atmosphere in spades, and it is never present during sunny days where everything is dry and clear.

I like to obfuscate. I find mystery in what has been either left unsaid, or is presented in a way where we have to work at seeing what is there. I like things to almost disappear : to live on the edge of perception. This is one of the reasons why I like to shoot in inclement weather, and will try to work as best as I can when the weather may be challenging.

I could not create the image above in fair weather. It had to be made on one of those ‘end of the world’ days, when you feel as though the sun may never come out again. This is a regular feature of the Scottish landscape during the winter months. The gloom can be overwhelming, and it can affect one’s mood, and judgement. I have often found it intriguing that moody images often look good to view, but are rarely good experiences to shoot: we are often overcome by the mood and feeling that pervades our awareness, but rarely do I look at photos from such gloomy days and feel gloomy. I often just appreciate the qualities of light and drama in these kinds of photographs.

To me, we have to remove our feelings of how bad the weather is while shooting, and instead focus more on what these kinds of bad days provide us with in terms of quality of light, of an unusual sense of atmosphere and how this will be translated into the images we come away with.

Evolution in Compositional values

I’ve been thinking lately, how I’m finding I’m becoming more attracted to compositions that may ask the viewer to look again. What might appear at first to be one thing, may turn out to be something else entirely.

For a very long while, I have been drawn to images that do not resolve. Foggy images or images where things become less and less easy to discern - such as the faint line between snow ground and a white sky have intrigued me. I love it for instance when I can remove that line between ground and sky so that trees in the Hokkaido landscape begin to float.

I think ‘composition’ can evolve. It might even follow a common journey such as this:

  1. things are all over the place

  2. removal of extraneous subjects to make the composition cleaner

  3. a further refinement on point 2, where tonal differences are considered just as importantly as subjects are.

This I think is fairly standard. But it is only really partially complete (if composiitonal technique is ever complete - as each new subject we meet, much like a new relationship is always a new puzzle to be worked out). I think that getting your compositions to a point where things feel clean, strong and simple can lead the images to become predictable, or perhaps even boring.

After many years of finding that I’ve been on a path to simplify (without really aiming for this - it just happened for me), I am finding now that these clean compositions are fine, but that I’m now looking for something that provides a bit of an unusual angle to them. I seem to be introducing things, or being attracted to compositions where things are deliberately unclear, or slightly confusing.

Take for instance the image in this post. The main reason why I shot it was that I liked how the light sand bars in the foreground intersect with the river in the midground. I was aware at the time that they would ‘join’ in the minds-eye once compressed down into a 2D image.

For me, every time I look at it, I have to work hard to get away from the mid ground river and foreground sand being one subject. My mind immediately joins them and the result is that they no longer are a river and dunes, but instead have evolved into becoming interesting graphical curves and lines.

This is part of what happens with visual construction. Let me illustrate this by the diagram below:

3 variations of the necker cube. Some are more easy to ‘construct’ in our vision than others.

All three wire-frame objects are cubes. Except that some are more easy to see as cubes than others. I would say the easiest to understand as a cube is the middle drawing. The left image is the 2nd easiest to see as a cube while the right image is the most difficult.

Our vision is a ‘construction’. We aren’t aware of it, because the process is innate. It happens without us knowing we are ‘constructing’ what we see. Using visual illusions such as the three cubes above allows us to see the ‘construction’ in construction :-)

For a moment while you stare at the left hand drawing you don’t ‘see’ the cube, but once you do, the entire drawing seems to morph in your mind’s eye.

This is the kind of optical confusion that I enjoy in some compositions. The image I shot in Lençóis Maranhenses last May does exactly the same thing. Upon first glance you see shapes and lines, and it is only after some understanding that you notice that the sand in the foreground is intersecting with the mid ground river. That what you are looking at is sand and water, not a graphical shape made up of curves and lines.

In a sense, most of my editing life, I would have tried to avoid this confusion, and would have worked to make these two areas of the picture separate. But I quite like marrying two areas of the frame together via tonal similarities if I feel the result may bring forth an image that is less conservative compositionally speaking.

I do think there is room in our imagery and compositions to introduce tension or deliberate confusion. But I think if these things happen during the early stages of us learning to compose we look at them as problems we have to eradicate. It is only after some time of working with compositions where things are clean, clear of intention, that one starts to wish to introduce some kind of tension back into the work.

Lençóis Portfolio

Here is the completed 18 images from my trip to Lençóis Maranhenses national park in Brazil last May. I don’t intend to add it to the portfolio section of my website as yet, as I wish to work on most of the portfolios for last year over the coming months, and then create a brand new page for 2022.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy looking at these. I am running a tour there this coming May and have a couple of spaces left, if you like the simple / abstract nature of the work in this landscape. It’s a beautiful place to be.

All the images here were shot on Fuji Velvia film (and desaturated in the edit stage). The colours can be more vibrant in Lençóis, but I was going for a more dramatic look to the work this year. I feel I have been working with bright luminance for some time and wished to return to some darker tones). All the films were processed at home in my development machine. I am so delighted with my decision to process my own films in future, and now feel as though I have filled in the last gap to the entire lifecycle of image creation. I am entirely in control of the process from capture to print.

Lençóis Dusk #2

The first night I was in the dunes, I walked over several ‘hills’ of sand, moving further and further away from the small oasis we were sleeping at. At the final moment when the sun was really fading I found this particular curve.

More images to follow on my monthly newsletter. I’ve been processing films all week and have managed to get through 160 rolls. Editing the Brazil images because that is what I found most interesting to work on: I felt excited, and keen to work on them. So they will be in the next newsletter.

I’m off to Japan next week to run my Hokkaido tour, so this is the last film post for a wee while.

Dusk, Lenćóis Maranhenses, Brazil

Dusk. It’s such a special time.

The light is fading, and somehow I find my feelings about life, where I am, and what is to come, surface in my thoughts.

Watching the hues change on a sand dune as the colour temperature moves from daylight to dusk is always a special time for me. These feelings about life, the past, the future, are often eclipsed by the feelings of ‘now’. Photography seems to do one of two things for me: I am either living in the present moment, or I find that I become invisible to myself. All thoughts and worries dissolve, and in a way, it’s the best form of meditation that I have in my life.

I loved the latter part of my private trip to Lençóis. I had booked to travel around the periphery of the park in a Toyota Hilux, and these moments were the best: being able to direct my driver and guide, to be able to navigate over great distances to reach a vantage point that I thought may work for the photographs I wished to compose really helped.

I am now busy working on the set of images I made last May. I am so glad I bought my own film processor and I am finding the results from the home development are better than what I have had from many labs this past decade.

First image edit in almost a year

I am around 2/3rds of the way through processing my backlog of images from last year. In case you do not know the back story to this: I lost faith in my film lab of 8 years this year as they kept ruining my films. So I opted to raise the money to buy an automatic film processor and learn to process my own films.

My first scan of my own processed images.

The image above is the very first image I have edited of my own work in about a year. Proudly : it is a film I processed myself at home in my automatic film processor. Editing it is the final proof for me that the processing is working, because when you add curve adjustments to the film scans, if there is any problem with the processing of the substrates in the film - they will become evident.

I will be heading to Japan in about a week’s time, so I do not think I will have any time to work on the backlog of work I’ve just processed. I do not like to look upon the ‘editing’ stage of my work as ‘post-processing’. I really dislike this term, as it almost makes the editing stage feel as though it is like doing my laundry: a chore, and more importantly: an after fact of the fieldwork.

Editing to me, is a highly inspiring, creative place to be. I love editing my because I get lost in the material. Each adjustment of tone and luminosity brings forth an immediate emotional response. It is not a part of the image making process that I would like to think of as a ‘task’ or ‘chore’, but more so as a ‘creative space’.

So I would prefer to work on my images when I feel the drive to do so. Not because of some schedule, or deadline.

In some ways, I have always enjoyed having a small backlog of images to work on. To me, it is like having a well with water in it. If I have no images to work on at all, then the well feels as though it is dry. For years I had always worried that if I took too long to get round to working on images, I would either never get round to them, or simply lose interest. But it is not uncommon for me now to hold onto work for many years before I choose to work on it (Senja from February 2020 is one such case).

Anyway, I feel heartened to know that I am now in complete control of the entire process: capture, processing, editing and printing. Now that I have walked through the film-processing part of it for a solid week, I now see that it is not so difficult if one has an automated processor. I will write up an entry about my Dev.a film processor at some point. But I feel I should really work with it for at least half a year before giving any opinions about it. I would say right now, that I am very happy with the machine and it is living up to the hopes I had to be able to run around 12 to 24 rolls of film a day through it, without feeling like my house or kitchen where it resides, is turned into a laboratory.

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Postamble: I would like to thank Kyriakos Kalorkoti for inviting me round to his house several times to go through the E6 process, albeit with a manual processor. Kyriakos instilled in me that I need to be methodical, and ensure that there is no contamination in the chemicals.

I would also like to thank Robert Salisbury for offering to stop by on his way home from making images in the highlands, to help me alter my kitchen and install plumbing so I could get the Dev.a film processor up and running.

Can we really trust our vision?

In short: no.

I’ve been fascinated for years as to why there is a disconnect between what we ‘see’ when composing out in the field and what we often have on or memory cards / films. It’s a rabbit hole that one can disappear down, and that is exactly what I did. I learned that the human visual system has its own innate processing: everything we see is a ‘construction’ in our mind, and it happens so innately that we aren’t even aware of it.

Illusions such as this one by Science Girl are great at illustrating that what we see is a construction that happens in our mind’s eye. Once you begin to understand that ‘seeing’ is not ‘truth’, this gives you the freedom to realise that everything is open to interpretation, and once we know we are doing this, we can choose to go anywhere we want with our imagery.