South Korea 2022

I’m not really a fan of groins, poles, or Tori gates in water. It isn’t my thing.

But I did find these pillars a little out of the ordinary. The rust colour was also unusually appealing. Which is why I think I followed through to actually finishing the work and presenting it here.

These were the only photographs that I made whilst in South Korea last October that I am happy with. They also feel sufficiently strong enough for me to include them on this blog. I see photography as a diary of my life, and my blog is a mirror of that. So here they are.

The follow through test

To me, there are several stages in the birth of images where the process can come to an abrupt end, or to put it another way, becomes still born, and if I manage to get through to editing the work and presenting it, then it has had to stand up to several tests. Here are my thoughts on what they are:

I have to be interested enough to shoot it

Judgement on whether something is of worth has to be present from the very beginning. I don’t just shoot anything, and I’ve found that I’ve become more selective over time (this does not mean it’s a good thing - as I think being overly selective can result in myself missing out on potential images). But I have come to realise that if I’ve shot the scene, I think there is some merit to it.

I have to be interested enough to scan and edit it

I have found myself reject the work when it comes to scanning it.

I have to be interested enough to actually publish it

I sometimes get to the end, and just don’t feel the work is strong enough. I think this has taught me that I often feel that hunch pretty much right through the process and I need to trust it more.

I have to live with it for a few months or maybe even a year

Sometimes our best work only becomes evident with time. Conversely, more often, I find work that I liked at the beginning, can become tiring or I just feel I see it for what it truly is much later: it’s not as good as I had hoped. So it is removed.

I feel connected to the work

I just have to find something about the work that pushes me forward to work on it. If I’m not engaged enough in it, then I think it will become evident during one or a few of the phases mentioned. I do sometimes find I pursue weak work right through to the very end, and still manage to publish it.

As it stands at the moment, I’m really not sure what I think of this work from South Korea. I can’t figure out if I just had to finish it, and publish it, because it was the only thing I found while I was there? Or is my uncertainty because it’s not within my usual style of subjects? I really don’t know. So I really need to live with it for now.

Finding the right colour palette / tonal response

I struggled a bit when I started work on editing the Jujuy images. I often find the start of some new work to be the most precarious part of the process. If I start on the wrong tack, I can head off in the wrong direction. Which is why I do a few things:

  1. give myself permission to change the work at any given time.

  2. edit a few images in the set to see what the overall ‘tone’ or ‘mood’ is. This may instruct that I go back to point 1 with images I edited at the very beginning.

Edit Mk1

Edit Mk2

Before I left for my Norway trip, I had a go at editing this image of Salinas Grandes salt flat in Argentina. The left-hand image is the original. I found I couldn’t settle into where I should go with it. The hue changed a lot during the Mk1 edit, and I settled for the water in the trench being the same as the sky colour. But I felt troubled by the dark horizon. It was far too dominant for me. Which leads me to my third point:

3. If something isn’t feeling right: it isn’t right.

I just didn’t feel right about this edit. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and so I decided to shelve it until I had completed more images from the set. You’ll note from my post from yesterday that I settled on a darker / more saturated feel to the work, and once I had done that, going back to re-edit the image above became much clearer which way I should go about it.

This leads me to my point today: sometimes the answer takes time to arrive at and perhaps more importantly, that accepting that everything is in a state of flux and could easily change is freeing. If you are the kind of person who needs to know now, or likes to regiment their life, then working on art may be extremely frustrating. If you can live with knowing that you may not know the answer to any artistic issues you have, then you’ll do a lot better.

Our biggest limitation is: ourselves. We are often the stumbling block in our own creativity.

I often get in my way.

I find that when I am uncertain of which route to take, it’s best to shelve it and go and work on something else. The answer will come in its own way when the time is right.

Jujuy

The birth of new images, is something that always makes me feel happy deep inside. It is as though they always existed, but were hidden out of sight behind a curtain, waiting for that moment when they would make their entrance.

From that moment onwards, it is as though they have always been part of me.

It is perhaps one of the greatest misunderstandings in photography that we create the work. I have been aware for many years that it is often the work that creates itself. It tells us what it wants to be, and where it needs to go, and if we are good artists, we respond to it and work with it, rather than try to control it.

If we don’t listen, and don’t respond to the work’s natural calling, then a sense of frustration and disenchantment will ensue.

I am aware that my work of late has returned to deeper tones and an increase in colour. I have not tried to steer it this way: I have just tried to respond to where the work feels like it needs to go. But I am left asking myself: why now? Why after so many years of wishing to return to exploring the lower tonal registers is it happening now?

I do not have any concrete answer, but I am wondering if the hiatus of the past three years, the pause in my creativity has been a form of some kind of reset?

With regards to this new work, I am also aware that as much as I am enjoying creating things again, and am happy that I have fresh new work to enjoy, I do not feel there is any progression in style. As mentioned in a previous post: I am giving myself a free pass on this one. I just feel lucky at the moment to be able to create new work at all, so to judge it and put it up for inspection would be detrimental.

In a way, this work from Jujuy is like a regression in style to my earlier work of the Altiplano. I feel a cementing of style, and a continuation of themes once learned and played with many years ago.

And that is fine.

I learned many years ago that progress is not linear, and it is best to work through what you’re creating, rather than to set high expectations of it being something more than it is. This work wanted to go for a more saturated, darker toned look, and so, in the spirit of following its intentions, I obliged.

It’s just nice to be creating new work, and as much as we often leap to a quick judgement of how good it is, perhaps it’s best to put any notions of evaluating the work to one side, and move on to what’s coming next.

I’m all up for keeping on going. I’m keen to build the momentum after several years of stagnation.

Jujuy, Argentina

Taken from afar, I never really grasped the scale of the mountains. When I look at this image, I can visualise myself climbing and wandering these jagged slopes, in an endless quest to reach the top.

illusion

This is excellent, and just pushes the whole idea that ‘seeing is an illusion’. Very funny and enjoyable to watch this, but also very illuminating as to how far we can be convinced of an illusion.

Leaving something in the tank

I’m back in Norway after three years away. Heading to the island of Senja tomorrow for a week of photography with a group of workshop friends I know well.

I still have a portfolio of work created on the island of Senja from February 2020, just before all the lockdowns happened. But I have been deliberately leaving it aside for work on a later date. This is something I do more of now than I once did.

Years ago I would be so keen to work on new images the moment I got them back from the lab, but I’ve found there to be something extremely positive about keeping ‘something in the tank’ for later.

Of course, I’d like to think that this is a mature sign: to keep work back, or only work on it when I am ready to do so. But this all started in a way that I had not planned. Initially it was simply due to too many workshops and finding that when I had returned home, I needed space away from everything. I remember the first time I shelved some work for a few months, I grew anxious as that few months extended into 2 years. The collection of images were from the Isle of Harris in 2014, and I remember wondering if I would ever get round to them. My initial feelings were that if I left them more than several months, I would either forget about them, or the momentum would be lost.

Instead, when I finally did get round to working on them, it was the change in subject (I had been shooting a lot of Snow at the time) and distance that allowed me to look at the work in a very different way. And once I had completed work on them, I felt an overwhelming sense of ‘understanding’ and ‘calmness’ about my photography:

‘there is no rush, just work on the images when you feel you want to’,

seemed to be the message, and I have lived by this ever since.

If we look at musical groups as an analogy to this, many artists when they finish an album have loads of other songs that they wrote during the time of the production of the album, but they never completed them or recorded them. Sometimes artists have songs lying around from several albums ago, that finally make it onto their new album. Sometimes these songs are some of their best work, so it’s not indicative that the work was difficult or second rate. It’s just that perhaps the work didn’t suit what they were previously doing, or they just felt it wasn’t the right time.

The important bit is that being creative is not just about creating work, it’s also knowing when to shelve work that isn’t finished, and to give oneself permission to rework, re-edit, pause, or just shelve something indefinitely.

All work is fluid. The good artist knows this

I like having ‘something left in the tank’ - a few extra portfolios of images that I haven’t scanned yet or edited. I have the confidence now to know that the work isn’t shelved indefinitely, but that I will just choose as and when to edit the work.

I think space has become increasingly important to me.

I feel I need to be ready to work on things, and feel a sense of ‘this is the time’ to do it. Having the precedence of leaving work in the past for a while and getting round to working on it, has shown me that I can trust myself to work on it when I feel I am ready to.

But that’s just me. What about you?

A vocabulary of light

ethereal: extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world

I feel the past five or six years has been an exploration in high key imagery. I think I have mentioned that I’m keen to go back to exploring darker tones and moods, and I was certainly aware that with my new Harris images, there seemed to be a bit of a return to darker imagery and also a reintroduction of stronger colour.

I think that the light one is working in, should really dictate the kind of images that are produced. In a way, we should consider that like a toolset, different kinds of light provide different things to our imagery, and learning how best to work with all these kinds of light is a skill we all have to work at.

Ethereal light on Harris last November.

We tend to shoot what we deem beautiful, and as a beginner I would only work with sunrises and sunsets. Most of us just go about responding to what we think beautiful and of course, that is a fine thing to do.

But I am aware that there are qualities of light outwit my normal shooting habits that if I chose to work in them, I might find some new ground, and an appreciation for.

But it is my belief that we have to take one kind of quality of light at a time. For the past while, I have been focussing on very light delicate soft light, foggy misty light. I have stayed away from hard contrasts from a general belief that the light doesn’t work. Yet I have had a few epiphanies over the past decade where I learned that what I thought would not work, does, if approached in the right way.

In short, learning to understand what different kinds of light are providing our imagery is like developing a vocabulary. It takes time to learn new words, and to understand the subtitles of them, and when to use them in our language.

dreich: Scottish (especially of weather) dreary; bleak.

I would not have attempted to shoot this many years ago, and I have received many comments that this image was quite different for me. I think that was partly due to the green colour (I rarely shoot green, in case you hadn’t noticed?), but also because of it’s dark, dare I say it dreary, bleak mood.

I think I’m playing more in different kinds of light. It’s good to exercise my vocabulary, or indeed to even discover that I’ve learned a new word or two: those images that work but wouldn’t ordinarily be the kind of light you would choose to work in.

We all have our own unique vocabulary of light. I think I know what mine is, and how far it reaches. Question is, do you?

Welcome back to wherever you are

It’s always nice to finish some new work, and doubly so to print it.

For many years I have always anticipated that style, if one is able to have it, is something that surfaces over time. Initially it’s not so clear, there are just hints and suggestions, but as one’s own confidence (and I really mean experience and awareness) improves over many years of creating work that we are happy with, I think ‘style’ if we have it, become more apparent.

I have also thought that progress is not linear. Sometimes we stagnate, other times there are big leaps in our development, or sometimes a radical change whereas other years we may feel we are chasing our own tail. But if we zoom out far enough, I would hedge a bet that most of us can see some kind of long-term evolution in what we do.

I’ve been pretty happy with my progress over the past decade. There have been a few moments where I really felt I had hit some new kind of look to what I do. Those kinds of times are very satisfying where the final result tends to exceed what you had hoped for. They do happen.

But I have also wondered when I might feel that my style becomes more ‘embedded’, more a fixture, and that any continuation in work is really an exercise in ‘more of the same’. I think it inevitable that this will happen. But we really never know when we reach a point where we aren’t going to change much more, and it’s just a case of fine tuning our skills, or whether it is just a period where we have hit a plateau for a year or five.

I think all one can do is just keep creating work, and not to dwell on such matters. After all, I never really ever set out to create the style I have : it just happened. Creativity in my view is the act of submission. Rather than the act of ‘forcing’ or ‘striving’ to get to a pre-determined destination. To move forward, you have to let go, and see where it will go under its own steam.

I feel that the last 3 years have been a stagnation, brought on primarily by the response to the covid thing. It halted any momentum that I had. I still feel like I’m picking up the pieces. I’m not entirely back on the horse as it were, and I still feel a sense of ‘not being fully present’. I think for me, it’s because I have lost trust in the future now. The world I thought I lived in does not exist any more, and so I suppose, I am still pinching myself that I am still here. There were far too many moments where I thought I wouldn’t be. I’m still coming to terms with what happened to myself, and how I feel about going forward. This has impacted me in ways I’m still trying to figure out. And when I write these words, I know that I am speaking for many of us.

So with that in mind, I am giving myself a free pass on the work I’m creating right now. To me, I’m just glad I’m creating new work at all. And I think to have any ideas about where it’s going in the long run, is simply too early to think about. I’m still finding my ground, after being groundless for a few years.

So ‘welcome back Bruce’ is all I can say to myself. And boy, it feels very nice indeed to create something new after all so much wasted time, and years that you and I will never get back.

The benefits of graduated filters

I’ve been running workshops for over a decade now. In the past few years I have noticed that there is an increasing belief amongst many of my workshop participants that grads aren’t that important any more and everything can be done in post.

I don’t dispute this. I am sure this is the case for many images, but there are still a few reasons why one should consider using graduated filters anyway.

Considering an e-book on this subject. I’ll see how it goes. I also think folks need to understand that grad hardness / softness is also dependent on the focal lengths used.

Grads don’t just darken the sky

… they brighten the ground also, thus opening up shadow detail.

Grads reduce the dynamic range. As you push the grad down, note in live-view how the earth gets brighter in value.

If the grad reduces the range of tones in your ground and sky to almost zero, then you end up with a nicely balanced image where the ground is the same luminance as the sky (this is how we perceive the world).

One thing to note about this ‘re-balancing’ of exposure, is that it only happens in evaluative / average metering modes such as Aperture Priority. If you are a manual shooter, you tend to set a constant - maybe exposing for your ground and then apply a grad to reduce sky overexposure.

I tend to prefer using Aperture Priority mode when I can, as it automatically re-adjusts the exposure as the grad is applied - lifting ground values at the same time as darkening sky values.

Over reliance on technology

I think there is too much reliance on the technology. My view is that if your philosophy is to ‘shoot now, ask questions later’, then you’re probably not working as best as you can. You’re probably not noticing the issues you should be.

Learning to see the issues and work to improve them at source, is better than doing it later as a kind of clean up act. The whole approach to me of ‘I can get it all in the histogram’ as a way of saying ‘I got it all, and I can clean it up later’ just invites one to be less attentive than they should be. If the composition has problems at source, it will continue to do so later on.

By working to get the image as balanced as possible in the field, and thus, adjust or correct the composition to suit better tonalities is important. ‘getting it all in the histogram’ just speaks to me that the photographer is more intent on aqusiition than really looking.

This I suppose, is similar to the argument that I hear about cropping. ‘I shoot 3:2 and just crop to 5:4 later’. In my view, if you’re going to crop to 5:4 later, then crop in the field at 5:4. In other words, if you intend it to be 5:4, then compose in 5:4. The results will be tighter than going home with a loose 3:2 capture that you intend to work into a 5:4. It’s the same argument. Get your exposures right in the field by using a grad. It will help you see better and make things tighter in your compositions.

Shadow data is improved

As a grad is introduced to the scene, the dynamic range is reduced. What happens is that the sky values get darker, but more importantly the shadow details open up as the ground values move towards the mid-tone. You get more shadow information in your files.

Better Composing in Live-View

It’s not just the technical that improves. You don’t just get nicely balanced photographs in-camera. You also get the ability to see better when working in live view. Work in live view without a grad and the ground is a muddy mash of difficult to see subjects and shapes. Similarly the sky is more washed out and it’s harder to see the elements that support or maybe distract in your composition. By applying a grad in live-view, you open up the ground values so you can actually see what’s there, and you also darken the sky. Everything just becomes a bit easier to compose.

More engagement

I don’t know about you, but I find that the images I feel drawn to work on when I get home, are the ones that look pretty good to begin with. I rarely work on images where the exposure is bad, or the ground is too dark and the sky is bleached out.

I’m a film shooter, so I only scan the images I have high engagement with. You tend to also shoot a lot less with film, and with digital, you have a lot more images to wade through. If I was a digital shooter coming home with lots of images where I have to grad in post before I know if they are worthy of working on, I think I would find that very hard.

I think balancing exposures in-camera at the point of capture leads to images that you are probably going to be more engaged with when you get home. Engagement, and being able to see what you really have in your files is greatly overlooked in my view.

Parting thoughts

Of course grads don’t work for all situations. My point is that they do work for a lot of things, and even in the age where we have a lot of dynamic range in our cameras, the human eye tends to perceive scenes as having a lot less range than they do. If you want your images to look as they do to your eye - you either have to grad in-camera, or do it in post. Either way, you have to grad. In my experience, using grads in the field allow me to capture images with improved shadow detail, and are more balanced / pleasing to my eye. Engagement increases and it helps me choose which images to work on when I get home.

There are also technical benefits to using grads while in the field such as improved shadow detail.

Of course you don’t ‘need’ to grad. This is not my point. What I hope to have illustrated today is that there are still a few benefits to using them, even in this day and age where a lot of digital shooters have abandoned them.

Isle of Harris 2022 Portfolio

New images from Harris, shot in November last year, on Fuji Velvia 50 120 medium format film. Processed and scanned at home.

I was unable to see any of my new work this past year due to giving up sending the work out to 3rd party labs for processing. It was a dry time for me - creating work I could not see, nor complete. As a result, I was starting to question why I was using film whilst watching all of my workshop participant’s images immediately appear on the preview screen of their digital cameras.

But as always, when my films are processed, and I’m able to work on them, and complete new work, I always feel very satisfied with the look of medium format film. It is different from digital, and I am sure it is a component of part of my ‘look’ that folks notice about my work.

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

I think this hiatus away from working on new images has given me time to do a ‘reset’. I feel my work over the past five years or so had become more and more minimal, and colour wise, more and more muted. I had been feeling I’d like to return to some of the darker and stronger tones of my earlier work, but was also acutely aware that ‘you can never go back’, or ‘recreate what you were doing’. I did try to work on stronger colours for a while but always found my taste would take me to more muted work. Somehow, this isn’t happening now - there is now a return of stronger colour to my work, but perhaps it’s more considered (well, that is something I’d like to think anyway for sure ;-)

Everything has an ebb and a flow, and everything is on a pendulum swing. I am sure I am going to fluctuate in my desire for stronger colour or darker tones. To me I feel I’ve been learning to work with the higher registers this past few years, and now it’s time to start incorporating darker tones back in. Let’s see where this goes….

Limited Time Print Offer

I thought it would be nice to offer some prints at a special price for a few days, to celebrate the new work :-)