Just a regular day at the office

I was sent this today by my photo tour participant Steve Semper, from the Puna tour I did in 2019, in Argentina. A good group of folks, and this is shot just after a sunrise visit I think.

Image below is of my guide ‘Pancho’, whom I’ve known now for about seven years. This shot was made at the labyrinth area. I have had to work hard to find vantage points here that work at sunset. Last visit I felt I cracked it, and now we are able to get good light on these hills of clay at the most beautiful time of evening.

I often feel that on the finished portfolios I publish on my website, there is no scope to show you all the distances and the varieties of landscapes we pass through on our way to the places I like to shoot for sunrise and sunset.

It is often an adventure. This is one of the three Hilux vehicles we travel in as a group.

Many thanks to Steve for getting in touch today and sending these to me. It is a nice thing to go back and remember the tours I do.

Art & Fear

“even the failed pieces are essential”

At the beginning, and perhaps for many many years, most of us direct our attention to the technicalities of picture making, not realising that perhaps the keys to our improvement as a photographer lie more with how our attitudes, and beliefs shape our work.

At some point, we have to work on ourselves.

Art & Fear book. It’s a small book, light enough to carry with you on your day to day journeys, and I am enjoying it very much.

It took me a while to realise that everything that I do, even the so called ‘failed’ pieces have value. Everything is an experiment. Everything is a prototype. To create surprising work and to exceed, I need to move past restrictions and boundaries. Looking at my work as either a success or failure prevents me from doing that.

These days, if I am asked ‘how many successful images do I get on a roll of film?’, I tend to respond with:

“everything is a stepping stone to the next image, so every image is important in that process”

“even the failed pieces are essential”

Meaning that everything is an exploration. Images that I am particularly pleased with rarely come from just making one shot. I have to make several, and I have to try out many different variances of composition, focal length. This can only happen if I give myself the permission to do that.

“you learn how to make your work,
by making your work”

These days, I don’t look despondently at the images that had to be made in order for me to get to the ones that I am most proud of. These days I realise they had to happen. That they are an essential part of the process. They are the reason why the images I am most happy with are what they are.

I think I know myself pretty well these days. Having had to do a lot of self enquiry about how I deal with the ups and downs of creating art. But I am never finished with learning about myself. Therefore I welcome continuing to read about the creative process from others. Not only is it always good to hear confirmation of what you trust to be true in someone else’s writings, but also, that I may hear a view that I had not considered before.

I am always reminded by the little saying:

“I didn’t know I knew that”

This is another way of saying ‘I had an epiphany’ . I had a moment of sudden insight.

As always on this blog. I am less and less interested in the technicalities of image making, or the gear. I am more interested in the person behind the camera, because it is in our hangups, our attitudes and perhaps misguided beliefs that we inhibit our progress as photographic artists. Misguided ideas that good artists know what they’re doing for example, can hold us back, because:

“making art is risky”

And yet, this is not so apparent to most. Many of us will spend years, decades, or perhaps our life times thinking that we need to focus more on the equipment, the gear, and the ‘how to’ aspects of image making. While doing so, we will often be unaware that the keys to how we move forward as an artist lie in our gaining understanding of how our views and attitudes shape us.

“tolerance for uncertainty is a pre-requisite for success”

How we deal with success and failure, and how we deal with the fear of failing in our image making, are issues that we all must face at some point. Perhaps the sooner we do this, the better.

Behind the Scenes in Bolivia

There’s a lot that goes on behind the final images that you see on this website. I am not normally a ‘snapshot’ shooter, but since I got a mobile phone with a decent camera, I’ve tried to capture some photos of my trips for my school friends who request that I send them home some images, so they can get a feel what what it is that I do.

So the images below are from this year’s tour to the Bolivian Altiplano. We travel in three Land cruisers with our own guide and three drivers. The guides are exceptional in terms of their knowledge and I’m always impressed with the driver’s capability to fix a failing land cruiser in the middle of nowhere.

Here’s a little video, which I hope will convey the scale of the landscape in Bolivia. My guide and driver are in the front, and it’s just after sunrise. I’ve been told they are discussing food, and my friend Kathy who organises this tour for me each year tells me they are ‘typically talking about food!’. There are no real roads as such in Bolivia. Just a myriad of dust tracks sprawling out in all directions, but the drivers and guides always know where to go :-)

I always prefer to shoot in the softer light, and since Bolivia is a high contrast, cloudless place most of the time, that means gearing the trips up for getting to the places for sunrise and sunset times. But we did get some cloudy weather this year on the Salar, and that allowed me to work with much lower contrasts, to produce the Salar images you see of the islands below.

But I think sometimes, I feel aware that participants wonder just how much the images I make, are true to what we see when we are there. Well obviously there is my own artistic take on the places, but you can’t put in what wasn't there, and one of my participants this year told me (I paraphrase) “I thought the colours in your images had been put in later during post-processing, but now I see that they truly are very special when we are there at sunrise and sunset”. The light is indeed special in Bolivia, and I find that it starts to ‘glow’ at the times when most photographers tend to retreat. For me, the special light is just before sunrise, and just after sunset, at the point when most folks think the light show is over, it is just getting started.

Looking forward to next year’s tour. I have decided to change the itinerary so we spend only one day in Chile, and the rest of the time in Bolivia.

The Landscape is my home

My eldest sister always tells me ‘you come home for a Holiday Bruce’. Because I spend a lot of time away in many different countries and landscapes, and I’ve been doing this for fourteen years. In a way, I feel that these landscapes have become my home.

I have often spent many years returning to the same place. More out of a desire than a need, and because I have felt there is scope to grow. For a long while i have said that if you find the right landscape to suit your current ability, it tends to show you the way forward, and give you room to grow. Rather than go to brand new places all the time, I prefer to repeat places, and let them get under my skin. For example, my relationship with Iceland is now almost 20 years in the making. Patagonia is slightly older at 21 years. These places are like magnets to me, and they have not only kept drawing me back : they have taught me so much.

I feel it’s about time to do some kind of review of my photography. There is now enough established time in most of the locations I’ve visited to collate them into a book. But I’d like to do something that is more than just collecting images together in one publication. So I’ve been sketching out a possible format, and letting it simmer in my mind for a while. I think I am going to write about the relationships I have with each place, and how I think they have influenced me over the years of returning.

Right now, I’m not entirely sure I can do a next book. Printing prices shot right up by around 40% over the past few years due to…. you guessed it… covid. Supply issues have caused a bottleneck everywhere, in many industries. So I’m starting to make enquiries, to find out how feasible it is to produce a nice hard back. It may be some time, but I am hoping I can do something for 2024. We will see.

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you what I’m thinking.

For me, I enjoy this part of the process very much: It is good to dream, to visualise, and to take some time doing this ‘dreaming and visualising’. I enjoy it very much.

I often find when I let things sit in the back of my mind, that they tend to slowly move into focus, become something more tangible, and ultimately, I find that this kind of thinking tends to steer me towards where the project in mind, needs to go.

if you knew you couldn't fail, then what would you do?

Creatively speaking:

if you knew you couldn't fail, then what would you do?

I’m in Holland right now, visiting some friends, and one of them asked me this today. I must admit that it gave me a chance to check in on my own thoughts and attitudes towards my own creativity right now.

Since I’ve been dragging myself back out of the whole covid thing, and getting back to making images, and running workshops and tours, I have felt that there is a part of me that is holding me back. There is a voice saying ‘but this might happen….’ or ‘best to save some money and not do so much travel right now’.

If I were to apply the question above, then I know the answer would be: I would not be cutting back on things. I would be pushing forwards with new plans for many new places etc. I would feel I have endless opportunities.

This question could of course be applied to other aspects of my creative working life. Not just in whether I feel confident to explore travelling to new destinations. It may also be a question to ask oneself when creating actual work.

I am always fascinated by the assumption that being creative is about producing things that are good or finished. In my view, being creative is about removing any kind of self-judgement of what I’ve done so that I can take risks and try out things. It is a matter of learning to let go, and of actually….. letting go.

For instance, if you did not care one bit how something may turn out, then you may be more apt to experiment, or go more freeform and see what happens. I think this degree of letting go can only happen if you accept and are comfortable with failure.

So, asking oneself the question : ‘if you knew you couldn’t fail, then what would you do?’ opens up the realisation that perhaps you are giving ‘success and failure’ too much power over you. Perhaps whether you succeed or fail, is stopping you, or holding you back?

If you knew that success was guaranteed, you would try out more options, experiment more, wouldn’t you?

Perhaps, if you have trouble with your photography, or are looking for new ways to be inspired, all you really need to do is ask yourself

‘if I knew I couldn’t fail, then what would I do?’

Perhaps that is all you need to do.

Tending your garden (Continued)

Several months ago I wrote about the creative benefits of having one’s own website. Even if no one knows about it, or if no one visits it, it is still a very beneficial thing to have. If you are in any way interested in improving your photography, or in trying to develop a sense of your own aesthetic style, then a website will help you with that.

I like to think of my website as my garden, and it is my garden for one reason: it is a place where I can plant conceptual ideas, or arrange my images in different formats. It is a place where I watch my ideas grow.

Personal websites tend to have a life of their own, and I find that I am always tending mine. My website has become instructive in helping me sort out what works and what doesn’t, and also in instructing me as to where my current work is leading me.

For the past year or so, I’ve been feeling as though I was in a wilderness. Since covid hit, the website became very static. I started to feel it represented this feeling. It was telling me : ‘you are stuck’.

It was telling me the truth, and I knew it.

I couldn’t go anywhere, and I couldn’t produce any new work. That feeling continued even when I began to go back to running tours and workshops, and my website confirmed it to me. I could see it in the layout of the work presented there.

It told me that I was (and still am) needing to go find some new places. It showed me that it is time to find other places. All I can tell you right now, is that I am working hard in the background at forging new plans. But it will take time. Covid didn’t just halt things. I have felt that things have been going backwards, ‘world view’ speaking.

Regardless of my personal plight, and insights as to where we are now. The fact is, that my website wasn’t lying to me. It was telling me something and I knew it.

In the meantime, I went through several iterations feeling unhappy, and knowing why that was so.

However, in the past months, I’ve begun to feel that I’ve turned a corner. By re-organising the front page, I noticed there was more of a cohesive theme between the portfolios than I had first assumed. What had first felt like a bunch of loose ends cobbled together after covid, was now showing me that underneath it all, the work was moving more towards a conceptual, abstract look.

I often feel that it takes a while for the conscious mind to catch up with where our artistic leanings are taking us.

Tending my garden showed me I was actually moving forward. I doubt if anything else could have done so.

I don’t quite know what’s changed, but I am of the opinion that unlike the saying ‘calm before the storm’, there tends to be chaos in one’s own work before it all starts to feel like it is making sense. The loose ends, feeling a bit stuck. All of that is normal creative chaos.

It is only since re-organising that I now see that what I felt were loose ends were actually all aesthetically bound together: the work is more abstract than it once was. I am more sure now, that I’m more interested in anonymous locations than the ‘honey pot’ spots. I’m also more aware that I’ve been moving towards fine tuning how I convey the places I have come to know so well over the past several years. This last point in case, I think is illustrated well by the six images above. They are not a radical departure from what I’ve created before, but I do think the concept is perhaps more focussed. Again, this could only have happened by tending my garden.

So you see, I think having one’s own website, one’s own garden as it were, to explore one’s own growth is important. I know for me, it has been so for a very long time.

Postscript: the above images will feature in this month’s coming newsletter about portfolio development.

Printing is always the final verification

Last week I completed work on a new mini-portfolio of images from the Iceland interior. I put them up on the website and have been living with them for the past week or so.

Over the week that i’ve been living with them, I’ve noticed things in the images that I didn’t see at first, so I decided to go and print them out. Well, I really should practice more of what I preach ! as I found quite a few problems with the images that weren’t quite evident on screen.

To name a few issues that I never notice on screen, but always become apparent in the print:

  1. dust spots, or distractions in the image, such as some sudden tonality change either right in the middle of the composition or at the very edge.

  2. Colour casts. In the instance of the images you see here, I noticed patches of deep blue that weren’t evident on the monitor. What I always find fascinating about noticing colour casts in the actual prints, is that once I see them there - I now see them on the monitor.

  3. Overall composition errors. The image may feel balanced on the monitor, but once printed out, certain objects or tones within the frame of the image become more prominent. Perhaps an area of the picture has too much detail than I would like, and therefore need their contrast reduced. Or perhaps it’s the other way around - areas of the frame that I thought were prominent in the image on screen, seem to lack it once printed. I have found that sometimes things that require presence in the edit - can be pushed much much further in the edit. And printing seems to tell me that I have only reached 50% of where it should be, and there is still a further 50% more to go in pushing the contrasts etc.

The main take away from this is":

“if an image looks good in print: it will look good on the monitor. But not the other way around”

If you don’t print, you only reach 90% of final intention of the image.

Photoshop Actions

I use actions all the time. They allow me to reduce ‘screwing up’ more than tends to happen when printing. There is already much to do to prepare an image for print and the Epson print driver is a nightmare (luckily, I do not use it - I have a much simpler piece of software that allows me to simply drag the file to the printer for printing).

But here are my actions for printing. I have these set up as constant actions for any images I work on.

You may notice that I have three actions at the top for saving PSD, Save for Web, Open Shadows etc. These are a feature of my editing workflow: I like to audition edited images as jpegs for my website. I also like to have a simple way of saving PSD files into one area.

As I edit, I audition the jpegs together in Lightroom’s gallery. I can see how the portfolio fits together.

As to preparing images for print, I LOVE the PixelGenius sharpener toolkit for Photoshop. It is now end of life, and not supported. But with a bit of work, it can still operate on the latest versions of photoshop. Despite what PixelGenius claim, I do not think the Lightroom sharpeners are an improvement. I tested them and I think they are not as good as the sharpener toolkit is.

So far I’ve managed to keep the PixelGenius sharpener toolkit running on the very latest version of Photoshop. If you are running on Monterey they should just work with PS 2023. If you are running on Ventura then the Automate/ Sharpener GUI is not visible. You have to run PS in Rosetta mode to get them to operate. You may also need to give Ventura permissions to run the plugins.

Use the MacOS UNIX terminal to do this. Copy/paste the following: 

sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine

Be sure to add a space after the e of ‘quarantine’

Then drag & drop the ‘PG Toolbox Plug-in Module’ plug-in (located inside Plug-Ins inside the PS
install folder) onto the terminal window …
and press enter. It will ask you for your password.

Restart Photoshop. If the toolkit is not visible, quit and restart PS in Rosetta mode.

Capture Sharpener reintroduces the loss of detail that is inherent in all capture mediums. In digital cameras the anti-aliasing filter introduces softness to the file. Use Capture Sharpener to recover lost detail. In my case, it is my film scanner that introduces loss of detail. PixelGenius has a capture-sharpener algorithm for 6x6 positive film and it works great for me.

I then resize down to the intended final output size. My printer’s resolution is 1440 dots per inch. I use 360 pixels per inch (this is a clean division of 1440 dots per inch). The theory being that you are trying to map a clean division of pixels in the file to dots on the printer. Therefore using an image resolution of 360 pixels per inch allows for 4 pixels to be quantised down to 1 dot (1440 / 4 = 360).

Once resized, I then sharpen for inkjet output. This is where most folks go wrong with printing manually. They tend to apply sharpener onto the file so that it looks good on the monitor. They are in essence ‘sharpening for monitor’.

We need to over-compensate when sharpening for print. This is because the printer tends to soften down the image. This is why I love PixelGenius output sharpener. It takes all the guess work away for me, and tends to apply the correct degree of ‘over’ sharpening.

I then covert to the correct colourspace, and 8-bit mode.

I use Photoshop actions all the time, and I have been using this kind of format for so many years now. If I keep the same process, then editing, and re-printing become more perfunctory. Less to think about, less to go wrong. I can get on with the art of trying to make the prints as good as possible, while reducing my chances of getting some part of the print process wrong.

Printing today

One of the most satisfying things, is seeing my images come to life in the physical world. When they become hard-copy, I see so much more in them. Like sitting with a good photography book, there is a different kind of interaction that happens when I look at printed paper than a computer monitor.

Thank you everyone who bought a print or two from my recent newsletter offer. I like to offer specially discounted prints each time I publish a new set of images. I’m not sure I will do this all the time, but probably just when I feel like it. You see, it’s rather tempting to give myself an excuse to print them all out.

I rarely actually print any completed images until I have a purpose or aim for them. If I am preparing a new photographic book, or someone places an order for a print, then that is when I will actually print them. And each time I do that, I always see tiny things that need improving in the edit. I should really print everything I consider ‘finished’ because they aren’t really completed until that final sanity check is done. A computer monitor only goes so far.

It’s always good to use cotton gloves when printing. Any oils on your fingers will always get onto the paper. Also check the platen-gap of your printer as this is one of the reasons why you may see black ink marks on the paper. My Epson printer always defaults back to a standard setting for the platen-gap, and I tend to prefer to use thicker paper which requires the platen gap to be set to wide.

A good guillotine is worth the investment as well, and a decent desk with which to store your prints. Over the years, I have always encountered print damage if I have the prints stored anywhere but inside a set of drawers. The universe seems to conspire to make sure that prints will get damaged if placed anywhere else.

Some technical PS tips for today

Sharpening

I’m a big fan of PixelGenius’ sharpening toolkit. Which sadly isn’t supported any more.

But I still use it even though it’s not supported, and I’ve found over the past few years that it sometimes isn’t visible in Photoshop’s menu when you install it, or when you migrate up to a new version of PS.

If like me, you love the sharpener, and want to keep on using it, then you can still get it to run, even on the latest Mac OS, if you run PS under Rosetta. You won’t want to use PS under Rosetta all the time, and I would suggest you only boot up PS under Rosetta when you wish to use the sharpener tool kit.

New Gradient Tool in PS

On another note, I got the fright of my life this week when I opened up PS. The latest version has been updated to make it work a bit more like some of the tools in Lightroom. I particularly dislike the new Gradient tool’s interface because I do not wish to see where the start and end points of the gradient are. I prefer to just keep drawing (and overwriting) a gradient until I get an immediate emotional response that says ‘that’s it!’. Fortunately, you can default the gradient tool back to the ‘classic’ interface. This is good news. I much prefer when a software company retain previous functionality where possible, rather than dictate a new way of working.

Improvements in gradient rendering?

But there is also something rather special about the gradient tool’s way of rendering now. They give you three different ways of how the gradients may ‘paint’ or ‘respond’: Classic / Linear and Perceptual.

I haven't studied them much as yet, but I am liking the Perceptual mode and find this one in particular appears to be reducing the chance of the gradients looking obvious. In the past few releases of PS I felt that the start and end points of most gradients were quite obvious when they had never had this issue in the past. I am grateful to have two other new modes for choosing how the gradation is applied to an image, and I look forward to getting to know the gradient tool in it’s new incarnation over the coming months. I feel there is a real enhancement here.

On listening to yourself, and trusting it

I wish I could teach folks to listen to their own hearts and minds more, when it comes to creating art. It is such an intangible thing to pursue: artistic confidence.

Red Point Beach, Torridon, Scotland, March 2022

Confidence does not imply aptitude to create great work. Neither is confidence the act of over compensating for one’s own abilities. Cockiness is not Confidence. Confidence is about being on a solid foundation of knowing where you are, and being able to live with it.

Confidence is also the act of being present, and of having an accurate view of one’s own abilities. Of knowing where your work needs to improve, and where its strengths and weaknesses lie. And of being comfortable with this knowledge.

Confidence is also the act of being able to try things without fear or worry, or of too much doubt. All artists doubt. All artists worry. But confident artists don’t let fear or doubt hijack their creative decisions too much.

Therefore, arrtistic confidence is the skill to have the convictions to follow through with what you want, and not to be swayed by what others are doing, or what others say. Not all feedback is of equal merit. Confident artists have developed the aptitude to be able to pick and choose the feedback that they see merit in, and discard the rest.

Artistic confidence is also the skill in understanding that not everyone will like your work, and still be comfortable and happy. If you are always hurt by other people’s views, then you need to work on your confidence. All artists create bad work, even those that you think highly of create bad work. How they deal with it is what matters, and that comes down to confidence.

I wish I could teach folks to listen to their own hearts and minds more. So often I feel that we know what we want to do, but self doubt and fear muddy the waters for us. We look for solutions in what others say too much, when we actually have the answers ourselves. We just need to listen to ourselves more.