unfinished business

Have you ever visited a place, and felt that you were not finished with it yet? But somehow, you have never returned?

Is this place sometimes in your dreams? Or perhaps you haven’t dreamed of it for many years, and suddenly you find your thoughts returning to it when you least expect it?

If so, you should go. No really, you should.

I have such a place, that my thoughts have started to return to. Perhaps due to working with autumn colours whilst in Hokkaido this October.

I’ve been reminded… that I still have unfinished business.

I always follow my heart where my photography is concerned. If you don’t normally do this, then perhaps you should too?

Motifs in one's own work

Hrafntinnusker, Central Highlands of Iceland © 2016. I love shooting the sun when it's low enough contrast to do so. Thick even cloud allow the sun to become a perfect circular disc, which isn't what happens when the cloud is uneven. I have found that shooting the sun this way has become a motif of mine over the years.

This is not encouragement for you to also adopt the sun as motif in your work. More a case that you should review your work to find out if you have repeating themes, or certain elements that you are drawn to.

This is the way forward for tapping into one’s own genuineness.

If you find such things in your work, then acknowledging them is the first step. Once we are aware of the things we are drawn to, we give ourselves permission to run with them more, and to recognise them more when we encounter them.

New e-book first draft is now complete

I’m very pleased to say that I’ve managed to finish writing this new e-book about aspect ratios. Which I feel is a massive improvement upon the first one.

I really need to shelve it now for a week or two, to gain some distance from it. I then intend to read right through it and make notes on what I think is missing or could be tuned a bit more.

Most of us never even consider that one of the artistic decisions we can make is which aspect ratio to use, not only when we are shooting, but also in terms of how we present our work. For many, aspect ratios aren’t even considered when buying a camera. Yet certain aspect ratios are just harder to work in than others.

The aspect ratios that any new camera offers can be a make or break for me. I find working in some aspect ratios a real breeze compared to others, and this all started out by me moving from 35mm to 6:7 over 25 years ago. When I did, I found my compositions just got a lot easier and it was all due to the shape of the frame.

My first e-book was mostly about how the shape of the frame you compose in affects how the subjects are spaced out around the frame. And of course, a consideration for shooting in something less difficult than 3:2, because quite frankly 3:2 is an awkward ratio to work in. Perhaps this is news to you? Perhaps you’ve always thought that 3:2 is fine? Or perhaps you always find you have to come home and re crop later on?

Anyway, the new e-book discusses how we tend to be blind to certain areas of the frame, how our periphery vision works (we have three forms of peripheral vision : near, mid and far) and how wider aspect ratios are more difficult to compose in as a result of using our periphery vision. The new book has exercises or advice in terms of what to do at the end of each of the seven chapters.

I think the book will still have to go through a few more revisions, but I feel it’s mostly there now. Each revision will just be about making the message clearer, and trying to tidy up areas where it feels it’s not focussed enough.

It’s currently sitting at over 50 pages. I like to keep things succinct. When formatted, the e-book should really have a clear message for each page in the book. I don’t like padding things out with waffle. And the reason it is currently at 50 pages instead of less pages, is due to the visual nature of showing variations of the same scene shot in different aspect ratios.

Mt Yōtei

I’d promised myself a block of time to work on the e-book I’ve been promising most of this and last year. I’m finally getting the space I need to work on the book, at a campsite in Hokkaido this week.

One of the surprises of coming to this campsite is that I’ve got a very beautiful view of Mt Yōtei from where I’ve pitched my tent. I did not intend to make photographs this week. It is more a ‘holiday’ for me, but did wish to concentrate on the new e-book which is really needing some re-arranging and structure.

I’m glad to report that sitting in their beautiful hut each morning for a few hours until around 1pm is really helping. It’s warm, and they’re even piping in some nice classic 40’s jazz (which does not repeat !).

My office away from home.

This is the very first campsite I’ve stayed in, in Japan. I’ve had a hunch the past few years that camping in Japan would be very civilised. I have my own allotment with car park space, log fire area and quiet and space away from others. This is unlike most campsites in Scotland now which seem to be focussed on cramming in as many people as possible. The hut I show above is heated, open until 10pm, and it’s a nice place to hang out in the evening.

I think I will try to make this a yearly occurrence. A bit of camping in Japan each autumn when I come out to do my Hokkaido autumn tour.

Gratitude part 2

If you want to find a level of deep contentment, or some kind of new happiness in your life, then finding a creative outlet can help with that. I’ve met quite a few people on my workshops and tours over the years that came to photography at very different times in their lives, and it has given them so much joy and contentment.

“comparison is the thief of joy”

I have also, met one or two whom after a few years got very frustrated with their work output and gave up doing it. I know how this can happen because it happened to me when I was a keen musician. I stopped enjoying what I did, because rather than just enjoy the moment, I had gotten so ambitious that I was always feeling disappointed with my music output when I compared it to the pro’s work.

Comparison as they say, is the thief of joy.

Southern Japan, 2025

I try to remind myself all the time, why I am in this. I have periods where I don’t create work that I’m all that content with, but I have learned that progress is never linear, and sometimes I have to get through the bad stuff to reach the good stuff. Or as a colleague of mine once said “you have to take the rough with the smooth”, or to put it another way “you have to have the downs so as to notice the ups”.

Which reminds me of a conversation on one of my tours when my good friend John asked a Belgium client “do you have any hills and valleys in Belgium?” to which they replied “no valleys, just hills”.

“always be kind to yourself, and your mistakes”

Joking aside, if you’re going to get involved in the creative arts (and I do consider photography to be one of them) you have to maybe enter into it with one simple golden rule, and remind yourself of it all the time. And it is this: “always be kind to yourself, and your mistakes”.

If you’re a high achiever, you’ll most likely struggle with that. High achievers tend to rarely be happy with where they are, and tend to constantly be chasing rainbows. This is not to say this is an invalid way to work. There are many areas of industry for example where having the drive to push oneself further is needed. Outliers are outliers because they cross boundaries.

With the creative arts, I do not think this works. “Striving” or “Pushing” your work doesn’t work. I have often felt that with any creative outlet, it is more about learning to let go, and to let things unfold in their own way. Often I have thought that the best work tends to create itself. Call it ‘positive flow’. Many famous songs for instance “seem to write themselves” when the songwriter is asked how they were written. I think in these cases, the songwriter has stumbled upon a good idea, and rather than try to control it, has just let go and gone with where his intuition wants to take him.

So I think that there are really perhaps three golden rules to keep by your side, as you wander through your creative life with your camera. And they are:

  1. Be kind to yourself

  2. Be kind to your creativity

  3. Practice gratitude for what photography has given you

Whether it is in finding friends, gaining experiences, or simply visiting beautiful places, your camera has opened up life for you in ways that you may not have realised.

I think practicing this simple three-step process of gratitude on a regular basis, or at the very least, being aware of it, is very worth doing.

Gratitude

This week I am back in Japan. I have just spent some time with my friend and guide Tsuyoshi Kato. We first met in 2015, and I did not know, that I was the first guy to run a photography tour with him. Tsuyoshi is great friends with Michael Kenna, and while I drove Michael around Scotland in 2015, he was very kind to give me Tsuyoshi’s details.

Tsuyoshi has been one of the best guides I’ve ever worked with.

This week, I am feeling nostalgic after him showing me so many photos of our times together.

Tsuyoshi Kato, Jeaninne, myself, Rick, Steve, John, Peter & Steve. I think this was tour 2019.

Each day, I remind myself of the gratitude I have for what my photography has given me. I try my best these days, to practice a 10 minute ‘gratitude’ moment when I wake up. I know it might sound rather ‘hippy’, but I have found that sitting still for 10 minutes and thinking about the positives in my life, have been very beneficial to how I am thinking about my life.

Had someone said to me, that the simple act of taking up an interest in photography, and buying a camera would have given me all the experiences i”ve had so far, I would not have believed them. I am very grateful indeed for my photographic life.

It’s not really about the photos. It’s really about the experiences and memories, paticularly with people I meet. Less so with the landscapes I visit, although that is often very special.

The truth is: it’s all about the human connection.

I do not remember where I read it, but back in the early 2000’s when I was a keen enthusiast, I read some quote somewhere that said “a camera is a passport to gaining experiences”. I paraphrase here.

I am grateful for where my camera has taken me, and for whom it has put me in contact with. Not only have I met so many beautiful landscapes, I have also made many friends along the way. Ones that, had I stayed in a regular job in Scotland, I would not have met.

That is what I think is so inspiring about photography.

I’m very grateful for finding photography in my early 30’s. It has given me so much.

Aomori, January 2025. Tsuyoshi Kato, myself, Anna, Ulana & Geoffrey. Standing in front of a snow wall that is about 14 feet high.

Differences in popular aspect ratios

When buying a camera, the most important consideration for me is what aspect ratios it comes with. I avoid 3:2 because I think it is more akin to a panoramic format. Once I had been working with 6:7 and 4:5 for a few years, I could not go back to the 35mm format. It is simply too wide, and too short.

Below I show the differences between the popular aspect ratios from most narrow (6:7 is almost a square) to widest (3:2 - 35mm standard format).

Green: 6:7
Blue: 4:5
Red: 4:3
Yellow: 3:2

Venturing out in the field with the aspect ratio set for your given pictures will enable you to realise tighter compositions. I have found that the idea of cropping later to be too loose for beginners at least. For myself, I have found that once I began to work with 4:5, after many years of working with 3:2, my compositions ‘clicked’ more, and things just seem to fall into a more natural order when composing. I have great trust in working with constants, be it fixed focal length lenses, or fixed aspect ratios. They offer a degree of discipline to my process and make me work harder at fine tuning my compositions.

This is why I am re-writing my aspect ratios book. I think aspect ratios are too important, yet oddly, seem to be overlooked, or rarely considered when one buys a camera.

White Canvas Update

I got stalled for a while this year working on my new e-book. I’ve just resumed work on it, and although I feel a sense of procrastination in ‘how am I going to convey [insert any concept I wish to discuss]’ with the reader, things are surprisingly going very smoothly.

It ‘should’ be much easier second time round is the theory. I’ve written about aspect ratios before, and although it would have been tempting to work with the original text, I know in my heart that this would have caused so much work and given me so much pain. It would most likely have confused things.

You see, I think that as you get better at explaining things, it’s because you’ve gained more clarity about the subject yourself. Upon looking back on my original e-book, I feel I went for a much longer walk than was necessary. As Brian Eno once said ‘sometimes you find yourself saying something that you didn’t know you knew’. This is similar to the idea that if you can’t explain something well that you think you understand, you maybe don’t know it as well as you thought you do. So too, returning to aspect ratios after a decade of thinking long and hard about why aspect ratios really matter and are, in my view, the very first specification I would check when buying a new camera. I have found that my own sense of clarity about the subject is, well, just more clear :-)

If you’ve got a good sense of what you think are the pro’s and con’s about a subject, then it’s going to be a lot easier to work on.

So I think the little book is coming on well. I will just have to see how it goes over the next few months as I have a few trips on the go which may cause me to pause my work on it.

On a frozen lake

While I was in Mongolia, we visited a very beautiful lake which is considered to many Mongolians as a sister lake to Russia’s lake Baikal. It is 200km away from it. Lake Khövsgöl freezes over each year and my guide this October while I was visiting Mongolia has suggested I come back in February to shoot it.

One night, whilst sitting around a campfire we had going, he described his first experience of being on frozen lake Khövsgöl with his friend Baggy’s brother:

Perhaps I’m mad to even consider it. But he told me that all the locals use the lake as a short-cut in the winter time and drive right across it.

I was particularly taken by some of the trees that exist around the edges of the lake, and since it is en-route from my trips I will be running in Japan, when coming home, I’m tempted to do it. Despite feeling that I may not have the courage to actually go onto the lake.

I am thinking tonight about the number of times I have been uncertain about doing something, and still doing it anyway. In a way, I would say that most of my photography has been about gut instinct rather than any actual plan. I can feel myself drawn to visiting the lake next February, and I can’t quite say why. I think that my gut is telling me there’s not only great photographic potential, but also, that it will be an adventure of a lifetime to do this.

Airline regulations are changing regarding the carrying of lithium batteries

Many countries are now rolling out changes to how one can fly with lithium and lithium-ion batteries.

For instance, in Japan:


Effective July 8, 2025 (Japan time), do not store mobile batteries in the overhead bins during flights. 
When charging them onboard, always do so in a location where their status can be monitored at all times.
Lithium batteries and lithium-ion batteries cannot be accepted as carry-on baggage.
Carry-on is permitted only if the following conditions are met 
Rechargeable type (lithium-ion battery)

* With a rated watt-hour capacity of 100Wh or less .
   Carry-on only.  No quantity restrictions.
* With a rated capacity exceeding 100Wh but not exceeding 160Wh
   Carry-on only. Up to two electronic devices and spare batteries combined.
* With a rated capacity exceeding 160 Wh.
   Not permitted in the cabin or as checked baggage.

If you’ve got some flights coming up, best to check with your local airline what the policies are with regards to flying with camera batteries. It will be different for each country.