I found a bay on Easter Island where the sun wasn’t bleaching out the entire landscape.

Te Pito Te Heuna, Easter Island, 2012

I used a very long exposure for this shot. Maybe around 2 minutes. Near the end of my trip, I stumbled upon some more great geology. These rocks are volcanic, as is all of the entire landscape of Easter Island. But rarely did I find pockets of red in the stones. I feel the red of the rock has a nice releationship to the golden colours on Poike – one of the triangular points of Easter Island that you can see on the horizon.

Way back in 2003, I visited Easter Island. It had been some place I’d wanted to go for as long as I remember. As a child, I had a small globe of the world in my bedroom, and I often used to look at the tiny dot of Easter Island on it, and wonder what it was like to be there.

Motu Kao Kao, Motu Iti & Motu Nui, Easter Island

I’m now back there this week. It’s my second trip to the Island. It’s a beautiful island, and quite strange too. It also has some of the most challenging photographic light with which to work.

Firstly, I felt way back in 2003 that the entire place should really be photographed in black and white, not colour. The subject matter looks very displeasing in colour, simply because stone and grass aren’t that interesting to look at. I found my initial attempts at colour images of Easter Island somewhat lacking. It was hard for me at the time to consider taking all my velvia images and converting them into black and white, but that’s exactly what I did with them, and after a lot of wrestling, felt that the entire project had been a disaster for me.

Stone Circle, Ahu Vaihu ©2003, Me

Roll forward to 2012, and I’ve been back on Easter Island for the past two days and I don’t think my judgement was all together constructive. I felt that if I returned, I’d know how best to shoot the locations now, and would approach them from a ‘black and white’ perspective from the onset, rather than considering taking colour photos and trying to ‘will’ them into being something else (black and white) later on.

So it’s been very liberating knowing that I can shoot it more extreme light, and not care too much about colour, just thinking more about form and tonality. I’ve discovered that I didn’t get things so badly wrong on my first visit: this is a very hard place to photograph. The light is harsh and intense for most of the day, and when the light does become soft, often the statues are so dark that it’s not possible to render any detail on them while holding the values in the sky too.

Tongariki

This has led me to go back to looking at my earlier work and reconsider that maybe what is required is a more deft hand at the darkroom end of the process. To be blunt – I didn’t really know much about tone and form in 2003. I had only been shooting for a few years, so when I was faced with working on my images in black and white – it was a form I knew very little about in terms of manipulation to the picture to bring out what I was trying to say. In other words, I lacked the skill and experience to do the images justice.

Motu Kao Kao, Motu Iti & Motu Nui

So I’m now very keen to return home and go back to the original negatives that I made on my first visit. Some of the problems I had at the time, are still evident in the locations now: statues have no discernible features until the sun is up, and when that happens, there is so much contrast, that there are blocked shadows everywhere.

But I’m happy I came back to Easter Island. I do feel I’ve been capturing new images, and along with fresh memories of familiar locations, I’ve been able to reinterpret the scenery in a new way. The light is still harsh for most of the day, but on this trip I’m seeing a lot of rain in the mornings, which is helping diffuse and bounce the light around the landscape a bit more.

On a different note, the island hasn’t changed much in almost 10 years. There’s little in the way of development which is just great to see, but if I were to criticise anything, it would be CONAF’s treatment of the historic locations. Many now have really ugly wooden fence posts around them, which make for difficulty in shooting, and they don’t discourage people from going in and touching the relics either. So nobody wins. That nice shot of the stone circle you see in this very post is now no longer possible because of some wooden fence that looks like it was put up by my neighbour after a visit to Homebase.

A few days a go, I wrote on this post some misleading information about the access rights to Rano Raraku. I said:

“The other thing that is really quite upsetting about this, is restrictions now to Rano Raraku (where all the stone heads were carved and many are still to be found). To get in here, it is now a $60 USD entry fee. That is fair I feel. I think it’s good that they charge a price for the upkeep of these historic areas, and the ticket does last for 5 days. But what I really object to is that the ticket is only valid for one entry only. If you want to go back again, it will cost a further $60 USD, which feels as if someone at CONAF was in a very petty mood at the time of the ticket price and rules review.”

It turns out that this is not correct – access is for multiple times over a 5 day period, so I think the price of the ticket is very reasonable indeed. CONAF told me today that the price of the ticket was $10 USD for around 20 years, so they needed to upgrade the price, which is understandable, but the main argument I had was access only once. It isn’t true, and seems to be a story that is propagated on websites and also through word of mouth via tourists on the island.

I was discussing my plans today for my forthcoming trip out to South America to run two photographic safaris (Patagonia and Bolivian altiplano). I have a week to kill in Patagonia, and the conversation came round to me going back to Easter Island.

Rano Raraku, Easter Island

I’ve been wanting to return for some time. Way back in 2003 I came here, found the place too small to be for more than a few days and quickly got cabin fever. It was only once I’d gotten home, that I was able to digest just where I’d been, and to think about how amazing the entire island is. I never really ‘got it’ at the time, so without any planning, I’ve just found today that my plane ticket has been changed to take me there in early June.

Wish me a good photographic trip!

I feel sometimes, I need to go twice to a location before I can shoot it – first time to get my bearings, and get acquainted, the second time to get to work and make the most out of the place. In Easter Island’s case, I think I just went there far too early in my own photographic development. I’m intrigued by the idea that we do our best work when we find a place not only inspiring, but that we reach a point in our photographic development / skill, whereby we understand the place and know how to shoot it.

Some of my portfolios are better than others.

Every now and then, I feel I’ve reached a peak in what I do, and then find that further work does not maintain that level. I’m ok with this. The ebb and the flow of creativity means that some things will be better than others, and there’s no telling just when I’m going to hit a coal-seam worth mining.

But timing is important.

Some landscapes can aid in our photographic development, and bring us to a new level in what we do, while others can hinder it.

We’ve not reached the maturity level required to know how to tackle them. Our skills are out of step with what they require to do them justice. Maybe we’re more at home with them, than they are with us….

I feel I didn’t get on well with Easter Island on my first visit in 2003. I’m sure I wasn’t ready to photograph it, and as a result, I tried desperately to make something of it, when I didn’t really ‘see’ it. I think this is a question we should ask of ourselves. File it under ‘self awareness’, but if you’d much rather not go around making blunt attempts at capturing the essence of a location, maybe you need to consider if you’ve reached the level required to ‘understand’ it, and know how to convert that understanding into a successful photograph?

Wish me well for my return to Easter Island :-)

I lost all sense of context whilst on Easter Island.

In this podcast, I explain how easy it is to lose your point of reference in a new land. In this case, I found that after a few days on Easter Island, I felt like I’d always been there. Home felt like it had never existed.

I sometimes find I lose all sense of context when I’m somewhere remote, making photographs.

I’m just not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

Please click on the image to play the podcast

Some places hold a spell over me, and I just have to return because I feel that I haven’t fully explored all the photographic potential that is there.

Easter Island is one such place for me, and I’m pleased to announce that I will be returning in 2009 (March 22nd to March 26th) to conduct a photographic workshop. I have aligned this trip to coincide with my annual workshop to Torres del Paine in Patagonia.

This is a very special trip that I have set up where each day gives a lot of concentrated time at many of the best locations, and of course, I’ll be there to share thoughts on photography as well as discuss techniques.

Easter Island has to be the most remote place I’ve ever been to. The island is small, taking roughly about half an hour to get from one side to the other in a jeep. During that half hour early morning drive, I would pass an abundance of archaeological treasures, volcanoes, wild horses and silhouettes of the famous Moai statues. I was always aware of the pacific ocean on my travels, as well as the wide open sky. The clouds race over Easter Island’s landscape creating shifting patterns of light and dark.

Please feel free to view the itinerary and if you have any questions I’d love to hear from you.

One of the most impressive locations I’ve ever photographed has to be Easter Island. Situated in the middle of the Pacific ocean, it is one of the most remote places I’ve ever visited. I’d come here to photograph the island because it is full of petroglyph’s, ancient ceremonial places and of course, the famous Moai statues.

I spent six days here and must confess to suffering from cabin fever after three days. Although there is lots to see and photograph, I found the hot days unbearable and the evenings sleepless. Night time consisted of many of the dogs on the island barking until the small hours, and when they did finally stop, the cockerels or roosters would kick in. I nicknamed the island ‘rooster island’ and for me, it will always remain so.

It’s very hard to hang around when I’m feeling like that, simply waiting for the day my plane leaves. Yet, paradoxically, when I returned home to Scotland, I couldn’t believe where I’d just been.

To this day it remains one of the most special places I’ve visited so far.

The above shot is of Rano Raraku volcano. The island is triangular in shape, and each corner is composed of a major volcano. Rano Raraku is a small volcano situated in the south eastern side of the island and is where all the stone statues were carved. Many of them still rest on the slopes of the volcano.

On one of my many trips back and forth across the island (which took no more than 20 minutes one way) I saw these horses grazing below the volcano. The scene just seemed to be begging to be photographed and I had to stop the jeep and jump out. It’s a hard thing to do sometimes – think about photography whilst driving (and not crash the car – something that I must admit I have failed to do on several occasions now – but that’s another story).

I felt at the time that the shot was going to be a throw away one (trip fatigue was affecting my judgment). But much later, after I returned home and got it processed, I felt very differently about it. This I think, is because when I’m away shooting somewhere, the first few days are fresh, new, interesting. But after a while, the exotic place that I’m in has become my ‘normal point of reference’. It becomes so normal in fact, that I start to take it for granted and I loose sight of what is special about it.

It’s only when I return home, and have gone through the dreaded ‘post trip adjustment phase’ which for me, lasts around about a week, that I start to appreciate how special and exotic a place was. That’s when it’s time to review the photos.

Sometimes it’s hard to judge your photos whilst your in the midst of making them. You need a sense of distance to appreciate them for what they truly are.