A few weeks ago I wrote on this blog about the feelings of dislocation that I often experience when i’ve recently returned home from a trip. The posting seemed to resonate with a lot of folks and I was inundated with personal emails on the subject! (Thanks!)

As of last night, I’ve just returned home from Iceland. The trip didn’t go as expected, but I’ve returned once again with that feeling of being outside myself, detached from my home life and more connected with the life I was leading while I was in iceland.

But there has been a realisation for me over the past month. I’ve started to notice that memories of places I know, or places I hang out in different countries and landscapes, are becoming intertwined with with each other, as if they all belong to the same place.

Dare I say it, but I feels as if the whole world is becoming my home these days, and it’s of no surprise when I consider where I’ve been and where I’m going this year alone;

Iceland (3 times)
Norway (2 times)
Chile
Argentina
Easter island
Bolivia
Australia / Tasmania
Portugal
Switzerland
….and also the workshops I’ve done at home here in Scotland

Memories of a familiar cafe in Reykjavík sit alongside memories of familiar restaurants in Chilean Patagonia. Walking up a street in downtown Reykjavík is becoming to feel as commonplace to me as I would feel walking up Sauchiehall street in Glasgow. The same is true, perhaps more importantly, for the landscape. The central highlands of Iceland, to my mind, are not too dissimilar from the landscape of the Bolivian altiplano. This is a rare luxury to own – the knowledge that there is familiarity in locations that others may find exotic. And sometimes certain landscapes trigger memories of other landscapes – I can get confused, thinking that one particular location I’ve witnessed belongs to the wrong country, simply because I see a similarity in the terrain.

I don’t bring this up to brag or boast. But merely to acknowledge that my life is far different from what it once was, and more importantly, it is causing me to re-interpret the landscapes I know so well – differently.

I seem to ‘see’ them in a different way now. Like friends you’ve known for so long, that do something out of character, and give you pause to re-think just who exactly they really are, there is a transformation that happens when landscapes from many countries start to become intertwined in your memories and thoughts. Features that seem very interesting to photograph, because they are exotic, can be used later, under a different occasion, and location, to interpret that other landscape differently. It’s hard for me to explain this. But maybe if I boil it down to this – it might be easier to understand: I’ve photographed many waterfalls in different countries. How I approach a particular waterfall on repeat visits tends to be influenced by how I got to know it in the first place. But what if I visit a brand new waterfall, in a different country, and it has a very similar look/feel/terrain/whatever to a well known waterfall? I find myself approaching it as if it’s a familiar friend to me already. My previous experiences are having an impact on my new experiences.

The world feels like my home, and I have spent so much time in places far and away from my home in Scotland, that I now have favourite haunts wherever I go.

But as much as all the traveling is making the world a smaller place for me, there is a price for all this and maybe one which isn’t so immediately apparent.

There are places I know so well, but I am realising that my friends know little of. I have become a stranger to my close friends through the acquisition of knowledge I’ve gained of new surroundings.

I’ve changed.

I would argue that most of our friends know the same terrain, the same places as we do. There is comfort and familiarity in knowing the same places. Like being from the same town, we feel we understand each other better if we share the same experiences, if we know the same locations, have felt and understand the types of rain you can get in Glencoe for instance.

I’m aware that some of my friends have little understanding of what it is that i’ve witnessed over the past few years of making images in foreign locations. But that doesn’t mean that their experiences are less valid than mine. I can be found to crave the simplicity of routine, of waking up in the same bed for more than a few weeks at a time. And their lives are going on, just as importantly as mine is. But our path’s have diverged, and it’s inevitable that I’ve become a little more distant because of this.

If all this were to grind to a halt tomorrow. No more travel for me, then I would welcome the chance to get ingrained back into a Scottish way of life. I don’t feel I can do that so easily right now as I’m often having to put my life on pause back here in Scotland while I go traveling. I feel like more than one person at times. But then again, it’s so lovely to meet up with my Norwegian friends in Lofoten when I go to run my photography trips there. They are as close to me, as friends that I have a few miles away from where I live in Edinburgh. I would also miss out on getting re-aquainted with the landscapes I love. I’ve had a serious love for Torres del Paine national park in Chilean Patagonia, and my visits are usually not longer than two or three years apart, since i first ventured there in 2003. I would find it hard to say goodbye to it, if I felt I was never to return.

But this assumption that I will return, is a luxury, and one that has been brought on by a radical change in my lifestyle. Have I changed through the experiences that having these close relationships with landscapes far and wide brings? Have I changed – through experiencing all the people I’ve met through my work, and all the friends I now have on just about every continent there is? Yes I think I have changed. My outlook is much more open. I feel less like a Scot, and more like a citizen of the world. One who still has an interest in finding out more about the world, and I guess that’s just great.

A friend once said to me – recognising in me what was in her – that we were both searchers. Travellers are not restless when they travel, they are often at peace with themselves because they are free to explore and discover their world.

Note that I said ‘their’ world. We all live on the same world, but each and every one of us has our own perception, and our own special way of being wired into what we see, hear and above all, feel.

When I travel I’m often at peace. When I am stationary for too long, I can’t find balance in my life because things are too static, staid perhaps.

I’ve just returned from a month long journey. Along the way I’ve changed. I felt new things, met new people I had not encountered before in my life, saw familiar landscapes in different moods, brought on by visiting in different seasons. I felt I was alive.

And returning home has caused me dislocation. The feeling that familiarity brings, is no longer familiar. I have not lived in a predictable environment for some time, and I’m finding it difficult to adjust to the static aspects of a life routed in one spot.

I thought I should be over this by now. I’ve lived a very travel-intensive life the past three or four years and I’d gotten used to going away, only to come home again. To flip between a life of new experiences and a life of familiar friends and family. Sometimes I thought I was becoming two people. Two separate lives. Where in fact, I was just coping with the sudden change of atmosphere. Moving from one environment of change to another of familiarity.

It shouldn’t bother me so much now, after all this time. I should have grown a thick skin to my sensitivities to the slight or sudden changes to my environment, but I’m glad in a way that I havent. Because it means I’m still sensitive to my environment, and my environment is all that I have to relate to when I photograph.

I don’t think most people out there realise the stresses put upon someone who has to move from a state of constant change, to that of being stationary. Those that don’t do this, think it must be a terrific way to live – ‘seeing the world is so exotic’, they may say. While those who do get to experience it often feel dislocated: each time a major trip comes up, I feel it looming for weeks, and I know that I will have to tear myself away from any feelings of being settled that I’ve built up over a few weeks of being back home. The flight tickets are booked and they are fixed in time, yet they seldom synchronise with my moods. If I don’t feel ready to go away, it’s a huge bind for me to do so. Like a child that doesn’t want to get into the bath, I too don’t want to go to the airport. And after a few days or perhaps a week on the road, I slowly realise that I’m actually enjoying my new freedom. I’ve become someone else through spirit of travel and all the new senses it provides. My old self seems like an distant memory – ‘was that really me who didn’t want to leave home’?, I ask. Now I’m in the bath, there’s no getting me out of it.

So I often wonder just why I find the transference from static to mobile so hard at times. I absolutely love traveling but I also really love being home too. I love my friends and my family, yet at the same time, I often find myself hatching new plans to go somewhere new. I think this is nothing unusual for most photographers – when we’re at home, we so wish to be away, and when we’re away, we can often wish to be home.

I’ve realised that I live a life very different from a lot of my friends now, and it’s very different from the life I used to lead when I worked in an office in Edinburgh. I feel I’ve changed as a result of my life-style. For me at least, it’s given me confidence in myself and a broader outlook on just what life is all about. As much as I can feel a sense of dislocation in those ‘transfer moments’ whilst moving from my home life to the life I have on the road, I feel I have found myself many times too, through the experiences that this ‘transference’ stage has offered me.

I can lose myself if I’m stationary for too long, and I can find myself when I put myself in new environments. And the opposite is true too. However, each time I move, I’m challenging my perceptions and I think that’s maybe why I love doing it: travel is perhaps just another way of making photographs. Instead of making visual images, I make emotional ‘imprints’ in my mind – they are what I like to call emotional-images. Less tangible perhaps, but equally valid.

Last night we had the biggest blizzard on the Lofoten islands (read Blizzard, not Lizzard!). It was so bad, that there was zero visibility on the roads and there were a few moments when I had to stop the car in the middle of the road, because I simply couldn’t see where I was going.

Needless to say, my flight and the following three other ones got cancelled. I’ve been to Lofoten a few times now, always in Winter, and not had any cancellations, but even the locals were saying the weather conditions were something else last night.

So I’m stranded here in Norway until Thursday, and will be spending a lot of free time roaming around Bodo, which seems like a nice town (i’ve only ever seen it in the dead of night when coming in from Oslo en-route to Lofoten).

But if you’re reading this and thinking ‘sounds terrible’, then you should also consider that the reason why the Lofoten is so amazing to photograph in winter, is precisely because of the dramatic shifts in the weather. If you want to shoot dramatic light, then you have to do it at the edge of a storm, and storms mean bad weather. They also mean unpredictable weather, and it’s this unpredictability that you have to accept (and to some degree – hope for). Things won’t always go according to plan and having an open mind to this, and the surprises it might give to your photography is a start, but you also have to consider you might not get home on time either.

So if you are considering going anywhere like Lofoten in winter time (maybe Alaska, or even the Scottish Highlands), it’s always worth giving yourself plenty of contingency time to change flights if need be.

We’ve become too used to having things work on time, and in my own case, I’ve just been reminded that nature does not conform to timetables.

Sorry my postings have been very quiet of late. I’ve had a lot of workshops and things on off late, so it’s been a bit hectic.

I thought I’d let you all know that I’m off to Ethiopia sometime in the next few weeks. I won’t be able to post anything on the blog because there is no internet access there, but what I do intend to do is write up a journal about my daily activities and the ‘memorable’ photographs I hope to capture each day. This is with the intention of coming home and creating a pseudo-diary of events on my blog, with the processed film pictures to go with the writing. I think since I’m a film shooter, this is going to be a really nice way of letting you see what happened each day etc…. I think it matters little that the entries will not be in real time.

So anyway, I was on Eigg last week with a group of eight people. We had a great time and I have a really nice mixture of different nationalities: Swiss, Swedish, Polish, Portuguese, English and of course one Scottish person too ;-) I hope to post a contact sheet or two from the groups efforts later on this week once I have had some time to rest. We ended the workshop on a nice note by putting together one big long slideshow with everyone’s best images in it and married it to the music of Martyn Bennet and some of his recordings from the Glen Lyon CD. Very atmospheric it was too!

I’m busy writing some chapters for the eBook I’m working on about Street Photography, and I’ve been diverted to reading on Photo.net today about David Alan Harvey. I’ve loved his photographs for some time now, and he’s a very simple shooter, only taking with him a Leica, 28mm and 35mm lenses.

I’ve been busy writing about how I prefer prime lenses and that I prefer to go out with only one or two lenses with me. Often it’s only the one lens I use. In the case of India and Nepal last year, the entire collection of images I made were shot with my Contax 645 and an 80mm lens. I didn’t need anything else.

I’m a big subscriber to keeping things simple and cutting down on the amount of gear I travel with. It can be back breaking bringing too much kit with you, but it can also inflict a sense of creative constipation because you also have too many choices at hand. You think that bringing all the lenses you can think of will mean you’re going to be prepared for just about any photo situation, but the truth is more often the case that we just confuse ourselves with what to use and when.

It takes time to master lenses, but that’s not really the issue at hand. It’s more about immediacy. If you have one lens on your camera at all times, you learn to work within the confines of that. I prefer primes because they make me roam a location and work the scene more. I also prefer primes because I don’t have to think about different focal lengths. I make do with what I have. I also prefer one lens because there is no delay in choosing another one. I also start to ‘see’ every potential encounter in the focal length of the lens I have on me.

Using one lens makes it easier for me to ‘visualise’ and be proactive, rather than reactive. And it also means I’m much more free to move around.

I get a lot of e-mails regarding the Mamiya 7 camera, which I use extensively for my travel and landscape shots.

I feel that many people assume that having the same camera as me is going to make their images better, which I misleading. But for those that are intrigued by the camera and want to know what I think about it, I’m going to give you the low down here and now.

Q. Why did I choose this camera over other Medium Format systems?

A. Because first and foremost, I wanted something with maximum resolution and lightest weight. I do a lot of traveling and it’s important that the camera is light and that the lenses are light too. Try out many other MF systems and you’ll soon see why the Mamiya is great for compactness and light lenses.

Q. What is the resolution like?

A. It’s a rangefinder system, so the lens designs were not compromised by having to ‘work around’ there being a mirror in the way. The wide angles in particular extend right into the camera body and are a few mm close up to the film plane. The distortion in these lenses is almost non existent. Point the camera down and the horizon is at the top of the frame – straight as an arrow. No barrel distortion.

Q. Are the lenses fast?

A. No. This is the real downside – depending on what you are shooting. With maximum apertures of f4.5, they are a few stops slower than other MF systems. This is because Mamiya couldn’t guarantee precise focussing with a rangefinder MF system. For instance, a standard lens in MF land is 80mm or 90mm. Now think about the DOF (depth of field) you have on a 90mm lens in 35mm land…. it’s not that deep is it? If your focussing is slightly off, chances are that at f2 you’re going to notice it. So the best compromise is to make the lenses slower. So that’s the downside. Slow lenses, but on the bright side, because they are slow lenses, they’re not that bulky / heavy / big. A plus point. Ideal for travel.

Q. What is a Rangefinder anyway?

A. A rangefinder is a system where you do not look through the lens. You actually view through a side window an ‘approximation’ of what you will get. The problem with this is that focus is achieved by overlapping two paralax images onto the same spot… this requires some mechanical calibration so that when the images are overlapped correctly, the lens is actually in focus.

Q. So why use this system if it doesn’t allow you to see through the lens then?

A. Because it makes the system more compact (no mirror in the way), you also get to see the scene at the point of exposure (no mirror flipping out of the way for a moment obscuring your view) and the system is also very, very quiet (no mirror to make a big slapping noise). The Mamiya 7 System has the shutters placed inside the lenses, making the shutter tiny – and therefore less prone to vibration. So images are often sharper than systems with large shutters that are 6×7 in size!

Q. What are the other limitations of the Mamiya 7?

A. Close focussing is terrible, due to limitations gaining accurate focus with a rangefinder system. No decent telephoto support either – the biggest telephoto you can get for it is a 210mm lens – at f8 !!!! and it’s not even coupled to the rangefiner – so you have to guess the focus point…. bit of a silly lens unless you intend to use the camera for landscape work.

Q. So what do I like about the camera?

A. I keep coming back to the camera time and time again. I swear at it, curse it while I’m using it, feel I’m missing shots with it, but each time I get the films back and look at those sharp 6×7 transparencies on my light table… I instantly forgive it its weaknesses.

A. I also actually like composing the shot through the rangefinder window. Because it is an approximation of what is there, I have to ‘visualise’ more in my head what I am wanting to create – no bad thing.

A. I tend to use it in manual mode all the time for landscape work. I have a Sekonic L-608 light meter which I use for zone system metering, so I can determine where and if I should use a grad filter. So I tend to slow down with the camera and think more about composition.

A. I also love the 6×7 aspect ratio.

A. I also love how quiet the camera is when out shooting street scenes. Even though it’s big, it doesn’t attract as much attention as a small SLR does.

A. I also find placing the grads on the camera to be a non-issue. I compose, I check how much area the sky is using – if it’s using a 1/3rd of the scene, then that’s how far down I put the grad. Because the grad is so close to the front element, it’s diffused anyway. I only use the hard grads. The soft grads are no use to MF or 35mm shooters because the lenses are small. For Large Format, the soft grads are worth holding onto.

A. I find the camera great for the landscape work I do. I have my process with this camera nailed down now, and am comfortable with it. I can take it anywhere with me and its been up the side of glaciers in Patagonia, on an ice field for a week (it uses small batteries), and its been completely soaked in New Zealand and it still worked the next day once all the water evaporated off all the lens elements.

Q. What don’t I like about the camera?

A. No close focussing.

A. No decent telephoto support

A. Slow lenses

A. To change lens, I have to pull a curtain over the film via a dial underneath. Can’t take any pictures until the curtain is released and I *always* forget to release it once I’ve changed lenses.

A. It’s poorly made, bits keep falling of the camera.

But I keep coming back to it. But be warned : it’s not for everyone.

A few days ago we took the boat up to the face of Glacier Grey in Torres del Paine. Most of the trips had been canceled that day due to 80km winds that were racing down off the Patagonian Ice cap, and onto Lago Grey.

It was a hectic journey on the boat with everyone staggering back and forth on the upper deck or hiding under the roof to shelter from the spray and winds that would often take us of our feet. Literally.

At one point I managed to make my way to the back of the boat, and to my surprise I could see the dingy that was attached to the back of the boat almost flying in the sky. I know, it looks like it’s been superimposed, but my workshop amigos will vouch for me on this one. It really was taken in one go. A lovely rainbow in the sky, a 17mm lens to get it all in, and an air born dingy.

I’m always intrigued by what is round the corner. I could have never anticipated this shot.

Now, if only my workshop amigos had captured me whilst I was outside trying to save my camera bag from disappearing over the edge of the boat in a pretty awful storm. I thought I had managed to rescue my bag whilst maintaining a degree of dignity (I got completely soaked!). I returned to the cabin where everyone hadn’t seemed to notice, only to discover later on at dinner that everyone on the boat had been watching me with mouths agape, wondering when I was going to go overboard along with my camera bag…..