Your own voice

 This week I was interviewed by the UK photographic magazine 'Black & White Photography'. It was interesting to find out that they were particularly interested in my isle of Harris photos below. 

During my chat with Mark Bentley, we got on to the subject of style and that of finding your own voice.

Isle of Harris images as requested by the Uk magazine 'Black & White Photography'. I'm always surprised by the choices others make when choosing which images of mine to use for publication.

I've learned that I can't guess how some of my images will be received, and I never hear the same things about them. This has taught me that I just need to listen and trust my own intuition first and foremost. I can't anticipate what others will like or dislike about my work, and the only person I need to satisfy is myself.

I've worked with many participants through the years on my workshops here in Scotland. The subject of finding a style is never far away from our daily critique sessions, so it's only natural that I should have formed some views on this.

To my mind, a voice is a unique thing. to be recognised, you need to stand out from everyone else in some way. So I think the main characteristic of those who create very personal work is that they have a deep trust in themselves to be independent and do their own thing.

Anyone who does something unique does so,  because they do not to pander to trends or others opinions. Take it from me: I hear opinions about my work from others all the time and there is so much variety in what others tell me, that I've come to the conclusion that if I tried to follow it - I'd get lost pretty quickly. Instead, what I choose to do (note that I'm the one choosing what to do here) - is listen to the stuff that makes sense or enlightens me in some way.  The rest - the stuff that I feel doesn't make sense or can't see any value in, I just take as someone else's opinion. Interestingly, I find that most of the time, others opinions usually tell me more about them, than me.

No one else can live my life or make my creative decisions for me. The only person who knows where I want to go with my photography is ultimately me. I can glean some advice from others but in general, the impetus to do anything in my work has to come from within. 

So here are my thoughts on finding your own voice.

• Your own voice, is something you find when you go it alone.
• Your own voice, is something that only you can find.
• Your own voice, is something that comes through a process of self enquiry.
• Your own voice, is something that becomes apparent over time.
• Your own voice, is something that comes to you when you listen and observe the changes within you.
• Your own voice, can't be found by being part of the derivative. Follow others and you quickly get lost in a sea of ubiquity.
• Your own voice, is something that happens when you are free of current trends.
• Your own voice, is something that comes when you don't try to please others.
• Your own voice, is something that comes when you are free of expectations.
• Your own voice, is something that comes when you are free of ego.
• Your own voice, is something that comes when you know yourself (i.e your capabilities and limitations).
• Your own voice, comes when you stop copying your influences. Embrace your influences and use them as the basis for where you start, but don't get tied to them.
• Your own voice, comes when you do your art for you and you alone.

In a nutshell, you need to have the courage to follow your own path, and above all, believe in yourself.

A Stark Beauty

Wishing for the golden rays of the sun to come and light up the landscape may be something that we all aspire to. But I believe that having this aim in mind isn't necessarily always a good thing.

Geothermal, Black Deserts & Ice hugging

Some landscapes are muted in colour by nature. I think this kind of understated tonality has a beauty to it - one that we as photographers need to embrace when we encounter it.

I think the central highlands of Iceland is one such place. It can be stark, bleak and yet it is a beautiful thing to witness. I can however, fully understand that to many, words such as 'stark' and 'bleak' could be construed as meaning 'ugly' or 'unwanted'. 

As a landscape photographer who has had a great deal of interest in vibrant colours, I have to say that there has been a subtle change in what I do over the past years - not just in how I edit my work but also in what I am looking for in the landscape. I think this has been an evolutionary thing for me. These days if I encounter a landscape that is devoid of colour, I think I'm more willing to accept it for what it is. I now see a kind of beauty where perhaps years ago I wouldn't have and as a result, i'm more comfortable representing it in all its muted, monochromatic glory.

For me, I think that's one of the reasons why I'm so captivated by the central highlands of Iceland. It's there that I'm confronted with oblique shapes and unconditional tones of muted grey. It is what it is and it can't be forced to be something else.

Natural & Hydro Powered Landscapes

For instance, some of the deserts appear to be devoid of colour. They are almost absolute black. They can't really be conveyed in any other way than their stark quality. And It's in this immensity of constant 'nothingness' that I've been drawn in. It's like I'm looking for something underneath, something just out of sight that  I know is there. Each photograph I take, is an attempt to convey that, yet each time I feel I'm just scratching the surface.

I think some landscapes offer us many lessons. They are places in which we can grow. But we have to be receptive to them. I've often said that visiting a certain landscape in my own photographic development has been key to showing me the way forward. The emptiness of the Bolivian Altiplano for instance has taught me how to simplify my compositions, and it also taught me a thing or two about tonal relationships. But I had to be receptive, I had to be willing to listen.

And there are some landscapes which we visit too soon in our development. We struggle to find something to work with or it's just plain too hard to do anything with them. I'm convinced these kinds of landscapes do have a lot to offer, but the timing is wrong - we're just not ready for them yet.

A mesmerising vastness of black deserts and moss.

Approaching a difficult landscape like the central highlands of Iceland has many obstacles to overcome. For me, I've had to overcome my own set of self-imposed restrictions. I'm aware that I do have them - whether they are conscious or unconscious.  Do I, for instance, only strive for golden warm light and disregard other kinds of light as a possibility? And should I only ever shoot when it is dry and never take the camera out when other atmospheric options show opportunities?

By placing these kinds of restrictions upon myself, I do a disservice to my own creative side but I also show a disrespect to the landscape for what it has to offer me.

The landscape is always providing, always giving something of itself. It speaks, it converses with me, it shows me what it is. This I know for sure. It's just up to me to choose whether I wish to listen to it or not.

As I said earlier on - landscapes teach us things about ourselves. An oblique landscape such as the central highlands of Iceland has taught me that If there is anything holding me back with my photography, then it is most probably me.

Josef Albers - Interaction of Color

I've been saying for a while now, that digital-darkroom skills take a lifetime to master. It is a continuous journey of self improvement. Simply buying a copy of Lightroom or Photoshop and learning the applications may give us the tools, but it does not make us great craftsmen. We need to delve deeper than simply adding contrast or saturation to our images to truly understand how to get the best out of our editing and to move our photographic art forward.

Josef Albers fascinating 'Interaction of Colour'. It's quite an old publication now, but it's great for getting a better grasp of colour theory.

Lately, I've been taking more of an interest in tonal relationships and more specifically, the theories behind how we interpret colour. It's something that has grown out of my own awareness of how my digital-darkroom interpretation skills are developing.

Simply put, I believe we all have varying levels of visual awareness. Some of us may be more attuned to colour casts than others for example. While others may have more of an intuitive understanding of tonal relationships. 

Ultimately, if we're not aware of tonal and colour relationships within the images we choose to edit, then we will never be able to edit them particularly well. I think this is perhaps a case of why we see so many badly edited (read that as over-processed) images on the web. Many are too attached to what they think is present in the image, and there's a lack of objectivity about what really is there. 

So for the past few weeks I've been reading some really interesting books on the visual system. In Bruce Frazer's 'Real World Colour Management' book for instance, I've learned that our eye does not respond to quantity of light in a linear fashion.

An overly-simplified illustration. It demonstrates that the human eye is not able to perceive differences in real-world tonal values. Our eye tends to compress brighter tones, which is why we need to use grads on digital cameras, because their response is linear, while our response is non-linear.

We tend to compress the brighter tones and perceive them as the same luminosity as darker ones. A classic case would be that we can see textural detail in ground and also in sky, while our camera cannot. Cameras have a linear response to the brightness values of the real world, while we have a non-linear response.

Similarly, when we put two similar (but not identical) tones together, we can discern the difference between them:

Two different tones. Easy to notice the tonal differences when they are side by side.

But when we place them far apart - we cannot so easily notice the tonal differences:

Two different tones, far apart. Their tonal difference to each other is less obvious.

Our eye is easily deceived, and I'm sure that having some knowledge of why this is the case, can only help me in my pursuit to become more aware of how I interpret what I see, whether it is in the real world, or on a computer monitor.

Josef Albers fascinating book 'Interaction of Colour' was written back in the 1950's. I like it very much because it:

"is a record of an experimental way of studying colour and of teaching colour".

His introduction to the book sums up for me what I find most intriguing about how we see -

"In visual perception a colour is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes colour the most relative medium in art".

Indeed. How a viewer of your work may interpret what your image says may be totally subjective, but there are certain key physical as well as psychological reasons for why others are relating to your work the way they do. But most importantly, if we don't 'see it' ourselves, then we are losing out during the creative digital darkroom stage of our editing.

"The aim of such a study is to develop - through experience - by trial and error - an eye for colour. this means, specifically, seeing colour actions as well as feeling colour relatedness"

And this is the heart of the matter for me. I know when I edit work, that sometimes I need to leave it for a few days and return later - to see it with a fresh eye. Part of this is that I am too close to the work and need some distance from it, so I can be more objective about what I've done.

But I also know that I don't see colour or tonal relationships so easily. I need to work at them. I am fully aware that I still have a long way to go (a life long journey in fact) to improve my eye. And surely this is the true quest of all photographers - to improve one's eye?

The path to black & white

Today I was chatting to the editor of a major photography magazine and he was asking me why I had decided to start working in black and white. The correspondence was on e-mail, so I wrote down very quickly for him my thoughts on this, and when I read it back, I felt it would be a really good thing to post here on my blog. So below is my reply, which I hope may give you some food for thought about colour, monochrome and more importantly the relationships between all the objects present within the frame of your viewfinder.

"Over the past 5 years, I’ve spent a lot of time teaching people about landscape photography. Through the teaching, I’ve had to look at what I do and figure out just what’s going on for me when I choose a certain composition. 

These images all started out life as colour images. Through working in a monochrome landscape such as the black beaches of Iceland, I learned a great deal about tonal relationships. This has, over the years trained my eye and I think when I compose in colour, I'm very aware of tones and their relationships, which is why I think these converted straight into monochrome with little or no further editing.

"In the past few years, I’ve found I have started to talk more about tones and their relationships in the frame. As a way of helping others think more about composition and what they’re putting into the frame of their viewfinder, I’ve asked them to consider if certain tones merge when put side by side, and also if some tones compete for attention with other tones in the same frame.

"My feeling is that black and white is harder to do ‘well’ than colour is. Many may disagree, but I feel that with colour, you can have lots of tonal ‘errors’ in the frame and you still get away with it because you’re distracted by the colour elements. With black and white you’re only dealing with one thing and although that may seem much simpler, it actually means that any errors you get in tonal relationships really stands out.

"What I found was, that many of my existing colour images worked really well when converted straight into black and white with little or no editing involved. I think that’s because for a long while, I’ve been composing my images with tonal relationships in mind. My style of photography is of a more ‘simplified landscape’ and when you reduce your compositions down to more basic elements, you’re forced to look at tonal relationships more than if you were simply trying to cram a lot of subjects into the same frame.

Bolivia was where i felt I started to work with more simplified compositions, simply because the landscape has so much space to it, you can't escape it if you work with what's given to you.

"So for me, the path to black and white started when I began to shoot more simplified colour landscapes. I found that understanding the different tones and their relationships between the objects present in the frame has been a great primer or foundation for beginning to work in black and white.

I’m often surprised that when someone has an images that doesn’t work in colour, they feel that a simple way to fix it is to turn it into black and white. As you and I both know, good black and white work is extremely difficult to pull of well. The key word here is ‘well’. I think a lot of people are happy when they turn something black and white, but it takes a lot more to make it special, and a good understanding of form and tonal relationships is behind that".

Visualisation & Xmas

Well Merry Xmas everyone, and if you don't celebrate Christmas, then I hope you are having a nice day all the same! So... the reason for my posting tonight (Christmas Eve) is to do with Visualisation. The 'art of seeing'. What comes to some people naturally, is also, something that some people grapple with and fail to grasp in their minds-eye. It's amazing for me to see how each participant on my workshops 'see's' very differently from each other, even to the point that I sometimes get challenged about how I make my images, because some folks don't see the compositions work the way I intended them to.

So I often find it very hard to explain visualisation to participants. To me, when I look at scenery, I see compositions all over the place. I'm able to abstract key components of the landscape, distill them down (well, I hope I do), to their simplest form. I don't say this to blow my own trumpet, but merely to illustrate that as a photographer, we should be able to cut a rectangle out of what is before us, and make an image out of it.

Not all beautiful scenery works well as a photographic image.

So tonight, I came across the little graphic you see above. Yes, it's from Google, wishing us all a merry xmas.

But I'd like to ask you - did you know it was Google before I told you?

My reason for asking is simple. I believe that if you're able to see that this is a google logo, before I even mentioned it, or maybe just after I set the context, then that means you're able to 'visualise'. Some photography-folks simply don't see things in a 'graphic' sort of way. I do, and I believe that most good landscape photographers are able to see the underlying skeleton in a logo, or a piece of scenery for that matter.

So 'seeing' a photograph requires us to abstract. To stop thinking of scenery as 'scenery', but as a painting, or a drawing, or a photograph. Being able to disengage our mind from what is really in front of us, and be able to extrapolate a different interpretation - one that will stand up as a 2D photograph, is a skill that most of us possess, but rarely acknowledge.

I leave this with you all for the Christmas season.

Take care, and enjoy the festive season!

ps. I'd like to ask you: what presents did you visualise for your Christmas? For me, that kind if 'visualisation' is no different from the way I 'see' images before me. It's all about exercising our imagination, I'm sure.

Olstind - a great presence

Some subjects are iconic. No matter where you are in the landscape, they just appear to be in your line of sight at each and every turn. And if they are not, then they are in the very corner of your eye: asking - or perhaps demanding to be included.

I believe that this is a form of visualisation. We are being guided to make an image of something because it has a presence.

It attracts our eye.

For some, this comes very easily, and for others, they just see ‘everything’ and make very un-focussed images: one’s without a presence or point of interest. For those of us who can’t help being drawn to certain subjects in the landscape, I think we are responding to our environment.

It’s almost like we’re on remote control - not really ourselves. We are drawn, or compelled to make an image of something and we’re not conscious as to ‘why’.

Olstind was exactly like that. I found that the mountain seemed to dominate my view at every turn. He demanded to be included in many of my shots and I was very happy that he did, because I found him a most pleasing subject.

I say ‘he’, because the mountain looks like an old man. His face has a beard.

Don’t you think that Olstind looks like he’s got a nice warm coat on, covering his neck too?

So I decided to be obvious about him. Better to just please him and take at least one direct shot of him where it’s clear that he’s the main point of interest, or perhaps better put - the star.

Visualisation part 5

Well, now that I've put the finishing touches to my Nocturne eBook about low light photography, It's time to start focussing more on the visualisation book I have started to piece together. I'm away next week for a week though. I'm off to the Isle of Eigg to conduct a photo workshop and it's one of my favourite locations. We have lots of nice home cooking at the Glebe barn to keep us all well fed (honestly, we eat like kings here - it's great), and we're only a mile or so away from the beaches we're going to photograph, so it all works out really nicely in logistical terms too.

So back to this visualisation subject.

Misconceptions

In order to visualise, we need to remove a couple of misconceptions that seem to be quite commonplace.

Misconception 1 - photographs are real

When we look at a scene, we have to be capable of imagining it as a final photograph. This usually means that we have to start to think of a scene as something more abstract. Photographs are 2d representations of what was before the lens. They are statically frozen moments of time.

Misconception 2 - photographs are truthful

How many times do you get people saying that the photographer lied because he manipulated the shot. Well, what about the camera lying. It doesn't see the way we see. It has a greatly reduced contrast range that it can handle. This is one of the reasons why photographs don't come out the way we imagined they should. We need to adjust and manipulate the image to match what we saw. But I wouldn't stop there. Each one of us interprets what we see in front of us differently. Seeing is believing - turns out to be very subjective. So when it comes to making adjustments to an image, we often do this to make the scene conform to what we saw in our minds eye.

Photographs can't be truthful because they are an edit of the real world. Like a tv documentary that edits the script to match the view point, so to, do we do the same thing with a scene. We choose what to leave out of our story and what to emphasise. We colour the story to suit our own perspective. They are only truthful in conveying what we feel.

And of course, humans do not see in different focal lengths, so how can a wide angle shot of a scene be truthful?

Visualisation Continued.....

One of the things I think that is important in the making of an image, is visualisation. It's such a broad word though in terms of meaning. For the past few days I've been pouring over all the Ansel Adams books to get a better definition. Ansel says: 'visualisation is the mental process of seeing the final image in the minds eye before the picture is taken'.

In order to be able to imagine, or I prefer 'realise' the final image in our minds, I think we need to have an established style, which I think most book writers call 'voice'. Having a strong sense of what your style is, understanding what you would want to do to a scene in photographic terms comes with experience and practice. I know for instance, that my printing techniques have morphed over time. I seem to have a stock number of applications that I will apply to a scene depending on how I interpret it. For example, one might be to darken the foreground down a little to help navigate the eye into the scene.... Because I've had years of experience of interpreting my images in the 'dark room', this has rubbed off on me such that I tend to do that interpretation at the point of capture too. It has affected my judgement at the point of making an image. It has, to be blunt, influenced even my choice of subject.

I will choose a subject these days, not specifically because I think it's beautiful, or obvious (such as an iconic location), but because I find symmetry in it, find balance, pleasing tone and I know it will work well as a photographic print.

This I feel is at the heart of visualisation - being able to look at a scene, reality, and instantly be able to convert it in ones mind from 3D to 2D, with time frozen and understand how the colours and tonal scale of the scene will be rendered on my film.

Which brings me back to dear old film. I find that using film actually helps me in the visualisation process. Because I have no immediate feedback on a preview screen on the back of my camera, I have to build up a mental picture in my head of how the image is going to be interpreted by the camera. The camera as we should all know - does not see the way we see. It is a much less dynamic eye. So there I am out in the field, making an image and for the most part, I have an imagined view of the scene in my head, I have to work out the dynamic range of the scene, use ND graduation to control it. But this all happens as a sixth-sense for want of a better term.

Now consider digital. We get instant feedback, we're able to see how it turned out and correct if need be. That's great isn't it?

To a point.

What digital does for us is break any engagement we have with 'living in the moment'. The instant we stop thinking about making an image and look at that screen, we may as well be checking our e-mail on our iPhone. We're no longer aware of what is happening around us, or even where we are. There is also an over-reliance on the screen. A lot of my pupils on workshops 'believe' what they see on the display and it can't be trusted. It's not calibrated, and screens vary in terms of quality. It is a handicap in some ways to visualisation because it deceives.

But it is a great learning tool in understanding exposure and composition. It's just that there should be a point when we no long use the screen on the back, because we are capable of visualising the final scene in our minds eye and we can trust our judgement.

Visualisation is the abstraction of reality, in some ways, we disengage from the real world because we are able to imagine the real world as a photograph. So my view is that when capturing a scene on film or digital, we should be striving to get the full tonal scale recorded - no blocked shadows and no burnt out highlights. We're not trying to capture the scene as is - in one go. We're aiming to come home with good raw material that can be used to create a good print from.

As Ansel said 'the negative is the score, the print is the performance', and as Ruth Bernhard said 'to stop at the negative, is to not realise the full potential of the image'.

So there we are, visualisation is the mental process of imagining the final print at the point of capture. I think Ansel was right.