For many years now, when I run my Hokkaido winter tour, we end up at the Takushinkan photo gallery. Inside it, they host the photographs of photographer Shinzo Maeda who died in 1989.

To my eye, Maeda’s photographs are beautiful minimalist statements about Hokkaido, in all seasons.

I was particularly taken with Maeda’s autumn images, and they are the sole reason for me wishing to come to Hokkaido at that time of year. I was sure, that Hokkaido could still offer the minimalism that I saw in his work, despite his images being created a long time ago.

Many of the locations of his images I thought beautiful. I appreciated that they were probably changed beyond recognition or no longer in existence. Such is the way of evolving landscapes - a benefit if you ask me. But it still did make me curious as to whether I might find anything at all in the Autumn. I think my concerns where that the landscape would be much more busy than the winter blankets of snow I had encountered up until that point.

I have never been interested in copying someone else’s compositions. Instead, I’m much more interested in finding out ‘what I may find?’

Fast forward three years and I am now on tour no.3 with a group. Tour no.1 was very much an experiment to see what was there. Each tour has always offered up different views, different autumnal conditions (this year for instance we just missed snow by a few days in Biei). But I’m glad I followed my heart in coming to Hokkaido in the autumn. I was not aware of many other autumnal images of the island which is good in the way that it makes it so much easier to go a place and not be bombarded by countless images you’ve seen elsewhere.

I’m just home from Japan, and this morning was my first foray into editing the work. Film processing began on Saturday at 1am due to jet lag, and it went seamlessly until Monday morning where I finished hanging up the last films to dry, and started to put them into sleeves. That was when I was able to review the images as I cut them into strips of three on my light table.

I think it’s tempting to look at all of what you’ve shot and try to make some kind of plan out of it. I’ve found the only plan worth sticking to is to work on the images that you feel most inspired by. Edit those, and then perhaps see how the fit together (if at all). The next set of images to choose to edit becomes clearer once you’ve done that first step.

The image above was shot at Lake Toya, which was not part of this year’s tour. I just wanted to go and see what was there. I followed my gut on this one. And during the five days I was there, I was repeatedly drawn back to these two trees at the lake side. I think it’s obvious why.

More to follow, hopefully in this month’s newsletter.