Thoughts on the impact of equipment change

This year I re-entered the world of the field camera. You may think this camera is a large format 4x5 inch system. It's not. It's actually a medium format 6x9cm field camera, only I'm using it with a 6x7cm film holder. So it's really a 6x7 medium format film camera with the added benefit of having tilt, shift and swing movements. Many Canon and Nikon users can buy tilt-shift lenses for their fixed plane camera bodies, for me, I bought a camera with tilt-shift-swing movements built into the body not the lenses.

Because it is not a large format camera, it's much smaller and lighter than you can imagine from looking at the photographs here. I just took this little system with me to Turkey a few weeks back and I carried it onto the plane in a waist-level bag including four lenses (38, 47, 65, 80), light meter, filter case and my entire film stock. I don't like to travel with multiple formats if I can avoid it - too many options make for a confusing time and I wished to get to grips with this system while I was away. There's no better way to do that, than to leave every other camera (read that as 'crutch')  back at home.

So why did someone who already owns three different medium format outfits buy a fourth one? Good question.

My answer is that I'd been feeling restricted by the lack of movements in my fixed plane camera bodies. Working with medium format often means that I'm working within a range of narrower depth of field's than someone using smaller systems.

I know for instance that with my Hasselblad 50mm or my Mamiya 7 50mm, the closest I can get to my foreground subject is about 1 metre. For those of you who don't know much about medium format, a 50mm lens is equivalent (I must stress - in angle of view only) to a 24mm lens in 35mm format. I still have the depth of field properties of a 50mm lens, because a 50mm lens is a 50mm lens, no matter what format of camera you bolt it onto.

Shorter focal-lengths provide more depth of field than longer focal lengths. And this is affected by the choice of format you decide to use. Use a small format such as Micro-Four-Thirds and your focal-lengths are half of what they are with 35mm. Consider the following table. If you were to aim to get the same angle of view as a 50mm lens in 35mm format across other camera formats, you would use the following focal lengths:

But bear in mind that you have a lot less depth of field at 150mm than you do with a 25mm lens for the same aperture. You can see how focal-lengths affect depth of field by playing with an ultra-wide lens and a 200mm lens. When you attempt to focus an ultra-wide lens, it kind of feels as if nothing much changes right? That's because even wide open, most of the scene is in focus. Whereas with a 200mm lens, you find that the focus has to be extremely precise.

Back to my choice of field camera. Most 35mm shooters using a 24mm lens can get as close as 2 feet to their foreground and keep infinity in focus. With my medium format systems - I can't. The closest I can get is 1 metre, and that's all because I'm using a focal length of 50mm to get the same angle of view as your 24mm lens. One way I can get round this problem is to use tilt (see picture below for front standard tilt):

The other reason I chose to get a field cameras has to do with converging lines. I've been finding many subjects I wish to shoot don't work if I have to point the camera up or down at them. For instance, those lovely red huts in Lofoten can only be photographed if I'm exactly parallel to them. If I point the camera up, my subject starts to lean back, if I tilt the camera down my subject starts to lean forward. See picture below for an example of how to look down but also keep vertical lines straight (not converging). Notice how the film plane is level - the camera has not been pointed up or down:

I think buying new gear should always be done with a lot of consideration. We often think about the benefits of what some new equipment may bring, but rarely do we think about the consequences it may have on our existing workflow. I'm always concerned that I may lose something I value in the process of changing something.

For example, I had been using nothing much else but a Mamiya 7 outfit for around 12 years with only 3 lenses. I am so used to visualising compositions in these three focal-lengths and also in a 6x7 aspect ratio. I think my compositions got better and better over the years because I was so tuned into using the same tools time and time again.  Around 2010, I took on a Hasselblad (which has a square aspect ratio) and when I did, I did it knowing it would take me at least a few years to settle into it (it did). I felt I might find that it changed the way I see compositions and I was concerned that I might find my compositional-abilities disrupted by the change. So I knew about the possible impact, and took on the change with a lot of care for my creativity.

And now that I've just bought an Ebony SW23 field camera, I've been very careful to buy the same focal-lengths as my Mamiya camera because I didn't want to affect the way I visualise. Changes to my process are always done in small, almost organic steps.

So now that I've re-entered the world of the view camera,  I've already told myself it will take time. A lot of time. And to be patient. I'm very self-aware of my creativity and I like to observe how things morph and change over time. That is one of the most beautiful things about photography for me.

Different tools : different outcome

This week, I watched a really interesting documentary by Keanu Reeves about the transition in the movie industry from using film to using digital capture.

Now before I go any further, I wish to make it clear that this posting is not a 'film vs digital' debate - it's a tired topic and one I feel there is little benefit in getting involved in. Instead, this post is really about the creative process, and how using different tools often require us to work differently, and that in itself,  often leads to a different outcome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-I2PmEhQSA&width=400

In Reeves documentary, we have people in the movie industry from cinema-photographer's to directors discussing how their process has changed. Some of them question whether it has been a good thing for them and some question whether they feel they've lost something along the way.

Martin Scorsese for instance, feels there is too much reliance on digital capture to give instant feedback whilst on set, stating that he never trusts anything until he sees it on a big screen.

Conversely, a film editor says that cutting a movie and deciding which camera angles to take to make a scene flow in the final edit has become enormously easier to do and re-do in the digital domain. Cutting celluloid often required a great deal of logistical effort. But he does state that he felt that working on editing films requires a more considered effort, that was maybe not there so much with digital.

These are just some of the examples in the documentary, but they resonated with me, because ultimately, what they were saying is that when they change something in their work flow, the outcome is often affected in some way.

I have always believed that whenever I change anything in my working process, the outcome is always affected.

I may gain, but I also lose something in the change because by nature, change is change. It's just often difficult to measure just how much the change has affected my work. And although this may be liberating at times, it's also a daunting place to be for the simple fact that there are things in my existing workflow that I do not wish to mess with, because I love how they produce a certain result. I'm aware, that by simply changing one little thing in my workflow, as inconsequential as I may feel it might be, I know it has the capacity to remove some of the elements I love about what I've done in the past.

For example, changing the aspect ratio of my camera has often led me to find new compositions that I wouldn't have seen before. For about 12 years I shot a Mamiya 7 camera which has an aspect ratio of 4x5 (yes, I know it's a 6x7 camera, but when you measure the images, they are 4x5 aspect ratio). Three years ago I bought a Hasselblad 500 series camera from a dear friend. I knew at the time, that it had the potential to really mess with how I 'see'. I think, over the years, I've developed a good eye for composing in rectangles and although I was keen to see where working with a square aspect ratio camera may lead me, I knew that it wouldn't be easy to go back once I'd gone down a certain creative road for too long. I also knew that any change in my workflow would require at least a couple of years of my time to understand what it had brought to my photography overall. In short, I tend to reflect quite a lot about what I'm doing, and why I'm doing it, and how things might change, and how things have changed for the better or worse along the way.

As creatives, we should always be asking ourselves questions. The creative process is really an internal dialogue anyway. One where we create and then we ask ourselves if we like what we've created. It's one where we make new decisions upon that. Having a sense of enquiry about what we do, being self-aware as always, requires us to think about how our work is changing, and how the tools we choose affect those changes. Good artists can't help but ask themselves these questions all the time.

So before you buy that latest lens, or new plug-in to try, ask yourself how you feel it may change what you do. And when you begin to use these new tools, ask yourself how they are influencing what you do whilst  using of them.

A creative life is one full of enquiry. We make work based on how we feel, and how we respond to our environment, but we also make work based on how we interact with the tools we use. Consider, reflect, adapt, change, revert where necessary, but always keep a sense of enquiry about what you do.

Osmosis

Osmosis - A gradual, often unconscious process of assimilation or absorption.

Some landscapes come to us when we are ready to receive them. Not the other way around.

Lumix GX1, 12-23 lens, Lee 0.9 hard grad. This image was taken quickly to illustrate compositional and tonal relationships during my weekend workshop.

Last weekend I was running my umpteenth workshop in Torridon - a very special mountainous place here in the Scottish highlands.

Although I've always had a love for the place, I've often found it extremely difficult to make images here, until recently. I think I've learned to understand this landscape more through the act of being a workshop teacher. Consider this statement by Brian Eno:

"You don't really understand your own ideas, until you try to articulate them to somebody else. Also, in the process of articulating, you find yourself saying things you didn't know you knew" - Brian Eno

This has often been a case for me whilst running my workshops. I discover that I knew something I didn't know I knew. And also, that through the process of having to explain something to someone else, my own understanding of a place, or a photographic concept becomes clearer.

I've found teaching workshops in Torridon immensely rewarding in this respect. The landscape is fractured and complex. It is not a simple landscape to make good images from, and it requires you to see that many of the stones, trees and bracken all have similar tonal relationships. When these tones are compressed down into a 2D image, they often merge, and become very confused and jumbled as a result. 'Separation' between objects within the frame becomes key. Through this awareness, my eye has become more finely-tuned.

The image you see at the top of this post was made last weekend while we were busy trying to work with competing elements. It has taken me around 13 years to get to a point where I can look at a scene and know how best to deconstruct it down to a few elements that will work as a photograph. Through this time, I have often asked myself questions about my work, and I've often had to explain it to others.

As creative people, we have to listen to ourselves and become more aware of our own thoughts. It is only through a sense of internal-dialogue, and a sense of inquisitiveness about how we choose to approach landscape photography, that we are able to progress as artists.

In the video above, you'll see Brian Eno and Ben Frost discuss the creative process. I found it fascinating to hear Ben mention that he finds his work seems to be a kind of diary. I think this is true of my own photography: my images are a sounding board that show where I was, creatively speaking. They are a record of my photographic development.

Ben is in-tune with his creativity - he understands where he has been and where he is now. This is perhaps a fundamental skill that all creative people should possess, or at the very least, be learning to tune into.

So Iconic, when we look, we don't 'see' them any more

A few days ago, a friend of mine emailed me about Mike Stimpson's lego images of iconic photographs. I thought they were terrific, and wanted to share them with you all.

Some of these should be very familiar to you as they are interpretations of well known global images. Images so powerful that we all know them, and yet, we rarely know the photographer behind them.

Such images have a potency - they are instantly recognisable, even when made from lego. Others, are perhaps less well known, unless you have an avid interest in historic photography, such as these:

On a creative level, these have been really wonderful to discover. My friend emailed me with the title 'best photography ever', and I think in some ways, he's right. I found them very clever and immensely enjoyable to view. What Mike Stimpson has done, is demonstrate that with a bit of inventiveness, we can create something fresh.

Similarly to the post earlier this week about Vivaldi's Four Seasons, I feel, what Mike Stimpson has done for me, is reignite my interest and love for images that have become so well known to me, that I don't really 'see' them anymore.

  Through his love for lego and photography, he has create a visual dialogue - one in which we are asked to revisit the original work with a new found sense of  enquiry and inquisitiveness.

Discreet Music

For a few weeks, while I was away in Bolivia and Patagonia, I had a little portable pair of stereo speakers for my iPod. I've had trouble sleeping of late, partly due to the change in time zones, climate, different beds each couple of days, and so on. I found Brian Eno's album 'Discreet Music' was ideal for listening to while I tried to sleep. I found it extremely soothing and it often fitted the background very well.

I read this about the album today on Wikipedia:

"The inspiration for this album began when Eno was left bed-ridden in a hospital by an automobile accident and was given an album of eighteenth-century harp music.^[2] After struggling to put the record on the turntable and returning to bed, he realized that the volume was turned down (toward the threshold of inaudibility) but he lacked the strength to get up from the bed again and turn it up. Eno said this experience taught him a new way to perceive music:

"This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the environment just as the color of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience."

I found this extremely interesting. Eno was forced to re-interpret the harp music in an unintended way. I often find many things are more interesting when used in an unintended way, and I think as a creative person, we should not just assume, but instead, we should enquire. This is what Eno did with his harp music, and I feel this is very much the main task of a creative person. We are enquirers. We engage with our subjects and we should question what is there, because without questioning, we may never see a new side, a new angle, or come across a discovery in our own art.

That alone is worth discussing. But let's move on to the main point for me - he decided to put an album together that was basically 'furniture music', music that was intended to fit as ambience more than anything. I often find other music like Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians is also perfect background ambience. But I think what got me in the last sentence in Wikipedia was Eno comparing the harp music as just another facet of his environment: it was no different from  the colour of the light or the sound of the rain.

In a way, shouldn't there be little or no separation between what we create and our environment? It is our environment that is our influence. We are a product of our environment, so why should be compartmentalise our creative time from the rest of our lives?

I know for instance, that many workshop participants tell me it takes them a few days to get their visual muscle working well while out making images. Perhaps I've had too much exercise in that department, but I see no reason why I can't always be thinking visually while I am not making images. Why should I compartmentalise this to something I do when I make images, and something I don't do, while I am watching TV, or driving?

I prefer not to compartmentalise. For instance, when I make images out in the field, I see no separation from the shoot, and the edit. In fact, I often feel as though I am iteratively going back and forth from editing and creating while I am on location, and I often re-compose the image through cropping once back at home. Putting a logical division in there, only gets in the way of what it is that I am doing - it is one never ending journey.

Currently, I have around 68 rolls of film from my recent trip to Patagonia and Bolivia away for development, but I don't consider the creative process stalled or stopped at the moment; they feel as if they are simply fermenting in my mind, waiting for the continuation of their birth to happen once they arrive back on my desk at home.

I certainly found listening to Discreet Music at a low volume was important. Too loud, and it dominated, but at the right volume, it integrated with my environment, and worked at a subliminal level. I was aware that something was being played, but my thought patterns weren't distracted by it.

I feel I have the same attitude whilst working on my images. And when I mean working on them, I mean the entire process - from out in the field, to back at the ranch in my digital darkroom: the process is one and the same thing for me. The process shouldn't be overly demanding. I shouldn't be overwhelmed at any stage, because this induces a form of stress. Stress is a form of blockage. Blockages have nothing to do with being creative, but more to do with writers block. To create, things must flow.

Creative people know that work has a way of surfacing. It may feel as if there was no intervention at times, because I think we tap into our subliminal states whilst we are in the creative mode.

Listening to music such as Eno's Discreet Music teaches me something. It taught me that my own mind is always working on things, even when I am not aware of it, and that when I think I haven't started on some work, that maybe the work is already underway in the back of my mind. I never really know how new work comes about, how it is created or where the source of it lies. All I know is that by being receptive to my subconscious, and by not putting boundaries or divisions up in my creative process (field work vs digital darkroom work for instance, or by thinking there are times for being creative, and times for when I shouldn't be), the work has a chance to flow.

Journeys are Important

A few days ago I had a very enlightening conversation with my friend Vlad that has ultimately led onto the creation of this post. We were discussing Vlad's video, and how he finds the time waiting at airports a form of mental adjustment in which he is able to prepare himself for what lies ahead. So often do I find that over the hours or days that I spend traveling some place to make photographs, there seems to be a mental transition of sorts that happens for me too. I feel it's a requirement of the creative process, almost a meditative time. Let me explain a little better.

When I first leave home, I'm usually still wrapped up very much in my home life. Friends, family, Edinburgh the town I live in, is my environment. I'm a city dweller. So while I am at home, my mind is often turned to the day to day living of being in a small city. If I were to teleport immediately to some remote landscape, I think I would find myself emotionally disorientated. I seem to need to have the journey time between home and location in which to let go of my city life, and slowly prepare, and move into the life I have while in a wilderness location.

There is a need, certainly for me, to have this time, to be able to transfer from one environment to another. Far off places, and perhaps friends who live there, are but an abstract notion when they are not immediately in my present day to day life. I have to file them away as some extension of me, and it takes me a while to step into the life of the people I know in these far off places. It also takes me a while to forget about my city life, to be able to fully let go.

There needs to be this transference stage. It's vital to have it, so that I'm emotionally ready and prepared to accept the landscapes I photograph.

Now imagine a world where distances are becoming smaller and things are becoming more immediate. Do you think these remote landscapes would be just as appealing to us if we could get there in a very short space of time? I don't think they would. We wouldn't have the appreciation for them as we wouldn't have had the settling in time, that a plane ride gives us. That time to reflect, to consider where we are going. A plane ride is forced meditation. It is a vital part of the process where we can let our minds float freely, allowing things to go and for our aspirations and anticipations of the future, to come to us. I think it's prep time, for my creativity.

This subject leads on rather neatly to the personal issues I have with what I do for a living now. Every few weeks I am away somewhere in the world. It can be a disorientating thing to be doing on a frequent basis, because it always takes me time to settle back into my Edinburgh life when I'm home, and then there is the mental and emotional demands of preparing myself for a workshop or photo tour somewhere that will require maybe a week or so of my time. I can only describe it as relocation-lag. Where it takes a while for my mind and spirit to settle into a different environment.

I'm just curious how this all affects the creative process? How do you see it affecting you? Does it take time for you to settle into a new environment before you can make images, or do you find that the newness is what inspires you to make images? Have you considered that the plane ride for a few hours, is perhaps like a meditative requirement, something that needs to be done, in order to prepare your mind for what is to come?

I think this is also why I need to have space between my shooting sessions and the post-editing. I need time to be able to absorb what it was I felt and took in while in a remote landscape. I can't be objective about it, or give the work the attention it deserves, if I come home and immediately start to edit it. I'm almost trying to complete the work, before my mind has even reached its own conclusion of the emotions and events that I'm still absorbing.

If I were to edit soon after the shoot, I feel the edits would be a rushed response, and would show little care for just what it is, that I'm still absorbing.

Traveling gives us time, and with that time, we gain insight. Travel also gives us distance, and with this distance, we gain a different kind of insight. Both contribute to the creative process in different ways. We should embrace them, because they are part of the creative journey and have impact on what it is we do and how we reach a creative conclusion.

Dissonance in Photographs?

In the world of music, dissonance is something that is learned at an advanced stage in the development of any musician whether they are simply learning to play or while writing their own compositions. Consider that during the early stages of musical development, most musicians learn to play (and also write) very simple melodies. Structures are uncomplicated and the use of chords as an expression is perhaps somewhat limited. Over time, as they develop, they delve into more complex musical structures and eventually begin to incorporate chords and complex overtones that have feelings of tension and expectation to them. This is known in musical terms as 'dissonance'. Dissonance is not a bad thing, it can provide depth and complexity to music and take us into different worlds of feeling and mood. We've all been subjected to it, for example - in film scores where it is used to convey drama. The music becomes extremely agitated and complex. It is a universal language we all understand.

Yesterday I had a very nice conversation with a musical friend of mine about this very topic. Since the conversation, I've been considering if there is a parallel to 'dissonance' in photographic images. I'm certainly aware that we can have dissonance in photographs, but I'm not altogether clear if dissonance is a good thing in images. Is it possible to have an image that creates tension, but at the same time be pleasing to our eye?

I also think that it's not possible to use musical development as a similar analogy to that of image making, as they both appear to be opposite from each other. In music, simple compositions or melodies are often encountered early on in our musical tastes and development, while more complex forms of music are often acquired over a long period of time while we learn to enjoy their depth and meaning. With photographic images, we often start with very busy, complex scenes, because we haven't developed our eye to remove all the distracting elements contained within the frame. It is only over many years that we become able to refine our compositional eye and notice things that need to be removed.

This has been my assumption until yesterdays conversation with my music friend. I'm now unsure if my idea that imagery should be simple, is a correct one. Certainly for many people who wish to improve their photography, gaining a more selective eye is a good thing. But what if you do want to create images that have a degree of tension in them? Surely it is ok for an image to be overly complex, to have a dissonance to it - if this is what you intended?

I think there is a difference between dissonance in an image, and a bad composition. For me, dissonance implies that the work is good, while containing a degree of tension in it. Bad compositions are often bad photographs because the composition creates a form of tension that is displeasing to the viewer's eye.

I'd like to hear your views, and maybe you can point me towards work where you feel there is dissonance (read tension) while at the same time, the work is superb. I'd love to hear from you.

postnote: I deliberately used the two images of Raudfoss in Iceland in this posting, because I feel there is perhaps more tension in the first image due to the more fractured foreground landscape. The second image has a less fractious foreground, with more space and is perhaps therefore calmer than the first. But there is still a degree of complexity to both of them, and I'm wondering if this is dissonance, of a sort? The images aren't bad, in fact, I'm very pleased with them, but there is certainly a complex overtone to both of them. How else may dissonance be conveyed in an image? A dramatic thunderous sky perhaps can convey drama, but does it convey tension? Do you feel on edge when looking at pictures of storms?

Black and White Canvas

Following on from my previous two posts (white Canvas and then Black Canvas) where I discussed the use of snow (white canvas) or black sand (black canvas) as a blank canvas in which to place isolated objects thus creating a simplified composition / photograph, it's time to talk about incorporating the two.

Of course, the title of this post suggests I'm talking about black and white photography. I'm not. I'm just amalgamating the previous two posts together. If you've not read them, then I suggest that you do, as they are really the foundation to where I'm going with all of this.

You see, for me, photography is not about great scenery. It's about tonal compositions. If we abstract a scene down to the basic building blocks we have tone and form. That's all we have. We don't have trees, we don't have rivers, we don't have beaches. Forget all those 'meaningful' handles we have for things out there in the world. They're really irrelevant and a massive distraction to what we're really doing in photography. So what is it that I think we're trying to do in photography?

Well, a number of things actually. But perhaps the most important one is that we're trying to make sense of the world, to distill what we see in front of us, down into a digestible, accessible message. We wish to compartmentalise what we see down into something we can understand, and that hopefully everyone else will too. We do this by using maths (spacial distances between related objects within the frame), and by mood (dark tones convey a sense of mystery or low feelings, while brighter tones are more uplifting and transparent).

But ultimately, everything we see within the frame is a tone. It is somewhere between absolute black and absolute white. I honestly wonder sometimes - if we could paint onto the sensors / film of our cameras what we want, we would. We're just dealing in tones.

So am I suggesting we all start working in black and white? Sort of, but not quite, but yes. I am.

Recently, while I was in Lofoten, one of my clients - John - was working with his D800 camera and I noticed he was working with his live-view screen set to black and white only.

I loved this.

To me it was the perfect summary of what it is we're trying to do as photographers.

What John was trying to do, was consider the tones in front of him. By removing the colour element, he was able to be more focussed on the tonal relationships before him, and the form they convey throughout the scene. By working with a black and white preview screen, he was abstracting.

Photographs aren't about scenery, they're about form and tone.

I began this discussion by presenting a white landscape (snow), to illustrate how we can reduce our photography down to the absolute zero in terms of content to a frame, and if we're good at it, we can make stronger images. I feel working in blank landscapes such as snow and beach locations can help us fine tune our photography. We start to realise we don't need much, and everything that is put into the frame should have a purpose.

Like Mark Hollis fromTalk Talk said "Before you play two notes learn how to play one note - and don't play one note unless you've got a reason to play it." The same holds true for photography. We must distill our image making down to what it really is, and it's not about scenery, it's about form and tone. Start with less form and work up from there is my advice.

Black Canvas

Several months ago, I wrote a blog posting about tonal relationships in photographs, and how dark areas of a frame create mystery. This was all spurred on by something I read in Galen Rowell's excellent book 'Inner game'. In it, he had envisioned a time in the future when something like HDR would arrive and he (correctly) suggested that with the power of such a tool, it would be very easy to remove all depth and mystery from an image. He died in 2001, so this was well before the advent of HDR.

But the main point that Galen wrote about in his article, was that he felt that dark areas of an image convey a sense of mystery, because as part of our primal instinct is to associate dark with danger. For example a dark cave or a dark forest would be considered a possible threat to our ancestors.

I bring all this up, as a precursor to what I'd like to discuss in this post.

Dark areas in a photograph should be considered as a welcome dimension, if they do not disturb the harmony of the rest of the image.

A few days ago, I discussed how using Snow in a photograph can create a sense of having a blank canvas, a space where the eye can float freely away (or over). Snow can simplify or distill our compositions down, reduce the landscape to the core elements that we wish our viewer to be attracted to. Similarly, black areas of a frame can be used in exactly the same way.

Take the above shot of my 'ice seal', shot in Iceland in 2011. Part of my attraction to a scene is often the lack of clutter around any interesting objects. This little sculpture was sitting on the beach separated from other ice debris. The black beach acts as a kind of 'filler' or blank canvas, pretty much in the same way as snow does. If anything it seems that there is a rule here - large areas of black act exactly the same way as large areas of white snow do. What this comes down to is recognising that spaces we encounter in a landscape can be put to just as much good use as the main objects of interest. If a photograph could be compared to a musical score, we would say that it's not just the notes of the melody that are important, it's the spaces between them as well.

I've always been intrigued that most photographers go looking for scenes with far too many things going on in them. It seems to be a natural conclusion that when we first think about landscape photography, we think about what we want to include in a shot, and seldom do we consider what we wish to exclude. Composing is partly an act of editing on location.

But when we do find good compositions, it's often because we have isolated out a few key objects in the scene for interest. It takes us a lot longer to learn to really see all the remaining clutter that was also present in the scene. So often do we return home only to discover that the scene we recorded, contains additional distracting elements that we never saw whilst there. This happens because we are selective in what we choose to 'see' at the point that the image was made. It takes years to begin to really see beyond what we have been attracted to, and notice subtexts. So in essence, landscape photography is a difficult thing to master, mainly because we have decided to start off with too many things competing for our interest within the frame. This is at odds with how many people find empty landscapes intimidating. I've often heard participants express a feeling of being overwhelmed by too little going on in the frame, when I have often believed that the less you have to worry about - the easier it should be to make an effective photograph.

Blank empty spaces in our landscape should be considered as inviting spaces to work in. They should be easy to work with, rather than hard, because we are trying to juggle a lot less than we would be, if we had to worry about numerous objects, each with their own conflicting shapes and tones.

Lastly, let's consider what a black canvas is for us, compared to a white canvas. I find snow scenes generally uplifting. The degree of bright tones within the frame convey a sense of openness and transparency. Darker images, like my 'ice seal' photograph do not. The adage that 'white reveals, and black conceals' is true. Black presents a less optimistic mood, and I often feel the images convey a less uplifting mood to them. So tones are an important element of our compositions, but I often feel they aren't considered until we are back home, viewing our image on a screen. It seems that while we are out in the landscape, we aren't entirely able to convert what is in the frame of our camera's eye piece into an abstraction (i.e photograph). We're still holding on to the notion of scenery to a degree. We may recognise objects, shapes and patterns and may have constructed a meaningful composition around what we've found, but all too often, we don't recognise the tonal aspects of what we have. A tree line across a snowy landscape can look like a line of trees while we are there, but when we're back home looking at the image on a computer screen, we see a black caterpillar crawling across a white piece of paper. Our line of trees have turned into something all together different from what we saw, because we did not understand that trees will render muddy and dark when encompassed by a much brighter tone (in this case, snow).

Maybe that's something for a further post.

White Canvas

Last year, on my Bolivia trip, Jezz said to me 'it's not that you like snow Bruce, it's just that you like white'.

I think Jezz hit on something with his humorous comment.

I do like white.

Over the past few years, as my photographic style has simplified, it's as if that 'white' that Jezz speaks off, has become something I seek, because it has a few properties about it that I find are an aid to my compositions and inspiration.

Like a blank canvas, these white spaces allow me to reduce the content of the frame down to the most elemental building blocks. Less objects in the frame can often suggest a much simplified view.

But these white spaces also allow the objects that I do include in the frame to be more separated out; for them to have breathing space around them. This breathing space implies a sense of calm to the photograph.

Snow is the epitome of space and 'nothingness'. Which is why I think I'm often attracted to the colder regions. There is something unblemished about Snow and Ice. It rarely has the mark of man on it, and through it, we are allowed to place upon it our own visions of what is or isn't there. And that's what space in photographs does for us - it allows us to have more freedom to conjure up our own thoughts and dreams.

So although Jezz thinks I like white, I really like space. Space in a photograph allows for things to be more calm. Space also allows for the image to be more simplified. Space is good.

But it's not just Snow that gives us this. We can reach similar levels of space and simplification by using other surfaces. Large areas of sand on beaches is another example, and so too is anything that has a simple texture and area to it with almost no break to its own continuity. This continuity I speak off, allows the eye to pass over, to float by and head towards the subjects we do wish the viewer to rest their eyes upon.

By isolating out regions of the landscape where it seems as though nothing is going on, we can create images where it feels as though there is more going on than meets the eye. Less is more. And by removing distracting tones, or overly complex structures in our images, we reduce our message down to one that is concise. Our message becomes much easier to digest, and more coherent as a result. Good images have often simple, but strong messages.

Yes, space in the landscape is good.