The Evolution of a Contact Sheet

When I'm busy editing my work, as I have been for the past few weeks, I like to collate all the edited work together and periodically do a review of it, to see how the portfolio is shaping up as I add newly scanned and edited work.

Some images from Fjallabak and also the north east of Iceland, taken this summer and autumn. Images © Bruce Percy. Mamiya 7 camera, Fuji Velvia RVP 50 film.

This has many benefits as I see it:

1) I'm able to see how new images added to the portfolio contribute by either enhancing or sometimes weakening the overall character of the collection.

2)  I can spot themes in the work which might suggest a direction that the work and future edits should take.

3) It helps me see when some images don't work because of colour problems and also tonal inconsistencies with the other images in the collection

4) The creation of a portfolio is an evolutionary process. As images are added to it, it grows and its character becomes richer. Sometimes a new story is unfolded in the process and what I thought the portfolio was going to look like, is radically changed.

It's also immensely satisfying to watch how the portfolio evolves. Like the act of making the images in the first place, there is a deep satisfaction in watching the work reach full completion.

Some portfolios come together very easily and quickly. Sometimes it's clear that there is a theme to the work before I start to edit, and other times, it's really not obvious to me at all.

I find the scanning and editing in the digital darkroom to be a fluid and iterative process. I may feel that certain images are finished, only to find several days later that they need to be re-tuned to fit with the colour palette or tonal response that the other images are dictating.

In order to let the portfolio evolve, I've got to keep an open mind, and be willing to go back and review an image I previously thought was done.

Images © Bruce Percy. Mamiya 7 camera, Fuji Velvia RVP 50 film.

Some artists say their work is never done, and I tend to agree with this. Images that we work on this week are really more a statement of who we were or how we were feeling at that moment in time. Edit the work months or years later and we may find we come up with a different interpretation.

But still, I don't like to look back too often. Although there is value in revisiting one's work from time to time I'm wary of falling into a hole that I can't get back out of: revisit your work, but don't endlessly rework it. That way lies an unhealthy obsession with perfectionism.

There is a lot of freedom to be gained by accepting that your older work is a statement of who you were at that time. Being able to let go of the past is healthy as it makes room for the future and in a sense, invites new work into your creative life.

The black deserts and volcanos of the central highlands of Iceland. Images © Bruce Percy. Mamiya 7 camera, Fuji Velvia RVP 50 film.

These images are my new work, and as such, it's too soon for me to be objective about them. I'm going to need some distance and that means some time away from them.

All I can tell you is that the images didn't come easily to me. The central highlands of Iceland is a difficult, wild place. I'm always looking for a graphic element to any place I visit and in this instance it was often not so easy to find.  I think this says more about me and my own approach (read that as criticism of my own limitations).

To add to the complexity of the place, the light was not easy to work with. The deserts are black and often times it felt as though the sun was bleeding out of the corner of my eye. Contrast is a massive issue here. 

Yet I feel that this is exactly what is so compelling about the central highlands of Iceland. Some landscapes are beautiful because of their awkwardness. They are complex and challenging and they are captivating because of these qualities. 

A landscape like the central highlands of Iceland is a defiant one. It will not submit to you. Rather, you have to submit to it. 

I feel I have only just scratched the surface of this intriguing place.

The Highlands of Iceland & North Iceland, 2014

Two nights ago, I published my monthly newsletter. In it, I described the beautiful complexity of the central highlands of Iceland.

I thought it would be nice to share a little contact sheet of some recent images from two trips this September (I still have a backlog of images shot during July as well as September to get through). So by no means is this the complete set of images.

Contact sheet of images shot in the central highlands and north east of Iceland this September. Images © Bruce Percy (Mamiya 7 Mk1 camera with 43, 50, 80, 150 and 210 lenses)

It's been so long since I had the chance to edit any of my own work. I've literally forgotten how satisfying and absorbing working in the darkroom can be (read that as digital-darkroom if you like me, use photoshop or any other digital editor, or analog darkroom if you are a traditional film photographer working in a wet darkroom).

Going into a room, and shutting myself away from everyone for extended periods of time and letting myself be immersed in my experiences and thoughts about the places I am working on, is a bit like re-living the times I had whilst shooting, and it also allows me to reconnect with the work at hand. It's just so enjoyable to escape into my own world and disappear for a few hours.

And a few hours can often turn into a few days. I think I've been putting off editing any work this year due to a lack of free time.

I really prefer to be able to set aside a few days or maybe a week in my studio, so I can truly get into the work I'm editing. Anything else feels like I'm being interrupted, disturbed in some way. And I've really not had much free time in between workshops, and running a business.

I really think to get the best out of ones editing, I need to get some distance between the shoot and the editing. It's the only way I can be objective about what I was doing. But leaving the work for more than six months or more (as in the case of images I shot in Venice a year ago, and Lofoten this February), feels like I'm so far removed from them, it's a little hard to get reconnected.

Anyway, I feel as photographers, we need to look after our mojo. Mojo will only exist if we remain enthusiastic in what we do. Being able to shoot is one way of keeping your mojo healthy, but also being able to bring work to completion is another. Leave things for far too long, or never complete anything and very soon you may be feeling that your photography has no direction or focus.

I've been depriving myself of the joy in bringing my work to completion, and now that I've completed some new work, I'm feeling energised to continue.

You can see more of my new images from Iceland under my ''recent work' section of this site.

Beginnings

You might have noticed a formatting change to my blog. Well my entire site is now mobile and tablet friendly. I had been thinking for a while now that desktop computers are on the wane, and tablets and mobile devices are taking of. So I felt it was time that my entire website had a bit of a make-over for the new way we all tend to enjoy the web.

One of the things that has come out of reviewing my old website and putting together this new one, is deciding which images I should perhaps leave out, and which should be included. During that phase a few months ago, I came across this image of mine:

My very first 'ooh, that' looks interesting' image, 1989.

It is the very first image that I ever made with a camera where I felt I had stumbled upon something.

I was around 22 years old, and I had owned my first camera (an EOS 650 with 50mm lens) for about a year or so. The image is of nowhere specific - just a corn field in the new-town of Livingston in West Lothian Scotland. 

One of my friends (the same one who had introduced me to photography) showed me a filter he'd bought for his camera. At the time (late 80's), the idea of using filters was still pretty new.

I bought one of the same filters and tried it out. One of the images in the slides I picked up from my local photo shop really stood out. The sky was completely overdone to the point that the blue was now black but the image was more interesting than I had anticipated.

For years, I had a few ciba-chromes of this made up for friends, and one of them always referred to it as 'a film-maker's dream'. Highly complimentary, but also I feel, alluded to where I might go with my photography in the decades to come.

I think we all have a photograph in our collection that has a special place in our hearts because it was perhaps a pivotal change in our early development. That's certainly how I see this photograph.

Back in the 80's, Photography had a way of making things look like 'another reality'. There was often a great disconnect between what we saw with our eyes and what was returned from the lab. It's something I loved about photography at the time (and to this day I still do as I continue to shoot film). The difference for me nowadays is that where I once pressed the shutter and hoped for the best, these days I have a slightly clearer view of how things might turn out.

Reviewing the new website has given me another chance to review my earlier work and through this process, I've discovered at least one thing: what I loved about photography back in the late 80's is still relevant to my photography today.

New website - monochrome

For the past while I've been noticing that many of my more recent efforts have been leaning towards a muted colour palette or towards a monochromatic look.

I've often said on this blog, that it's possible to see where you're going by looking back at where you've been. There are often clues and signs in your previous work which suggest the direction you are headed.  For the past while I've noticed signs that monochrome might be an avenue for me to explore. I've encountered some locations that have dictated a more muted or monochromatic feel in my colour work. The black volcanic beaches of Iceland is one obvious example of this, as the following images may demonstrate.

The black volcanic sand beaches of Iceland is one area where I think I was given permission to accept that pink skies don't  always suit the subject matter. Rather than looking at a landscape and wishing for sunset tones, it's best to find beauty in what is actually there. Work with what there is and if the tones are muted, and the sky is overcast - then embrace it. It has its own kind of beauty.

This is something I find many workshop participants have to overcome. What appears to be boring light or disappointing as it does not match a pre-visualised ideal of a certain location can, and often is great light to work with, providing you can see that this kind of light and muted tones are actually quite beautiful.

I think I've been working in a monochromatic way even before I visited the black sand beaches of Iceland. If I look at this shot of the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia taken in 2009, it's really monochrome-in-blue.

But black and white isn't easy. I think that's one of the reasons why I've steered clear of it for so long. The medium is unforgiving when it comes to noticing any errors in tonal relationships. I feel it's a medium that is actually harder to work in despite common sense telling me that it should be simpler. It's often the case that what looks simple is actually very difficult to pull off well.

I've always felt I needed to gain a good grounding in darkroom interpretation skills - knowing where to dodging and burn rather than how, has taught me a lot about how the tones in an image interact. So for me, working in colour, and reducing the components of the scene down to a much simpler set of tones and colours has been a good primer for working in monochrome.

With this in mind, I've decided that it would be great to start exploring the world of monochrome a little bit more, in addition to my colour work. I'm sure both will influence each other over the coming years. But at the moment it's just a hunch and I'm really keen to see where things may go.

I've set up a new website for my monochrome work here: www.monochrome.brucepercy.com

The site currently contains some re-interpretations of some of my better known colour images along side some new images.

Lastly, my reasons for setting up a dedicated website for my monochrome work was purely aesthetic. I feel mixing colour and monochrome work together under the same space is trying to do too many things in one go, and that kind of approach never works. One will dilute or weaken the message of the other. Plus, I feel that the viewer should be led into a body of work and whilst there, enjoy a sense of continuity rather than being flung from monochrome work to colour and back again. It's unsettling for the viewer and it breaks any spell they may be under (hopefully) from immersing themselves in the work.

For me, the importance of how ones work is presented, should never be underestimated.

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.