Transposing Tones

I've been working on a new e-Book for some time now - 'Tonal Relationships'. 

Each time I begin work on a new project, it can really take a while to move off the landing pad. I found this to be particularly true when I wrote my Fast-Track to Photoshop e-Book, which actually took me about two years. Most of it was a sense of procrastination because each time I approached it, I felt I was tackling it from the wrong perspective.

A work in progress. It's better to release something when it's right. It may be some time yet :-)

I'm a great believer in sleeping on things if I don't know the answer. Backing off from something and giving my mind the time to collate and make sense of something works really well for me. I've found that adopting this approach to my photography, as well as writing e-books and also in life experiences, has been invaluable.

I found that just by leaving my 'Fast Track to Photoshop' e-book idea on the shelf for a long long while, I seemed to get clarity on how it should be formed, and when I did get round to writing it, it all came out very easily and I felt I wrote one of my most clear and concise efforts to date.

Well, I'm not there yet with my Tonal Relationships e-book, as I've been having difficulty trying to figure out how to proceed, but I've noticed that over the past few weeks I've started to formulate a structure for how the e-book should be laid out and things are getting clearer in my head.

One aspect that has become clear to me over the past few years, is that tonal relationships do not just have to work within each single image, but in order to help with defining your own style, I think the tones should remain consistent through any body of work you produce. For instance, I've noticed that when I convert my colour work to monochrome, I'm able to see how consistent my work is - strip away the colours, and the images still appear to be very balanced.

It was only when I converted some of my existing colour work to mono, that I discovered how consistent I was with my tonal ranges in my work.

Anyway, I digress a little. Here right now, is a rough idea of how I feel the e-Book may be laid out. I'm always open to things changing, and trying to not be too fixed on things, because creativity needs the space to go where it wants to go.

Main ideas of book:

• Relationships throughout the frame - by strengthening one area of the frame, other tones are affected
• If you make two areas of the frame the same tone - they become related.
• If you make two areas of the frame different, they become unrelated.
• The odd tone out is the dominant one. If you keep one area of the picture different from the rest, it becomes the dominant tone. White stone on black background, or black stone on white background

Fieldwork Awareness Section

• learn to think about tones while out making pictures: abstraction versus association
• being aware of colour constancy / chromatic adaption while you work under different lighting conditions, and applying this to your choice of subject
• Avoiding overly complex tonal compositions

Darkroom Workbook Section

• Transposing Tones - take one tone in the image, and shift it (harris hills in harris photos)
• Look for images in your collection that have very few tones. Edit them so all the tones become more similar
• Simple compositions aren’t necessarily of one or two objects. Sometimes they are simple because they contain one or two dominant tones. Busy images can have too much tonal information in them. 
• Image selection: choose those with simple tonal relationships, because it will make the task of editing them easier.
• image selection: when toning one image, refer to others in the collection for guidance. Often one image will dictate how the others should be edited, so they 'sit together' better.
• Is your eye being pulled all over the place by too many tonal distractions? Apply localised contrasts, or reduce contrast in other areas to bring emphasis to other areas.

The editing stage

I never like to work on images piece meal. I'm much more interested in a collection of images that work together as a whole. For me, that means that when I edit images, I'm focus my attention on images shot during one shoot. For example, last week I edited work from the isle of Harris only, even though I have plenty of images from other places I could have worked on or switched between.

I think these four images work well together, and the truth is; maybe the originals didn't. But with a bit of editing work, I was able to bring them in-line with each other.

I prefer to stick to this approach because I find that I can immerse myself in the colours and tonal responses of one place and get to know and understand them, which I feel is vital if I'm going to get the best out of the work I've shot.

You see, I think the editing stage is really important, as I think it's possible to screw up good work simply by not understanding it. It's possible to murder a collection of good images by tackling it the wrong way.

So I prefer to work on images from the same shoot. It allows me to get into the atmospheres and embedded feelings that were there when I made the work and it also allows me to see and feel the emotional messages in the resulting film transparencies. After all, if you spend a week or two in the outer hebrides shooting beaches, you will get into a certain theme or frame of mind while there. So too, the editing stage should have the same approach.

But I also like to focus on the same collection of images for a few other reasons:

1. it often takes me a while to find the theme in the work. I can sometimes have some false starts by taking up the wrong approach to the work, and I've been known to stop and retreat back to square one because I feel where I'm going with the work isn't right. I may find the first few images I work on don't seem to gel. I find it takes a while to get the right 'groove' for the work i'm looking at, and that can only happen if I let myself relive the experiences - the sights, the smells, the atmospheres of the place. I also find that after a few days of working, I start to find a theme in the work that kind of dictates how the rest of the work should be edited, and more specifically, which images out of all the ones I've shot - I should select to be worked on.

2. Different places have different qualities of light. If I move from editing images shot in a place where the light is soft and the tones are bright, to working on images from a high contrast location where the tones are dark, I loose my rhythm. I can't context switch between the two and I lose focus. It's best to remain with one theme and one body of work until the edits are complete.

I think these four images work well together. It was only after a few days that I realised there were some darker images in the collection that worked well together and as often is the case: one successful edit seems to lead the way forward for how the remaining should be edited.

3. Tonal responses are important. I'm always thinking about how the tones between images relate, not just within the image, but within the collection. It's important to see parallels and work with those hints. Just slapping on some grad in the sky and cranking up the contrast for all your work will reduce the possibilities of what your work could be, or the new heights it could reach by a sloppy approach. By working on images from a location, you remember the qualities of the light, and how you thought it should be conveyed, but more importantly, you should be tapping into your understanding of the tones that are present in the final images and be leveraging it. 
There should be a lot of care and consideration taken during the editing stage, just as much as the care and consideration that was made at the time of capture. Both the shoot and the edit are interrelated and rely on the same skill sets.

I tend to take many days, if not weeks working on a new collection of images. The editing times per image are quite short (a few minutes) because I like to go with how I feel and respond to the edits I put in, and I'm aware that working on them for longer than that means I'll lose objectivity in the work. But as I go on and edit other work, I find I often return to the earlier work to 'tune it' in so that all the work sits well together. Some days I find some edits look good only to find the next day that I hadn't gone far enough, or had gone too far, so there's a reiterative process there where I return and keep tuning images until the entire collection sit well as a whole.

My final edit of my Harris shoot from last November.

Association versus the anonymous

I often feel there's too much emphasis made of association.

Landscape photography requires us to be able to abstract: to reduce meaningful objects down to their graphical forms. Rather than thinking about trees, rivers and mountains, we should be able to see them for how beautiful their forms are. Rather than seeing 'mountain', we may see  'pleasing conical shape', rather than seeing 'tree', we may see 'pleasing wavy flow through the image', and rather than seeing 'river', we may see 'beautiful s-curve through the frame'.

Scarista, Isle of Harris, Scotland November 2014, © Bruce Percy. But you didn't really need to know where it was did you? ;-)

But I think this only happens for some of us, and for the majority of us, we photograph things because we know them. If I show you a chair, you associate with it, because you know what a chair is. If I show you a tree, then most people see a tree, because it's what they already know.

To find a beautiful composition, we need to be able to see the relationships between objects, not in terms of what they are (association) but how they graphically fit together. Perhaps the tree and the mountain have similar shapes and there is empathy? Perhaps the tones in the river compliment the tones in the tree? If we do this, we make our imagery stronger, because it has more foundation in the arts than it does in real life.

But there is more to this problem than simply being able to abstract objects down to their basic elements of form and tone. Our problem goes much deeper than this. I'm guilty of finding myself on many occasions making pictures of a place, not because the light is beautiful, but because the place itself is iconic. In fact, sometimes the light at the iconic place is not so special and there is better light elsewhere, yet I still choose to photograph the iconic place.

I've had to ask myself why is it that I do this? Well, I think the reason is simple: we are attracted to what we know and the power of association is a very strong force to deal with. We seek what we know, because we find safety and comfort in it.

So my question to you is: what would you rather do? Would you prefer to photograph an iconic place in boring light, or photograph an anonymous place where the light is beautiful? I think you may say the later, but the truth is, I think many of us often do the former. I'm certainly guilty of it.

When it comes down to it, a photograph of an anonymous place in beautiful light is more powerful than a photograph of an iconic place shot in boring light. But despite believing this, I seem to always gravitate to what I know over what is photographically better.

Being a landscape photographer is sometimes about overcoming our human instincts to go with the familiar and this is certainly one example where our being human gets in the way of better photography.

Moving between fixed and fluid creative states

I made this photo of Stac Pollaidh (pronounced Stack Polly) last October during an exceptionally windy day. I've known of this location at the end of the loch for some time, having first spotted it many years ago on a week long workshop with a group. I was drawn to the criss-crossed lines in the foreground rock, and knew that if I could be here when the conditions were right, then I might get what I envisaged in my mind's eye.

I've stuck with the same film type for years now because I love it, and because I know it well. You could say this is part of my structured approach to creativity.

I've found over the years of repeatedly going back to places, I learn how the landscape works. I begin to understand where the light is coming from and where to be at sunrise and sunset, but I also get to know some of the more intimate details of the locations I visit - the criss-crossed features of the foreground rocks in the above picture is a perfect example of that.

Continuing from my previous post, I think it's important to keep things fluid. I love to go for a wander and to find things by chance, or to encounter something where there was no pre-visualisation involved. It's very freeing to work with what you're given. But there is also value in researching places and building up knowledge of locations too. I like both approaches and tend to move between fluid and fixed states all the time.

I think my personality has dual sides: in some ways I prefer to be structured while in others I prefer to be fluid. For example, i'm very structured with my technical process. I've used the same film stock for many years now, and I never deviate from it. I am also very wary of changing even the smallest of things in my workflow, because I believe it could have far reaching consequences that I'm unable to comprehend until much later. But I also like to be very fluid - I prefer not to pre-visualise a scene, often going for what feels right at the time. This is not just in what I choose to shoot while on location, but also in how I edit the work. I like to keep an open mind in this regard as I may find later when I come to review the photographs that I see something different or new in them. 

So I think to be creative, we need to be able to move between these two states of being fluid and fixed. Being fluid allows us to find new things and find inspiration, while being fixed allows us to shape them - to give our ideas structure and to see them through to completion.

The skill however, is in knowing which state to be in, and when :-)

I like to try out my shots in black and white sometimes. They may be better in monochrome, but even if they aren't, I maybe notice new things about the image when viewed with the colour removed. It allows me to free up what I'm doing and I think this is perhaps a fluid aspect to my creativity.

Becoming Unstuck

I've been able to get outside a lot, and create new images. But what I've been having trouble with, is actually getting round to scanning the work and editing it. The problem is that since I'm so busy running a workshop business, when I do get some free time, I've not been feeling that I have any energy left to deal with the backlog of work that has been piling up in my studio.

Nisa Bost, Isle of Harris, November 2014. © Bruce Percy

When images start to pile up like this, it can have some negative side-effects to your own psyche. Firstly, if too much time passes, then it gets increasingly more difficult to look at the work. I can easily become so distanced from it, that I actually start to dread looking at it. Before long, any work that's left undone for too long starts to feel like a burden to look at. It begins to feel like a chore. And this simply isn't a good position to be in.

Then before long, a sense of perfectionism starts to creep in. You're so worried to look at the work in case it doesn't live up to what you hoped it might be that procrastination soon becomes the order of the day. And this is like a compound problem - a problem that is created on the top of a problem you started out with, and things just start to get far too complicated.

Creating art is all in the mind, and to be able to create work, we must have a healthy attitude towards what it is that we do. Once things like perfectionism and procrastination creep in, then things can quickly start to get out of hand and before long you can become lost.

Part of my problem has been that when I do create new images out in the field, I often find I have very little free time at home to work on them. So I decided this summer since I have some time off from my yearly schedule, that I would brace myself and get in and start to work on some of my blacklog.

I'd be lying if I said it wasn't easy to get started. So much time had passed, and I felt the weight of the work pressing upon me, but somehow I managed to get going, and I'm so glad I did.

Sea grass, Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides, Scotland 2014. © Bruce Percy

I've now found that things have turned around for me and I'm feeling enthused about the new work, and it's slowly but surely gotten under my skin, so much so, that rather than dreading starting work on something new, I now find myself unable to keep away from it.

So I've learned something about myself as well as the creative process. I've learned that in order to keep a healthy attitude towards ones own art, I must keep on creating at all costs. Even if I feel the work isn't up to much, I should still work on it anyway - because in doing so - I gets cleared out of the way. I know from life experience, that new things can only come into my life provided I've made room for them.  So get it out of the way. 

One thing you must also consider, is that it's ok to create bad work, otherwise again, a sense of perfectionism will grow and you'll be stuck once again. We are not masters of our own creativity and therefore we can't control when we will create our best or worst work. There is just an ebb and flow that means our work will fluctuate. Either way, bad work has to be flushed out of the system - it still needs to be worked on and besides, we learn something from the bad work as well as the good.

White sand, Seilebost beach, Isle of Harris, November 2014. © Bruce Percy

So I've also had to recognise that I shouldn't be so precious. Art is about creativity, and for creativity to happen, things have to remain fluid. This means letting go.

When you start to control things too tightly, things stop flowing, and before you know it, you're back to being stuck again.

So keep working, keep creating and allow yourself to be open and fluid with what you do. Your output may vary, but the important thing is that you're going somewhere with it, and you're avoiding becoming stuck.

Isle of Harris, November 2014

I've just started working on some new images from the isle of Harris, shot last November during some personal time before a workshop up in the outer hebrides of Scotland.

Luskentyre, Isle of Harris, November 2014 © Bruce Percy

I remember when I first set up my Harris workshop for November 2009. I felt at the time that I might be taking a gamble going all the way up to the outer hebrides at this time of year. Often Scotland becomes very wet and windy and most sane photographers assume that heading this far north at this time of year is madness. Perhaps it is. But the storms and changing light during the winter months really ads a dimension to my photography.

I remember when I first started playing around with photography way back in the late 80's as a 20' something year old. I always went out to shoot in sunny summer weather because it was exciting to my eye and it felt good to be out in such weather, and I would always store my camera away during the winter months.

Storms on Harris, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, November 2014 © Bruce Percy

That is a complete reversal of what I do now.

These days I tend to avoid the summer light because I don't particularly like blank clear skies, and there is almost no atmosphere to the light. I learned many years ago that what my eye found pleasing, my camera did not. I also learned that what I was feeling at the time seldom translated into a good photograph. Just because I was out in pleasant sunny weather and felt good: did not guarantee a good image when I got home.

Conversely, being out in dull overcast grey skies can lead one to feel miserable, or unmotivated, but that's only because most of us equate this kind of weather and light as 'miserable' or 'boring'. But our camera loves soft overcast light, and the photo loves mist and rain as they can veil parts of the landscape.

Weather creates atmosphere and atmosphere aids the power of an image.

So I love very much going to the Isle of Harris in November now. As much as the rain might be a factor to work around, there is always enticement of great light and drama or action to any images I shoot and these days, I now find myself feeling very alive, and excited during these moments. So much so, that I find myself enjoying all seasons and all light, and also all weather types these days.

The world is beautiful and photography has taught me to enjoy every single moment.

The Milky Way from the Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

I'm just home from South America. My friend and client - Stacey Williams showed me this photo, taken by her at night on the largest salt flat in the world - the Salar de Uyuni. 

Milky Way & Land Cruiser, Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia © Stacey Williams

The tour company I use to get us around the Bolivian landscape are terrific. Standard tours here take people out to the landscapes during the middle of the day. They took us everywhere we wanted to go, so we got there for sunrise and sunset. But they also extended themselves by taking a few of my clients out in the night to go star shooting :-)

The above image was taken by Stacey on the salt flat. The driver was kind enough to position the car underneath the milky way and Stacey used a torch to light up the land cruiser in the foreground.

I'd just like to thank my guide and drivers for a spectacular job. It's important for a photography tour to get to the special places for sunrise and sunset and this is a big thing to ask of the guides and drivers here. Many do not want to head out onto the salt flat when it is dark as it becomes difficult to navigate the terrain. Get stuck or have a breakdown at night is not to be recommended - the temperatures can plummet to -17ºC here. Plus, it also means that they are working much longer hours than the usual tours. In addition, what is not so evident to the rest of the tour is just how much extra work they put into the trip: often having to rise several times during the middle of the night to turn the engines over, to prevent them from freezing (the altitude is anywhere from 3,600m to 4,800m), the terrain here is hard on the people who live here and hard on the cars too.

I love going to Bolivia when I can. The landscape and the quality of the light are something I haven't found anywhere else. I hope to post some new photos from here later on this summer.

Using tonal relationships to connect the inside with the outside

I think there are a lot of parallels between the world of photography and that of the world of painting.

I found this video today on YouTube which I felt has just as much validity in teaching us photographers something, as well as it's intended audience of painters.

The video deals with the art work of Winifred Nicholson. She was a beautiful painter of still life's that she painted from inside looking out. I've enjoyed her work for many years since I first found out about her while on the Isle of Eigg here in Scotland. Winifred visited the island several times and made many paintings whilst there.

Candle, Isle of Eigg. Painting by Winifred Nicholson (1893 - 1981)

Anyway, I digress a little. In this video we see that Winifred was very clever in allowing us to know that she was painting from inside a house looking out, but manages to avoid showing us the window. But more interestingly, as she developed her style, she started to incorporate the inside of the house into her paintings, but she did so by managing to make the inside feel 'related' to the outside. She did this by clever use of tonal relationships.

In her earlier work, the quality of light within the house is different from that of outside - thus creating a divide. As viewers, we do not feel so connected with the outside. Whereas in her later work, she was clever in making the quality of light and tonal responses inside and out similar, therefore relating the two, and ultimately bringing the outside into our viewing space. 

I've been thinking about tonal relationships for a long while in my own work, and I find that when I make two objects in the same frame tonally similar - they become highly related. Conversely, when I make two objects in the same frame tonally dissimilar, they become less related. 

Well, this video illustrates this point very neatly, particularly in the last image where we see that Winifred uses a couch inside the home as context - something for us to begin from, and then through the similarity of light and tone inside and out of the house, invites us to reach outside the house where the outside feels like an extension of the inside.

Although it's discussing paintings, I think there is always much to be learned about photography through the world of painting. I hope you get something from this short video.

Driving the Salar de Uyuni

I've been in South America for the past six weeks. Today I am flying home.

One of my Photo Tour participants - Geoffrey Van Beylen, kindly sent me these videos of us driving the Salar de Uyni salt flat after an early morning sunrise shoot in the middle of it. 

The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world. In the video you can see that we are spread into two Land Cruisers, and that we are heading for a volcano (Tunupa) in the distance. As you watch the video, the volcano doesn't get any closer, despite appearing to be rather close. It's about 30KM away from where we were in our cars. It's easy to get confused by distances in Bolivia.

Here is another one showing the deserts that we have to cross. The distances are large and the roads are often just tyre marks in the sand often. I wouldn't recommend trying to navigate these places on your own. I am often surprised by the knowledge that my drivers have of the areas. They know these 'roads' well, despite the landscape often consisting of many criss-crossed markings that have no road signs and no indication of where they lead to. 

I'm personally surprised that Bolivia is not on the 'map' for most photo-tour / landscape-workshop participants. Most folks haven't figured out yet that Bolivia is really 'up there' in terms of scenery and photography.

The Salar at dusk, Laguna Colorada at dusk and the Salar again at dusk, but this time shot from an island in the heart of the salt flat.

I also spent some personal time after the tours back in Bolivia for a week exploring more of the landscape and making some new images. I found some very surprising locations that are not on the general tourist trail that are very worthy places to visit and I felt I made some new images which I hope to include in a new book I'm currently working on.

As with all things, I tend to find that I go back to a place to 'complete' what I felt I missed the last time, only to find out there is a whole lot more. It seems that I could spend years working on a book of the Altiplano....and it would be tempting to do so. But I now feel I need one or two more trips here to finish off what I started back in 2009. Yep, I've been coming to Bolivia for quite a while now. The quality of the light here at sunrise and sunset is like nowhere else that I've been so far.

As part of my time here in South America, I also visited a new place - the Argentina side of the Altiplano, which at the moment is even less well known than Bolivia is, but is just as impressive, and different. This particular place has a landscape that is not unlike the central highlands of Iceland in my opinion, and also many other strange and wonderful locations. Perhaps that book on the Altiplano is going to take much longer than I had anticipated..... and I feel I need to go back to this region as well. So I'm already hatching plans to do so within the next six months if I can.

So much to explore, and so little time.... :-) But I feel I've found 'my landscape', a place that I have room to grow as a photographer. The world may be getting smaller, and sometimes it may feel as though everywhere has been photographed to death, but in reality - we haven't even scratched the surface of what is out there.

I had a great time with my groups in Patagonia and Bolivia. Many thanks to all whom spent time with me (including you too Brian ;-)

Patagonia 2015

I'm in South America right now. I've been here for three weeks so far, and have another two weeks to go before I head back home to Scotland.

I've been sent some wonderful images by Bill Filip, who participated in my Patagonia tour this May. In the image below, you can see myself (right) with another fellow participant - Carl Zanoni with the reflection of the Torres mountain range reflected in laguna Redonda.

The mountain range is approximately just over 9,000 feet high, rising out of the Pampas from almost ground level. I think this image conveys the scale of the place.

Image © Bill Filip, used by special permission. Carl Zanoni & Bruce Percy at the edge of laguna Redonda, Torres del Paine national park, Chile

I have to pinch myself sometimes. I'm so extremely lucky to get to visit Patagonia every year or so, as part of my workshop and tour schedule. If someone said to me that I would have to give up doing what I do, and head back to a 9-5 office job, I think I might just jump off the nearest bridge.

Patagonia has become one of my many homes from home. It is a place I've got to know since my first visit there in 2003. I know it extremely well, and each time I manage to make it back out there, it's like getting re-accquainted with a dear friend.

Each landscape I get to visit, has become an indelible mark on my emotions and memories. Iceland too has become a home from home - I've been going there since 2004, and likewise, the Lofoten islands has a similar place in my heart too, as I've been going there since 2007.

The more I return to these places, the more I get to know them and the more I recognise what it is that makes each and every one of them stand apart from each other. I love Patagonia with all of my heart. It is somewhere that I feel I am at home, even though it is roughly half way around the world from where I reside in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Many thanks to Bill Filip for allowing me to reproduce his fine image on my blog