Do you desaturate outside of your comfort zone?

We also have our comfort zones when it comes to colour and contrasts. As a beginner I was always reaching for the high-contrast option, the deep blacks and bolder colours that I could get from my Velvia films and from the available light in the landscape.

But our world does not just have one face. It has many faces and many colours, tones, contrasts, and all of it is worthy of being utilised in our photography. I think moving into new regions, using softer tones and more subtle colour palettes takes time though. Again, like a child building a vocabulary of words, we too have to build up a vocabulary of light qualities and colour responses that we know will work in our imagery.

Desaturated (compare to the originals below).

Our comfort zones often mean we have a tendency to push for the dramatic and bold. Not just in our photography, but in most things in life:

Q1. Does the bass and treble on the hi-fi system have to always be boosted?

Q2. Does the food always need to have salt and sugar added to it?

Q3. Do we always have to search out dramatic sunsets?

Q4. Do the Photoshop / Lightroom sliders always have to go up rather than down?

Can't there be enjoyment in the subtle as well as the dramatic? Do you even allow it in your work? Or are you always striving to make things shout out more to the viewer?

Going the other way leads you into new territory where there is another beauty, another enjoyment.

A1. Turning the Bass down on your hi-fi allows the mid-range to have more clarity.

A2. Cutting back on the sugar and salt in your food allows the natural flavours to surface.

A3. Shooting in more muted light brings you to new colour palettes, softer tones and new moods in your work.

A4. Moving the Photoshop / Lightroom Sliders to reduce things rather than boost them bring you to new colour palettes, softer tones and new moods in your work.

We often hang on to stronger tones and colour more through habit than an appreciation for them.

The originals before I desaturated them. We often hang on to stronger tones and colour. It's a habit, more than an appreciation for stronger colours and harder contrasts.

Where do your comfort zones currently sit? Are you often trying to push the dramatic aspect of your work or do you also play with the more subtle, softer aspects of our world? I ask this in all seriousness because photographs aren't just about great placement of objects to make good compositions. Good compositions aren't just about objects, but often about the interplay between colour, contrast and luminance.

We have so many comfort zones in what we do, and knowing where you are with that, indeed who you are, is key to growing as a photographer.

Using tones outside of your comfort zone

When we edit our work, I think it's very easy to sit within a confined range of known and often used tones. We have what I would describe as a tone comfort-zone, one which we have settled into and tend to apply to most of our work.

Part of this is due to visual awareness issues, of not really thinking about luminance in the first place. We think of our images more in terms of scenery - mountains, rivers, grass, rocks, whatever. But we haven't passed this early stage and moved on to thinking about these subjects less as what they are, but what they provide in terms of luminance and other tonal qualities.

Indeed, our edits can be rather narrow in their tonal range, just like our vocabulary is narrow when we first learn to speak. We have to move outside of our comfort zone at some point, but this can be difficult if we're not really aware of what's out there and how luminance levels in the far brighter and darker regions of our images may serve us.

One technique I use is to push the luminance to extremes and then reign it back until I think it looks good. It's well known that if you move something to where you think it should be and compare that to where you would have ended up if you pushed it well beyond where you think it should be and move it back, your initial judgement will have been conservative. In other words, by really going over the score and then moving it back to where you think it should be, you'll find you've pushed the boundaries in your edits.

We all have our visual comfort zones and it's good to try to move beyond them. The only way to do that is to exercise your visual awareness by placing yourself at the extremes well outside the normal parameters that you reside, and see how the new terrain fits.

Our visual sense needs to be exercised for us to learn to truly see what is possible, and this is one such way to do it.

Forthcoming e-Book

On the 25th of this month, I shall be releasing a new e-Book. This one is about tonal relationships and their importance during the editing of our work.

For the past two years I've been offering a Digital Darkroom workshop which specifically deals with how to interpret ones own work. It's not a 'learn Photoshop' or 'learn Lightroom' course as those kinds of skills can be picked up from many sources. What can't be easily taught, is how to look at your work and see relationships within the unedited work, and how to utilise these to realise the full potential of your vision.

During these past two years, I've been thinking about how to possibly simplify my message about editing. It all really comes down to seeing tonal relationships in your images and working with these to bring your images forward.

At the moment, there seems to be a real imbalance between those that value fieldwork tuition and those that value post-processing tuition. Although many of photographers have adopted post-process tools such as Lightroom or Photoshop, I feel the general consensus at the moment is that the skill lies in the capture stage, and the post stage is something anyone can do. I don't entirely agree with this.

For me, the edit stage is an enormously creative place to be. Although I give 100% of my effort to capture something in-camera that I love, I also give 100% of my effort to the careful birth of my images. In my digital-darkroom I will spend days thinking about tonal imbalances, colour-balance adjustments and further aesthetic changes I wish to convey in my work. This is an absorbing time for me where I find myself reliving the work, immersed in the memories of being there making the shots. I also get great satisfaction from feeling how the images morph and change as I adjust and impart my own vision onto them.

However, you may think that the edit stage is a place to cheat, or to try to make things better than they really were. I've never seen photography as  'this is how it was' but more 'this is what I felt', or 'this is how I feel now' about the images. I do believe that any image we choose to work on in the edit stage should already display great potential and I only choose to work on those where I am inspired to do so.

I believe the image is never complete once we click the shutter; we're only truly half way there.

Light Table

Over the past five or six years, I've noticed a resurgence in analog photography. There is usually one or two participants on my workshops who now have a traditional black and white darkroom at home, or are a colour film shooter. Some are pin-hole shooters but most of them are hybrid photographers. They have digital and film and like to experiment with all the mediums now.

An A2 in size LED 'light pad' used as a photography light table.

This I feel, is greatly refreshing to note. For a long while, I was always being asked 'have you gone digital yet?' and this question seems to have abated over the past while because we've gotten over that uncomfortable period when everyone feels they need to throw out the old for the new. It is no longer an either / or situation and we are now living in a period where photographers are embracing multiple formats, multiple systems and along with that, different mediums such as palladium printing, traditional black and white as well as C41 and E6 processing.

For a while, it was becoming harder to find things like a good light table. I have a beautiful one at home by Gepe. It has the same colour temperature as my monitor and daylight viewing booth, but I wanted a larger area - something around A2 to help me do an 'overall' review of images I've shot. I like to be able to see the bigger picture, to understand what kinds of images I've made on a shoot and how I think they may be edited together into some cohesive final portfolio.

I bought this A2 light pad, as it's called. It was pretty inexpensive for what it is (£70). It's great for helping me spread out several sheets of transparency roll films for review! I just love looking at transparencies on a light table - the scene comes alive for me but most importantly, it allows me to reconnect. I find my imagination is awakened and I can step back into the scenes I was photographing.

The downside about using an LED light table though, is that its colour temperature is far too 'cool'. Images can appear more blue or cold than they really are. The other issue, which is the most important one for me is that when I return back to my monitor the colour temperature shift is noticeable. My monitor appears to look rather yellow in comparison. It's not really. It's just that the LED is far too cold. 

So I bought a Cinegel #3409: Roscosun 1/4 CTO A2 sized colour correction gel filter to help reduce the coldness of the LED light table. It's exactly what I needed to bring my 'lighted' into line with the colour temperature of my monitor and daylight viewing booths.

Lyme Disease in the UK

Today I found an article about Lyme disease on the BBC news website. It's a timely one as Lyme disease is on the increase throughout the British Isles and is still not widely known about.

If you are an outdoor photographer living in the UK, you should be made aware of Lyme disease. It is a disease that is transferred by deer ticks and if it goes untreated, can be a debilitating and dangerous illness.

• Ticks are active March to October, but they can be active on mild winter days
• You will not feel the tick attach to you, so check your skin

In this BBC news article, the writer goes to great pains to explain that Lyme disease is on the increase and can be picked up in many places throughout the UK. The disease is transferred via deer ticks - if you get bitten by one and start to feel really poorly, then it is vital that you seek medical attention.

Here is an exerpt from Stopthetick.co.uk:

Initial symptoms differ from person to person, this makes Lyme disease very difficult to diagnose. Some people with Lyme disease may have no symptoms at all.

1. There are three phases to Lyme disease: In the first phase, a red ring-shaped rash (called Erythema migrans) appears (in 35-50% of cases) within three weeks at the site of the bite. This rash slowly expands, then fades in the middle and finally disappears.
2. During the second phase, flu-like symptoms appear: headache, exhaustion, pain in the arms and legs. These symptoms are self-limiting and will disappear on their own.
3. During the last phase, often months after the bite, more serious and chronic symptoms will occur: joint pain, cardiac arrhythmia and nervous system disorders.

This disease isn't taken seriously enough by the medical profession, mostly I feel, due to a lack of understanding and a belief that it is not possible to get it in areas where you actually can. I've had direct experience of this myself because I was dismissed by a GP when I went to see him about a suspect bite that had now covered my entire leg. He couldn't believe that it may be possible to pick up Lyme disease in the countryside outside of Edinburgh. In the BBC news article, the writer describes a similar circumstance where his GP was doubtful that he could have picked up Lyme disease near London.

I think it is good practice to always check yourself over each time you have been outside during the tick season. Take note whether you get bitten and if you start to feel like you're coming down with the flu. The important thing to know about Lyme disease is to know what it is and what the typical symptoms are.

Further Reading:

www.stopthetick.co.uk/

http://www.lymediseaseaction.org.uk/about-ticks/

BBC new article - I was floored by a Tick

New Atacama images

I have a backlog of so many images from my travels over the past few years and I've become aware that there really has to be the right time to work on them.

Rather than fret and put pressure on myself to work through that backlog,  I should just work on what I feel inspired by and leave those other images for another time. But the backlog 'does' need to be cleared, otherwise a 'creative blockage' - builds up in one's mind, which isn't a good thing.

One of the difficulties for me, is that I need space and time away from what I do, so I can approach the work with a sense of enthusiasm and objectivity. If you travel a lot like I do, and there isn't a lot of space in your schedule, then it can be hard to find your mojo.

Balance is key to everything we do in life. Too much of one thing and it starts to suffer. These days my photography is no longer my hobby. I have had to choose other activities so I have time away from what I do. So this summer I've spent a bit of time cycle touring and long-distance racing around the north of Scotland.

I mention all of this, because I simply cannot come home and delve right into editing work straight away. Apart from requiring some distance to maintain a sense of objectivity from the shoot, by the time I've spent over a month somewhere, I'm a bit saturated. The enthusiasm is starting to wane simply because I need some balance in my life.

Regarding the editing of this new Atacama work, I had a few false starts trying to begin work on them. When I've not given myself enough time to recharge - I can view things rather negatively. If i'm not in the right frame of mind, it's easy for me assume the images I've shot are no good.

It's hard to gain inspiration in something if you're needing some time away from it.

So this is one of the reasons why I have a backlog of images from the past few years. I just haven't found the right time and place to edit them. To ease the burden of feeling there is so much of a backlog, I've given myself complete permission to have that backlog. I've also made it clear to myself that it's ok not to work on stuff when I don't want to.

This self-acknowledgement has helped tremendously in dealing with the work. I've found as a result, that the work doesn't get left behind. The fear of neglect has gone, and a new way of working has surfaced. It is not unusual for me to delay working on images for up to a year or more now. I like to think the gestation period gives me time to consider and approach the work the right way.

This collection of Altiplano images had a few false starts. I was letting self pressure get in the way. So I backed off from it all and chose to do other things.

Then one morning, with no intention to begin work on them, I found that things just started to click. There was positive flow. As a result I never made it out of the house for the next 24 hours. I immersed myself in the flow of creativity I found myself in and above all enjoyed the process.

Patagonia 2016

This week I published some new images from Patagonia on this very website. 

My previous visits to Patagonia yielded monochromatic, often dark toned, images. I felt at the time, this really summed up my view of this landscape. Seems I may have been too quick to judge as this year I found myself confronted with a softer, lighter view of the place.

Serrano Forest,
Torres del Paine National Park, Chilean Patagonia
Image © Bruce Percy 2016

I think the appreciation of what I saw and how I interpreted Torres del Paine this year was influenced heavily by my visit to Hokkaido last December.

Since that visit, I feel my images have been moving towards the higher registers of tonality. Rather than focussing on the dark tones and 'drama', I now feel I've found a few more octaves of light to play with.

Like a singer who stays in the middle range of their voice for safety, I'm curious if this is what most of us photographers do with the tonal subjects we shoot. Most of what we do resides in the safer tones. Yet, by pushing the exposures to the extreme outer edges of our comfort tones, we may find some new things to say in our work.

Ice & salt in Laguna Armaga,
Torres del Paine National Park, Chilean Patagonia
Image © Bruce Percy 2016

In this new work, there is a mixture of dark images and as well as lighter ones. The skill I feel, is to marry them so they feel part of the same set. 

Tones and tonality has become something I'm very obsessed with over the past few years. I think it's easy enough to make nice images these days, but to really make your images stand out, or to go that extra mile, I feel an understanding or tones and relationships between them is vital.

Returning to the same places time and again is a tortuous thing for me to go through. Not only am I so fortunate to return to Patagonia on a yearly basis, but each year it feels as if the place sets me new challenges, new homework.  The benefits are enormous. Through this process, I get to grown as a photographer in some way.

Rio Serrano Forest, Torres del Paine National Park, Chilean Patagonia
Image © Bruce Percy 2016

What I like most about this years work, is that I made photographs of lesser, iconic views. I've never shot Lago Pehoe before without the Cuernos mountain range in the background. The mountain range always seems to dominate my view of the place. It's therefore unusual for me to make more abstract or intimate compositions.

Lago Pehoe, Torres del Paine National Park, Chilean Patagonia
Image © Bruce Percy 2016

At Lago Sarmiento we had no view of the Paine massif, and this was very freeing. I felt I could concentrate more on the shore and the rock formations there. Sometimes the Paine massive is just too magnetic. It can over dominate the scene.

Rio Serrano Forest, Torres del Paine National Park, Chilean Patagonia
Image © Bruce Percy 2016

Colour Proofing.......

Today I'm colour proofing...... But I have to calibrate my monitor first, to ensure that what I see on it, is a close representation of what's actually in the files.....

Most people choose 'native white point', but that may result in the monitor being too cool in tone. The only way to confirm your monitor is calibrated, is to compare it against an icc profile verification print - essentially a  file that has been accurately measured and is guaranteed to be close to the file it was created from. I put this file under a daylight viewing booth (as shown below) and compare it with the source file it was printed from, with proofing switched on in Photoshop. If the 'perception' is that they are similar, then I've got the monitor calibrated & profiled well.

For essential colour accuracy, one must use a daylight viewing booth to confirm the profiling of your monitor. If the print target does not match the monitor - then the calibration / profiling is off. You also need to have a torch and an Icelandic Puffin in your studio too :-)

On a side note - daylight viewing booths such as the one I use from GTI have a colour temperature of 5000k. But there's more to it than just assuming that if the viewing booth is 5000K, then my monitor should be set to the same colour temperature. This won't work. GIT have an article that explains what 5000K actually means if you really need to know this stuff, but for most purposes, you'll find a 5000K viewing booth will be comparable to a monitor running at a temperature much higher than 5000k. (If you put your monitor down to 5000K - it will go seriously yellow and it definitely won't match your viewing booth at all).

For me, the most critical aspect is the neutrality of the black and white tones. In the  icc profile verification print you see above, there is a monochrome section in the top left of the file. If I have the monitor white point set too high, the monochrome picture may appear too cold (it should theoretically go blue but some monitors don't - see below for more on this). Conversely,  If you have the white point set too low, then the monochrome area will look too warm on the monitor. By fine tuning the white point of my monitor (through the calibration software I use) I can get my monitor closer to what I see on the print. This is an iterative step that I do until I find the right white point.

Lastly, as mentioned above, it's easy to assume that computer monitors should become bluer (cooler) as their white point is increased. This isn't always the case. Some monitors may go either green or magenta when their colour temperature is turned up too high, I find that my Eizo goes a little green.  Apparently setting the white point only alters the blue to yellow colour axis and not the green to magenta tint.

So If you do find your monitor is going a little green or magenta, then you may have to compromise and stick to the native white point. I would suggest however that you experiment.  For me, I found moving my monitor down to just below 6000K seemed to work nicely but your findings may differ.

My musical past

I've had two creative lives. The first one was a musical one which started when I was twelve years old. I lived and breathed music - writing it, playing it, recording and producing it until I got to around 29 years old.

Back in the mid-90's, I was in a Scottish band called 'The Indian Givers' with my friend Nigel Sleaford (whom you can hear singing on the song that I've embedded into this post). Nigel had just been dropped by Virgin Records whom he had been signed to for a few years. He had released one album as The Indian Givers and had thought he was set up for doing a second album when Virgin were bought by EMI and they dropped most of the non-major artists on their rosta. 

For those of you who know a bit about some of the lesser known Scottish bands at the time, I was a friend of Gordon Kerr's - he was in a band called Botany 5 whom had some success in the early 90's. Gordon put me in touch with Nigel when I was looking to work with a singer. Nigel at this point, had been dropped by Virgin. Up until we worked on this track, I had just been putting together instrumentals and was keen to find a vocalist to work with.

The song you can listen to above, is from an album of twelve tracks we recorded over 4 years in my living room. It's very 90's now :-) 

All the sound production and mixing  was done by myself on a really horrible cheap / nasty mixer. So it's really a 'demo' and I'd hoped that if we got to record it properly sometime, we might have used a real string section for it, rather than samples. Everything on the track was either sampler or synth.

For the music nerds reading this post: I did have some very nice Synth's at my disposal (Prophet 5, Studio Electronics ATC-1, Wavestation, TX816, Roland S-750 Sampler, Waldorf Microwave, Waldorf Wave, SCI Pro-One) and a Mac computer with an Audiomedia card running on it (for the vocals). Plus a lot of outboard effects units. I was still learning about audio production at the time.

I find that looking back at this period in my life a bitter sweet one. We had been offered a publishing deal at the time but it never really got off the ground. I almost got offered a job working for a film studio doing sound design, but that never really happened either. After working on music for so long and feeling that nothing was coming of it, I hit burn out. 

I had a hiatus of around 4 years where I couldn't face writing music any longer and where I had no other creative outlet. I think I needed the break, but looking back - it was an empty time for me. I really need to be creative.

My second creative life - that of Photography - really started around the year 2000 when I was around 33 years old. I've never had any real direction in what I've been doing with the photography side - it just seems to have blossomed over the years into something that I could actually do full time. I'm extremely grateful for this, because I always felt I should be a 'creative person' in some form or other.

But one thing I've learned over the years is this: you need to look after your creativity. Nurture it. Don't abuse it, don't be overly critical of yourself, and above all else: remember to enjoy it. I beat myself up so much about my music that I stopped enjoying it. I also took it far too seriously. I wish I hadn't.  

At the moment, I'm just grateful to have found a second creative outlet and that this one has been much kinder to me.  I hope I can continue to be creative for many years to come :-)

I feel very philosophical about my musical past: it's mine, I own it. I also feel that everything we do is a stepping stone. I know for sure, that I needed to go through the process of working on music for so long, in order for me to be doing what I do now. We are after all, products of our accumulated experiences. 

Shedding Old-Skin

"We need space in our creative endeavours,
just as much as we need space in our photographs"

Often, I feel too much emphasis is placed upon the creation of work. But I think as artists, our non-creative time is just as important. We need to understand and most importantly, respect that periods of inactivity are just as healthy as periods of activity are. They give us a much needed pause in our creative lives to reflect and grow.

Moonfall, Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Image © Bruce Percy

Creative drought is often viewed upon negatively. There is a fear that since we cannot find any inspiration to create, or cannot create at will, that perhaps the creative well is dry for good. Our thoughts go along the lines os 'I shall never be able to create anything ever again!'

I think we should look more positively at these periods of inactivity and recognise that as with any creative endeavour, there is always going to be an ebb and flow to what we do. A yin and yang. To create, we must have periods where we do not.

I see these moments of inactivity as a rest, a pause in the music of our creativity. But there is more than just this, I've often found these periods to be the precursor to some new growth in my artistry.  What I had thought may be the dwindling of my creative force, turned out to be the beginning of a new direction, or the reinforcement of a style in my work. The shedding of old skin.

If you are currently experiencing some creative drought - a bare patch in your creativity, I would suggest you accept it and let it ride itself out. Take your foot of the gas and wait.

Just as when we have a pressing issue that we do not have the answer to, I've often found that given some time away from it, the answer will come. As my dad has often said to me when I was trying too hard to get something to work: "best give it a rest for a while and when you do come back to it, you'll see it in a new light".