Reconnecting

Every once in a while, I lose inspiration, or just start to wonder if I’m really all that interested in photography.

As much as you may be alarmed to read this, it’s nothing unusual. In fact, I think that everyone, no matter how passionate they are about what they love, lose interest, or have doubts for periods of time. If you don’t, then I think you are either very unusual, or just not being honest with yourself.

Graveside Statue, Cimitero Monumentale, Milan, Italy. 2008
Image © Michael Kenna

I have been running a photo business for a decade now. No one really understands how it has been for me. I realise that some people may think that it’s been a great time and Bruce has had a real adventure (they’re not wrong - I’ve had a terrific time!), but the thing is, until you are in someone else’s shoes, you never really understand what it is they are going through.

Take it from me: turning your passion or hobby into your work is a double-edged sword. I don’t refute that there are the benefits that we all think there may be. Sure, I’ve had a great time, sure it beats doing a ‘real job’, sure it’s nice to be able to do photography all the time. But there is another side: the pressure of making an income, the pressure of delivering tours and workshops that customers have paid good money for. Pressure to make sure that everyone feels happy with what they got. That is quite a large-scope to handle, because every participant that comes on a trip with me has their own personal ‘take’ on what they’re looking for, and why they are there.

Anyway, I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m moaning. I really appreciate what I do, and I think it’s amazing that I get to go around the world, doing what I do, and getting to meet so many people from everywhere. It’s one of the most special things that has happened for me: I’ve also met some very special people over the years. Ones I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet if I’d stayed in my IT job here in Edinburgh.

But the fact is, turning your passion / hobby into your living, can, without any will in the world, turn it into some unwanted pressure. Something which, for the most part hasn’t happened to me. But the truth is: it has, on occasion been too much. There have been a few moments when I thought ‘I’m not sure I want to do this any longer’.

For a long while I couldn’t accept these thoughts or feelings. I felt I was being an absolute traitor to who I was before I started doing this. The guy who had so keenly abandoned a 9-5 job for this ‘dream job’.

But these days I don’t feel bad at all when I encounter these feelings. You see, they’re no different from the feelings we all experience. For example, no matter how much we may love our partners, we all have doubts. In my view, we would be very unusual if we never ever had any doubts about who we are with. Then there is our career. If no one had any doubts about the job that they do, or the friends that they know, or the life that they lead, they’d be more perfect and in their lives than not just the majority of us, but all of us.

Truth is: having moments of doubt is healthy. It means you’re ‘checking in’.

It means you’re present.

It means you’re here.

It means you’re in touch with where you are right now.

Life, and art are not black and white. Nothing is.

There is so much grey ground in what we do in our lives. Maintaining the same level of passion for something indefinitely is hard, if not impossible to do. Rather than worrying that it’s the start of the end, it’s much healthier to realise that any doubts or downturn you have is ‘just a moment’. Part of the ebb and flow of life. Just like everything else we encounter.

Anyway, my reasons for writing this today is because I’ve been ‘reconnecting’. Looking at photos that I love, and if you are a regular follower of my blog, you’ll know I’m an unashamedly Michael Kenna fan. So that’s why Iv'e attached the photo above. A statue in an Italian graveyard, photographed in such a way that anyone may assume it’s a real person. Michael is a genius.

I’m thankful for the photographers I love, because each time I feel I’m wondering if I should pack in what I do, I reconnect to my heroes (Galen Rowell, Elliot Porter, Elliot Erwitt, Robert Cappa, Bill Brandt and of course, the special talent of Michael Kenna). By doing so, they remind me why I am in this game in the first place.

By reconnecting every once in a while to the photographer who are my heroes, I am reminded why I do what I do, and why I’m grateful for it.

The Creative Process

I’ve been making photographs for over twenty years now, and during that time I have found the creative process to be an elusive thing to describe. How do we define something which at its heart is free-form? 

Creativity should know no boundaries, should have no rules. The results, however they are gained, should speak for themselves.

But how should one describe the creative process? Despite thinking that it is near impossible to do so, I think describing one’s own motivations, thoughts and feelings towards what it is that they do, goes a long way towards trying to pin down what creativity is.

I’ve put together a small e-book of just over one hundred pages, where I’ve culled my favourite creativity related entries from my blog. I often consider this blog a journal of some kind, a way of sorting out my ideas, of figuring out what it is that I just did, and why I did it.

There have been some minor changes to some of the entries to make the english more correct. A few posts have been almost totally re-written in an attempt to gain clarity. It seems that not all my blog posts are as lucid as I’d like them to be.

I hope, if you choose to buy this e-book, that you can appreciate that it is often hard to describe what one is trying to describe. Especially when it is about the nature of creativity.

Some things don't sit well, while other things do

Gut instinct is one of the best tools we have as photographers.

How about you? Do you listen to how you are feeling about something when making a decision, or do you just plunge on regardless? To me, listening to my gut is Karmic. What goes around comes around. If you’re not feeling it, probably it’s due to the idea not being for you. Or it’s simply a bad idea. If you are feeling it, then most probably it’s what you want to do. So you should follow it.

If I could give any simple advice about the creative process, this would pretty much be it.

Creative flow (part 3 of 3)

Today, if you have time, I would like to suggest that you pick 3 photos from your recent efforts, and set a time limit to edit them. Just work on them quickly, take almost no care in precision of the work, just let yourself go with whatever happens while you edit them. Rather than applying a lot of consideration just apply the edits broadly.

Accept the following:

1. Anything you do that you didn’t intend : look at it and consider whether the unintentional is interesting / offers up something you might like to go with. If so, then go with it.

2. Accept that the work is transient. Disposable even. It’s just a task to see how fluid you can be.

This is all in the nature of seeing how fluid you can be. How creative you are, and whether the work comes together quickly. Don’t judge yourself too harshly on what you create, just try to see if you create new work, and to see if it offers up something you hadn’t done before.

if we are able to remove any sense of preciousness about what we do, we may be able to tap into a degree of fluidity. Not everything we do is going to be good and we need to get over that. It’s more important to just keep creating, rather than measuring what it is we do. Creativity is fluid, and it ebbs and flows. Some days your work will be average, boring even, other days it will be something else.

I feel we often over judge our work while we are creating it. I think this can lead to stagnation. This is why I think having no undo feature in your editing software may be liberating. It teaches you to just ‘go with whatever happens’, to understand that you are in a performance.

Performances are transient things - they are what they are while they are happening. If you can consider what you do as a performance, one way of doing something for just the moment you are in, then I think you can free yourself enough to let your creativity flourish.

Creative flow (Part 2 of 3)

Yesterday I asked you ‘what would you do if you had no undo?’

My own views are that creativity is a mixture of part performance and part control:

1. Performance - free flow, getting into the zone and just going with a flow. Less thinking, more intuition.

2. Control - noticing things in the performance that you like / don’t like, and tuning the performance accordingly.

I think there’s too much focus on the control side of creativity, and much less on the performance aspect.

Having an undo is part of the control aspect of creativity. I would like to put forward an argument that by avoiding using the undo feature, you are in the ‘performance’ aspect of creativity. Stop your flow to hit the undo button and you are breaking flow.

I sometimes feel that there is a need to over-produce work, that photographers want to have all options available to them, so that if they make a mistake, they can back up and correct it. But by having this ‘escape option’ available all the time, we’re less likely to just run with where the work is taking us.

If you were a live musician then you would be very used to your performances varying from one concert to another. But when we have endless options to go back and correct what we do, I think we can lose a lot of spontaneity in our work.

But the problem is much wider than this. I think that when we have too many options and a way of backing out, we never really ever commit, or finalise what we’re doing.

I hear too many points of view these days about trying to remove the need to commit to anything for as long as possible. For instance, just recently I heard an argument about not using grads in the field because they are ‘baked into’ the shot and cannot be undone later. It’s a terrible argument because it is trying to avoid introducing mistakes.

We have to make mistakes. Mistakes are part of the creative process. Mistakes allow us to find new directions through the unintended. We can often be surprised by what we’re shown when we do something we didn’t intend to do. Mistakes are part of experimenting. Creativity is all about experimentation, and experimentation means we do not really know what the outcome will be.

Mistakes also tell us that we need to work on improving our technique.

Avoiding any commitment, any final decision in what you do to the very end is, well, just a false view that you have endless options and therefore greater control. Too much control and the performance suffers. Spontaneity is removed and the work suffers.

Creativity is a mixture of performance and control. We need to be loose enough to find new things, and know when to hone and shape (control) what we’ve found. We also need to know when to let go and surrender to wherever the work is taking us.

Creativity is about keeping up a flow in one’s work. That can only happen when we choose to commit, choose to complete, and choose to move on.

I’d suggest avoiding using the undo feature for a while. See where your decisions take you.

Creative Flow (part 1 of 3)

Today i’d like to ask you a question: What if all the tools you use had no undo? What would you do, if each time you changed something, you couldn’t undo it?

What if you had to stand by each decision you made, whether it was the choice of focal length, the choice of grad filter, exposure, or choice of parameter change in your editing software?

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My latest set of Harris images, edited in one day, to try to be as fluid as I could.

Do you think having no undo feature, no way to change your decision would be beneficial or detrimental to your creativity, and creative flow?

What do you think?

Hokkaido space available

I have one space left for my Hokkaido tour this coming January. Perhaps you might like to join me?

The dates are : January 7th - 17th 2020.

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Good light vs ugly light

I’m in Iceland right now and today we visited one of my favourite lakes where we can get graphical shapes and tonal separation from the sand bars and water.

I’ve become more ‘accepting’ of shooting in the middle of the day, if the light is right. Where I once religiously stuck to sunrise and sunset only, I now shoot when I think the light is soft and gives me something to work with that is beautiful. But not all light is beautiful, and no amount of dynamic range in a digital camera will compensate for it. Beautiful light is beautiful light. And ugly light is ugly.

So here I was today, at around 10am at a lake in Iceland and the conditions were perfect as you can see from this iPhone shot. And so, I had to do a dance to celebrate it :-)

Image © Finnur Frodason

I'm going back to Harris next year

I’ve just published a photo workshop to the Isle of Harris for October next year (2020). If you’d like to join me?

Sold out

Isle of Harris

from £748.00

November 13-18, 2025 (5-Nights)
November 20-25, 2025 (5-Nights)

November 13-18, 2026 (5-Nights)
November 20-25, 2026 (5-Nights)

Price: £2,495
Initial Deposit: £748
2nd Deposit of £748 due six months before tour start date

5-Day Photographic Mentoring Workshop

Introduction

Harris is a beautifully compact island with wondrous expansive beaches and a rugged eastern side. The Isle of Lewis and the Calanish stones are only 1 hour away from our base and we will head there in the evening to shoot the stones during sunset.

This trip is specifically great for simplifying your compositions as most of the beaches have a lot of space where only light and tone are the predominant features.

We are staying down on the beaches, in two different houses with our own private caterer. The houses are beautiful. Please note however that bathroom facilities are shared. Being near the beaches is ideal. The nearest hotel is 30 to 40 minutes away.

Date:

Select Date 13-18 November 2025 20-25 November 2025 20-25 November 2026 13-18 November 2026

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The trip is now fully booked. If you’d like to join the waiting list for any cancellations, please just email me at bruce@brucepercy.com

The Pendulum Swing of Colour use

I find that each time I edit a new set of images, my application of colour varies. Some times the work has very muted tones. Other times the work has too much colour and I find that a few days later I’m re-adjusting the work to be more muted.

Part of the problem is colour constancy, or the lack of ability in oneself to correctly gauge the strength of colour, the more that one stares at the work. Part of the problem is that I’m still figuring out what my style is, and I find as my mood changes, my feeling towards the work also changes. Sometimes the work is stark and monochromatic, devoid of any colour at all. Other times the work is very colourful, and I feel a need to tone it down.

This is not just a case of my mood changing. It mostly has to do with how our brain ‘auto-white-balances’ what we see. Our visual system innately compensates. What we perceive is not always true .

And I’m sure I’m not alone. Most of us have a hard time judging the level of colour to use in our work.

I’ve seen some photographers who completely lack any colour judgement at all. The work is overly garish, the colours sci-fi, horrific in application because there’s just simply too many strong colours competing with each other. I am convinced that photographers who create this kind of work are at the beginning of their photographic journey. They haven’t developed their colour awareness yet, and are still very much in love with the need to over-excite the work they create. They are so enraptured by having strong colour in their work that we can’t get past it. I believe this, because I suffered from this in my early years.

When I look back at my earlier work, delicate application of colour is pretty non-existent. Despite thinking at the time that the colours were great in my photographs, I now realise that I was working from the belief that ‘more is good’. I had a lot to learn.

At the time, I had no idea about colour relationships, let alone that having too much colour, or competing colours in the frame could sabotage the composition. I also had no idea that composition was more than just the art of placing subjects within a frame. Composition is also about the application of colour, as well as tone and form. Each of these three elements has to work with the other for the composition to be successful. Simply plastering lots of strong colour across my images was clumsy at best, and at worst made my images look infantile.

And now twenty years later I’m still wresting with colour. In that I’m wrestling with ‘just how much’ to use. In other words I struggle with the degree of colour to use. I appreciate that colour is dependent on the subject matter, what the actual landscape offered. Some places are simply more colourful while others are naturally less so. So I understand that some photos or portfolios call for very little colour, while others require the colour to be applied selectively to aid the composition.

My recent images from Brazil are interesting because there appears to be a return to stronger colour for me. They are the strongest set of colour images I’ve made in a while.

But if I look at how I used to use colour over a decade ago, I’m aware that the application was more broad, more clumsy back then. Nowadays, I’m more selective. I feel I can produce a colourful image, without swamping the composition.

Colour is a balancing act.

Put too much in and you can swamp your compositions and ruin your work. Put in too little, and the image can appear dead or lifeless. Some sets of images require more colour than others, and of course we have our visual perception of colour to struggle with while we are deciding upon just how much colour is required.

The use of colour is a skill. Just like working on composition is as life long learning experience that never ends, so too is our application of colour. For colour application cannot not mastered overnight and we should expect our perception of it to pendulum swing from too much to too little, and back again.