Assynt, Scottish Highlands Workshop, February 2021

Assynt & Inverpolly, Scottish Highlands Assynt & Inverpolly, Scottish Highlands
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Assynt & Inverpolly, Scottish Highlands
£688.50

Price: £2,395
Initial deposit: £688.5
2nd Deposit of £688.5 due six months before tour start date

5-Day Photographic Workshop

Date: March 2 - 7, 2026

Introduction

In the far north west lies some of the most distinctive mountains of Scotland. Stac Pollaidh, Suilven, Canisp and Cul Mor dominate the landscape, yet there is an abundance of wide open space. This is real highland countryside with some dramatic coastal scenery to boot.

I thought that it would be nice to spend a bit more time in Scotland during 2021, for some of my trips.

I’m pleased to let you all know that I will be going back to Assynt / Inverpolly region of the Scottish Highlands in February 2021.

This region of Scotland has some of the most distinctive mountains, and lochs.

We should have a lot of nice light in February and maybe many cold-snaps / frost.

It’s been a while since I’ve been here, and I’m really looking forward to it. Especially in February as it is often one of the more ‘frosty’ months in Scotland.

Just click on the image to go to the respective page, if you’d like to learn more.

The three core elements of a good landscape photograph

There are three core elements to a good photograph:

  1. good light

  2. good composition

  3. good exposure

Probably in that order.

Senja-2017-1.jpg

If you get those three core elements in one picture, then you’re almost done. Of course, cameras don’t see the way we see, so I always think that a degree of editing or ‘grading’ is required to bring out what we envisaged. But the same rule holds true for this also: if the material you’re editing is good, it will tell you clearly how it needs to be edited, and you shouldn’t find yourself working so hard.

I believe that if we find ourselves ‘striving’ or ‘struggling’ or ‘putting a lot of work’ into trying to get something to look right, we’re probably working with something that isn’t such a great idea to start with.

That goes for editing, but it also goes for what I choose to shoot out in the landscape also. If it isn’t working, your creative flow will jam up, and you’ll just find it’s like pulling teeth. If the idea is a good one the composition should just flow and it should come together easily.

In the past twenty years we’ve seen a lot of developments in technology. But one thing has remained constant:

Garbage in = Garbage out.

A great idea (read that as a great composition, with great light and a good exposure) is still at the core of good image making.

Nothing has changed. Thankfully.

Screen Grab

Today I was image selecting for my forthcoming Hálendi book.

I had already made a rough sequence of the images for the book, but today’s task was to dig out the master PSD files, and collate them.

And here are some of them. Badly named I might add.

I have maps of Iceland laid out on my desk, and like a detective, I am piecing together where each of the 100+ photos were made. It is bring back memories, and I am realising that the location of an image may not be where I had thought it was.

Once I have them named, I will need to sequence them. And once I’ve sequenced them, I will need to print each one of them out for review.

And no doubt, I’ll need to fine-tune / optimise them for print. That’s going to take me some time, but I am finished my workshops and tours for this year, so I now have plenty of time to work on this.

Loving it. It’s like a review of sorts. It’s a way of checking in on where I am, and where I have been.

Luminous Beings

It’s good to have both visual and also audio stimulation. I personally can’t live without either.

Book update

I’m pleased to say that all of the text for my next book is now complete.

halendi.jpg

I will be spending next week working on the sequencing of the images, and printing every single one of them out for evaluation purposes. Those of you who follow this blog may have read me talk about this before, but images are never finished until they are printed. For one single reason: verification. You can’t evaluate an image on a monitor successfully. No matter how accurately profiled your monitor is, there is still a ‘reality-distorition-field’ at play. Printing allows you to see the smaller issues that the monitor doesn’t show so easily until you print. Once you print and notice the errors in the print, you begin to see them on the monitor also.

So this is what I will be doing next week: printing over 100 images and then ‘re-mastering’ them so to speak. Tying up the discrepancies in order to bring them to where they should be.

I find this part of the process fascinating. When you’re forced to review your work in such a way, you do it with a 3rd-person’s point of view. You see the work as if someone else created it. It’s a learning process about yourself.

I also find it hugely enjoyable printing my work, and above all, sequencing it. Sequencing is a way of telling a story.

I’m sure once I’ve completed the sequencing, I’ll probably want to write more text, more things to include as pauses between the sequencing. We will see……

I hope to publish the book around Summer next year. But that is all dependent on other things outside of my own control such as the printers, shipping, etc, etc. Let’s see.

Stark beautiful landscape

Yesterday I just announced my September 2020 photographic tour to the interior of Iceland. We visit vast black deserts, deep canyons and many roads less travelled by others. The interior has been a passion for me for the past few years to explore and to work with more stark landscapes.

It is a highly graphical landscape, one of extreme contrasts.

Iceland's Fjallabak - The Remote Interior

 

Date: 20th - 29th September 2020

Price: $7,995 USD
Deposit: $2,158 USD

Remote & Wild, Interior Black Deserts, Volcanic Craters & Lakes
10-Day Photographic Adventure

 

This trip takes us from Reykjavik into the heart of the remote central highlands of Iceland - the Fjallabak nature reserve (behind the mountains).

Fjallabak is a spectacular highland wilderness area - a place of contrasts from vast black sand deserts to rhyolite covered mountains. It is a true wilderness, not so often photographed due to its inaccessibility, but highly worthy of any time spent there.

Learn more

Authenticity as currency

Do you know authenticity when you see it?

Do you think you know when someone’s work comes from an authentic place? Or perhaps you are good at spotting when someone’s work is contrived, created only to generate an income?

I think that being authentic is a highly undervalued currency. Authenticity is hard to judge.

Fjallabak-Sept-2019-(17).jpg

But how do you know when someone is being authentic? How do you know when their work is coming from the heart?

In my view, it’s not easy to know. Because even as an artist, sometimes you only know how much you really cared about the work long after you made it.

In my own case I’ve gone to review work I created a year or so ago only to find I’m disappointed in it. I can see that I was just trying too hard. Other times I look at the work and think ‘wow, I was actually tapping into something at that time’.

Wish I could tap into ‘that something’ whenever I wanted, but the truth is - I think genuine creativity is an elusive thing.

You see, I think it’s hard to know when oneself is being authentic, let alone whether someone else is. It is only with some hindsight that we can get clarity what we’ve created.

But ultimately: does it really matter?

If others love the work, then surely that’s all that counts? Surely if the work was highly-contrived, generated to make money, but people still loved it, then it’s good, right?

Well in my view it’s up to the individual. But I think when an artist’s heart isn’t into it, most (but not all) folk pick up on it. Most smell a rat.

That’s where I think authenticity wins. As the saying goes:

you can fool some of the people some of the time.
But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

And I would like to add, with respect to how we feel about the work that we create:

We can fool ourselves some of the time.
But we can’t fool ourselves all of the time.

Momentum

For a long while, I’ve often had problems with creative-momentum.

Sometimes I find it very hard to get something started, and once I have managed to achieve a sense of flow to my process, I’m loathe to halt it.

I have found on many occasions that ‘life’ gets in the way of the set of images I’m currently editing. You know the stuff, commitments, an invitation to go out with friends, got to go to work, all of it was a hassle for me. Especially if I found myself at 3am in the middle of an editing session and I was loathe to go to bed because I had ‘just one more photo’ to edit.

Hokkaido-2018-(15).jpg

Similarly, when I have stalled something due to commitments, I used to be worried that leaving it hanging in the air, unresolved, would somehow mean I’d lose something critical. I was terrified of not being able to pick up the threads later on, or worse still, find that the moment had passed and the passion I had felt for the work was, well, no longer there. It used to cause me a great deal of angst.

I think it all stemmed from a sense of fragility. Creating work is like a birth. But due to the many decisions that you can make (and make wrongly) the birth process is fraught with the possibility of things not reaching their full potential. It was hard for me to walk away from something I was in the middle of, hard to press ‘pause’ and then leave it for weeks while I was busy with something else. I hated it because I was always full of doubt as to whether I would like the work when I was able to return to it. Imagine finally getting back to something, only to discover it’s not as good as you had thought it was?

Then about four or five years ago, I just found I’d run out of steam. I had reached the end of a workshop year and the last thing I was wanting to do was work on any images. But I had a set of images, indeed many sets of images that I had shot that year, which were all now sitting in a pile in my home studio waiting for me to look at them, to appreciate them. I couldn’t face it.

So I did what I never do.

I parked them to one side and despite feeling that doing so, I’d never ever work on them again. I chose to put off working on them, because I’d much rather prefer to work on something when I’m feeling it than work on it when I’m not. It is perhaps the worst sin we can do as creative people: work on something when we’re not into it. It’s disrespectful, as we need to give our work the attention it deserves. I mean why bother spending $$$ and hours out in the field, if you’re going to be rushed at editing the work?

So I parked them. Some of them for months, and some were parked for a year. Others are still parked many years later.

Hokkaido-2018-(22).jpg

I didn’t know when, or if I would work on these images. I just felt I needed to give them some time, and myself some space from them. Distance, as I’ve written many times before can give clarity, and also time for us to re-charge, get enthused about what we’re into.

And this is exactly what happened with some of the images about six months later. And then a year later I did it again. It was new territory for me to find out that I would still get engaged in work that I had created months, or even a year before. But I did, and I took comfort in knowing that just because I did not feel the need to work on the images straight away, it didn’t mean the work was garbage. It just meant the time was wrong. I learned that it’s best to let thing sleep if I’m not feeling it. And to just wait until the time I do feel like working.

My original fears of losing momentum on the shoot, of not remembering what it was that I was doing, or leaving the work for so long that I would have very little connection to it turned out to be false. I got into the work, but I did it when I was ready.

These days, I now have a pile of work sitting in my home studio, which I now trust myself to get around to at some point. I think that trust is the key word here. I trust myself. Because before this, I don’t think I ever did trust myself. I was too precious about my work, and felt that if I didn’t deal with it straight away, I’d loose momentum on it.

Hokkaido-2018-(12).jpg

I now enjoy the fact that I have a backlog of work to work on. It means I have something saved up, something in the store. Just in case the well runs dry, or I can’t get out and shoot. I like that. It’s like being a song-writer that has a stock of songs to work on. So if there are days when I can’t come up with new melodies, I have these unfinished songs to work on.

Before I finish up today, I would like to stress that I am no procrastinator. But I do think many people are. Please don’t assume that I condone ‘putting off working at your photography’. If you are a procrastinator then I can see you easily take up my words as validation to keep on procrastinating. Today’s post is not for you.

If, however you are someone who works very hard, but gives yourself a hard time, most of the time, for not working harder, then I am glad you’ve made it this far in my post today. My message is really aimed at those that plough on regardless with their photography, and don’t stop to think that maybe they are over-worked, or not really in-touch with what they’re creating. By letting the work take a back-seat for a while, even a very long while, it may be the best thing for it.

As with anything, it’s a case of knowing when you’re in the creative zone, and when you aren’t. If you aren’t, then perhaps it’s best to sleep on the work for a few days, months or sometimes just file it away for some time in the future.

Once more, with feeling

I’m in the process of text revisions for my forthcoming book. I’ve come to realise that part of the creative process is repetition. Of endlessly going round and round the same material, auditioning it, fine tuning it, re-auditioning it, re-tuning it again, and again. And again.

halendi.jpg

There must come a point when the revisions get smaller and smaller, until there are no more revisions left to do. That’s when I let things sit for a while. Forget about it for a week or two, and then - review. Again.

That was the process for the Altiplano book. I think I stopped writing the text about 9 months before it was completed. We had so many revisions, so many alterations due to realising the flow wasn’t quite there yet. We also had translators turning the English into Spanish. It was a long haul.

With the forthcoming book, I’ve been working on the introduction by my guide / driver today. His English is amazing (as all Icelanders seem to be) and his knowledge of his own back yard is second to none. It’s been fun reading about his experiences, and how we started to work together - particularly about the interior tours we do.

I’ve also got some essays that need to be expanded upon. It’s a lot of fun thinking about the concepts for a book.

Oh, and we’re hoping this one might be a hardback this time. We will see.

Sensory addict?

Music, Photography, Art, anything that involves creativity, is a creative pursuit, and it utilises the same techniques and processes.

This month I’m at home. Which is in itself a rarity. My friends have forgotten my name, my mum doesn’t recognise me and she’s told me if I keep phoning, she will call the police. I’m joking of course, but I do a lot of travel, I do a lot of photography. I work a lot and I don’t have very long periods at home (mostly).

But right now, I’m at home for an extended period. And I’m avoiding photography like the plague right now. I’ve got my man-cave. It’s full of lots of nice music equipment and I’ve been busy working on some new music. I don’t claim to be any good at it, but it’s something that’s been part of me since I was 12 years old.

Roland System 500 modular system Mutable Instruments modular system

Roland System 500 modular system
Mutable Instruments modular system

I remember a quote from Peter Gabriel. He said ‘I need visual and audio stimulation’. I think that sums me up quite well. I need sound. I’ve always needed it. I wonder though, as a keen photographer, how important is sound to you?

My theory is that most of us aren’t just visually aware, or visually-addicted. We’re probably all sensory-addicted. Right? C’mon. Most photographers I know are (pleasantly) nutty. The simple fact that we are fascinated by pixels isn’t normal (but then, what is?). We obviously have an attention to detail. But is it limited to pixels alone? I doubt it.

Is sound important to you?

It is pretty important to me. But what about you? Are you a sensory-addict?