Kiss the ground

I watched the Netflix movie ‘Kiss the ground’ last night, and it left me feeling that there’s hope for climate change.

In the film, it’s explained that tilling the fields causes soil erosion and since the 70’s we’ve lost 1/3rd of the earth’s soil this way. It eventually turns good land into desert. Analysts think we are 60 years away from losing all of it. That is 60 harvests.

It seems that soil has a way of absorbing carbon. But each year when we till it, we release carbon back into the air and also loosen the earth that the top soil can easily be washed or blown away. By not tilling it, there is a natural process at play where the land absorbs carbon and soil erosion doesn’t happen.

It is definitely worth watching this movie. Because I had been under the impression that carbon emissions could only be reduced by reducing our use of fossil fuels etc.

Man on Mars

I was just digging through my old emails this evening, and found these images.

They made me very nostalgic. In one swoop I saw the passing of my life, and also the extreme privilege I’ve had of visiting some very special places, often more than once over the past decade. I am spoilt for sure, no doubt.

But these images also left me with a logging. I don’t just go to photograph places for the sake of making good photos. I go because I fall in love with the places. The photos are almost secondary, and right now, I’m thinking ‘when will I ever be back in my beloved Bolivia again?’.

Sorry for the bluntness, but: screw social media. Screw facebook likes. Screw Youtube channels and stars full of vacuous content. Why would you want to spend your valuable free time watching someone else tell you what they’ve experienced when you could be out there experiencing it for yourself?

Give me real life experiences any day. Let us all go out there and experience. Let us all have the joy of being out there.

I hope the virus is over soon.

Hálendi Limited Edition Prints

Printing a book is a lot of work. Each time I go through the process of putting a new book together, there is a lot of unseen work that goes on in the background. Usually it takes about a year, in-between other work commitments to get a book ready.

Last week I spent a few days alone printing 390 limited edition prints. There are often errors and problems. Paper isn’t always perfect and I have to discard some images due to some paper malfunction or blemishes. Then there is the cropping and individual evaluation of each image to make sure there’s nothing wrong with it. And then of course, trying to make sure that when I sign / title them, I don’t screw up.

So today has been a day of doing reprints to make up for the loss of certain prints that didn’t fit the grade. Either because they were at the tail end of a roll of paper and got damaged in some way, or perhaps there is some ‘pepper’ grain marks on the source paper.

I haven’t signed them yet. And I have to brace myself for this as it needs to be done slowly and carefully. No rushing, because that introduces errors, and that means having to go back to printing some more, and cropping all over again.

But one thing that i love about printing is seeing the work laid out on a table. AS you can see in this photograph, nine of the images are laid out in stacks, and I’m often reminded that photographs don’t come from casual days out. They happen because you need to put the work in. Some of these images go back seven years, while others were made this year. Accumulation, the act of slowly adding to one’s portfolio is the only way to build upon your own efforts.

Good work, let alone great work isn’t created causally, or in a day. It is often the result of many years of trial and error. Of cutting out the images that didn’t work, and going back many times to a place to get what you want, or to keep on exploring.

Book production - knowing your market size

I’ve been very fortunate to have a few folks who follow me, and are very kind enough to buy my books. I am now working on book no.6. Something I never thought I’d hear myself say. Getting book no.1 off the ground always felt like a momentous thing to achieve. A dream.

There are a few things we have learned over the years of designing and printing books. I think this post today is really to cover one question I get asked a lot: “will there be a reprint, as I missed out on the last book?”. The answer is always no, and there are very strong reasons for no reprints. So I’d like to go over them. But first we need to go back to the first book I printed and discuss some of the things we learned upon first print.

No.1 Over-personalising it

There is this common understanding in house buying that folks who buy a second home to rent out, tend to over-personalise it. They tend to get carried away and before you know it, they’ve spent so much money on the 2nd home that it almost negates the purpose of buying the 2nd home as an investment to make some additional income each month by renting it out.

The same can be true about printing your first book. Looking back, I went for the grandest format I could. It was large, it was hardback, and at first I tried to go for the best paper quality available. I even went overboard on the dust jacket which was double layered. Over the months that I worked with the printer in China, the cost of the book escalated, and before I knew it, I was wondering how I was going to break even printing it. Printing a hard back quality coffee table book is very costly. We’re talking about over 20K depending on the specification.

Since that first book, both myself and my friend Darren - who is the main designer behind the books I print, have tried to get as economical as we can. A fine balance between value for money and print quality / presentation, without there being a detriment to one or the other. It’s a hard balancing act, but we’ve learned that it’s all too easy to get obsessed with your book - particularly your first one - and go overboard on it.

No.2 Volume

When I originally began talking to a printer about my first book, I had thought that 3,000 copies would be a reasonable size of print run. My friend Neil Mclwraith who owns Beyond Words book shop assured me that ‘whatever print run you go for, you are usually left with about half of it rotting in a basement’. He was not wrong.

Even though I had revised the print run down to 1,000 copies, I found the order arrived on three full pallets and it took a whole day to move off the street and into a climate controlled room in the office I shared with friends. It took about 5 to 6 years to sell all the books. This is related to the initial question ‘will there be a reprint?’.

No.3 Storing of books

Storing books is difficult. They need to be kept somewhere that is dry, and at a constant temperature each year. They are also bulky and very heavy. Garage will not work. The books will get damp. Attic is just as bad due to the temperature fluctuations that will happen over the years you are storing them. You need a climate controlled, damp free room, which for most people printing a book will mean some spare room in their house. And for 1,000 books, that’s an awful lot of space.

No.4 Postage costs / weight

Printing a large book can make it almost cost-prohibitive to buy, if you intend to post it. There is a 2KG limit here in the UK where prices rise considerably once you hit that limit. Most hard backs can easily be around 1.5 kg without a slipcase, and then over 2kg with the slipcase and packaging included.

This is why my book ‘Colourchrome’ was small. We had a bad reaction to the unwieldy size of the first book that we figured a small book would be easier to ship, and less troublesome too in terms of handling (book boxes are extremely heavy).

Print Run / Re-evaluating

After storing old stock for such a long time, and the problems encountered with this, plus the problems of paying for stock that you cannot sell for many years, your motivation turns from ‘over-personalised-grand-project-with-no-expense-spared’ to ‘simple-elegant-economical-small-print-size-small-production-run’, and the print run is reduced for this single reason:

Book Sales over time

The first six weeks is when most folks will buy a copy of your book upon promoting it. If you’re lucky to have a following at all, then you might sell a lot of copies in that first six weeks. But once the book has been out for more than that, interest drops off quite dramatically.

For my first book ‘Art of Adventure’, we found that by the 2nd month, there were almost no sales at all. Perhaps one or two books would sell a month, but if you consider that you sold 300 copies in the first month, and almost nothing in the 2nd month, you soon realise that it’s going to take a long time to sell the remaining 900 copies that you just stock piled in your spare room.

What’s your market size?

So the question soon comes down to - how many people follow you, and more importantly, how many of them are willing to buy your book? That, in my view only comes over producing a number of titles. Which is where I am today.

I have discovered that I tend to have enough interest in the first month to sell around 300 copies. After that month, interest is almost zero, and sure, I will keep selling copies of the book over the coming year or two, but very very slowly.

So it soon became apparent to me that looking for a print run of 300 copies was my ‘sweet spot’. And this has been backed up by Neil who told me that most independent photographers should really opt for a print run of around 500 copies max for any book they want to get printed.

So back to the original question: will I be doing a reprint?

As you can probably see from my detailed explanation above, trying to sell an edition of a book is pretty hard to begin with if you print more than the initial interest for the first six weeks or so. So the chances of even doing a reprint of the book is very highly unlikely.

Book No.6 is now work in progress

I’ve just begun work on my next book about Hokkaido. The image sequencing and selection is now complete, and so too is the text for the book. I am hoping to have it published sometime next year.

The idealised view

We all have a tendency to idealise the view. To remember what we saw in our hearts than what was actually there. 

But seldom does reality meet imagination.

Which explains my fascination with finding balance and symmetry in nature.  For I am always seeking those rare moments when a pleasing composition, conjured up out of random elements, suggests that there was always a greater purpose. That there is an intended design behind everything we encounter.

Instructional 3/13

Part 3 of my ‘Hálendi’ book walk through. Some of the video sessions are anecdotal, while others are fairly instructional and you might find quite informative.

Sometimes, you just need time with dog on a hill, in the Highlands

Since March I have not been able to take a decent break away from ‘pivoting’ my business from workshops and tours to on-line teaching. I have just finished my second set of webinars which went very well.

So now it’s time to take time off. And what better way to do that, than go up Cul Mor mountain in Assynt with my sisters dog and my friend John Richardson who came along to do the hill with me today. We had a terrific day, and my sisters dog even got photographed with ears mid-flight :-)

I hope you are all remembering to switch off the tv from time to time, and to ignore the news. You’re honestly not missing much. And some time doing something you enjoy is much needed by all of us.

Instructional 2/13

This is part 2 of 13, of a book ‘walk-through’ I did with Sam Gregory from TheTogCast.

Instructional 1/13

Sam Gregory from ‘TheTogCast’ did a book ‘walk-through’ with me. We reviewed 13 of the images from my new book. This is the first instalment.