Driving in Iceland

I’m in the central highlands of Iceland right now. I’ve been coming here, offering a tour since 2016. I think this is my last tour for a while, as I need to give it a rest, and do something new next year. Anyhow, my guide allowed me to drive his vehicle this time round.

His car is a Ford F350 customised by sawing it in half, and bolting on the back of a Ford Excursion. It has six doors, and raised foot plate.

This video shows one of the ‘roads’ in the highlands: a river. I’ve been through this many times.

As much as I love the highlands of Iceland, I need to give it a rest now. After seven years, I need to go and do something else for a while. So next year I think my guide and myself will be working on a new tour.

I will return to the central highlands for sure, but I need some time away now. I don't ever see a time when I won’t be working in Iceland. It has become part of who I am. I have been coming here since 2004, and although I run two tours a year here, I often come to do my own thing as well.

Last September while running the tour here, Daniel Bergman said that I was an honorary Icelander: A huge compliment. My parents are highlanders from Sutherland in Scotland. My blood and my heart are from there. I feel a connection to Iceland because it is not only a beautiful place, but there is something similar in its raw nature to that of the Scottish Highlands. Perhaps I have just found somewhere that is a home from home? I don’t know. It is just a special country.

Many thanks to my guide and friend Haukur for trusting me with his amazing vehicle.

Domke Protective Wrap

Last week on my Eigg workshop, Sureita turned up with a small protective wrap by Domke which she was using to cover and protect the tripod cube that she had brought along. This I believe was the small 15” version of this cloth.

I noticed there is a 19” version available so I bought a couple to try out. I’ve experimented at home and I see that the cloth has a plastic membrane which is waterproof on one side, and a felt-like material on the outer. It has velcro on each corner of the cloth.

It appears as though it might be a great accessory for when it’s raining. As I can wrap it around the camera, and tuck in one of the corners at the top to give it more stability. I can even use it as a hood for my filters, which might stop the rain from dripping down the back of the filter.

I’m off to Iceland next week for 10 days and will try this out. Perhaps it’s not suitable. I just don't know yet, but I think it’s rather good for general protection anyway. Let’s see.

Japan are to lift remaining tourist restrictions this October

Japan are due to lift restrictions further this October. At present, it is not possible to go to Japan as an independent tourist without the aid of a recognised travel agent. Plus you have to send your passport to the Japanese consulate.

I am now busy re-instating the Hokkaido tour I had hoped to operate the past few years, for this January 12 to 22nd. We’re now busy looking at the hotels and I hope to have the tour arranged and advertised hopefully by the end of this month. The first announcement of this trip will be put in my monthly newsletter.

Eigg

I’m just home from my workshop on Eigg.

I love going there, and I was searching today and found this video of my friend Charlie. I met him for the very first time this April while I was there. I had booked a bothy on the opposite side of the island and thought I would cycle across to the beaches each day. Only to find that the roads are pretty bad and lumpy. So I phoned Charlie, and he became my wee taxi each morning to the beaches.

Ok so no big deal to arrange a taxi, except that when I phoned him and put it to him that I’d like picked up at 5am, he was ok about it - but a bit stunned. Who would be wanting to go anywhere on a 5 mile island at 5am?

We became good friends, and he often gave me a wee dram of whisky each morning on my way to the beaches.

I love going to Eigg. Currently, as it stands, I think next year is my last year running workshops as the place I stay are are considering retiring. But I know I will continue to return on a personal side, besides, I haven’t shot any images on Eigg myself for quite some time. It is about time I do my own work there.

Six Images update

Work on ‘Six images’ has been going well. I now have seven short videos finished. I have a further 4 left to do, and since I am on a workshop next week, work will resume on these once I am home.

Teaching can teach the teacher so much.

For the past two years I’ve tried several formats. The first year I tried to do the classes live, but there is just so much preparation, not to mention technical difficulties, and also nerves, It was difficult. Last year I settled on 1 hour pre-recorded classes, with a week to ask questions which I would then produce a further Q&A video about.

It worked well, but I am doubtful as to how many folks had an hour to listen to me drone on? :-)

So the format this time round is several 12 to 15 minute videos (that’s just the way they were turning out), and I think these ‘bite sized’ tutorials are more appropriate.

This is what I have so far:

  1. Editing in a Nutshell (a distilled version of all my digital darkroom stuff)

  2. Obtaining smooth tones & depth in your images (how to prepare your files for editing)

  3. Creating compositional focus (how to lead the eye)

  4. Creating 3D perception (photographs are 2D by nature, and so we need to use techniques to imply a sense of depth to the work)

And these are more or less the preamble :-) Foundation stuff. But I feel I got the message simpler in these. As I say: teaching can teach the teacher. I have learned so much about my own photography by having to sort out in my mind what I want to teach others. Sometimes you find yourself offering an answer to a question that you didn’t know you knew the answer to :-)

The last set of videos are per image. Each image takes around 15 minutes to dissect and explain the edits I applied.

I’m also hoping to put one further video together regarding ‘fine tuning’ the collection as a set. In musical terms, this is one of the main tasks of ‘mastering’. The mastering engineer takes all the songs for the album and ensure they sound consistent - similar volumes, similar tonality (some tracks may need more treble / bass or less). This is done so the entire set can be played right through with consistency. That’s what I do for my ‘set’ of images. I fine tune the tonalities.

I think I will have the last few videos complete in a few weeks.

I hope to offer this as a class towards the end of November / December, as I need to work it around my real-world workshops. Feeling very good about this work.

Editing on an uncalibrated system

This past April, I ran my Digital Darkroom class. We had snow, rain, fog, and just about everything else weather wise. I have a little place on the edge of Loch Maree that I use for compositions, and to get some material for the class.

Anyway, during the class, I work on one of the best digital projectors - a Canon Xeed. But I always find that although its shadow detail is quite good, it’s nowhere near the blacks that one can get out of a well calibrated monitor.

Richard McDonald and I made the image above. The left hand side one is the image that was edited during the class, and the right-hand edit is the same image ‘colour corrected, and graded’ on a calibrated screen at home.

I am always fascinated that an image I feel is ‘finished’, can in fact, turn out to be unfinished. I have this problem with my own work, which is why I like to let it sit for a while. The human eye is capable of lying to us. It is highly adaptable and will ‘remove’ colour casts, and also convince us that the luminance values in the image are sufficient, when in fact we may be only half way there.

Each time I do my own edits, I like to open them up and compare them with work that I know has the correct luminance. In audio mixing, sound engineers will often compare the mix of a song they are working on against a song that is already published and mixed well. It will show discrepancies in their mixing.

For me, I often find that my eye tells me things are bright enough when I may only be around 75% towards absolute white.

Image © Digital Darkroom workshop participant Richard McDonald

I think the revised edit of Richard’s image is much better. But I know I couldn’t have done it on the uncalibrated system - which is why getting your screen calibrated is vitally important, but also, I know I couldn’t have corrected it so soon to the initial edit. By leaving it for a while, I have been able to note that there was a distinct green cast to the image, and that its luminance values were a little on the muddy side.

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Oh, one last thing: note however that even though I was working on an uncalibrated system, the luminance relationships between each of the objects within the frame are intact in the original image. I did not need to do any drastic adjustments in the corrected version. I find this very interesting. It tells me that I got the relationships correct, even though I could not determine the true blacks and whites of the actual image.

Six Images - Online Class update

I’ve been working away this past month on my new on-line workshop that I am going to hopefully offer later this Autumn. The class so far has three videos made, and I think there will be five in total. Some of the videos are very short at around 10 minutes each. Just the right length to get the message across, and so that folks can replay them as a refresher, without having to commit too much investment in time and brain cells ;-)

The titles so far are:

‘maintaining smooth tonality whilst introducing depth and punch’

‘conveying a sense of 3D’

and

‘Compositional Focus through tonal editing’.

These are all primers that are useful before stepping into the longer video about the six images I want to discuss. Work is going well, and I’m now starting to feel that it is all beginning to tie up quite nicely.

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postamble:

Lastly, I have to say that producing videos is extremely slow and time consuming. If I get 10 minutes worth that is well recorded and edited done in one working day, I’m doing well. I have full absolute respect for those who produce YouTube content. The audience if fickle, easily distracted, and if they don’t post regularly, the algorithm buries them. So there is a treadmill there. It must be a lot of high pressure. I am sure that many of the 10 or 20 minute videos I watch take more than a week or two to produce.

There is also a massive learning curve in production values, storyboarding the video, recording it, and editing it. plus, you’ve got to be comfortable in front of a microphone. I’m still struggling with that one: as soon as I begin to record my voice, I almost inevitably get my words jumbled up, trip over myself, or find myself using the wrong word. So many retakes…… and after a while fatigue sets in. And the takes just get worse. So recording takes while rested, and fresh is advised.

My initial hope had been that I would now produce one video class a year. Initially I had thought about producing a portfolio class each year that covers a new set of work each time. Perhaps I might come back to that, but man, it’s very intensive, and requires a lot of planning.

I hope to have the new class ready by mid Autumn if all goes well.

South Korea

I am returning to South Korea this October. The last time I was there was back in 2018. So it’s been four years since that visit.

For me, most of the places I end up visiting come through personal connections. I’ve met quite a few people over the years on my workshops and tours, and I like to try to go with the flow: if someone suggests or invites me somewhere, then I try to follow the lead. Call me a hippy, but I think that when an invitation comes, there is usually a door to new possibilities ahead. I trust it and I have found over the years that this has mostly been beneficial to my photography / creative growth.

Prior to going to South Korea, I had never considered the country. This I find fascinating, because now when I look at the images I made there, I know they could not have come about, had I not accepted my friend’s invitation.

These images are so part of me now, that to imagine that I might have declined his invitation and never gone, is unthinkable. Such is the wonderful surprise of future possibilities (In my view, opportunities and possibilities are being offered to us each day, but it’s up to us to recognise them and to run with them).

When I did get to South Korea, I must confess that I hastily made the assumption that I would not get any photographs. Initially I saw little promise. This is because the parts I visited were particularly urbanised, or affected by man in some way. I found that we drove long distances and often times, the landscape was not obvious.

All I remember about the end of the trip was saying to my friend ‘well, I shot 18 rolls of film, so I must have something’. Even though I could not put my finger on any particularly strong images that I had made at the time, I had still shot film. I never shoot film for the sake of it, I always only shoot because I’ve found something that I think might work.

What had originally been an invitation to a country I knew very little about, and had not even been drawn to thinking of its landscape much, turned out to be a very positive experience. If this has taught me anything, it is that one never really knows when the next set of images is coming from’. We just need to put ourselves out there for things to happen.

So I’m looking forward to returning to South Korea. It will be a different experience this time (because it always is), and I do not plan to set myself up with any expectations. Because no matter what I may envisage, photography always tends to offer up something I hadn’t expected. My photographs are never quite what I thought they might be.

This is what I find most inspiring about photography. An invitation, and the conviction to go someplace, can lead to images that you had never thought possible. Each day out there with a camera, is a chance to find new ground, and to create something that never existed before. But once it is here, feels as though it was always a part of you, and you have been carrying it along inside of you for all these years..

Radio Times 1974

Nothing much to report today. As I explained in my recent newsletter, I have not received my film processor as yet, so I have not been able to work through my backlog of images shot this year. I expect it will take me a few more months once I do get the processor to get up to speed with it.

Anyway, I found this image in my folder of things that I think might be worth putting on this very blog. I am going to avoid the politics of this, but I would like to say that this is the cover of a well known British institution magazine that is still going strong. The cover is from 1974, and I do indeed remember being told that an ice age wasn’t very far away.

I love the graphics. The ‘RadioTimes’ font has always been deliberately ‘retro’, perhaps a hark back to the early 1920’s? And the actual graphic of the earth is very nice also.

I’m just surprised that someone had the foresight to scan or archive a copy of this magazine, and in colour too.

Adventures in Abstraction & Analogue Volcanoes

I love it when someone decides to make their own photographic book. I’ve had a correspondence with Stephen Milner for many years now. He is an Englishman based in New Zealand, and he got in touch last year to tell me he was putting his first book together, and whether I would like to write a foreword for him, which I have done (it is reproduced below).

I can think of no better way to describe the book, than have Stephen discuss it here:

You can now buy the book here:

Buy now

I wish Stephen all the very best with his project, and I encourage others to consider doing their own book. There is something extremely satisfying in putting your own book together.

Foreword: Adventures In Abstraction & Analogue Volcanoes 

If I were to say the word ‘volcano’ to you, I am confident that you would instantly ‘see’ a cone shape in your mind’s eye. The shape of any volcano is instantly recognisable to all of us. They have one of the most iconic shapes of our world.

 In Milner’s images, he has settled upon using this iconic shape to unify his imagery. He understands that using form in this way can strengthen the work. For when we break down any image at all, they are constructed of the same basic building blocks of form and tone. Regardless of what we think we see, all photographs are representations, made up of these parts.

 Milner has also chosen to make these images by using film. In an ever-increasing age of convenience over any other consideration, this is a hard feat to maintain. Firstly, the photographer does not have any immediate feedback. There is no way to review what he just shot. There is no way to check that the compositions or exposures are right. His only tool at his disposal is his intuition. Trust in one’s own abilities, and the knack of visualising what one is capturing is key. Learning to ‘let go’ and ‘move on’ rather than fixate on looking for assurances is the nature of the game.

 As a film photographer myself, I enjoy this process very much. Rather than thinking ‘volcano’, I am encouraged to think about whether the subject has a strong enough shape to act as a foundation for the composition. I am also encouraged to abstract the scene. Rather than thinking of ‘scenery’, I am left to think about how the shapes of all the subjects within the frame interact. I am forced to ask questions such as ‘do the constituent shapes build a pleasing story that sits comfortably when viewed as a whole?’ For great scenery does not guarantee a great photograph.

 Make no mistake, there is, and must be a leap of faith in one’s own judgement when shooting film. One must commit and accept that there is no undo.

 I bring up these points for one reason: all well executed work brings forth the illusion that it was effortless to produce. I know all too well that the work within this book took a lot of time, and a lot of love to create. Milner has been busy.  What he brings forth to us, is a cohesive set of images that just seem to flow as if they were an effortless effort.

 He has successfully abstracted the volcano. For we do not see the hard work. Instead we are left to wonder about the many adventures he surely had along the way.