Music Studio

It’s my downtime.

But I am someone who needs sound, as well as visuals in my life. I am a constant music listener at home, and when I’m not listening, then I am hopefully playing around in my home studio.

One of my ways to regenerate and get some new energy, is to focus my attentions away from photography, and onto something else. I write music, and this is me tinkering around with a Eurorack modular synthesiser called a Qu-Bit Data Bender. It simulates ‘faulty electronics’. I love ambiences, and effects on sounds and this machine does that. All the stuttering you are hearing is it generating it from an audio input from a keyboard.

The landscape never judges. But, do we?

I have found myself at loggerheads with many friends over the past few years. We live in divisive times. I now believe that: ‘you cannot change someone’s mind’. All you can do, is leave them with what you want to present to them, and hope that they might follow it up.

In my view, pressing harder your point of view, just increases the resistance from whomever you wish to convince of your point of view.

In artistic terms, this is why I do not believe in pushing my work too much. I think that by trying to force your work upon folks who are either not into what you do, or are just simply not ready: you are just putting them off.

An analogy to this, is that I am a big fan of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. Their music in my opinion is an acquired taste. It is not for everyone, and for a few years, it wasn't for me either. I had several friends try to show me the right way, to enlighten me. Their efforts failed. Instead, what had to happen, was that had to find them in my own time.

It took about 2 years of a slow ‘drip-feed’ of finding their music in car adverts and on the radio.

It had to happen in my own time. When I was ready.

What I love about the landscape is that it doesn’t care what you or I think. It’s not even aware. Landscapes are confident in being themselves. You can take them or leave them, but no matter what you think - nothing is going to change for them. They just ‘are’.

So, when we come away from a place and say ‘I didn’t like it’, or ‘there was nothing there to photograph’, what we are doing is placing our own expectations or judgement upon the landscape. If we have a great time, we think the landscape is great. If we have a bad time, we think the landscape has nothing to offer.

The landscape doesn’t care.

It really doesn’t.

It has eternity to deal with. The least thing it has to worry about, is what we thought of it,.

The landscape just ‘is’.

And the sooner we realise it, the better. Landscapes are much older, wiser and constant than we are.

Thank you for the present

I received a bottle of Harris gin today. No card. Nothing. I can only presume it is from someone who wishes to say thanks? I really am guessing here.

If you sent it - then thank you.

Voice of the eye's book

I’m very honoured to find that I have been included in René Algesheimer’s curated book of photographers - ‘Voice of the Eyes’.

As someone who has produced a book or two myself, I am sitting here looking at a book that has 500 pages, and has very nicely written interviews with photographers that I know, and also, many that I have not been aware of until looking through this book.

A few hours have passed, and I am still buried deep with it, and there are a few photographers in here that I now feel inclined to check out more of their work.

René first contacted me about including my work in this book maybe three or four years ago. It all seemed like a pipe dream to me, and I wasn’t sure if his project would come to anything. And now, here it is, on my table. A small, but heavy / dense book with a lot of information in it. Each photographer featured in the book is given a decent amount of coverage with maybe three or four images each. It is the kind of format I was considering for a ‘retrospective’ I would like to do of my own work in the future - each ‘chapter’ of my own photography would have maybe three or four images and some detailed text about the location. So I think René design format makes a lot of sense.

If you’d like to know more about the book, or even buy it, then head over to https://voiceoftheeyes.com

Of course I’m going to tell you that it is highly recommended, because I’m in it :-) But apart from myself, I think there’s a lot of depth to this book. At over 500 pages, and enough photographs per photographer featured, and a decent set of questions to dig below the surface, it should keep you immersed for some time.

Highly recommended.

Patagonia is another old friend

I go out each morning to get a coffee locally, because I work from home and I find it too socially cut-off. Going out each day for that coffee allows me to meet other people and just have a connection with folks around me. It’s all good for mental health.

Today I bumped into a writer, who has been publishing books about ‘hidden’ Edinburgh and also ‘Uknown Glasgow’. Turns out that by trade, he is actually a lawyer, and that spurred on a discussion about ‘doing what you believe in’, rather than ‘doing something because you think it will make money’.

I’ve met this writer a few times before so he knows all about me, and what I do. Today he said ‘I presume that the trips you run, you do them because you love them?’, to which I replied that in my view, everything I offer, always started off as a personal trip to see what was there. I have never gone anywhere from the beginning with the idea of ‘checking it out for a future workshop’. I think that is just a bad idea. I’d much rather to to places that I am passionate about.

And then later on this morning, one of my clients Richard, wrote to me and said ‘I think I’ll come to Iceland with you, because you wrote so passionately about it’. Well, it wasn’t really my intention do to a ‘sell’ on Richard in particular. I just think that sometimes I feel I need to let others know that the trips I run, didn’t come from a need to make money, but they are often places that are very personal to me.

Iceland as I wrote a few days ago, has been part of my life since 2004. Patagonia is a year older. Torres del Paine has been part of my psyche since 2003. I was only about two or three years into making images as a ‘serious’ hobby at this point.

The thing for me about Torres del Paine, is that I knew the moment I was leaving that place, that I would be back. Although I had no definite plans to do so, and felt that this was a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience for me, I just had a hunch that it would feature as an important place for me, and so it has become that.

Some places draw you back, because you know you haven’t really managed to get under the skin of it enough. Or you know you’ve found some parts of the landscape to be elusive. You see things but aren’t able to capture them, or you know there’s a few more faces to the place that you still have to experience.

I have often thought that Torres del Paine is a place of many personalities. It is complex. The weather is so changeable, from sunny weather and t-shirt to downright difficult. It’s one of the major reasons why I think I can’t stay away from the place.

And it is one of those places that when you do go there, you always come away thinking you need to go back again because you know there’s a lot that’s been left unsaid.

I don’t think I will ever stop going to Torres del Paine national park. There are locations and places around the world that have become part of my world-home-view. I would be a very sad person if I were to find out I could not go back to many of the places I visit: Iceland, Japan, Patagonia, Brazil…. they are part of who I am I think. They have etched part of themselves in to me. I know this for sure.

Old tools vs new tools

Just recently I upgraded something in my home music studio. Except that it turned out not to be an ‘upgrade’ but rather, two weeks of frustration because things stopped working, and I was getting some intermittent problems with audio.

This has reminded me that I am just as guilty of being seduced by new gear as anyone is. The strange thing is that when it comes to photography, I rarely buy anything I’ve not used before. In fact, I am perhaps guilty of holding on to the things I know work well, to such a point now, that I have bought spares of certain objects because they are no longer in production.

I realised many years ago that by keeping using the same gear, things become so familiar that workflow becomes natural and seamless. When you know your gear inside out, muscle memory takes over, and you just do things without needing to think too much. Each time I have bought something new for my photography, I have found that it often interrupts it. Disrupts the flow, and in a sense: either creates a pause in what I’m doing, or worse: is a step backwards.

An unfamiliar piece of gear can really screw with your creativity.

I should have figured this out when it came to my little home music studio. I had built up enough experience to know what the issues were and how to fix them when they came up. With the new audio interface I bought, I was un uncharted territory. I experienced a myriad of issues that took me a few weeks to figure out. And even now that I feel things are working again, I’m aware that I haven’t got much experience with this new device, and can still possibly encounter more problems as I start to use it in earnest.

The same is true of photography gear. When I take on something new, I do so, fully acknowledging that I will have to live with it for at least a year before I have enough experience to know whether the problems I encounter with it are more a case of being unfamiliar, or if the tool is just either a bad fit for what I do, or has some design flaw I can’t live with.

Go gently with new gear is my view. If you’ve got your process working well and you like it, leave it be.

I’ll leave you with a little story. I once bought a new ball head, only to find the clamp wasn’t as secure as I thought it was, and enjoyed watching, in slow motion, as my entire camera fell off, and dropped right into a silt river. It was an entire Mamiya 7II body and lens. I went back to using my older ball head after that.

Notes on weather forecasting, and predicting the future

I’ve decided to admit to something :-)

On my workshops and tours, I must admit that it drives me nuts when folks start to tell me what the weather is going to do. I’ve had folks saying to me ‘we better not go out as it looks like it’s going to rain in half an hour’, to ‘Looks like Thursday will be a write-off’.

Most of the time I’ve found that forecasts are wrong, and even when I have gone out and it is wet: I’ve often got interesting and good shots :-)

The adage ‘if you don’t go, you don’t get’ still holds true in my book, and there is something beautiful in ‘not knowing’ about what the future will hold.

Forecasting as useful as it is, shouldn’t be used to rule our lives. Reading into weather forecasts too much can stop you from going out, and besides, you don’t know what the weather will bring you when you do'.

Most of my best images were created in what folks would call ‘bad weather’. Only recently, on the Isle of Harris, the ‘bad weather’ days turned out to be our best. We had reduced visibility with the backgrounds becoming veiled and ‘foggy’ due to the light rain we had.

Conversely, photographing in dry weather (oh how much of a reprieve this may feel after wet weather), is often extremely boring: one dimensional. Like a postcard. Dull.

So my advice would be : unless the weather forecast is telling you that a storm will wreck your new hair style : go. Go and see what happens (and leave that forecasting machine back at the hotel).

You just don’t know what you’ll get, and that is the beauty and inspirational part of it all.

Japan is calling.....

Tonight I have been busy planning my hotel stay in Tokyo. I remembered that a few tours ago, I stayed at a hotel in Tokyo that had a robot girl as the checkin attendant, and she was accompanied by two Dinosaurs. One of them was definitely a raptor. While I was checking in, I had to listen to the ‘roar’ of the ancient forest.

I checked though my notes, to see which year this was, and it appears to have been my last Hokkaido trip in 2020 before the whole world went mad.

So I decided I should go back again. If you are interested / curious, the hotel is called Henn na Hotel in Tokyo. Looking forward to it. This is SO Japan !

Isle of Harris, or Bolivia?

This past month, I ran two workshops on the isle of Harris. I took this photo with my iPhone while we were there.

One of the things that I’ve learned over the past 13 years, is that each landscape can be a great teacher. Had I not visited Bolivia in 2009, I don’t think I would have embraced the minimalism that is available to me on Harris. Prior to my Bolivia trip, I was shooting Harris like every other beach is photographed. But Bolivia taught me to use space in my photos, and now I seek it wherever I go.

The Hálendi Tour

It’s been a long while in the making. But next September, I’m running a tour that goes right through the interior of Iceland up to the north east, and then back. This tour will completely avoid the ring road of the country, and focus on taking us into the heart of the highland landscape.

I decided that as much as I love my Fjallabak tour, it is time for me to give it a break (I need to keep my inspiration up), and so what we’re doing next September, is that we will journey through the two main ‘roads’ (I use the term loosely). The Sprengisandur road is perhaps one of Europe’s most stunning journeys. River crossings, vast empty deserts, glaciers along the way. It’s a beautiful journey.

We do stop for the first couple of days around the Fjallabak region, at the start of the tour, as it is only a few hours outside of Reykjavik, before venturing further north on the Sprengisandur road. The north east of Iceland is one of my favourite places to visit. It has some of the more spectacular waterfalls of the country and the return trip will take us to spend a few days around the Kerlingarfjoll area of the central highlands.

I don’t think I could stop coming to Iceland. I think it has become a home from home for me. As I look back at my first visit here in 2004, I would not have envisaged that I would come back so often, nor how Iceland’s landscape would become a teacher for me. I have often said that certain landscapes, when visited at the right time in one’s own photographic journey, can become instructors, showing you a way forward. Iceland has been one of those places for me, and I think that the repeated visits, and learning more and more about the country over so many years, has given my photography more depth than I would have gotten, had I only come here a few times. I am hoping I will keep on returning.