Re-Imaging your older work - noticing how far you've come

Sometimes the shoot goes well, but I struggle to edit the work to my satisfaction. In those moments, I often find myself asking the question: Is it simply that the work isn’t any good? Or it is more a case that I simply lack the skills at this present time to bring the images to a successful conclusion?

Knowing the difference between a bad idea, and a good one that has been poorly executed, is never easy to know at the time of the edit.  For if I lack the skill to execute it, then I may lack the ability to judge it correctly.

My original edits of these images of the Taj Mahal were just like that. Originally shot in 2009, the images lay dormant, filed away, because I had never been entirely happy with them. I couldn’t figure out at the time if the work was wanting, or whether I just lacked the skills to bring them to a successful outcome.

Looking back now, I could clearly see that the work held promise, but I had lacked the skills and experience to bring the images to a satisfactory conclusion. My use of contrasts and general tonality back in 2009 was rather rudimentary. To my inexperienced eye, I thought that by adding darker contrasts to the images, I would impart a sense of drama. Instead of drama, I got muddy images that lacked any focus.

I’ve learned over the intervening years that working in foggy conditions where definition is reduced, can be advantageous. Indeed, I often like to play with the edge of definition and deliberately lose it in my edits by pushing my images towards a more hi-key look. 

Foggy locations, seem to excel at being edited with this approach in mind.

As I reworked the images to give them the treatment I now felt was more appropriate, I found myself looking over my original edits as one might look over some historical documents.

I had a sense that I was being given an opportunity, to see who I was back in 2009, and to notice how far I have come in the intervening years. Where the original edits had been full of uncertainty, I was aware that my new edits were more immediate. They had a clarity of intention, that only confidence from working on similar imagery, over many years can bring.

It is my view that clarity of intention and good execution can only come through practice and experience. I had 17 years’ worth.

Yes, I was much happier with the new interpretations of the work. But what I got out of the exercise the most, was an understanding of just how far I had come in the intervening years.

Progress is often subtle, invisible even. We need the passage of time – often many years – to see that our progress has been more substantial than we first assumed.

Concrete, Fibreglass & Steel

Can we find beauty in industrial places? Places we would ordinarily pass over, because we tend to relate to them as purely functional in purpose.

Often, I’ve thought, that there is no room in our minds, for beauty or art, with such places.

Zeeland, like many other parts of the Netherland’s coastal polders and dikes is reclaimed land. Over the centuries engineers have heavily fortified, straightened, and dammed sections of the Dutch coastline.

I doubt that beauty was ever in the hearts of the engineers that reclaimed this land. And yet, beauty is what I found here. In concrete, fibreglass and steel.

Who would have thought, this landscape to be worthy of a photographic portfolio? Especially from someone who has spent most of his time photographing natural landscapes.

I would not have guessed that I would enjoy so much photographing a world built for function and purpose. A place that no one frequents.

I was intrigued that our world can have vast areas of land, dedicated to the design and function, of engineering structures that no one goes to, or lives in. Where catering for human presence, if done, was done almost with a grievance. If done at all.

A landscape that is stark and austere of human ornamentation.

And yet, I still found much beauty. Beauty in the austerity of the technical design. Tower and blade. Abrasive concrete. Fibreglass and steel.

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Many thanks to my friend Frank Hoogeboom www.frankhoogeboom.com for showing me around.

Lightroom Curves, Precision Tonal Adjustment

I’ve finally published my adaption of my Photoshop Curves e-Book for Lightroom users.

Buy

This book is a deep dive into Lightroom’s Curves tool. A hugely powerful tool for creative and surgical tonal control.

Please note that this is e-book is an adaption of my Photoshop Advanced Curves e-Book.

It teaches:

  • The theory behind curves (how tones are mapped and manipulated)

  • How to use curves for specific tonal regions (shadows, midtones, highlights)

  • Both simple adjustments (like contrast or brightness tweaks) and advanced techniques (like lifting shadows without affecting contrast)

  • Practical workflows using masking + curves together

  • Subtle but critical topics like:

    • Contrast vs saturation relationships

    • Avoiding highlight/shadow clipping

    • Precision control using the histogram and “adjust” tool

  • Real examples with before/after images + exact curve setups

  • Plus: included Lightroom catalog + video tutorials for hands-on learning

New Podcast Video

The summer time is my ‘time off’ from my intensive yearly workshop and tour schedule. To be able to recharge my batteries, it’s best I spend my time away from photography. But it is in my core. It is part of who I am.

I enjoy making these videos very much, as they allow me to crystallise my thoughts on what I do, and why I do it. But also, I am someone who creatively speaking, loves to work with sound as well as vision. My photographs are always concerned with creating atmospheres, and so too, are my little vignettes.

These are very time intensive to create. I have the utmost respect for folks who create high-quality documentary style video that is over 5 minutes. The level of detail and work required to do this is immense. I struggle to get a sentence out without falling over my own words….. So creating these short videos over the past while has been a humbling experience for me. Making high quality videos is a lot of effort. As the saying goes - ‘professionals make hard work look easy’.

One last thing: if you like these vignettes, I’d really appreciate it if you could let your friends know about them.

Gradations on the Salar de Uyuni

It was the first time I’ve seen water on the Salar de Uyuni.

Vera, Tommy, Pete and James on the Salar. Just a few inches of water, but more than enough to allow for perfect reflections in the evening light.

Always choosing to go in the dry season, there are never any guarantees that the season will be exact. In a way, I take delight when the weather is not predictable - whether it’s due to El Niño or something else, temperatures fluctuate, things change, nothing is ever quite the same.

And so, this year, we found a small patch - maybe 5km square, on the Salar which still had water left over from the wet season. Around two to three inches deep. Just enough to allow for beautiful reflections, and not too much to cause waves that would disrupt the calm of infinity when one walked around the location.

I rather enjoyed feeling as though I was walking on water.

I also rather enjoyed studying the smooth gradations in the sky and water, and the enormity of space. So much so, that I found the set of images I edited this year, and indeed what I initially chose to shoot in Bolivia - were more towards my own preferences of ‘less structure, more space for tones to stretch out with gradual variance’.

I originally thought I did photography for the experiences it brings. But as much as I think that is true, it’s not entirely accurate. I think I’m drawn to colour, light and the gradation of time. Not so much the actual subjects of the photos, but the quality of light, and how the tones slowly morph and gradate from one luminosity to another.

When one strips the more conventional subjects out of the scene that we (mistakenly) assume to be the reason for our photographs, we find gradation of colour and luminosity is really at the heart of our picture making.

Mirage

I’d like to thank everyone who bought my new e-book. I’ve only just realised it’s been a couple of decades in the making - it was only possible to write it now, after all the experiences and thoughts I’ve had over the past few decades of editing and working on my art.

One thing leads to another. Stepping stones. Small steps. Gradual progress. Compound interest. Slowly but surely we develop. Patience and self awareness are key.

Got so much to do. But I’m breaking up the drudgery of three months worth of accounts with editing images from my recent travels. Like this shot….

Mirage on the largest salt flat in the world. The heat and air bending light on islands that are 30km away.

I enjoyed Bolivia this year very much. It’s an old friend now. Seventeen years since I first started coming here. I know it very well and have spent a lot of time engaging with it.

What I love about repeating places is that they are seldom the same. Something happens you’ve not seen before. They can surprise you.

I enjoyed shooting the mirages on the Salar this time round. We also had the salt flat partially flooded...

New images from Bolivia to be published later in the year. They’re all edited now, but I have a backlog of work sitting in the queue to be published when the time is right.

Editing Masterclass - Creating 3D Perception

I’ve just released a new e-Book.

Creating 3D Perception teaches the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’. It is not a technical book. It covers concepts you can use to impart a sense of 3D to your images without having to reach for global contrast.

With a few simple, easy-to-remember techniques, you can train your eye — and your editing — to give images a compelling sense of depth and dimension.

This concise e-book distills my editing experience into three core concepts:

  1. Using tonal gradations across a scene

  2. Separating foreground and background luminance

  3. Employing contrast differences to create the illusion of three-dimensional space

You'll learn why a soft gradient convinces the viewer's eye far more than a hard one, how brightening a background can make your subject appear to step forward, and how the luminance of surrounding areas can make the same subject look lighter or darker without touching it at all.

These ideas may seem obvious once you know them — but I can guarantee that they are not so obvious until you do. Few photographers edit with this kind of intention. This book gives you the 'why', so that every edit you make has a clear, considered purpose.

This e-book has been formatted and written in a deliberately concise way, with each lesson distilled down to a page to help with the learning.

immediately applicable to any landscape image.

Specifications: 33 pages.
Format : Electronic e-Book. Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

Buy

How far should one go?

I have long considered the editing stage to be just as creatively important as the capture stage. For those of you who have been following me for a long while, you know that I like to work in the digital editing domain much like a traditional black and white printer would in the darkroom: I like to dodge and burn the images to bring about my own visual aesthetic.

I also use these techniques to help lead the eye around the frame and to enhance the main subject, while maybe trying to subdue less important areas of the scene.

In my view, most folks focus their attention on the capture stage and have the belief that this is where the majority of their improvement in photography will be made.

I have long held the view that editing is not cheating and that it is a creative area where we have more of a chance to express our own unique vision. But perhaps more importantly, it’s where we learn about what works and does not in our compositions. Editing is much like working on a puzzle: as we work through the edit, we are learning how the image is constructed and how it fits together. And more importantly, where it doesn’t work and why it doesn’t work.

Paying attention to the things that don’t work is important. But there’s a tendency to reject and discard failed images without asking oneself ‘why’ they didn’t work.

Editing teaches us to find good source material. By that, I mean good compositions. Scenes where the tones do not clash. Scenes where the edits will ‘flow’. Bad compositions tend to make one struggle to work with them when editing: If the source is broken, then you cannot repair it. Get the source right, and everything else will fall into place. But one can only learn what kinds of source images work best while trying to edit them.

So editing is a skill that needs to be learned, and it is just as important as our fieldwork.

However, editing is a skill that cannot be learned overnight. Or within six months or a year. Much like we are never finished learning to compose out in the field, we are never finished learning to edit.

It is a continual move forward with improving one’s eye. Because if one cannot ‘see’, then one cannot edit well.

Boundaries are important. If you do not know you have boundaries, then my suggestion is that you haven’t pushed your work far enough yet. Everyone has boundaries, and if one is not aware of them, it’s because you haven’t found them yet, and you are more likely working in safe, familiar ground all the time.

To me, one of the biggest skills I have had to learn, is ‘how far I can push the edit’. It’s like stretching a muscle you didn’t know you have. Most of us don’t know what the limits are of our physical abilities, and the same is true with how far we can take our work.

We need to find techniques and tools to help us expand our work. For instance, I now know that the eye is lazy and will convince me that I’ve got a dynamic picture. But when I use a reference image to compare against, I can often see that I have not pushed the edit as far as it could go. Looking for things that take you beyond your own comfort zone is important.

I’ve got some techniques I use all the time, because I’ve learned over the years, that often when I think I am finished with an image, I can sometimes only be half-way there.

An unexpected gift at an unexpected time

I passed on these huts for many years. I’d like to think I just wasn’t ready. Well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I got round to shooting them, and I shot them when I did, because that is when it was time for me to shoot them :-)

Recently, I’ve noticed that I am playing more with man made structures. With these huts, I found that the corrugated roofs almost looked like ploughed fields - a landscape on their own. Especially when the roofs had frost on them, as they do here.

Busy film processing.....

80 rolls of film to process this week in my home. I’ve just set up the film hanging racks. It’s been maybe around two or three years since I started to process film myself and it is still very much a learning experience.

There’s something very satisfying about being in control of the entire process from shooting to printing. But I must confess I still have issues with the film curling once it’s up to dry on the hanging racks you can see in the photo above.

I’ve got a humidifier set up this week to see if that will help, as I believe the curling happens because there are different surfaces on each side of the film and one dries quicker than the other.

I’ve been meaning to write for a while now about my experiences with the film processor I bought. I got an Analogico Dev.a film processor which on paper looks to be ideal. I did however buy it one year into them releasing it and had a hunch that I might be an ‘early adopter’ and to expect teething problems. This has turned out to be true more than I had imagined, but I have found Analogico’s support to be first rate and they always get back to me within a few hours. Always with a solution.

Perhaps at some point, I will buy a newer machine from them, as I think the one I have is now full of so many custom fixes to keep it going. So many things have broken over the time of using it, and always they have encountered the issue before and have a solid reliable fix for it. I am sure that when I do get round to getting a brand new machine, i’ll maybe look back at my first one as an early prototype.

I also had issues with the film developer I was using. If I am not mistaken, I think it’s quite hard to process E6 films in a drum processor and the best way to get even development is to use true inversion (in other words - shake the drum around every once in a while to ensure even coating - this is not possible when the film is sitting in a drum that is fixed onto a spindle on the machine).

I’ve got it tuned as best as I can, and I’m quite happy with the results now.