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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

There are three core elements to a good photograph:

1. good light

2. good composition

3. good exposure

Probably in that order.

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.

sold out

January 31-5, 2022

Price: £1,695
Deposit: £495

5-Day Photographic Workshop

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.

I’ve been busy working on the image selection / sequencing and text for my forthcoming book. I’m really pleased with how it is all going. But I am now at a stage where I want to print all of the 100+ images.

I don’t trust monitors for image review.

As much as I am very confident that my monitor has been calibrated correctly, and profiled well, I still find that when I print, I’m forced to see things in the print that weren’t so obvious on the monitor. For one, luminance levels of a print can easily be misread on a monitor because our eye is highly adaptable. What may appear bright after staring at it for so long may appear much darker in print. So printing the images out allows me to get a real-world grasp on how the luminance levels are on the print.

That’s one reason to print. But there are many reasons to print and those reasons only become apparent once you have a print in your hands to review. So many times I’ve noticed colour casts, fine detail distractions that weren’t so obvious on the monitor, but once printed, I now notice them - both in the print and more interestingly, on the monitor as well.

Our eyes are highly adaptable, which leads us into tuning out colour casts ‘in our head’. So I’m always looking for a way to force my eye to see things that it has become blind towards. The more you stare at a picture on the screen, the more desensitised you become to it. It’s like tunnel vision of a sort.

So I definitely wish to print out all of the images that have been selected for inclusion in the book. But I want to go one stage further: I’d like to simulate how the images will look when printed on standard proofing paper:

“Standard Proofing Paper has a Fogra 39 certification, which is becoming the European standard. Offering the widest colour gamut available for accurate colour reproductions, this paper provides a base colour, weight and gloss level designed to match colour-critical commercial offset, press applications. Optimised for proofing applications, when used with our Epson UltraChrome K3 Ink with Vivid magenta, this media delivers outstanding short-term stability”

So this week I’ve been printing off some targets to get measured, so that I can have a custom profile built for this paper.

I’ve always printed my images out to verify them, and to give as a hard-copy to the printer. I was advised years ago that having a hard-copy is the ultimate reference when getting someone else to reproduce your work. I’ve been pretty happy with the colour reproduction on the last two books. But this next book will be a test of sorts, because we are working with some extreme edge blacks and off-colour whites.

I think that my optimising of the prints will go a lot smoother, and will be much finer if I am printing them on a standard kind of proofing paper that is close to an off-set press.

I realise this is perhaps of little use to many of you, but I suppose the big message here is - your photographs are never finished until you have them printed and verified. I always find errors and inconsistencies in my work once it’s printed, and if I tune the print to look good, then I know it will also look good on the monitor also. But not the other way around.

Before I begin my article today, I’d like to make a few points very clear:

1. There is always a trade-off. When you gain something, you lose something.

2. Sometimes we like something because we’re attached to how it is.

3. The two images below, I don’t view one as better or worse. And hopefully you should get beyond this point also. ‘Like’ is a personal preference. It has nothing to do with the validity of an image.

I have just recently chosen to go back to some of my favourite landscapes in Scotland in 2021. Partly it is because I would like a change: It has been many years since I photographed my own home country, and I feel that there has been a big change in my style of photography over the past few years. I’m curious to see how I will approach / react / and photograph, since I am aware that I am looking for different things now.

Well I’m sure you’ve already studied the two images above : both from the same film-scan and reached your own view of which you like more than the other. This article today is not about this. I am not going to say ‘this image is better or worse because of…..’. Instead, I just wish to discuss some other aspects.

Point 1. Familiarisation makes it hard to see it any other way

I personally love the original image, but I’m really not sure how much of this has to do with familiarisation. We become set / stuck in our ways the more we live with how things have been. And this is just as applicable to our older work. Attempting the re-interpretation image has forced me to think about whether I’m attached to the original image because it’s good, or just because I’m overly familiar with it now.

Point 2. How radically different an image can be through editing

Editing / post-processing (I abhor this term personally), is a highly creative place to live. I have never believed that the work is to ‘get it right in camera’. And I’ve always enjoyed the editing / interpretive side of my photography. It’s interesting to know that an image can be edited in many different ways. Editing is an art, it is a skill. It is a life-long endeavour in learning to see what was in the image and bring out the main motifs. Editing isn’t done by learning Lightroom in a few weeks and that’s it. It can really take you places if you don’t mind departing from what was there at the time of the capture.

Point 3. How much I have changed

I don’t know if I have it in me many more to do deeply saturated colour work. I’m wondering if I may return to it in some years to come, but I’m certainly aware that the original image from 2009 isn’t something that I would do any more. There is always a trade off in your own development. I see things in the original image that I love, but I couldn’t do that now if I tried, because it’s not where my aesthetic leanings are. I’ve lost some aspects to my image making, but I’ve gained also. As I said, there is always a trade-off.

Which leads to my last point:

Point 4. The original capture was made by a different me. Edited by a new me. Perhaps this doesn’t work?

Yep, the guy who made the original shot was the ‘Bruce-Percy-2009’ edition ;-) We shed skin, we move on. I’m not too sure it’s a good thing to return to older work that was created by a different you. Because there is in some way a disconnect. I think I would shoot this scene differently now and I think it would be done differently with an aim to edit it a particular way. These days my editing and composition skills are intertwined. Where I once just went out to make images and then see what I could do with them later on. I think that when I compose shots in the field now, I already know what I’m going to do with them when I edit them.

I think if one wishes to return to older work to re-edit it. There has to be a reason. For example, if you ‘see’ something in the work that you can bring out, or enhance then I think it’s valid to return to it. But if you are trying to ‘update the work to match where you are now’, I’m not convinced it will work.

This is what I tried to do with this image. I attempted to edit it to ‘see what I would do with it now, based on who I am now’. And I’m not sure it’s a success. My reasons are, there are too many distractions in the foliage that I probably wouldn’t have shot it this way. So I’m trying to start on an image that isn’t at the right starting point for where I am now.

Conclusion

It’s fun to go back and revisit older work. You can really learn a lot about yourself in the process:

• How far have you come?

• Would you shoot the work this way now?

• What distractions in the work do you see now that you didn’t see at the time of the original creation?

• Do I want to return to the same places now, that I feel I am looking at things differently?

For me, the last point is the salient one. I am very curious to find out how I will approach photographing in Scotland now that my style has evolved. Will I find some common ground? Will I see new things?

Landscapes can teach us so much about our photography and about ourselves. Find the right landscape in your own development and it can move you forward in ways that other landscape won’t. Returning to a well known place many years later can be very interesting because you will most likely be looking for different things and you’ll therefore see it in a fresh and new way.

I’m aware that my work is always in a state of change. Nothing is ever finished. There should be no rules. Do as you please, return to older work if it’s what you feel you need to do. Re-interpretation can teach us so much. I just don’t think it will always yield better / improved results, but you’ll certainly grow from the experience.

sold out

2021, April 5-10, Price: £1,695
2021, Sept 6-11, Price: £1,695
2021, Sept 13-18, Price: £1,695

5-Day Photographic Workshop

Introduction

The small island of Eigg contains perhaps one of the most dramatic and photogenic beaches in Scotland: the Bay of Laig & the Singing Sands. With abundant geological features on each beach and the isle of Rum as a perfect backdrop, this location is a dream for any landscape photographer. 

This is a walking only workshop. All locations are reached by foot with most walks taking up to at most 30 minutes for moderately fit people

I’ve just listed two more Scottish workshops for 2021 on my workshop page. I will be going back to Eigg (it’s a favourite place of mine that I have been running a workshop on for the past decade). The island is small, we spend all of our time on mostly one beach (which is highly photogenic).

We have private rooms, in small cottages but some of the bathrooms are shared. Eigg is a small island of around 85 people, eight miles long. So there are no hotels, nothing to spend your money on, and as such, it gives a unique Scottish highland experience.

To enjoy this trip, you should be fit enough to walk for 30 minutes over uneven and boggy ground with your camera bag and tripod. The beaches are rocky in places. To get the most out of this trip I would suggest you need to be comfortable being on rocky beaches (some previous clients have not been). We spend our entire time on just two beaches, both highly photogenic.

I decided many years ago that this blog should just be about the creative arts - photography, music, whatever I think is worth talking about from a creative perspective.

I therefore chose to avoid the following: too much of my own private life, political leanings (yes, I do have them), and anything else that I think may not be appropriate for a photography blog. You all come here after all, for your love of photography.

But I am going to break my rule today by telling you that for the past 11 months I was in so much pain that I started to really worry that something very bad was happening to me. Last November I woke up with bad neck pain that seemed to stretch down into the shoulder blades of my back. It didn’t go away and after weeks of it, I realise it wasn’t going to go away. The pain got worse, and then I found that I had weakness in my left arm. I had already been suffering pain (which I assumed was arthritic) in my left hand’s middle two fingers.

Well, things just got worse. I started to have lots of headaches that reached behind my eyes. Each day was the same: I’d wake up in a lot of pain, and as the day went on, it would subside. Only to find the pain-reset button set to FULL the next morning.

I went to two Osteopaths. I went to two physiotherapists. I went to my doctor and was scheduled for an MRI. Six months later I was still in a lot of pain and I now had such weakness in my left leg that I was convinced that I had some kind of tumour or something and that my days were numbered. I was already suffering from periods of feeling very despondent about it all. There was no end in sight.

I suffered the worst pain I’ve ever experienced for 11 months. I said very little on my workshops and tours but it was hard going dealing with it.

I am glad to report that I am now 100% pain free. It has all gone, as quickly as it had arrived 11 months ago. And I wish to share with you what the underlying problem was. It was my teeth. It turned out that I grind and clench my teeth while sleeping. I’ve apparently been doing this for years, which explains the stiff neck I’ve had for a very long time. I just needed a mouth guard and some massaging to remove all the tense muscles.

I had to find a dentist that worked with TMJ (jaw dysfunction). My original dentist referred me to my doctor. My doctor was clueless and sent me for an MRI. One of the osteopaths had warned me that she thought my problem stemmed from my jaw and that I may have to look for a dentist as most of them are pretty useless at diagnosing TMJ.

I sought out a dentist that specialised in TMJ after reading about neck pain on Google. As I say: few dentists can help you but I found one who made me a custom mouth-guard to wear and confirmed I was grinding my teeth. She also suggested i go for regular head-massages to help relieve the tension in my jaw. Which is what I did.

I think the massages helped, but they didn’t cure. The mouthguard made no difference at first. But I think the combination of the two made all the difference. It took about 2 weeks before all the pain subsided.

I feel as though I’ve been given a ‘get out of jail’ card. The dread of living the rest of my life in the pain I was in has been lifted.

And I am better than I have ever been. The slightly stiff neck I had for maybe 10 years has gone. As well as other slight ailments. Seems I was suffering for a long time and didn’t know I was putting up with some pain.

I am now 100% pain free. I’ve never felt better.

So I write this with one intention: if you are suffering similar body pain. Something in your neck that you think is either a pinched nerve, or pain in your arm (nerve pain) or weakness on the side of your body : it may be your jaw that is at the heart of the problem. Seek a dentist out that specialises in TMJ and ask them to check if you are grinding your teeth.

I am pain free.

But no thanks to most of the specialists I went to see. I had to persevere.

I spent a fortune trying to find out what was causing my pain, and I had 5 health specialists unable to help me.

What fixed me was eventually a Thai masseur and a dental mouth guard.

I just feel it’s so easy to get lost in one’s pain and not see a way out of it. Seldom do we hear the success stories, of someone who found a solution and helped. For me, I was left in the dark. Google searching told me about a lot of overlapping conditions that could cause what I was suffering but few articles or forums gave me hope. If someone got fixed, they went silent.

So I hope this post today may be of help to someone. Just one person. And it’s worth it.

I’m in Turkey this week with my view camera - I own an Ebony SW23 medium-format film view camera. Whilst looking through my older entries in my blog (which I recommend you doing sometime, as there’s now quite a lot of information here as I’ve been writing it for over 10 years), I found this article. Which I felt I would like to re-post today.

—-

Originally posted on May 5th, 2014

A few months ago, I re-entered the world of the view camera. It was a decision based on a few things.

Firstly, I'd been finding that I needed perspective control over some of the landscapes I've started to shoot over the past year. Buildings, and tall features in nature were causing me issues where I felt that the subjects began to lean backwards or converge together. Using a camera (or lens) with perspective control would alleviate that issue.

However, one of the challenges of using a view camera is that of composing upside down. I've found that rather than it being a hindrance, it has been beneficial in teaching me to notice things in the frame that I wouldn't ordinarily see at the point of capture.

One aspect of the human visual system, is that once we learn what an object looks like, we tend to keep it for reference point later on. This happens with everything that we see in our daily encounters. For example, when learning to read, once we know what some particular words look like, we no longer actually 'read' them (in my mind, this is tantamount to not seeing them). We simply scan past them. Take this sentence for example. Try counting the number of 'F's in it (please count it once):

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

How many 'F's did you count? Most folks tend to count three. There are actually six. The reason why you probably got somewhere around three, is because your mind has learned to 'scan' words such as 'OF' - you don't actually read them. Instead, your brain passes over them because it learned many moons ago that it's really laborious to read words like this all the time.

Another example to consider is that of a room you know so well. Once the ornaments and furniture have been in place for a while, you tend to pass over them with your eye. But if someone comes in and re-arranges something, or changes something, you'll more than likely pick up on the change when you enter the room. Rather than having to 'see' everything, as if for the first time, each time you enter the room (which would be really exhausting on your visual system), your eye tends to pass over familiar objects.

Now, photography is really the art of being able to enjoy the subtleties and nuances of familiar objects. Like taking a still-life art class, where we are asked to look at a vase of flowers and draw it, the act of making pictures is really about noticing the details of things we take for granted.

In terms of photographic composition, when we see a objects we are familiar with, such as trees and mountains, we tend to pass over them quickly. This leads to issues where we don't notice compositional errors in our pictures until we are home staring at them on our screens.

But what if the image is turned upside down? Do you still pass over the tree in the frame below, or is your mind thrown into a state of trying to work out what the object is?

Turning an image upside down breaks our ability to pass over items within the frame easily. In an attempt to understand what we are seeing, we pay more attention to the shapes and tones of the items within the frame. Looking at the two examples on this page, I would like to suggest that when you see the upside down image, this is exactly what is happening in your brain. But when you look at the image the right-way-up, you're now back to scanning familiar objects such as trees, mountains, sky, etc.

So turning an image upside down allows us to abstract the composition down into form and tone.

I guess you may be asking - well how can I use this, if I don't have a view camera like Bruces? I'll let you into a secret - I don't just use this feature with my view-camera - I also use it when I'm editing images at home in Photoshop. It's hugely beneficial to rotate my images 180 degrees - because it allows me to notice flaws in the composition, or to see things that I wouldn't notice otherwise. The interesting thing about this is that once you correct the things you're not consciously aware of, the compositions tend to become much more relaxed and easier for your brain to take in.

So if your camera has the facility to turn your preview image upside down - it might be worth using it from time to time. Set up your composition and then flip the image 180 degrees to look at the frame and see if anything you didn't notice before pops out at you. Additionally, it's worth doing the same exercise with an image once back home and behind your computer screen.

Turning your images 180 degrees is a bit like having a workout for your visual-muscle. Perhaps it's something you might like to consider whilst out in the field, or at the very least, once back home and editing your work.

Yesterday I reposted an old blog entry about viewing images upside down. The main benefit of looking at your photographs upside down is that it forces your eye into areas of the frame that you rarely visit.

You see, I have found that we all have a predisposition to walking through the frame a certain way. In my own case, I often walk through an image from left to right, but depending on the compositional content of the picture I will either start from bottom-left and end up at the top-right, or I’ll start at the top-left and end at the bottom-right.

Left to right walking

In each ‘walk’ described above, I essentially ‘blank out’ the red regions of the image. In other words, if I walk from bottom-left to top-right, I spend very little time in the top-left and bottom right areas of the picture (see diagrams for a clearer illustration of this).

Until I turn them upside down that is.

That’s when I find that my eye is now forced to roam into regions of the image that I didn’t when I first walked through it.

Right to Left walking

Over the years I have been teaching workshops I have found that out of a group of six participants, two-thirds of them follow the same flow that I have whilst walking through an image. They start bottom left and end top-right, or if the subject demands it they start top-left and finish bottom-right.

Blind Spots?

I’ve come to the conclusion that regardless of whether my ‘theory is correct’, we all have visual blind spots when we look at an image. It may be due to how the composition is constructed, but the fact is that we spend more time in certain areas of the image than other areas, and those areas we don’t spend time in - are areas we often don’t visit.

This is a handicap of sorts. Because it means that we are visually blind to certain areas of the frame. This can affect us whilst outside composing our photographs and also while editing them.

So yesterday, I suggested that if it’s at all possible to review your images upside down, you should do so. It’s simply because our eyes tend to walk through an image a certain way, blanking out regions of the photograph that may be problematic to other viewers. By turning the image upside down, your eye is forced to enter into regions of the image it wouldn’t have done if it were the right way up. And by doing that, you are forced to notice things about the image that you were originally blind to.

You are effectively seeing the image anew, and you are being forced to confront areas of the picture that you were perhaps weak at working with at the time of capture.

We are all visually blind. I like to think that photography is the pursuit of learning to see again - of noticing the things we have a tendency to pass over. Turning images upside down can aid you in working around your visual blind spot.

Try it for yourself

With all of this in mind, try it with your own images. Ones you are happy with, and ones you are not so happy with. You can learn so much by rotating them. Do you notice things you didn’t see before? If you do, then think about why that is. Perhaps you have some blind spots when you walk through an image.

Printing is the final stage in finishing your images. If you don’t print, you are trusting your monitor 100%. I’ve learnt that even if my monitor is very tightly profiled and calibrated correctly, I still can’t see certain discrepancies in the image until it is printed. And once I see it in print, I am now able to notice it on the monitor also.

So each time I come round to preparing images for a new book, I print every single one of them. I’ve done this now for the last two books and it has allowed me to get the best out of my work. I have often found just about every image needs some further work to tune it as best as it can be. For me, that extra 5% or 10% is crucial because I think printed images are more exposed, more vulnerable to inconsistencies than a computer monitor will show.

Through this process, I have also learned to ‘interpret’ what my monitor is showing me. I now understand that shadows and highlights and hues in those areas are more obvious in the print than on monitor (yes, I’ve profiled and adjusted the black point of my monitor). I have also learned that colour casts become more visible in print than on the monitor.

I think most importantly for me, is the luminosity or ‘dynamics’ of the print that I’ve noticed more in print. The eye is adaptable, and after staring at a monitor for too long, the eye adjusts and you start to believe things that aren’t true. We can convince ourselves that a duller luminance is brighter than it actually is. For instance, what you may interpret as white in the image may actually turn out to be around 50% L: a mid-grey tone. Printing out helps you recognise if the image is as vibrant as you think it is.

So a few weeks ago, I asked Neil Barstow from Colourmanagement.net to build me a custom profile for the Epson Soft Proofing 205 paper. This paper is a pretty good standard paper to convey what the images will be like when printed on an offset press.

I printed the Verification test image that I bought from him, and compared it with the proofing switched on in Photoshop.

I’m really pleased to have a ‘standard’ to print to. I can evaluate my images for offset printing.

One final thought: when you send your actual files to the printer for printing, I always send a printed copy of them. You can’t get more truthful than a hard-copy and I think it is always prudent to give this to your printer, as it means that you can avoid any possibility that their colour management is different from yours. They should be able to match the offset press to your hard copy prints.

A few days ago I began work on proofing the images for inclusion in my next book. As suspected, I’ve found loads of issues with the images once printed. Some of them it’s to do with the blacks and white points of the images, but also, clipping that is incurred by the reduced gamut of the paper I’m proofing onto. I am finding I am having to calm the higher tonal registers to allow the image to sit on the page without any flat-wall-clipping occurring.

I knew I would have a challenge ahead of me, in terms of sequencing the work. In the proof snapshot you see above, I spent a lot of time matching images to each other so that images on the left and right page compliment or sit well with each other. For me, this is about choosing the right images to begin with. Then once I have them sitting next to each other (I use View / 2-up vertical in Photoshop to view two images side by side, I can notice if there are luminosities that jar between the two side by side images, or colour casts - perhaps in the blacks that work against each other. For instance, one black desert may have more blue in it while the complimentary image that is to sit on the opposite page may have more of a reddish black. These things can sometimes be ‘tuned’ to sit better together and other times, I just find that the image doesn’t work when its colour balance is tuned away from its current colour temperature.

To me, this is ‘mastering’. I am trying to get the entire set of images to sit well together, and for that to happen, it’s never really about subject matter, or geographic location. It’s all about whether the tones and colours (or perhaps for some of you, monochromatic tones) that matters. Images have to sit on opposite pages in a way that they work together as a set. But the work also has to flow through the book as well.

I’m really enjoying this process. Images that I thought were nice, become something special when I print them out and notice further adjustments and enhancements. It’s like putting the icing on the cake.

Printing is indispensable in really getting the best out of your work. And it is giving me a lot of confidence in knowing the work is as good as it can be for publishing in my forthcoming book.

It is an inevitable fact that your camera gear is going to malfunction at some point. Especially if you keep on travelling the law of averages simply mean that at some point something is going to go wrong.

A few weeks ago I travelled with my Ebony field camera only to discover that two of the lenses were broken because the shutters had failed. I also found that one of my film backs wouldn’t wind on correctly, and just wound the film all the way through the back.

I’ve had many other incidents where lenses have given up on me (usually due to a screw becoming loose while travelling on unsealed road). I’ve also had the occasional mishap where the entire camera body as slipped out of my hands only to drop into a river (completely unsalvageable), or drop onto some ice and the prism smash.

It’s inevitable that at some point, things are going to go wrong.

I usually travel with spare items. When I travel with my Hasselblad outfit I tend to carry two bodies, three film backs and some overlap in lenses. Or to put it another way - if you take two wide angle lenses such as a 20mm and 24mm then you’re at least covered if your 24mm fails. I also make sure I travel with a duplicate standard lens.

The way I see it, is that there are certain ‘core’ focal lengths that you need to cover for failure. For me that’s the equivalent of a 24mm and 50mm. So in my Hasselblad medium format system that equates to 50mm and 80mm. I always go with two 80mm lenses and I double up on the wide angle with a 40mm and 50mm. Both are useful in their own ways but they can also work as a substitute for the other if one fails.

I also travel with two light meters, several cable releases and even a spare ball head, and also a complete dupliate set of ND grad filters (stored away in a small Pelican case in my main luggage).

Having backups is necessary, but you don’t have to exactly duplicate things as your camera bag may just become unwieldy. So if you’re keen to double up, you just need to think more along the lines of maybe cheaper, less sophisticated (or pricey) items to carry as backups, and hopefully lighter and smaller.

You may think ‘that’s completely out of my budget’, but the truth is - if you’ve spent a few thousand dollars on a trip somewhere, it’s going to hurt pretty badly if you get there and find you can’t make any photos because your camera is dead.

One other way to get around this issue, is to travel with friends who have similar setups to yourself. Got a Nikon camera and your friend also has one, then you can share lenses.

I can’t state how important it is to have a back up for your gear. You don’t have to spend a fortune doubling up on everything but you do perhaps need to think about backups for the more critical components (camera, main lenses you tend to use), and a cheap ball head.

Ultimately, you will never be 100% failsafe. That’s just life for you. But by having the spares, you will have peace of mind.

One last thing - if you are travelling with backups, best travel with a 2nd small camera bag (I stuff my spare bag in my main luggage - usually filled with clothes) so I have a 2nd bag to put my backup items in. Storing your backups in the same bag on location is just asking for trouble, and if say your bag gets stollen or trashed, than not only does your main system get trashed, but also your backup items as well.

So here’s how I pack for going away:

1. My main luggage has inside it a small Pelican case with my resin filters (not glass as they will break) in it.

2. My main luggage has my main camera back inside it - either flattened down, or if I can’t do that - I fill it with clothing so it become part of the luggage space of the bag.

3. My tripod + two ball heads are in my main luggage

4. I travel to the airport with a trolley bag with all my camera gear and laptop in it.

5. For film, I store it in a small ‘personal item’ case that I am allowed to carry onto the plane along with my main trolley bag.

The reason for having the trolley bag, and also the main camera bag is that while I am on location shooting, I put my spare items in the trolley bag, and port all my main camera items into my camera bag. It ensures that all my backup items are in a separate bag - in the car, so they are less likely to get damaged along with my main items if an accident happens.

Tonight I’m working on print evaluations of the images for my forthcoming Hálendi book. It’s a lot of fun just seeing my images in print, or in the example below, showing the page layout.

Seeing these two images is a reminder of why I love to go into the interior in the winter time.

I’ve just completed the sequencing and ‘grading’ of the images that will be in the Hálendi book. I feel I’m getting closer to the completion of the book.

I just need to proof the work now, and make sure that what I am seeing on my monitor holds up when it’s printed. I’ve been a little bit delayed in doing this for the simple reason of running out of ink for my printer late last week! Seems it’s impossible to buy ink for next day delivery here in the UK and I can only assume it’s because I’m using an older printer.

Proofing, as the name suggests, is about simulating how the images will look once printed on the paper of your choice. It’s really useful to help you figure out if there will be any significant loss of contrast, colour or anything in your interpretation that is critical to keep. The reason why you may lose something while printing is because each paper has a reduced contrast ratio and gamut of colours. So something will get lost in the conversion.

Since the contrast ratio of a piece of paper is much smaller than what a computer monitor can display, some images may not transfer well when being squeezed down to work on paper, and compromises will have to be made to allow the image to be acceptable to you.

Every device out there has its own physical limits to the gamut (range of colours) it can reproduce. Colour management is often more about managing how you deal with out-of-gamut colours as you move from one device with a large colour gamut to one with a smaller one.

This is where rendering intents come in. Intents allow you to chose how ‘out of gamut’ colours are treated. You essentially get to choose how the compromise is made. For example, one rendering intent says ‘any colour that is easy to transfer over with no change, do it, but any colour that is outside the gamut of the new device, move the colour to the nearest available one’. You have a options and the best way to work out which rendering intent to use, is to proof the image on your monitor and flip through all the rendering intents to find one that gives you the closest match to what you hope the image will look like in print.

Truth is, rendering intent should be chosen on a case by case basis per image + media combo. One image may print well on one paper but less so on another. Experimenting (in proof mode) with different rendering intents per image on your chosen paper will give you the best compromise. You may find that one rendering intent does a better job at giving you a closer rendition of what you intended.

Proofing is important because it allows you to cut out a lot of guess work. You essentially see the image as it will look once printed - on the chosen media, while saving on paper and ink.

In the image above, I’ve got proofing switched off. When you edit your work, you should always work with proofing switched off. You are editing an image which is neutral of any medium you print it on.

When you come to print it, that is when you should make a copy of the master file and perhaps name it for the paper of choice it’s intended to be printed on. Then while proofing is switched on for your duplicate file, make adjustments that are relevant for the paper you are proofing under.

The image above illustrates what may happen when proofing is enabled. You can now see that the whites of the border have dulled down a lot (to simulate the colour of the paper). I notice the two images have less ‘presence’, but after a few seconds my eye adapts and I start to believe that the images look as powerful as they did with the proofing is switched off. This is key.

The eye is highly adaptable, to a point. We’re also extremely poor at judging relative colour. Have two slightly different prints and place them in separate rooms, and walk between both rooms - I doubt you will notice any changes in the images. But side by side - that’s when you’ll notice colour differences. So the eye is easily fooled.

Most of the time when you proof, the images should still stand up, even if it is now being simulated on a less contrasty, less dynamic medium. But occasionally I find some aspect of the image that is important to me becomes lost. In these cases it’s either that you’re working with the wrong medium. Certain papers excel at colder / whiter images than others. A warm paper will smother snow scenes for instance. So you need to experiment and find the right paper with the right gamut for your image, or try to make adjustments (with proofing switched on) to see if you can regain what you lost. I usually find the solution is in the former option. Not all image work well on all papers so paper choice is critical.

In the case of my own proofing this week for my book, I have no choice in paper. I am using a proofing paper that gives me a reasonably close rendition of what an offset press can do. So I’ve found one or two of the images has required a lot of work to get it to sit well on the page.

It took about three weeks to complete the images for the Hálendi book.

You may be wondering what I had to do, other than just put them in a good order and print them? I rarely print all of my work, it would just be far too time intensive for me to do this and I realise when I publish them on the web, they are about 90% of the way there. Or they way I like to look at it - 100% there, but when I come to print them, I’ll notice things that need to be tightened up and the final image will now be 105%. That extra 5% is the ‘excellence’ in what we do - that extra bit of ‘going a little bit further with the work’.

Truth be told, if you care about your photography, it’s something we all do - we agonise over the smaller details.

Proofs are a way of verifying to me that the images are right. But there’s more to it than this. These proofs will be sent to the printer as a hard-copy - to tell them ‘look, this is what we expect to see in the final print’. Sending files on their own is not enough as each offset press has their own custom ‘colour management’ or maybe ‘no colour management’ in place. So the hard-copies are references for them.

But I find that going through the slow progress if printing 100 images is immersive and instructive. Although I had done an initial image selection and sequencing, I still found about 10 images were dropped from the final book and about 5 or 6 images were added in their place. Sequencing was tightened up as I felt there was a broken flow to the work as you walk from one page to another.

Seems I had to print them to find this out. Seems I needed to go through each image tightening up the tones and colour casts to ‘marry’ with each other to notice find it out also. Seems I had to live with the work over several weeks of printing and editing.

And rarely did I find an image just went straight to print. Every one of them needed work done to make them sit on the page. In some instances the image was too dark, too light, too soft, too hard, lacking contrast, requiring contrast reduction.

Printing always teaches me about my deficiencies. The way I interpret transmitted electronic light from a computer monitor is not the same way I look at light reflected off a piece of paper. I seem to ‘see differently’ and I know it is not a unique trait that I have, but one we all have.

So what’s next? Well we’re still about six months away at least from a printed book in my hands. The book artwork has to be finalised and the materials chosen for the book. We’ve had some price quotes through for soft-back and hard-back books. This is always a trade-off as I don’t have a large audience, so a smaller print run is important, and with smaller print runs the costs go up if you want to go hard-back. Quite a bit. So we will see.

Then when we send the final work to the printer, I would like this time to turn up for the actual printing to see it in progress.

I am going to go quiet now on the book. The rest of the process isn’t that interesting for most, so it’s time for me to talk about other things on this blog.