Tag Archives: Bruce Percy

Nervousness and questions of interpretation

I should be finishing the first page on wind farms (or working on a lecture for tomorrow!), but I wanted to share some reflections that I have found I can articulate quite clearly at the moment…

There are good reasons not to publish photographs. Some are very good reasons - the best reason of all probably being that the photograph in question is rubbish! Rubbish? Is that too harsh? How about “does not correspond to the pre-visualisation”?! (By the way, Alan Ross has just written an interesting post about Ansel Adams’ first moment of real pre-visualisation, if you’ve not come across this story before.) Of course, some are just rubbish!

However, many are not. Many might even be rather good: they are technically fine, they are reasonably well composed, and the exposure is sufficiently on target for it to be usable. And yet… and yet…

The safety of darkness (Loch Leven, December 2012)

… I don’t then click that “Export” button in Lightroom - the first step in moving an image onto my website and making it available to others to see. It’s not that I worry about what people will think of it: there are a select group of friends, particularly on Twitter, whose opinion I greatly value, but I wouldn’t not publish something just because I thought someone might not like it, nor would I publish something just because I thought someone might like it! Those who know me personally will know that I’m not really that bothered by what it is that others think in this kind of context.

The welcoming warmth of the cold (Loch Leven, December 2012)

No, the problem - if problem it is - is that I am not happy to share the image. My finger metaphorically (and sometimes literally) hangs over Lightroom’s “Export” button, and I study the image once more. And thoughts appear, almost as involuntary spasms in my brain: “it’s just another hillside”, “haven’t I photographed XYZ frequently enough?”, “what do I think I’m really adding to the world with this?” - and so on. Whilst some of these stop me, none of them necessarily do so. But there is another thought that does. So I don’t then click that button - and then nothing appears for others to see. Others being people like you, reading this. What is that thought? Before I come to that, it’s worth taking a step back.

The problem - if problem it is - is simply that in the meantime I know I have sufficient technical ability to be able to produce a certain kind of image and for it to come out reasonably well. I have many technical skills still to learn and don’t deny that, but I have come a long way from relying on the ‘auto’ setting! Now I’m wanting to inject more into the image, more than compositional ability, exposure, and so on. Now I seek to impart meaning through it.

First flight (Loch Leven, December 2012)

However, the problem - if problem it is - is that this meaning is not just down to me. Yesterday, the wonderful Deborah Parkin released this photograph, which I interpreted as the child (Deborah’s daughter, Fleur) being content and self-assured; Lucy Telford, another talented photographer, said that it “Captures that self-contained feeling - poignant - signs of growing up, going inside oneself, inevitable but somehow sad.” Deborah responded to us both, noting that we saw the image differently, but with some commonalities. It is stating the obvious, but so much of the interpretation of an image is down to the viewer. Sometimes this chimes with the intentions of the photographer (for example, I understand from their interaction on Twitter and the comment she left that Rob Hudson’s interpretation of Lucy’s recent new image corresponds closely to her initial vision), but sometimes it does not. And what makes me far more nervous than someone misinterpreting an image, is someone interpreting it correctly.

The great escape into freedom (Loch Leven, December 2012)

The problem - if problem it is - centres around how I deal with that. On the one hand, as I said, I am rather stubborn and that means I don’t worry about what other people think of what I do, but there is another side to that. I am aware that I see some things differently to others. In Assynt in autumn 2011 Bruce Percy looked at images I had made in one of the workshop’s critique sessions, and said something like, “ah yes, you see differently” - not as a judgement, just as a comment. What I see, and what I want others to see, varies, of course. All the images in this posting come from a morning last December, spent on the shore of Loch Leven, watching the sun come up - except that I wasn’t that bothered about seeing the sun itself, of course - and they communicate something for me. Should I give them titles that simply say “Loch Leven, 2012″, or should I give them titles that point to my mood at the time? Obviously, I have done the latter, but it takes effort. I was reflecting on a particularly difficult autumn teaching semester at the university - difficult not because of the students, of course, but because of management, and I was wanting to reflect on those experiences. Whether they communicate the same thing for you as they did for me, I don’t know. Do I want to explain what they do for me beyond what I have done here? No, I do not. But do I want to share these images in case you work it out? Of that, I’m not always sure.

The last dark refuge (Loch Leven, December 2012)

Despite what some may think, I’m a fairly reticent kind of person and do not like to give much away. Clicking that “Export” button in Lightroom is the first step not only to others being able to critique an image (“it’s just another hillside!” being an entirely fair response!), but more importantly, it gives others - that’s you - something of me. You get to see something of me, and I’m nervous about showing that, giving something of myself away. I’ve described a related issue in connection to photographing a model (the first image on this page), but my photography is also giving something of me. What you see might not be what I think I am showing, but… it might be. The danger - if danger it is! - is that you see what it is that I am seeing, as happened in the Lucy/Rob example given above, and that makes me nervous. My stubbornness means I don’t mind what people think of my images (good/bad/indifferent) because - as I don’t yet tire of saying - I am making photographs for myself, nobody else. They explore things for me, they explain and dissect and reassemble thoughts, they reveal hidden depths to me, and make me reflect on who I am and what I am doing. And now I’m supposed to share that with others, with you? Are you surprised I’m nervous about doing so, that I often can’t quite make my finger click that “Export” button?

Resignation, followed by return (Loch Leven, December 2012)

And yet - getting over that and sharing images, sharing myself, is also a privilege. So thank you for taking the time to read this posting, to look at the images, to think about them. Now, I had better click “Publish” before I change my mind and delete this posting…

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Why workshop?

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A while ago I mentioned on Twitter that I had booked myself a place on a photography workshop. Someone commented on this in what felt like a throw-away remark, saying they had never seen the point of going on workshops. So I - in 140 characters! - sought to explain why this was important to me. Now that I’m just back from the workshop I booked on at the time, I thought I’d try and say more about it, and include some images from the time away (these are just the digital ones - I have yet to take the film rolls to be developed).

Achnahaird Bay

Firstly, it’s worth noting that I have no formal artistic training (unlike my correspondent, who has, I think, a degree in art/photography), and so for me, I hope that a workshop can serve partly to teach me something. Secondly, having a pretty intense full-time job means that if I get the time to go and photograph for a few days and do nothing but think about photography, that is really fantastic! The week was a proper holiday, and I didn’t read a single academic text whilst away (even though I did have a book with me… I rarely travel without one!).

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, engaging with a photographer leading a workshop is about having someone critique what I do and help me move forward in my thinking and my photography.

Loch Bad a' Ghaill

My week away was with Bruce Percy, who has been running workshops for several years now. Exactly two years before going on this Assynt workshop, I went (with my neighbour, Mabel Forsyth) to Torridon on one of his weekend workshops. That was a great experience, as I wrote about here at the time. So I was confident the week in Assynt would be a good week.

There are some people who seem to be workshop-regulars, going from one to the next all the time. I am not like that: I have attended a couple of other day-workshops in recent years, but have not been on residential workshops other than the one in Torridon and this one in Assynt. So if you’re wanting me to offer comparisons, I can’t do so (though I have now heard quite a few horror stories of other workshops, some by really famous photographers… and no, I won’t say more on this). My main purpose in going to Assynt with Bruce was that I wanted to rediscover something about my own reasoning and motivation for making photographs - especially landscapes - that I had found increasingly difficult to identify in recent times. I felt I knew enough theory in terms of operating my cameras (though of course, Bruce was able to help me improve in certain areas, such as my exposures and hyperfocal focusing). But I felt I needed input on more important things, especially aspects of composition and how and why I frame the way I do or give more attention to certain things in a scene, and what all that says about my own ‘visioning process’ (sorry, I think that is a rather horrible phrase, but I can’t think of a more suitable one; pre-visualisation covers some of it, but is not the same thing).

Glencanisp Lodge, with view to Suilven

Of course, this is not something that I discussed in any detail with Bruce before or during the workshop, because I knew from previous experience that this might come anyway - and it did. One of the two key things for me in thinking about a workshop is that I have to like the photographs that the workshop leader makes, and I really love Bruce’s work - it offers depth and challenge, simplicity and elegance, in both his landscapes and portraits. Of course, I have no desire to create images that are like Bruce’s, even if I could do so, since they represent his vision and not mine; however, I feel I can relate to his vision. I have come to realise that the other key thing for me is that I have to feel I can connect to the leader, and that he or she can connect to me. Of course, I’m privileged in that I was able to go on the Torridon workshop with Bruce and I therefore knew him a little already; and we’ve also become friends over the last couple of years - that is not something that is necessarily open to people who don’t live in the next neighbourhood to a workshop leader! But it is possible to at least gain some impression of the person from their images and their writings (such as their blog) and this offers good clues. And, of course, you can trust my recommendation that Bruce is a great workshop leader!

So, is it possible to sum up what it was that I gained from Bruce’s input? There are a number of things that come to mind, but the main one for me can be outlined in the following terms. At the beginning of the week, he noted that he sometimes found it difficult to understand exactly what I was seeing and why I had gone for a certain composition (I did say this was perhaps because the images were no good, but Bruce disagreed!). A day or two later he began to suggest that my visualising of scenes was perhaps too selective - I tended to visualise one or two really significant elements in a potential image, but I did not always frame these in a way that meant they were as apparent as I wanted them to be, whether this be unusual shapes, repeated lines, patterns on hills, the interplay between different elements in a scene, and so on. This is not simply about excluding extraneous elements - even if I intended to crop the image from whatever I saw in the viewfinder - although this is also a factor (see the tree image I discussed here recently and the grass in the bottom right of the image: 1, 2). Rather, for me, it is about expanding the view of the scene as a whole, about being able to encompass the elements that form the shapes, colours and tones in a way that enables a more holistic image to emerge. That is what I want to achieve, and I know that I do that, but not always as consistently as I would like.

At Achnahaird Bay, looking south

Of course, this is just me. Other participants will hopefully have found something in Bruce’s critiques (there were 2-3 hours of image critiques on every day but one; other participants also commented on images) that helped them with whatever they thought they needed - or perhaps that they didn’t know they needed.

A month or two ago I removed all the landscape galleries from this site. There really was a lot of rubbish there, in amidst some images that I liked. Before going to Assynt I had begun the process of recreating the galleries and they are gradually going to reappear, but this time with far fewer, more carefully selected images. In general, I make photographs for myself and not for others: being clearer about what I’m doing is therefore essential, and I feel the week away with Bruce has enabled me to see much more clearly exactly what kind of images I want to create, and given me more tools to enable me to go about doing that. Those are the images I want to show here.

In essence, I feel I am approaching my photography with new confidence, a clearer sense of why I’m doing it, and how to go about achieving what I want. So in answer to my correspondent: that’s why I wanted to go on this workshop!

New book from Bruce Percy - first impressions

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This lunch time I went to pick up my pre-ordered copy of Bruce Percy’s new book from his office. Here are some snapshots of the book on my living room table (that really don’t do it justice - sorry about the yellow ceiling light, forgot to fix white balance!):

Bruce Percy, The Art of Adventure

There are 40 images with descriptive text, laid out like this:

Bruce Percy, The Art of Adventure, sample page

About 3/4 of the images are landscapes from all over the world, the remainder street portraiture from some of Bruce’s trips to various countries in Asia and South America.

It’s a fabulous book - it feels lovely, looks beautiful, and the images are printed fantastically well - they almost feel three dimensional. In fact, they look as if they could almost be prints that have been bound into a book - this book is itself a work of art, a thing of great beauty. Michael Kenna has written a very lovely introduction. And I’m very touched that Bruce has mentioned me in the acknowledgements (I was involved in proof-reading the text earlier this year).

Bruce Percy

Oh, and yes, I did get a signed one…

The book is available now from Half Light Press (and at the moment only from them - don’t fall for Amazon’s cheaper price, because Amazon won’t be able to deliver them at this price and will simply tell you it is not available). I think Beyond Words will also be selling them soon. Half Light also have offers with selected prints from Bruce. The first edition is limited to 1000 copies, and when I picked mine up earlier today, substantial numbers were being packed up to be sent off (all sold pre-publication).

I’ve bought quite a few photography books this year, and this and Michael Kenna’s Huangshan are the two highlights.

BUY ONE! In fact, BUY TWO and give one away to someone you love…!

Alternative aspect ratios

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Bruce Percy, one of my favourite photographers, posted another interesting entry on his blog a few days ago. As you may know if you’ve read other entries on my blog, he is not only a gifted photographer, but also offers brilliant photography workshops. This particular blog posting was (provocatively) called “Abolish 3:2 (35mm)” and discussed aspect ratios: the size/shape of the viewfinders and resultant images in cameras. From the early days of 35mm film cameras to today’s DSLR cameras (as well as most compacts etc.), the format has stayed the same: all images are a multiple of 3 x 2. This makes for relatively long images, horizontally or vertically, but it’s not a very “natural” format, particularly for landscape imagery. After all, we don’t see the world in this way: our (peripheral) vision is much broader than this, and we see more in all directions. I have to say that I think the 3:2 format can work well for portraits because it can be used for the length of the human body. But for landscapes, a “squarer” format often tends to work better, either a real square (i.e. with sides of exactly the same length) or nearly square (such as 4×5 or 6×7 or similar). One of things Bruce tries to encourage is visualisation: “seeing” the image as you want it to be, even before you squeeze the shutter. He’s written quite a bit about this in his ebooks too (especially in “The Visual Sense“). His blog posting was picked up by others (for example, The Photographer’s Ephemeris and then Tim Parkin, and a lively discussion took place about all this (on Twitter).

However, it is not always easy to visualise in a different aspect ratio to the one the camera offers. Tim Parkin pointed to a product that did this for his DSLR (though Tim is mostly a large format, not a DSLR photographer). That seemed like a good idea, but even if it were available for my camera, it seemed like an unnecessary expense to a poor person like me, so here is my version of the same thing for my Nikon D90, manufactured at great expense (er… yes… that is a wonky piece of card I’ve cut to size and jammed in behind the plastic cover of my screen…):

4x5 template for D90

It does present problems when I want to see all the settings, as some of the key menu options are hidden under the bottom piece of card:

4x5 template for D90

Nonetheless, once I remembered to use the “liveview” function on the camera rather than composing through the viewfinder, it did change how I went about composing: rather than guessing at what a 4×5 ratio image would look like, I could really see it on the screen. It is stating the obvious to note that it does make quite a difference to see the image in the proportions I am ultimately aiming for - even if I intend to crop the image later.

4x5 template for D90

Of course, what I want next is a quick and easy way to convert this template to a square format.

And for my film camera… er… I can see the argument for a new investment coming…

The wonder of film

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This evening I needed to be in nearby Musselburgh, where I would be waiting for half-an-hour at the harbour. Musselburgh has a lovely small harbour, and at the moment all the sailing boats are ‘parked’ in the car park round the harbour (in spaces that are marked ‘dinghy parking’!).

Stephanie, photographed on Ilford FP4 plus (ISO125)

On the way out of the house, I took my camera, tripod, spirit level, filters, a 28mm and a 50mm lens - and looked forward to capturing some of these boats and the harbour scenes. I took my favourite film camera, the old Nikon FM2, with one of the last three rolls of Fuji Sensia that I have: this is a bit of a trip down memory lane for me, since I used to use Sensia a lot before switching to Fuji Velvia for colour landscapes; Fuji have recently announced they are stopping the production of Sensia so I have just bought three rolls of it to play with for the last time. It was fairly dark when I arrived in the harbour, and as I took my bag out of the car and began to set up, I realised that I had left my light meter at home - since the FM2′s slowest shutter speed before getting to the bulb setting is 1 second, the camera’s meter would be useless and I would have had to more or less guess all my exposures… so, sadly, I packed everything away again and went to buy a newspaper instead. Next week, when I expect to be there again, I’ll remember the meter!

I’ve read two nice postings on other people’s websites recently about using film. The first one was from the great Bruce Percy, who discussed how much he enjoyed using a particular kind of Kodak Portra film for a recent trip he made to Ethiopia and then, referring to Canon’s 5D digital camera, noted:

I get a lot of correspondence from people wanting to know how to get the same look with their 5D. You can’t.

If you want the look of film, then shoot film.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that! The other piece I’ve come across is more of a short essay by the wonderful Max Marinucci (though the second part describes how he develops film, so you may want to skim read that bit if you just want to pick up on his philosophy about film):

…patience and parsimony are virtues to be cultivated and nourished. When shooting film, you immediately accept the fact that it may be a little while before you see the fruits of your work and, by living with this, you will become a more disciplined shooter, which will in turn carry on to your digital side as well. It also means that shooting everything in sight without any thought into basics like light and composition is out of the question since you only have 24-36 shots in a roll of 35mm and it makes no sense in spending time/money developing simple, careless snapshots. This is a valuable exercise in restraint and it brings us to actually THINK before we shoot. Would you have taken a picture of your toes with film just because you can? I sincerely doubt it.

Although I use my Nikon D90 digital camera a lot, there is something wonderful about film that cannot be beaten by the more ‘clinical’ nature of digital… and it has to do with all these key components of photography that often go missing in the techno-madness that camera manufacturers obscure from us as they add ever more silly functions to their cameras: patience, composition, light, perspective… I’m not a dogmatic film shooter: of course digital cameras have their place (I couldn’t be involved in the same way in the African film festival if I wasn’t using digital, and I do like my D90). I think it is just a question of being reminded of that at times, of using film and digital in different circumstances as appropriate, and above all, appreciating film for all the wonder it can bring to the craft of photography.

Thoughts on ‘progress’ and loyalty and contemporary cameras

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One of the (to my mind) coherent arguments against digital cameras is that in the longer-term they cost more than film cameras. The idea behind this is that with a film camera, once you achieve a certain quality of body/lens, there is only limited additional quality that can be achieved by replacing the body. So whilst it might make sense to buy new lenses periodically (that is another argument entirely that I will perhaps return to another time), there is generally little point in replacing a body unless you’re a professional who needs a faster autofocus, motorwinder or whatever. But for most of us, we can buy a decent film camera body and be done with it, just spending our hard-earned money on occasional lenses. Then we can direct our attention towards actually taking photographs with all this expensive stuff we’ve bought.

With digital, it’s been a whole other issue, as bodies have improved remarkably over time. Ken Rockwell describes this rather memorably as ‘digital rot‘, and Bruce Percy and many others have also made similar points in the past: people who buy digital cameras will tend to want to buy new digital cameras when ‘the next model’ comes out. In the longer-term, therefore, digital shooting costs more than film shooting, even taking into account developing and printing costs, because you buy new bodies every few years. With digital cameras, the manufacturers keep telling us, there is a marked difference in newer models: better metering and white balancing to make sure the images are better exposed, Active-D Lighting to deal with light/dark differentials (which is what Nikon calls it, I’m sure Canon will offer an equivalent though I don’t know what it is called), more megapixels, greater dynamic range, and so on…

And yes, to be sure, there is a huge difference in Nikon’s early digital cameras and more modern ones (for example, the professional level D1H that was discontinued in 2006 had a 2.66 megapixel sensor, compared to the 12 in my D90). However, I am increasingly unconvinced that all this is changing as rapidly in contemporary times as it did in the past. I write this as the ‘replacement’ for the D90 is hitting the shops, Nikon’s D7000. Yes, it looks very good, and I’m sure many people will buy it, and some of those people will make absolutely stunning images with it. But is it really so-o-o-o much better than the D90 that I should feel the need to go out and buy one?

But… but… the pixel-counter-nutheads will say, how can you ask that? Surely it’s newer, it’s better, it has more megapixels (16, as opposed to the D90′s 12… as if that really mattered! - see below), it can shot 6fps instead of ‘just’ 4.5fps, it puts the milk on your cornflakes for you and makes your tea… ok, probably not those last two.

For all practical purposes, in the DX camera range (Nikon’s cropped sensor cameras), the D90 has , until now, probably been Nikon’s most user-friendly digital camera producing better images than anything else in this price range. It perhaps even surpasses the D300, as this is heavier (though made of metal and therefore sturdier), with less easily accessible options (though they do shoot a little faster and have one or two additional imaging features). Unless you’re a professional taking hundreds of images every day, this is no better than the D90, as to all intents and purposes they use the same sensor and processor.

Now the D7000 has come along. It is an improvement on the D90, but I don’t feel that it gives me that much more than the D90 has given me already. To be sure, if I was now looking to upgrade from the D40 as I did a year ago (Nikon only list the D40x on their website - the D40 was much the same with a 6mp sensor), I would seriously consider a D7000 as well as the D90, but having the D90 now doesn’t make me want to move to the D7000.

I think we need to get away from the mentality that just because the camera manufacturers tell us that something is new and better, we believe them! They cynically presume an inherent disloyalty to the products they themselves sell us: we are no longer supposed to feel so attached to our cameras, instead willing to give them up for something ‘better’ just because it fits their marketing cycles. What we really have are fantastic machines that 10 years ago would have been way beyond anyone’s imagination, and I for one, feel I barely scratch the surface of what my camera can do. I have taken about 10,000 shots with my D90, but know that I am continually learning how to use it better. The early great photographers always said, ‘know your camera so that it becomes second-nature to use it’. I’m quite happy to admit that only after the first 2-3,000 or so shots did I feel I was beginning to really understand what my camera was doing and what I could expect of it. Getting to that point opens me up to using it more creatively, to experimenting with some of the capabilities that lie hidden in the menus or the way it interacts with particular lenses - and only once I’ve got all that sorted out, can I engage with it much more intuitively and create images that centre on the key themes of lighting, composition, visualisation and so on. Buying a new camera gets in the way of that, at least for me - I found it initially quite difficult to move from the D40 to the D90, as certain things kept not happening that I was expecting to happen, and other things did happen that I hadn’t expected!

The only real upgrade at this time, I think, is in format. If I was going to change from the D90, the DX sensor D7000 is not where I’d go. If money was not an issue, I would be interested in the full-sized sensor D700 or D3x - but that would in turn necessitate other lenses…

So if you’re anything like me, don’t fall for the camera manufacturers’ hype. If you have a great camera that you like (and most cameras can be great cameras in the hands of those who know how to use them properly), then stick with it - show it loyalty, and it’ll reward you with images that emerge from your intuitive abilities and interests. And you’ll be doing the environment a favour too…!

—

PS The difference in the D7000′s 16 megapixels and the D90′s 12 is as follows:
D7000: 4,928 x 3,264 - D90: 4,288 x 2,848
This means 640 x 416 pixels more, crammed into the same sized sensor (which brings its own problems, as I understand it…) - if my maths is right, this is about a 13% increase in image size. In practical terms, unless printing huge advertising hoardings, this is totally irrelevant. In fact, even for advertising hoardings, it’s probably irrelevant since you’d never look at the image closely enough to see the individual dots that make up the image. If you want proof of this, the next time you see an advertisement for shampoo at a bus stop, go right up to the image and look very closely at the model’s face and hair to see all the little pixels that make up her ‘smooth’ skin and even ‘smoother’ hair - they are anything but smooth when viewed closeup! But we don’t normally do that, and that is what makes these small differences so unimportant in large prints. Get over the megapixel mania and think about how you produce sharper images using the light you have and the lenses you use - it’s about art, not pixel-counts!

Photojournalism and street portraiture

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Yesterday I was listening to a very interesting podcast from the BBC called Every Picture Tells a Story. The presenter, Razia Iqbal, muses on the ongoing significance of photographs in news reporting. The programme is sometimes a bit unstructured and doesn’t offer very much that is new to those who engage with these issues anyway, but it is an interesting programme nonetheless, mostly because of the stimulating ways in which she engages with some of the best photojournalists working today.

I’ve also been proof-reading the draft of Bruce Percy’s longest ebook to date, on street portraiture (scroll down this page for details - due to be available at the end of July, hopefully). It’s a stimulating read, and in terms of method and approach is very consistent with other texts Bruce has written. Surprising details (to me, at least), such as the rationale for using manual focus instead of autofocus, are logically explained, and the ebook is, as ever, beautifully illustrated with examples of Bruce’s work.

What is interesting to me about these two themes of photojournalism and street portraiture is how similar they are. All the images discussed in the BBC programme are a kind of street portrait: even in the most dangerous and life-threatening situations that photojournalists find themselves in, I can see a connection to what Bruce is talking about in his ebook.

I’m off to a week-long conference in Barcelona next week, but despite the frenetic programme that such events usually involve, I’m hoping very much to be able to capture some of the Barcelona night-life on camera… using Bruce’s ebook as a guide.

On visualisation

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Bruce Percy has published another eBook that I have been privileged to proof-read, so I know it’s good! Click here and you’ll see the first volume on visualisation. Volume 2 is still to come.

Tree in Edinburgh

Bruce discusses ways of thinking and seeing images in advance of squeezing the shutter, at the moment the shutter goes, and afterwards. It’s tremendously helpful to someone like me when thinking about how I see what I think I want to photograph. For example, whilst I like this image a lot, I might have tried to take it quite differently after reading the book: despite being heavily cropped, it’s still quite ‘busy’, and although I obviously can’t cut all the bushes and trees down round about it (I’m no Michael Fatali, in all senses of the phrase!), I might have tried harder to reframe it in some other way. Fortunately, because it was taken on black and white print film (Ilford Delta 100, if you’re interested!), scanning it at a high resolution allows it to be cropped down to a smaller size whilst still being large enough to produce substantial prints. Something useful can therefore still emerge from the original concept I had when visualising the tree.

Bruce’s book deals with all these issues and many more in his usual lucid and engaging way - highly recommended.

Engaging with composition

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Bruce Percy has written a fantastic ebook about composition, which will be of interest to anyone working in photography, film-making, art… He has a phenomenal understanding of what makes an image work, and communicates this very ably through lots of his own photographs, clear and detailed explanations gently written, and diagrams. Here’s a sample page from his blog:

Bruce Percy, 'Simplifying Composition'

How do I know this book is so good? Because I was privileged to be asked to read it in advance and make comments…

Taj Mahal: a photographer’s approach

Photography or image capture?

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I’ve just been at a seminar led by David Rodowick of Harvard University on historicising virtual images in a cinematic context. Whilst most of this is way beyond my own academic field and most definitely not something I’d want to pursue in any meaningful way, I had a brief conversation with him afterwards about photography. He doesn’t talk about movies that are digital as ‘films’, arguing that there is something essentially chemical about film which is not present in digital imaging using a digital video camera, for example.

In a similar way, he said he doesn’t talk about ‘digital photography’, but about ‘image capture’, because ‘photography’ involves a chemical process, whereas digital cameras are recording data. The data is manipulated and eventually turned into something analogue, otherwise we couldn’t see it (a screen is, after all, an analogue device). Film, once treated in the appropriate chemicals, can be held up to the light and the image can be seen without this kind of manipulation (though of course, how the chemicals are applied, in what concentration, temperature and for how long has a profound impact on the resulting image).

Is it important to make this differentiation? It is if we are thinking about how we visualise what we photograph and then compare it to how we see the end result. In Torridon Bruce Percy described his workflow from taking the photograph on his film camera: he develops his film, and then scans it in on a high quality scanner, producing very large digital files which he can then manipulate in Photoshop. These files essentially become his negatives, he said. Thinking about Rodowick’s comments makes me wonder about the way they become his ‘negatives’ – after all, the tangible pieces of film are still the ‘real’ negatives (which I presume he keeps somewhere very safe!), and all there is on the computer is a collection of data – zeros and ones that can be re-converted into an analogue form in the right circumstances.

Ken Rockwell talks about ‘Real Raw’, meaning film, and if we think of the ways in which some of the great photographers have used film, we know that this is qualitatively different to digital image capture. For example, we know that Ansel Adams used film, and so this famous image by him (‘Half Dome, Blowing Snow’ – click it to go to the Ansel Adams site where you can buy a print), is a digital scan of a piece of tangible film – the very same piece of film that was actually at the scene where this image was taken, in Adams’ camera. In a very real sense, the film ’saw’ this scene, which we couldn’t say about digital cameras! The conversion of the analogue image to digital loses something… and many people feel this also happens with digital cameras, which is why so many people – myself included – still like film so much.

We can see this more obviously in the cinematic context: I recently bought a DVD of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ – originally shot on film, of course. However, it has now been scanned into a computer in order to make a DVD – a digital method of reproducing a film (or perhaps I should say: a film-like experience!). As digital technology improves, the archived film strip will be scanned again and again to obtain ever higher resolution and improved sound… but the ‘negative’, if you like, is still a tangible analogue substance – ‘Real Raw’.

Although for day-to-day photography thinking about all this is perhaps largely irrelevant, I think it is important to always remember that images coming from a digital camera (especially so-called ‘raw files’) are like a negative, but are not the same as a negative, which is a different kind of process and a different way of recording images. So David Rodowick is right, I think, to talk about ‘image capture’ rather than ‘digital photography’ in contrast to film photography. But for all practical purposes, it is perhaps simply something to be aware of when choosing the medium for capturing a particular scene (‘how will this work best?’), rather than necessarily employing this language in the everyday context of creating images.

P.S. None of this is to say that image capture on a digital camera isn’t a form of art - it’s just a different way of doing it than happens with a film camera.

P.P.S. I think I now realise more acutely why I dislike Adobe’s use of the word ‘negative’ in the name for their archival format for the raw files generated by digital cameras: DNG, for ‘digital negative’. Of course, I still use DNG for my digital images…!

Artistry

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 4

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After my previous posts about the Torridon workshop, I wanted to leave a little bit of mental distance and reflect on the weekend. I’m actually finding this quite difficult! It’s a week later, and Torridon seems like a very long time ago at the moment. In an email exchange with Bruce today, I noted this, and he responded by saying:

Like you - I was thinking today that the Torridon trip felt like it was a lifetime ago.
I think that’s the sign of a trip that has affected you or changed you in some way, or perhaps just had some kind of impact on you.
I often feel like that after a good workshop, and more so when I return home from a really life changing photographic trip!

Too right, Bruce! But I’ve been very busy with work this week and have had very little time to get out and take any photographs. However, at the beginning of the week, I did stop on the way to work and sought to capture an impression of Stirling Castle from Bridge of Allan that I consciously felt to be quite different to previous images. I was using my Nikon FM2 with Velvia slide film, so I don’t yet know whether the image will work, but even just the process of thinking about the framing and composition felt different… more… considered, if you like. One of Bruce’s lines is that ‘to explore the world through photography, is to explore oneself’. That is something I’ve felt more acutely than ever before as a result of this weekend: in relation to one of the critique sessions, I said I found the need to open myself to relative strangers quite difficult, though it is good, very good to do so… I’m not sure I can say much more than this at the moment, but perhaps the fact that I’ve been reviewing old images for possible inclusion in a sales gallery is also indicative of an effect from the weekend - I feel much more able to be constructively self-critical of my own work, which is also a process of self-exploration. Of course, as an academic, I do this all the time with my writing, and although I can discern similar processes in my assessment of photographs, the criteria and methodology of assessment and critical appreciation are somewhat different.

Bruce Percy

I want to mention the mysterious brown A4 envelope Bruce gave each of us as we were leaving (see my third post). This is amazing: it contains a series of printed guides written by Bruce, as well as a CD with these tutorials on it AND a sample image from Bruce’s own work, showing pre- and post-processing. Not only are these beautifully and clearly laid out, but they are also incredibly informative, with precise details and helpful guides and tips. Not having known about these guides, I went and made notes on some of what Bruce showed us during the critical review sessions - but everything I noted down is contained here, and much more coherently written! I’m sure Bruce could sell printed versions of these guides and people would love them. Perhaps, one day, we can look forward to a book of Bruce’s images, along with inlays such as these (I love photo books and feel I learn a lot from studying other images, but would also like to see hints of some of the processes involved). To give an impression of what is covered, here is a list of the contents (note that in complying with Bruce’s request not to distribute these documents, the image here is just a low-resolution screen capture of one of the covers of Bruce’s documents; clicking it takes you to Bruce’s site, not the document):

a document entitled ‘Bruce’s Approach’ (‘My aim is to try to realise the full potential of a location in such a short space of time’ - I couldn’t sum it up any better!)
an explanation of how to use Adobe Camera Raw etc. in the ‘Raw Conversion Process’
‘Digital Darkroom Printing Techniques’ (for Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop Elements)
and 3 documents on understanding bit depth, exposure and monitor calibration.

A fantastic gift, on top of all that Bruce gave us of himself over the course of the weekend!

Overall, if I were to be asked to say one thing about the workshop, it would be: go on one yourself! Whether you’re just starting out or have been photographing for years, whether you have a basic camera (mine is the cheapest in Nikon’s DSLR range) or a top of the range full-frame colossus/medium format camera, spending time with Bruce will almost certainly improve your images. He is a tremendously accomplished photographer, but far more importantly, he has a warmth and generosity of spirit coupled with a deep sensitivity and connection to his creative abilities - and he knows how to communicate all of this. A great pedagogue, you will quickly realise you are also in the presence of a great artist who is willing to give of himself in sharing aspects of his photographic craft with you. And that is what really makes going on one of Bruce’s workshops worthwhile… I’m going to be saving up for a week-long course at some point (I just need to persuade the family they want to do this too!).

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 3.1

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In my last post I mentioned Bruce’s exclamation about my tree photograph: he obviously really does like it, because you’ll now also see it on his page advertising the Torridon courses (I was emailing him today to thank him for the weekend, and said he could use anything in my emails or blog entries to promote his workshops if he wanted to do so). I’m very flattered…

He has also included that image, part of an email I wrote to him and a link to this blog on this page; at these locations you’ll also find two fabulous images, along with comments, from Mabel Forsyth, my incredibly talented neighbour who went on the weekend trip with me.

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 3

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We were out again early this morning. The day looked like this:

6:30 meet in hotel lobby, out to location
9h return for breakfast
we then had time for washing/packing up (we needed to check out of the hotel room)
11h image critique
followed by lunch and departure.

Bruce took us to a new location, near Shieldaig (upper Loch Torridon), overlooking water, with quite a steep hill rising up from the shoreline of Loch Torridon. My first reaction was to think: ‘Why did he take us here? Those trees are in the way!’ I realised I was a bit disgruntled about this, and wandered around at first not finding anything I could imagine as an image. I find I often do this: pace up and down looking for an angle, a view, something that is unusual and stimulating that will grab me. But I wasn’t finding it on this occasion. I went down the hill and to the right to avoid the trees, but the view just felt bland - another set of grey mountains with water in front, so very typically postcard Scottish, and at that moment for me, completely boring. So I headed left, nearer to the shore, and this brought me closer to the trees. I was trying to look through them at the view behind, to see if there was any point in climbing up the hill again and looking over the trees. Nothing. As I was stumbling about looking through the trees and muttering away to myself in frustration, I suddenly realised that looking through the trees was just what I ought to be doing. I found myself facing two trees that were distinct and separate from the rest (i.e. the branches were not intertwined). They were also leaning left, which I liked: we often think that moving right ‘leads the eye in’ (see for example, Ken Rockwell’s stair images entitled ‘McCloud, California’ about 3/4 down the page; he shows the image facing both ways), and many of my photographs reflect this. But I think the orientation to the right only works because we read left to right, whereas for readers of, for example, Hebrew and Arabic, this doesn’t necessarily make sense, and given my academic research topics, I felt this spoke to me on that level too. The mountains across the loch formed a ‘v’ just in the middle of the image, balancing the ‘v’ formed by the tips of the trees in the foreground - and so this is the image that I came up with (note that, following yesterday’s post about cropping, this is very slightly cropped at the sides, but otherwise works in the 35mm format):

Torridon

This was my second image of the day, and after taking it I thought, ‘well, it won’t get any better than this, I should stop now…’ - but I didn’t! After my initial disgruntlement and frustration, I felt tremendously moved by the beauty of the light, and began to see all sorts of other patterns:

Torridon

The trees on either side seem to me to be reaching towards each other, forming an upside-down ‘v’, almost like a classic child’s drawing of a house. The other trees in the centre are smaller, almost as if they are in the ‘house’. Bruce later pointed to the four ‘quarters’ in the image that balance each other - I hadn’t consciously seen this, but he’s right, of course. By this stage, I was elated - I realised that even if the images on the tiny screen on the camera had been out-of-focus, I had seen something I thought was special. It’s an interesting issue: here I was, trying to capture an image on a camera not knowing if it would work, but knowing also that even if it didn’t, I would remember this image without the camera’s help. It’s a way of internal visualisation that I will want to explore further at some point, perhaps here.

Bruce came over to me a while later, once I was on the shore line, wrestling with another image, of which more in a moment. He looked at the first of these two images on my screen, and was delighted for me, exclaiming: ‘This is the kind of photograph I always want to take and I never manage it.’ Now although I’m sure that’s not really true, it gives me the opportunity to reiterate something about Bruce: I hope I’ve already communicated something of Bruce’s genius with imagery - but he’s also a genuinely warm and generous person. This is something I felt again and again over the weekend, and although I point to this in a context of his praising my image, I don’t do so to show off (well, ok, maybe I do just a little bit…!), but to say that I saw this repeatedly in his interactions with all the other participants. If you’re thinking of going on a course like this, Bruce will make you feel really welcome, and it will be an affirming and uplifting experience - guaranteed!

The image I was struggling with when Bruce came over to me is this one:

Torridon

Or rather, this is what it became. I felt I wasn’t capturing the mountain behind the first one, which, especially on the right side, looked in part as if it was a shadow of the foreground mountain, but Bruce assured me I was on the right lines. I was sure this could be cropped - it had lots of sky that wasn’t ‘doing’ anything, but I felt I wasn’t really getting the detail in the more distant mountains that I wanted. I knew I wanted this to be black and white, but needed somehow to make that ‘shadow’ appear in order to provide the continuous line of the second mountain that I could so clearly see. Once back at the hotel, I offered this along with the previous two images for critique. From this session, and Bruce’s earlier comments, I was reminded of the complete inadequacy of the screen on the back of the camera, even when zooming in on the image, because the shadow is clearly there, but was barely visible on the camera’s screen. And the lesson is: trust that most of what you can see in the landscape can be seen by the camera, even if it sees it quite differently (note to self: I never doubted this kind of thing with film, so the screen is actually hindering me here! In a different context over the weekend, Bruce mentioned photographers he knows who tape over the screen on their digital cameras and just trust their instincts). In Photoshop, I cropped this down, developed the tones just a fraction, and turned it into a black and white image.

After lunch, we all got ready to depart. Before we did, Bruce gave each of us a large brown envelope - without saying more than that ‘it doesn’t contain banknotes’, he just made sure everyone had one. It was only when I arrived home that I found out what was in it… but I’ll leave the discussion of that for the fourth post about this trip, which I intend to write in a couple of days time, after I’ve had a little more mental space to digest what I’ve learnt, what the experience did for me, and so on. However, I hope you’ve gathered that I have had a magical weekend, in the company of and under the guidance of a tremendously creative, passionate and generous teacher and fellow traveller, and accompanied by five other participants who brought light (in all ways!), energy and laughter to the creative process. Many of their images were fantastic too, and I found myself thinking tonight how nice it would be to have a little online gallery somewhere with one of each of our images, even if that is somewhat impractical.

P.S. I did, of course, have a film camera with me (guess which one!), but found that I only used it a couple of times. I think I was concentrating too much on using the digital camera in order to make images that could be critiqued. Insha’allah I’ll be back to Torridon with a film camera to make many more images.

Michael Marten's Photography

life in photography - photography in life

Tag Archives: Bruce Percy

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New book from Bruce Percy - first impressions

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Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 4

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 3.1

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 3

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