Tag Archives: Torridon

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 4

2 Replies

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

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!).

About these ads

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 3

6 Replies

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.

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 2

2 Replies

Day two of our course began very early. Here’s an approximate breakdown of my day:

  • get up 5:30
  • out 6h (rain)
  • ca. 6:20 arrive on location (a LOT of rain) - we are at Loch Clare
  • waiting in the van
  • rain clears a bit, returning intermittently; we’re out, taking photographs
  • back to the hotel and breakfast for 9h
  • out to another location shortly after 10h - this time Loch Torridon
  • more photos, more rain - then lots more rain (run back to minibus)
  • new location (no rain)
  • ca. 13h rain
  • at Bruce’s suggestion, we decide to return to the hotel and have lunch
  • 14h everyone chooses two photos to critique
  • 15:30 out for sunset
  • periods of heavy rain, and beautiful calm
  • moon photographs (visible for exactly 25 seconds - see below!) and more
  • return to hotel
  • 18:30 in the bar
  • 19h dinner
  • and then blog writing and bed!

An excellent day, though a long one… and I think all six of us felt that.

When out, we all wandered off in our own direction, photographing what we saw. Bruce knows the area, and chose locations that he had either photographed in the past, or that he knew would offer something tangible for us to photograph (after all, this weekend is about learning techniques etc., not about photographing something that has never been photographed before - though, of course, each of us returned with very different images from each location). He then made a point of going to each person and reviewing some of their photographs (we’re all on digital this weekend to help with the teaching process, though I am not the only film shooter here), talking through how they were approaching their imaging, what might work differently, ways to deal with particular compositional or lighting problems, suggesting alternative perspectives, exposures and so on. For example, I have often felt that the metering on my Nikon D40 was out, and have therefore almost always had the exposure compensation set at -2/3. Bruce discussed this with me at length and demonstrated, even on the crappy wee screen at the back of the camera, that this resulted in problems with my shadow detail (lesson: there is a difference between dark and moody… and just dark). I realise that this is also partly Bruce’s style - I sometimes think that although he describes himself as a landscape photographer, I wonder if this not more of a convenient label: his images are often not really landscapes, but images of light that is transformed in some way through reflection, absorption etc. in the encounter with the land. That is what attracted me so much to his art in the first place, and so I have no objection if even a tiny fraction of this sensibility rubs off on me.

I want to describe some images. After breakfast we went to Loch Torridon. Bruce drove us quite high up, and we took photographs overlooking the loch, towards the mountains around the water. In the foreground, there were substantial erratics (a new term I learnt: these are the rocks that have been brought to their present location by glaciers that have long since vanished, leaving just the rocks in their incongruous locations), and Bruce wanted us to try and think about the use of foreground detail as well as background material. The wind was strong, it was raining, but despite water droplets dribbling down both sides of the filter, we managed some spectacular images. When Bruce came over to me, we talked about what I had been trying to do, and he asked me if I had turned and seen a particular tree; I hadn’t. He borrowed my camera, and took three or four photographs. He showed me the last one, pointing out the simplicity of the image, and the ways in which the mist isolated the tree from the mountain in the background, making for a very simple, but very powerful image of the tree. This is his photograph (which I post here and on my website with his permission):

Tree and mountain (Bruce Percy)

I liked this immediately, but also wondered about other ways of taking this photograph. I took several photographs, and ended up with this one:

Mountains and tree

Bruce’s photograph is undoubtedly fantastic (though he said he thought it was a little underexposed; without wanting to sound presumptuous, I’d agree - and also add that mine was underexposed too; I’ve corrected this a little here, but didn’t feel I should manipulate his photograph!). But I also like mine, bringing in more of the mountain outlines, setting a wider context, and offering a different role for the tree. In my image, I realised later, the tree almost serves as an anchor for the mountains, rather than the mountains doing that for the tree. It’s as if the majesty and grandeur of these incredible hills is given additional meaning by the tree’s inclusion in the image - although several times as tall as me, it is quite tiny in comparison to the massive mountains in the background - and thereby it perhaps helps to give a sense of the amazing landscape we were in. I also converted this to black and white, and cannot quite decide which I prefer - the subtle tones of the colours in the original, or the even more simple tones of the black and white (comments on this are very welcome!):

Mountains and tree

As we were driving back in really hard rain, Bruce slowed the minibus and pointed out the view. He asked if anyone wanted to photograph this, and two of us leapt out of the bus, getting ourselves and our dried off cameras wet all over again. This is the image I came up with:

Mountains, Torridon

I post it here as a kind of contrast to the tree/moutain images. Although I think this is beautiful, the large white expanse (that’s the mist…) in the bottom left corner decontextualises the mountains, making them almost more of an abstract series of lines than a mountain range. Although these are pretty much the same mountains as in the tree photograph, in this photograph there is nothing much that anchors them to the earth, and so the photograph becomes something quite different.

Undoubtedly the most useful part of the day was the critical review. We had very little time, but we each had to choose two photographs we had taken, and offer them for review (not easy to choose, when you have just a few minutes and are scanning 150 images!). Bruce had brought a projector and showed us our images on a large screen. We then explained what we had been trying to do, why the image was important to us, what we felt about how it had turned out, and so on. Other participants then offered comment, as did Bruce. This was in all cases incredibly positive and helpful criticism. Bruce then went through the images in Photoshop, and showed us simple and effective ways of manipulating them in order to bring out contrasts, highlights etc. There are many many ‘small’ things that I took from this, but the really major one that I took away was a reflection on image size: even when I crop my images, I tend to leave them in the original aspect ratio (i.e. based on a 35mm film image - perhaps this is a subcounscious desire to ‘retain’ something of the ‘original’? even though I know this is a nonsense), even though most images benefit from different shapes. I’ve often felt my images were too ‘long’, and this session radically opened my eyes to the more pleasing ratios of 4×5, 6×7, or 1×1 as well as arbitrary crops - you’ll see that nearly all the images from today on my website are now cropped in such a way, almost as if to make a point to me, never mind anyone else.

In the late afternoon, we went to another loch, Bruce hoping to offer us a location and a sunset for trying out some of the techniques we had talked about in the critique and other locations. It was very wet. Not just the loch from below, but also the clouds from above. I sometimes think that rain in Scotland must have magical molecular properties that other rain does not have… but more on that later! I went down to the edge of the loch, and also into the loch (very slight shoreline, so that wellies were more than adequate). It was cloudy and overcast, making for very soft light. No real sign of a sunset, but despite this, some of the resulting images were great. I was very pleased with my foregrounding of stones, for example, and the capture of the moonlight, which appeared once, for about 10 seconds, and I missed it; but I saw the clouds moving in such a way that it might reappear. It did, for precisely 25 seconds (I know this, because I took five images at 5 seconds each - and it was gone!). The image originally has the moonlight curving, which I think might be the lens’ barrel distortion (I’ll perhaps get around to correcting this at some point…):

Moonlight, Torridon

Bruce then took us all back to the hotel - and our first shower of the day! The dinner discussion in the evening was stimulating, covering the purpose of this kind of photography (one participant argued that it is to document reality/something ‘real’; Bruce asked if that was so, why was this person using a wide-angle lens?!), the processing stage (are images ‘doctored’ if they’re manipulated in Photoshop to bring out the highlights etc.?), Vettriano (is it art?), the BNP on BBC Question Time (should they have done/should they not have done?), free speech in a democracy, the Iraq invasion/war, the significance of 11.9.2001…

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 1

1 Reply

This will be one of several planned entries about this weekend, which I am spending with Bruce Percy in Torridon, on the west coast of Scotland. I am here with my neighbour, Mabel Forsyth, and we are both hoping to learn lots from Bruce, a great photographer, and a lovely, warm person. The title here (‘the art of adventure photography’) is shamelessly copied from Bruce’s website.

In some ways, this isn’t really part 1, in that I haven’t been making photographs under Bruce’s guidance or direction yet, but we arrived this evening and had our first sessions discussing photography with Bruce. He showed us a number of his images, and talked about how he made them, we spent some time talking about the best ways to use our equipment, and tomorrow morning we’re meeting at 6h to set off for some sunrise images. The weather forecast is Not Good, but we’ll see how it goes!

One of the pleasures of driving here with Mabel is that we both wanted to stop a number of times along the way to photograph the autumn light, such as this rainbow west of Dingwall (there’s more images on my website - click this image to go there):

rainbow west of Dingwall