if you knew you couldn't fail, then what would you do?

Creatively speaking:

if you knew you couldn't fail, then what would you do?

I’m in Holland right now, visiting some friends, and one of them asked me this today. I must admit that it gave me a chance to check in on my own thoughts and attitudes towards my own creativity right now.

Since I’ve been dragging myself back out of the whole covid thing, and getting back to making images, and running workshops and tours, I have felt that there is a part of me that is holding me back. There is a voice saying ‘but this might happen….’ or ‘best to save some money and not do so much travel right now’.

If I were to apply the question above, then I know the answer would be: I would not be cutting back on things. I would be pushing forwards with new plans for many new places etc. I would feel I have endless opportunities.

This question could of course be applied to other aspects of my creative working life. Not just in whether I feel confident to explore travelling to new destinations. It may also be a question to ask oneself when creating actual work.

I am always fascinated by the assumption that being creative is about producing things that are good or finished. In my view, being creative is about removing any kind of self-judgement of what I’ve done so that I can take risks and try out things. It is a matter of learning to let go, and of actually….. letting go.

For instance, if you did not care one bit how something may turn out, then you may be more apt to experiment, or go more freeform and see what happens. I think this degree of letting go can only happen if you accept and are comfortable with failure.

So, asking oneself the question : ‘if you knew you couldn’t fail, then what would you do?’ opens up the realisation that perhaps you are giving ‘success and failure’ too much power over you. Perhaps whether you succeed or fail, is stopping you, or holding you back?

If you knew that success was guaranteed, you would try out more options, experiment more, wouldn’t you?

Perhaps, if you have trouble with your photography, or are looking for new ways to be inspired, all you really need to do is ask yourself

‘if I knew I couldn’t fail, then what would I do?’

Perhaps that is all you need to do.

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Tending your garden (Continued)

Several months ago I wrote about the creative benefits of having one’s own website. Even if no one knows about it, or if no one visits it, it is still a very beneficial thing to have. If you are in any way interested in improving your photography, or in trying to develop a sense of your own aesthetic style, then a website will help you with that.

I like to think of my website as my garden, and it is my garden for one reason: it is a place where I can plant conceptual ideas, or arrange my images in different formats. It is a place where I watch my ideas grow.

Personal websites tend to have a life of their own, and I find that I am always tending mine. My website has become instructive in helping me sort out what works and what doesn’t, and also in instructing me as to where my current work is leading me.

For the past year or so, I’ve been feeling as though I was in a wilderness. Since covid hit, the website became very static. I started to feel it represented this feeling. It was telling me : ‘you are stuck’.

It was telling me the truth, and I knew it.

I couldn’t go anywhere, and I couldn’t produce any new work. That feeling continued even when I began to go back to running tours and workshops, and my website confirmed it to me. I could see it in the layout of the work presented there.

It told me that I was (and still am) needing to go find some new places. It showed me that it is time to find other places. All I can tell you right now, is that I am working hard in the background at forging new plans. But it will take time. Covid didn’t just halt things. I have felt that things have been going backwards, ‘world view’ speaking.

Regardless of my personal plight, and insights as to where we are now. The fact is, that my website wasn’t lying to me. It was telling me something and I knew it.

In the meantime, I went through several iterations feeling unhappy, and knowing why that was so.

However, in the past months, I’ve begun to feel that I’ve turned a corner. By re-organising the front page, I noticed there was more of a cohesive theme between the portfolios than I had first assumed. What had first felt like a bunch of loose ends cobbled together after covid, was now showing me that underneath it all, the work was moving more towards a conceptual, abstract look.

I often feel that it takes a while for the conscious mind to catch up with where our artistic leanings are taking us.

Tending my garden showed me I was actually moving forward. I doubt if anything else could have done so.

I don’t quite know what’s changed, but I am of the opinion that unlike the saying ‘calm before the storm’, there tends to be chaos in one’s own work before it all starts to feel like it is making sense. The loose ends, feeling a bit stuck. All of that is normal creative chaos.

It is only since re-organising that I now see that what I felt were loose ends were actually all aesthetically bound together: the work is more abstract than it once was. I am more sure now, that I’m more interested in anonymous locations than the ‘honey pot’ spots. I’m also more aware that I’ve been moving towards fine tuning how I convey the places I have come to know so well over the past several years. This last point in case, I think is illustrated well by the six images above. They are not a radical departure from what I’ve created before, but I do think the concept is perhaps more focussed. Again, this could only have happened by tending my garden.

So you see, I think having one’s own website, one’s own garden as it were, to explore one’s own growth is important. I know for me, it has been so for a very long time.

Postscript: the above images will feature in this month’s coming newsletter about portfolio development.

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Printing is always the final verification

Last week I completed work on a new mini-portfolio of images from the Iceland interior. I put them up on the website and have been living with them for the past week or so.

Over the week that i’ve been living with them, I’ve noticed things in the images that I didn’t see at first, so I decided to go and print them out. Well, I really should practice more of what I preach ! as I found quite a few problems with the images that weren’t quite evident on screen.

To name a few issues that I never notice on screen, but always become apparent in the print:

  1. dust spots, or distractions in the image, such as some sudden tonality change either right in the middle of the composition or at the very edge.

  2. Colour casts. In the instance of the images you see here, I noticed patches of deep blue that weren’t evident on the monitor. What I always find fascinating about noticing colour casts in the actual prints, is that once I see them there - I now see them on the monitor.

  3. Overall composition errors. The image may feel balanced on the monitor, but once printed out, certain objects or tones within the frame of the image become more prominent. Perhaps an area of the picture has too much detail than I would like, and therefore need their contrast reduced. Or perhaps it’s the other way around - areas of the frame that I thought were prominent in the image on screen, seem to lack it once printed. I have found that sometimes things that require presence in the edit - can be pushed much much further in the edit. And printing seems to tell me that I have only reached 50% of where it should be, and there is still a further 50% more to go in pushing the contrasts etc.

The main take away from this is":

“if an image looks good in print: it will look good on the monitor. But not the other way around”

If you don’t print, you only reach 90% of final intention of the image.

Photoshop Actions

I use actions all the time. They allow me to reduce ‘screwing up’ more than tends to happen when printing. There is already much to do to prepare an image for print and the Epson print driver is a nightmare (luckily, I do not use it - I have a much simpler piece of software that allows me to simply drag the file to the printer for printing).

But here are my actions for printing. I have these set up as constant actions for any images I work on.

You may notice that I have three actions at the top for saving PSD, Save for Web, Open Shadows etc. These are a feature of my editing workflow: I like to audition edited images as jpegs for my website. I also like to have a simple way of saving PSD files into one area.

As I edit, I audition the jpegs together in Lightroom’s gallery. I can see how the portfolio fits together.

As to preparing images for print, I LOVE the PixelGenius sharpener toolkit for Photoshop. It is now end of life, and not supported. But with a bit of work, it can still operate on the latest versions of photoshop. Despite what PixelGenius claim, I do not think the Lightroom sharpeners are an improvement. I tested them and I think they are not as good as the sharpener toolkit is.

So far I’ve managed to keep the PixelGenius sharpener toolkit running on the very latest version of Photoshop. If you are running on Monterey they should just work with PS 2023. If you are running on Ventura then the Automate/ Sharpener GUI is not visible. You have to run PS in Rosetta mode to get them to operate. You may also need to give Ventura permissions to run the plugins.

Use the MacOS UNIX terminal to do this. Copy/paste the following: 

sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine

Be sure to add a space after the e of ‘quarantine’

Then drag & drop the ‘PG Toolbox Plug-in Module’ plug-in (located inside Plug-Ins inside the PS
install folder) onto the terminal window …
and press enter. It will ask you for your password.

Restart Photoshop. If the toolkit is not visible, quit and restart PS in Rosetta mode.

Capture Sharpener reintroduces the loss of detail that is inherent in all capture mediums. In digital cameras the anti-aliasing filter introduces softness to the file. Use Capture Sharpener to recover lost detail. In my case, it is my film scanner that introduces loss of detail. PixelGenius has a capture-sharpener algorithm for 6x6 positive film and it works great for me.

I then resize down to the intended final output size. My printer’s resolution is 1440 dots per inch. I use 360 pixels per inch (this is a clean division of 1440 dots per inch). The theory being that you are trying to map a clean division of pixels in the file to dots on the printer. Therefore using an image resolution of 360 pixels per inch allows for 4 pixels to be quantised down to 1 dot (1440 / 4 = 360).

Once resized, I then sharpen for inkjet output. This is where most folks go wrong with printing manually. They tend to apply sharpener onto the file so that it looks good on the monitor. They are in essence ‘sharpening for monitor’.

We need to over-compensate when sharpening for print. This is because the printer tends to soften down the image. This is why I love PixelGenius output sharpener. It takes all the guess work away for me, and tends to apply the correct degree of ‘over’ sharpening.

I then covert to the correct colourspace, and 8-bit mode.

I use Photoshop actions all the time, and I have been using this kind of format for so many years now. If I keep the same process, then editing, and re-printing become more perfunctory. Less to think about, less to go wrong. I can get on with the art of trying to make the prints as good as possible, while reducing my chances of getting some part of the print process wrong.

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Printing today

One of the most satisfying things, is seeing my images come to life in the physical world. When they become hard-copy, I see so much more in them. Like sitting with a good photography book, there is a different kind of interaction that happens when I look at printed paper than a computer monitor.

Thank you everyone who bought a print or two from my recent newsletter offer. I like to offer specially discounted prints each time I publish a new set of images. I’m not sure I will do this all the time, but probably just when I feel like it. You see, it’s rather tempting to give myself an excuse to print them all out.

I rarely actually print any completed images until I have a purpose or aim for them. If I am preparing a new photographic book, or someone places an order for a print, then that is when I will actually print them. And each time I do that, I always see tiny things that need improving in the edit. I should really print everything I consider ‘finished’ because they aren’t really completed until that final sanity check is done. A computer monitor only goes so far.

It’s always good to use cotton gloves when printing. Any oils on your fingers will always get onto the paper. Also check the platen-gap of your printer as this is one of the reasons why you may see black ink marks on the paper. My Epson printer always defaults back to a standard setting for the platen-gap, and I tend to prefer to use thicker paper which requires the platen gap to be set to wide.

A good guillotine is worth the investment as well, and a decent desk with which to store your prints. Over the years, I have always encountered print damage if I have the prints stored anywhere but inside a set of drawers. The universe seems to conspire to make sure that prints will get damaged if placed anywhere else.

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Some technical PS tips for today

Sharpening

I’m a big fan of PixelGenius’ sharpening toolkit. Which sadly isn’t supported any more.

But I still use it even though it’s not supported, and I’ve found over the past few years that it sometimes isn’t visible in Photoshop’s menu when you install it, or when you migrate up to a new version of PS.

If like me, you love the sharpener, and want to keep on using it, then you can still get it to run, even on the latest Mac OS, if you run PS under Rosetta. You won’t want to use PS under Rosetta all the time, and I would suggest you only boot up PS under Rosetta when you wish to use the sharpener tool kit.

New Gradient Tool in PS

On another note, I got the fright of my life this week when I opened up PS. The latest version has been updated to make it work a bit more like some of the tools in Lightroom. I particularly dislike the new Gradient tool’s interface because I do not wish to see where the start and end points of the gradient are. I prefer to just keep drawing (and overwriting) a gradient until I get an immediate emotional response that says ‘that’s it!’. Fortunately, you can default the gradient tool back to the ‘classic’ interface. This is good news. I much prefer when a software company retain previous functionality where possible, rather than dictate a new way of working.

Improvements in gradient rendering?

But there is also something rather special about the gradient tool’s way of rendering now. They give you three different ways of how the gradients may ‘paint’ or ‘respond’: Classic / Linear and Perceptual.

I haven't studied them much as yet, but I am liking the Perceptual mode and find this one in particular appears to be reducing the chance of the gradients looking obvious. In the past few releases of PS I felt that the start and end points of most gradients were quite obvious when they had never had this issue in the past. I am grateful to have two other new modes for choosing how the gradation is applied to an image, and I look forward to getting to know the gradient tool in it’s new incarnation over the coming months. I feel there is a real enhancement here.

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On listening to yourself, and trusting it

I wish I could teach folks to listen to their own hearts and minds more, when it comes to creating art. It is such an intangible thing to pursue: artistic confidence.

Red Point Beach, Torridon, Scotland, March 2022

Confidence does not imply aptitude to create great work. Neither is confidence the act of over compensating for one’s own abilities. Cockiness is not Confidence. Confidence is about being on a solid foundation of knowing where you are, and being able to live with it.

Confidence is also the act of being present, and of having an accurate view of one’s own abilities. Of knowing where your work needs to improve, and where its strengths and weaknesses lie. And of being comfortable with this knowledge.

Confidence is also the act of being able to try things without fear or worry, or of too much doubt. All artists doubt. All artists worry. But confident artists don’t let fear or doubt hijack their creative decisions too much.

Therefore, arrtistic confidence is the skill to have the convictions to follow through with what you want, and not to be swayed by what others are doing, or what others say. Not all feedback is of equal merit. Confident artists have developed the aptitude to be able to pick and choose the feedback that they see merit in, and discard the rest.

Artistic confidence is also the skill in understanding that not everyone will like your work, and still be comfortable and happy. If you are always hurt by other people’s views, then you need to work on your confidence. All artists create bad work, even those that you think highly of create bad work. How they deal with it is what matters, and that comes down to confidence.

I wish I could teach folks to listen to their own hearts and minds more. So often I feel that we know what we want to do, but self doubt and fear muddy the waters for us. We look for solutions in what others say too much, when we actually have the answers ourselves. We just need to listen to ourselves more.

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Is the work moving forward?

A rhetorical question, but one that I rarely ask myself, but tend to ‘know’, when I am looking at a set of completed new images.

I find it much easier to gauge how much I’ve changed if I am photographing places I know well, and have had a long term relationship with. I have felt for some time that the only way to get deeper into a place, is to keep returning. But this should only be done if you feel compelled to go back. There is little point in returning to a place where you feel no interest, or didn’t feel you felt there was ‘something else left unexplored’.

For me, there is usually a hunch or a feeling that there is still much to do. Often times I think for most of us we have a sense of only scratching the surface with a location. So that in itself is an indication that your creative mind has found something worth returning to.

I think for me, my position is a little unusual, in that my job is tied to returning to places, sometimes on a yearly basis. With Bolivia’s Altiplano, I can see that the work has become more and more reduced over time. I seem to be much less interested in compositional subjects as such, and instead looking for images that work on a tonal and colour response mostly. I think with Bolivia, I am attracted to the colours that are present there, and how the light changes as we head towards dusk, or surface out of it in the mornings.

I have to keep my interest levels up, and coming home from photographing the same places each year and working on them in a similar way can quickly become tiring. So I have always just trusted my feelings when I find myself feeling interested in something in a way that I haven’t looked at it before. What interests me the most, is when I find myself doing something different with a well known location.

For instance, I had not considered editing some of the work with a view towards conveying dusk, and so this time round it has been a surprise to me to find myself experimenting with these edited ‘illusions’, of what I felt as the light fades in Bolivia. It is often a very beautiful time to watch the light fade, and yet I have never really known how to convey it.

Technically speaking, I do not shoot in the dark as the reciprocity times of my films are simply far too long, and they tend to be monochrome studies in the blue channel only.

But my aesthetic seems to be more happy these days to let some colour back in, and darker tones as well. I’m aware that I seem to be more comfortable now working with darker hues than I have been for some time. When I first started out 23 years ago, my work was all over the place, but mainly dark and contrasty with not much attention to tonalities.

Going back to places that resonate with you is really worth doing if you are keen to notice changes in movement in what you do. I will confess that around 6 years ago or so, I felt I couldn’t really go anywhere more with Bolivia. I did wonder at the time if I should stop going and move on to new pastures.

But I think that when something isn’t working any more, it’s not always forever. It is definitely a sign that you need to do something new with where you are shooting, and sometimes it’s a sign that you’re changing.

It may also be the mark that you simply need a pause, or to return later in several years time. You may have moved on a little in what your eye is looking for and it’s going to take some time for your abilities to catch up with what your mind’s eye is now seeking.

I am enjoying the new work I’ve created. I know for sure that I wouldn’t have made these images 14 years ago when I first ventured to Bolivia. I have had several periods where I felt my work had moved on in some way, and other periods where I felt it stagnate. All I know for sure, is that everything I do is always a stepping stone forward, even if I cannot see it at the time.

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Kodak Portra Reciprocity Times

I’ve had trouble buying Fuji Velvia 50 for a year now. I am told that due to material shortages, Fuji cannot make enough of the stuff. An order I placed with Wex Photographic a year ago, is being honoured by a few packs of film every six months. It’s clear to me that Wex (and others) are simply dividing what they are being given and sending out the stock to all their customers, rather than honouring who ordered first.

When I was in Japan in January I managed to buy some Velvia. My guide in Japan has been on the hunt for me as well and has been lucky enough to find me some film that will keep me going for another year I suspect.

So I figured it’s time to look at different film stocks and try them out. I have a mass of Kodak Portra 160 sitting at home which I have used for portrait work in the past, and I’d like to see how I get on with the C41 process as well. So I think this is what I’m going to do.

So today I worked out what the reciprocity corrected times are for my most used shutter speeds when going long-exposure. I am hoping I got this right based on the graph below.

I think I will head out with the camera later this summer, to try this out. I will have to print this out and laminate it, as I do prefer to memorise these things, and work them out myself whilst in the field. Which is often something that participants on my workshops find funny, as they can often hear me counting and using my fingers to work out the adjustment based on the ND grad strength I’m using. I do not wish to use an App, because I would prefer to be in complete control, and the only way to do that, is to fully learn and become accustomed to the tools I use.

So here are the adjusted exposure times for Kodak’s Portra. Note that I always work on a 1-stop granularity basis. I never use half-stops or third-stops. In my view, I rarely need to work with anything finer than 1-stop differences. Besides, it makes for much easier computation if everything is either halved or doubled, and that goes for buying ND filters too.

 
 
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Dream Processing

I just completed processing my latest films from Brazil, Bolivia and also some other trips I did this year. There is now a pile of films sitting waiting to be edited.

But I have this photo below - of my light table a few days ago etched in my mind.

I have too much to do right now, that doesn’t allow me time to edit the work, so while I am busy doing daily life chores, I am finding that I can’t help but visualise the final portfolio from my Bolivia tour. As much as I keep returning to the same places, I feel I’ve moved on as a photographer and I’m less and less interested in the literal view.

So I’m kind of enjoying the dreaming process I’m going through right now. I have been convinced for many years that one should collate and sort out their most recent images (RAW files), and just get a ‘feel’ for the work, before approaching doing anything with them. For me, that’s all about processing the films, collecting them into piles of transparencies, and glancing at what I’ve shot. The main thing is not to launch straight into editing the work.

I think I see a very different set of images from Bolivia for this time round, and if anything, just realising that I have so many potential images to work on, and that some of them are surfacing quite often in my thoughts is a good thing. Whether the final portfolio will be anything like I am imagining isn’t of any importance. It’s more about just finding that you are feeling inspired, and that your mind is dreaming, wondering, conjuring up different feelings and emotions about what you shot, that is what drives me forward.

I’ve got to go away for a few days, but I am now finding myself quite keen to look at this work next week when I have some time. This is another aspect for me; I do not like to edit images piecemeal, with only a few minutes free here and there. I like to have a good chunk of free time to do it, as I find I tend to become immersed in it. So for me, allocating two or three full days is ideal. I realise that this isn’t feasible for most folks, but for me, I’ve always enjoyed the solitude and I like to give myself plenty of space and time to work on images.

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Light Table View

Been a bit quiet this past few weeks. I’m in the middle of processing films from my recent tours to Brazil and Bolivia.

Below is a photograph taken on my phone of my light table with Velvia transparencies just dried, and in the process of being cut, and put into a sleeve to protect from dust.

9 images from one roll of film, on my light table.

One of the things I loved about this year’s tour to Bolivia was that we had a lot of overcast light during the day time. My fantastic guide Silveria wanted to show me two of the islands on the Salar because she loved the shapes of them: pyramid and some kind of flying saucer shape. I have worked with Silveria before and she seems to understand and know what I’m looking for : graphic shapes and simplified composition.

Anyway, if there is a point to this post today, it is that even though I have been coming to Bolivia now for over a decade, there is often a chance to see something new. Partly it’s a case of being taken to new views, other times it’s that the light is different. But on this occasion, I know within my heart that what I am attracted to make images of these days, is quite different from what I was looking for back in 2009 when I first ventured here.

Bolivia has been a learning landscape for me. It is often easy to see our progress when we look back, and when I review and study my first efforts, and how the compositions seemed to become more simple as time went on, I gained so much in noticing that there were elements and traces of where my style was going to progress to, in the initial images from all those years ago.

I’m almost finished processing the films from the past year. I hope to start working on editing and publishing images from Bolivia and Brazil over the coming weeks. We will see.

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