What will your photography bring you next?

I believe photography allows us to open up an internal dialogue with ourselves, one where we are able to ask questions of ourselves and our world and be free to interpret at will. I think that's one of the reasons why I love photography so much, because there are always things to be learned about the world, and also about myself.

Portraits of Deakons, Orthodox Christian Lalibela, Ethiopia, © Bruce Percy 2010

I've often felt that the learning tends to come during the act of making pictures, or much later on, once I've had time to consider and reflect on the experiences and also the results from a photographic trip somewhere. For instance, the new set of photographs I published a month ago of Iceland are still perhaps too fresh for me to get a clearer understanding of what I've created. I'm sure over the coming years, I'll gain a clearer understanding of what I was doing, and why I was doing it.

The main thing for me is not to impose any set of expectations of rules onto what I either wish to create, am creating, or have created. It is what it is, and I fully accept what it is. In this way, I am receptive to understanding its successes and failures and at the same time, not judge it.

I've been thinking today that language, or more specifically, the choice of words we use when we talk about our art can be a clue to how we feel about our creative selves. For instance, I sometimes hear others talk about their work in the sense that they have to  'strive', 'push' or 'challenge' what they are doing. For me, I like to use words such as 'flow', 'embrace', 'discover' and keep things 'open' to whatever may come.

So I've been wondering about this. Why do many photographers talk about their art in a forceful way? Surely the words 'challenge', 'strive' and especially 'push' suggest a need to change and by exerting some kind of rules of force upon what you do - then the change will come?

In the arts, change does not come from challenging or pushing oneself. It only leads to expectations and expectations lead to writers block. Writers block is a symptom of setting goals and if you're unable to achieve them, a feeling of not going forward ensues. Before long, a feeling of stagnation begins to pervade your creative efforts and you loose confidence and faith in yourself. And before long, something you always turned to, to give you inspiration and joy in your life is no fun at all.

Creativity needs to be nurtured, cared for, tended well.

And this means banishing thoughts of pushing oneself forward, or of striving. Things should not be difficult. If they are difficult, it is only because you have made them so, and it is best to stop and leave it a while so it can find its own flow again.

Portraits of Kathmandu, Nepal. © Bruce Percy 2009

You may be forgiven for thinking that I've got it sussed. That I know how to avoid these stagnant moments, or times when I feel I'm not going anywhere in my art, or I've maybe given you the impression that I never suffer from this affliction. Rest assured - the main reason why I feel I have such a grasp on why language such as 'strive','challenge' and 'push' are bad, is because I've found them destructive forces in the past.

I have indeed suffered from moments when I've felt lost or stuck with my art, and I still get them. Only recently, I'd been feeling a sense of stagnation with regards to my portraiture work. I simply hadn't had any free time over the years of running my workshop business, to go make some new images of people. The trouble I had, was finding a group of people that I felt a connection or desire to go make photos of. Rather than force it, I just decided that the answer would come sometime, and it did. Just the simple act of watching a movie about the last Geisha was perhaps the catalyst. I thought about how beautiful Geisha are and I've always felt that if I am to photograph anything, it should be because I think it beautiful. Before I knew it, I was buying books on Geisha, reading up on their history, and it just grew from that. Months later a plane ticket was bought and a plan had been formed..... I'd got my inspiration back.

These days, I feel I have a better understanding of my creativity and how it works. It has its own flow. Things happen when they happen and I can neither control or will it to happen. It just does and sometimes it just doesn't. When it's not happening, I'd much rather not force it, so I tend to put the camera away and go do something else instead.

My creativity tends to flow when I am not putting pressure on myself, but just being in the moment, with no expectations or preconceived ideas of what I might create.

Portraits of Geisha. I'd been feeling a sense of stagnation about my portraiture work, and since I'd always had a love for the beauty of Geisha, felt a real desire to go make some photographs of them in 2014. © Bruce Percy

Next year, in 2015, I've set aside more time than usual in my calendar for some personal projects because I feel there's been an imbalance between my working life and creative life. Running a workshop business is fun, and it's creative in the sense that I am dealing with other's creativity, but I've been feeling a neglect towards my own creative needs. 

So in 2015, I'm heading back to Ethiopia to revisit the sacred town of Lalibela for a special orthodox christian celebration. In February I am returning to Japan to photograph more Geisha, and in April this year I will be heading to Bhutan for the very first time.

 I don't know what these trips will bring, and I love not knowing. I feel that the possibilities are open for things to happen as they happen, when they happen and if they don't, then so be it. It's just the way it is.

I also have no idea of what I will learn about myself or my art until I have made the work. I'm just looking forward to finding out things along the way, opening up a dialogue between myself and the world I am interpreting through my camera and seeing where it takes me.

Photography is a gift. It is an invitation to explore the world and oneself. It is a passport that says 'find out more'. It is a creative outlet. It should not be challenged, or forced at will to perform. Just go with it for the journey and I'm sure, over time, it will enrich your life more than you had ever imagined.

Be kind to your creativity.

Hans Strand's Iceland - a photographic book review

It's no surprise to many of you that I own many fine photographic books.

What you may not know, is that many of them have been the catalyst that got me to go to some of the places I now know and love so well. Galen Rowell's 'Mountain Light' for instance inspired me to go all the way to Patagonia to witness for myself the grandness of Torres del Paine's stunning landscape.

Landmannalaugar, central highlands of Iceland, shot - I believe - from a helicopter. Image © Hans Strand

I love how photography books can instil a sense of wonder and inspire me in my own photographic pursuits, but they can also take me inside myself for an hour or two where I feel I connect with my creative self. Give me a good book of images and I'm lost, entranced. Time becomes irrelevant, as too does the past or future. All that matters is the present moment - how I interact and feel about the work I'm viewing.

Hans Strand's book on Iceland is a very good book, because it does exactly that for me. I get lost and absorbed in the wonder of Iceland because the work presented inside the book is so beautiful.

 Image © Hans Strand. The book has many abstracts taken from the air.

When I received the book, I thought I'd have a short glimpse through it, but I got so caught up in the landscape, my quick few seconds to look through it extended to over an hour. I lost myself in the landscape and Strand reminded me that Iceland is still relatively untouched, unknown and un-photographed. He takes us on a very different journey through the landscapes of Iceland. His book shows us the abstract nature of many unknown locations from the air as well as the ground: sometimes at a very disconnected (read satellite view) and other times at a more intimate vantage point, just hovering a few hundred feet above. 

 Images © Hans Strand

Indeed, places like the Landmannalaugar region of the fabulous Fjallabak area of Iceland are perhaps best photographed from up high. With its rhyolite and green moss hillsides intermixed with snow that remains until the very tail end of the summer, there are fabulous patterns to be enjoyed - more so if one has a helicopter. I think his images of the Landmannalaugar region are perhaps some of the strongest in this book: because they successfully capture what I see in my own mind's eye when I am there myself but am unable to capture. They are also beautifully abstract and well composed images. More art than document.

But why would anyone want to own a photographic monograph? I ask this, because over the years I've been writing about some of my favourite books, I've had emails from readers of this blog who have either told me that:

1) They have never owned a photographic book (imagine just what they are missing!)

2) or that they only wish to buy a book if there is text inside which explains how the images were created (and therefore missing out on what can be learned by just studying and enjoying someone's work)

Front cover of Hans Strand's book

It’s no surprise to me that many photographers do not buy other photographer’s work. They may enjoy it on a web browser, but the interest seems to go no further than that. This is a shame, because photographic monographs are inspiration food for us photographers. If they are well printed, as is the case with Strand’s wonderful book on Iceland, they can teach us and inspire by illustration. They also feed us with the possibilities of what is there and what we may experience if we so choose to go there ourselves. They also remind us of why we love photography so much.

Ultimately, photography books like Strand's allow us to connect to our creative selves: if I can't get outside to make photos, then sitting gazing upon a beautifully printed book is the next best thing. In this regard, Strand's book is one of the nicest, and inspiring books on Iceland that I've seen in a while.

If you would like to find out more, or perhaps buy a copy, this book is available as a special signed edition from Beyond Words at £40.

Josef Albers - Interaction of Color

I've been saying for a while now, that digital-darkroom skills take a lifetime to master. It is a continuous journey of self improvement. Simply buying a copy of Lightroom or Photoshop and learning the applications may give us the tools, but it does not make us great craftsmen. We need to delve deeper than simply adding contrast or saturation to our images to truly understand how to get the best out of our editing and to move our photographic art forward.

Josef Albers fascinating 'Interaction of Colour'. It's quite an old publication now, but it's great for getting a better grasp of colour theory.

Lately, I've been taking more of an interest in tonal relationships and more specifically, the theories behind how we interpret colour. It's something that has grown out of my own awareness of how my digital-darkroom interpretation skills are developing.

Simply put, I believe we all have varying levels of visual awareness. Some of us may be more attuned to colour casts than others for example. While others may have more of an intuitive understanding of tonal relationships. 

Ultimately, if we're not aware of tonal and colour relationships within the images we choose to edit, then we will never be able to edit them particularly well. I think this is perhaps a case of why we see so many badly edited (read that as over-processed) images on the web. Many are too attached to what they think is present in the image, and there's a lack of objectivity about what really is there. 

So for the past few weeks I've been reading some really interesting books on the visual system. In Bruce Frazer's 'Real World Colour Management' book for instance, I've learned that our eye does not respond to quantity of light in a linear fashion.

An overly-simplified illustration. It demonstrates that the human eye is not able to perceive differences in real-world tonal values. Our eye tends to compress brighter tones, which is why we need to use grads on digital cameras, because their response is linear, while our response is non-linear.

We tend to compress the brighter tones and perceive them as the same luminosity as darker ones. A classic case would be that we can see textural detail in ground and also in sky, while our camera cannot. Cameras have a linear response to the brightness values of the real world, while we have a non-linear response.

Similarly, when we put two similar (but not identical) tones together, we can discern the difference between them:

Two different tones. Easy to notice the tonal differences when they are side by side.

But when we place them far apart - we cannot so easily notice the tonal differences:

Two different tones, far apart. Their tonal difference to each other is less obvious.

Our eye is easily deceived, and I'm sure that having some knowledge of why this is the case, can only help me in my pursuit to become more aware of how I interpret what I see, whether it is in the real world, or on a computer monitor.

Josef Albers fascinating book 'Interaction of Colour' was written back in the 1950's. I like it very much because it:

"is a record of an experimental way of studying colour and of teaching colour".

His introduction to the book sums up for me what I find most intriguing about how we see -

"In visual perception a colour is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes colour the most relative medium in art".

Indeed. How a viewer of your work may interpret what your image says may be totally subjective, but there are certain key physical as well as psychological reasons for why others are relating to your work the way they do. But most importantly, if we don't 'see it' ourselves, then we are losing out during the creative digital darkroom stage of our editing.

"The aim of such a study is to develop - through experience - by trial and error - an eye for colour. this means, specifically, seeing colour actions as well as feeling colour relatedness"

And this is the heart of the matter for me. I know when I edit work, that sometimes I need to leave it for a few days and return later - to see it with a fresh eye. Part of this is that I am too close to the work and need some distance from it, so I can be more objective about what I've done.

But I also know that I don't see colour or tonal relationships so easily. I need to work at them. I am fully aware that I still have a long way to go (a life long journey in fact) to improve my eye. And surely this is the true quest of all photographers - to improve one's eye?

The memory of a colour

While I was in the Fjallabak region of the central highlands of Iceland this September, I encountered a number of vast black deserts. I've been in vast landscapes of nothingness before, such as the Salar de Uyuni salt flats of the Bolivian altiplano, and also the pampas of Patagonia.

These places are captivating endless nothingnesses that make the eye hunt and hunt for something to latch onto. At least, that's what I think happens when humans encounter something so vast and featureless.

One of the many black deserts of the central highlands of Iceland. Black can come in many shades and hues, as I discovered.

This was nothing new for me. But what was new for me, was that I discovered that black isn't really just black. There are many different types of black desert to be found in Iceland. One of them - near the volcano Hekla, is so jet-black (it feels as if nothing can escape it's pull) that you realise every other black desert you've witnessed has to a large degree - some kind of colour to it.

There's a lot of psychology at play when it comes to interpreting colour.

Bruce Frazer's excellent book on colour management. Every photographer should read this.

For instance, I've been reading Bruce Frazer's fantastic book 'Real World Colour Management', and in it he describes the psychological factors involved in how we interpret colour. Colour is as he describes it 'an event'. It is light being reflected off a subject and viewed by an observer.

We have what he describes 'memory colour'. For instance, we know what skin tone looks like, and we all know the kind of blue a blue sky should be. We know 'from memory' how these colours should be. There are psychological expectations that certain colours should be certain colours. 

I think this applies to how I perceived the black deserts of Iceland. If i say a desert is black, we think of it as jet-black, even though it might be a deep, muddy brown-black, or a deep muddy purple-black.

I think most of the time, many of us simply go around looking at colour but not 'seeing it'. We use memory colours all the time with little thought to what the real colour of an object might be.

For example, last year during a workshop, my group and I were all working in very pink light during sunrise. Knowing that the entire landscape was bathed in a pink light, and that many of us don't notice the colour cast so obviously, I asked my group individually what colour the clouds were. Half of the group correctly said that the clouds were pink, while the other half incorrectly said that they were white. My feeling on this matter is that those who said the clouds were white - were attaching a memory of what they think clouds should look like. They were, in other words, not really noticing the colour of the object at all, but just attaching a common belief that clouds are white. This is a good example of memory colour.

But let's go one stage further. This might actually not be colour-memory at play though. It could simply be our internal auto-white-balance working. It's known that the human visual system is very good at adapting to different hues of white light. If we are in twilight, we may not see the blue colour temperature of the light on the landscape (but we sure would notice it's twilight if we take a photo on a digital camera and look at the histogram - there will predominantly be a lot of information in the blue channel, and very little in the red and green channels). Likewise, if we are sitting in tungsten light at home, our visual system adapts and tunes out the 3000k warm hue that we're being bathed in.

I think I was applying 'colour memory' to the black deserts of Iceland - I wasn't aware of the subtle differences in hues between one black desert and the other, because I had just attached a memory of what I know black should be (all blacks are black right?).

Being aware of the subtle differences in colour is hard work, because our visual system has evolved to adapt to whatever context we exist in. If we are sitting in pink sunrise light, we tune it out. If we do detect any pink at all,  it's in the more obvious region of the sky where the sun is. That's why most amateur photographers point their cameras towards the sun at sunrise (I tend to point 180º the other way, because I know the pink light is everywhere, and the tones are softer and much easier to record).

If I see clouds, I assume they are white because my visual system has its own auto-white balance. If I see skin tones, I use colour-memory to assume all skin tones to be the same, regardless of what kind of light the person is being bathed in. For example, if someone is standing underneath a green tree, there will be a degree of green-ness to their skin tone which I won't see, because of colour memory.

We lie to ourselves all the time, but our camera doesnt. It tell's it like it is, and I think this is the nub of todays post: being a good photographer is about being as colour-aware as we can be.

This is not an easy thing to do, because we are hijacked by our own evolution: our visual system tunes out colour casts all the time, and we also apply colour memory to familiar objects. We expect certain things to have certain colours, and as a result, we tend to ignore the subtle difference that the colour temperature of the light we're working in can have.

As I keep saying to myself as I work on my new images from Iceland "Not all black deserts are black".

The Highlands of Iceland & North Iceland, 2014

Two nights ago, I published my monthly newsletter. In it, I described the beautiful complexity of the central highlands of Iceland.

I thought it would be nice to share a little contact sheet of some recent images from two trips this September (I still have a backlog of images shot during July as well as September to get through). So by no means is this the complete set of images.

Contact sheet of images shot in the central highlands and north east of Iceland this September. Images © Bruce Percy (Mamiya 7 Mk1 camera with 43, 50, 80, 150 and 210 lenses)

It's been so long since I had the chance to edit any of my own work. I've literally forgotten how satisfying and absorbing working in the darkroom can be (read that as digital-darkroom if you like me, use photoshop or any other digital editor, or analog darkroom if you are a traditional film photographer working in a wet darkroom).

Going into a room, and shutting myself away from everyone for extended periods of time and letting myself be immersed in my experiences and thoughts about the places I am working on, is a bit like re-living the times I had whilst shooting, and it also allows me to reconnect with the work at hand. It's just so enjoyable to escape into my own world and disappear for a few hours.

And a few hours can often turn into a few days. I think I've been putting off editing any work this year due to a lack of free time.

I really prefer to be able to set aside a few days or maybe a week in my studio, so I can truly get into the work I'm editing. Anything else feels like I'm being interrupted, disturbed in some way. And I've really not had much free time in between workshops, and running a business.

I really think to get the best out of ones editing, I need to get some distance between the shoot and the editing. It's the only way I can be objective about what I was doing. But leaving the work for more than six months or more (as in the case of images I shot in Venice a year ago, and Lofoten this February), feels like I'm so far removed from them, it's a little hard to get reconnected.

Anyway, I feel as photographers, we need to look after our mojo. Mojo will only exist if we remain enthusiastic in what we do. Being able to shoot is one way of keeping your mojo healthy, but also being able to bring work to completion is another. Leave things for far too long, or never complete anything and very soon you may be feeling that your photography has no direction or focus.

I've been depriving myself of the joy in bringing my work to completion, and now that I've completed some new work, I'm feeling energised to continue.

You can see more of my new images from Iceland under my ''recent work' section of this site.