Colour palettes - colour grading

In black and white photography, tinting prints - tritone, duotone, quad tone, is a staple of the process. Black and white often uses hints of colour in the shadows and highlights to give the work a particular feel or look.

But in colour landscape most photographers don’t apply the same principles to their work. When it comes to editing, few consider using colour thematically. By that I mean, few consider using colour to give their work a particular kind of look or feel. Yes, they may saturate the colours or mute them, but that is often as far as it goes.

Adjusting the colour palette, or ‘look’ of a scene has been a staple of the motion picture industry for a very long time. Movies are there to tell stories and to take us into another world. One way that movie producers take us into another world is by the use of colour. They will often adjust the colour palette of a movie to give a certain feel to it. This is called ‘colour grading’.

In colour photography, many of us choose to adjust contrast and overall saturation of colours, but few of us use colour to convey a certain mood of feeling to the work.

Perhaps you feel that adjusting colour in this way is not what photography is about? Perhaps you feel that photography is about recording what was there?

I hope the opposite is true for you. That you like photographs to convey a mood or a feeling, and that you think of photography as a creative medium where you can cast a spell over the viewer. Photographs aren’t real. They never were. Everything about the process introduces a point of view: where you stood to make the shot, what lens you chose, what exposure you opted to give the shot. All these decisions mean that you are telling a particular story. A point of view. An illusion.

One of the most under-utilised tools in our editing process is the choice of colour palette. It’s something I’ve been working with now for about the past five years: I look for photographs that have similar colour palettes to work as a portfolio. Colour and how it is applied, is just as important as where to stand was, or what lens to use. Colour is part of how we tell our stories, and using it in a delicate, considered way to ‘colour grade’ our photographs is a skill that most never consider.

I colour grade my work all the time. I consider the use of colour just as important as all the other more mainstream actions we take. I’m not interested in whether the colour is accurate to what I saw, but more about whether the tonal and colour palettes give me the look and feel I want.

if not now, then when?

I just published some new images this week from a trip to Romania this February.

If you’ve been reading my blog for many years, you probably know that I don’t like to edit work straight after shooting it.

There are many reasons why I choose not to:

1. I’m far too close to it to be objective about what I shot.

2. I may be too attached to certain images and may be forcing them to be something that they’re not. I may, for instance think an image is much better than it actually is ;-)

3. f I’m disappointed that they didn’t come out the way I saw them, then I’m less likely to get past that, and see the image in another light.

4. And conversely, a photograph may actually be much better than I had thought at the time of capturing it. If I’d worked on my images straight away, I would have discarded it too soon.

I also believe that having some time away from the shots allows for my subconscious to continue to work on them. I’m sure that there are processes at work, that I am unaware of, which are going to influence the outcome of the work when I do get round to editing.

Diminishing returns, the longer you leave it?

But I also believe there may be a time-limit before the work becomes too distant, too remote, perhaps irrelevant to where you are now, if you leave it for far too long.

I used to believe that if I didn’t get round to editing the work within a month or so, that the work would become too disconnected from myself and I would find the window to edit it had passed. This is no longer the case for me. I sometimes shelve work for many months and in some cases years.

I fail to see the need to edit ‘right now’.

For example, I have a very nice unedited collection of images from Senja in Norway that are now 3 years old. I didn’t work on them at the time I made them because I felt too close to the work, and then as the months ensued, I just found more pressing subjects to work on - usually I like to prepare new images to coincide with the announcement of a new tour or workshop. So some images do take precedence.

My last set of Harris images from Scotland sat in my filing cabinet for more than a year before I got round to editing them. This was the first time I’d left work for that long.

I just didn’t feel inspired / in the mood, to work on them and I think this is a very valuable lesson: never work on the images, even if you feel you have to, unless you are inspired to do so.

I had originally thought there was nothing on the films of merit so I just parked the work. A year later I took a look at the work and found that there was a lot of really nice images…..

So sometimes you are simply too close to it, or perhaps there is something internally going on with you that means you’re not feeling the work ‘at the moment’.

Just because you’re not in the mood:
doesn’t mean the work is bad

Similarly with this new set of Romanian images. I did try to work on them, and had a couple of false starts with it where I gave up because I just wasn’t feeling it. There was no inspiration to work on them. Again, I’ve learnt that rather than this being a symptom of poor work, it’s more a symptom of where I’m at. Either through over-work, or just where I am creatively speaking, I just don’t feel in the mood. And not being in the mood is OK. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just that there is an ebb as well as flow to our creativity.

In other words - just because you’re not in the mood, doesn’t mean the work is bad. It just means you’re not in the mood. Best park the work somewhere to come back to it another time.

And now, eight months later, I got round to working on the Romania images. I’m not sure what shifted for me. After many months of feeling that I had nothing to say about the work, I found myself enthused and excited to work on it this week. What changed? I do not know, and perhaps there is no need to know.

What I have learned is : work on the work when you feel it. If you’re not feeling it, put it to one side until you do feel excited to work on it. Never work on images simply because it’s the new work you have, and never force yourself to do something you’re not feeling. Often there is a right time, right place to be creative and one of the best skills you can possess, is knowing when to not work on images, as well as when to.

Inkjet paper de-roller

Worth every single penny

Some things don't seem worth money on paper, but prove to be worth every single penny when you finally take the plunge and buy them. One item that falls into that category is the £200 Lion paper de-roller you see below.

I’ve struggled for years to try to flatten inkjet paper that comes on a roll. I’ve tried leaving the paper under books for weeks in the vain hope that the curl in the rolled paper will be removed, but to no avail.

Then, I saw a YouTube video of someone using a roller blind to remove the curl in the paper. He claimed that his $10 dollar roller blind did the same job as the £200 de-roller, except when I tried it, I got a crease right through the middle of my prints because the roller blind fabric is too thin, so the edge of the paper tends to push through the fabric and imprint itself on itself as you roll the paper round. So as much as his claim that using a roller blind did the same job as the £200 de-roller at a greatly reduced price, he was incorrect. It did the job, but it did it badly as it damaged the paper.

Well, there are so many opinions out there, and the best way to find out if something is good or not is to try it for yourself. My good friend Kyriakos who lives nearby owns a de-roller so I went to try it out and found that it works perfectly. No creases in the paper because it has a thick laminate surface and the surface as it’s being wound round the pole is kept apart from touching the paper by a sandwich layer at the outer edges that keep the laminate away by around 4mm.

Why does such a simple tool cost so much? Is it worth it? I know you might be feeling that £200 to re-roll paper is a crazy amount, but it’s no different from the argument about expensive tripods.

When we all first start out, we think a $200 tripod is all we need. We find the idea of spending $1000 on a tripod crazy. It only keeps the camera steady right? But after a few years with a poor flimsy tripod that doesn’t stay where you want it to be, or the ball head creeps once you let go, you soon start to realise the value of that $1000 tripod. I know myself that the money at first doesn’t feel like it’s worth it, but I feel very different these days. I certainly wouldn’t go cheap on a tripod in future and as for ball-heads - well, they are useless if they creep at all once I’ve tried to set them.

Same goes for a paper de-roller. I will gladly upgrade from a $10 roller blind that creases and damages my inkjet prints to a £200 de-roller if it does the job and does it well.

You don’t value products by how much they cost. You value them by how good a job they do and the de-roller does its job fantastically well as you can see from the two pictures above showing the curled paper (left) and it flattened once I used the de-roller on it.

Above is another photo, showing a set of curled prints (I’m preparing for my special edition Altiplano books), and further up the desk is a set of prints after they have had their curl removed.

Alternatively, buy cut-flat paper rather than roll paper?

Well you could do that, but it’s a lot more expensive. Rolled paper works out to be a lot more cost effective than the cut sheets you buy. Plus, you can print endlessly on a roll whereas with the cut paper you have to load each sheet individually (if it’s thick rag paper) into the back of the printer one sheet at a time. So I ended up abandoning cut sheets to go for rolled paper. And now that I have the de-roller, I’m no longer stressed about my prints having a curl in them.

When handling prints, it’s a good idea to use cotton gloves, so that any natural oils in your skin don’t blemish the paper. Above is a stack of prints that had a natural curl in the paper. The curl has been removed by the de-roller.

We shouldn’t rate products by how much they cost us. But we do. We should rate them by how well they do their job. Tools that do an excellent job, are in my book, priceless.

The de-roller does it’s job very well. It removes the curl in rolled paper of most thicknesses, and it’s built very well to ensure that the paper isn’t damaged in the process.

As with most things - you get what you pay for.

It comes very highly recommended.

Lion paper de-roller :

https://www.lionpic.co.uk/product/Expression-De-Roller--610mm-x-38mm---24---x-1.5--Roller-,34057,0.aspx

Presentation in everything is key

During my portfolio skills workshop this September, we spoke about the need to work on the presentation of our work. Portfolios may seem to be just about arranging the work, or selecting the work, but how the work is presented, is just as important.

For my Altiplano book announcement

Photography is a visual medium, so I think it should make sense that anything you do visually, should be as aesthetically pleasing as you can make it, at the very least. It should hopefully have some kind of unity or ‘brand’ that represents you and your work.

Lençois Maranhenses portfolio

As some examples of this, I showed some of the previous banners from this website to my workshop group. My aim was to point out that creating the photographs was one thing, but I deliberately spend a lot of time thinking about the presentation : how to lay them out.

Now, I’m not saying you have to have a banner on your website. You may be thinking this is what Im telling you. I’m not. I’m saying that how you choose to present your work, in whatever medium you choose to do it in : matters.

I chose to put a banner together on my site because I find it a great way to give visitors to my site an initial ‘hit’ of what’s in store.

Back to the design of them: my banners often require a lot of thought and experimentation by me to get the look I want. I don’t just grab a selection of images and put them together for the banner - the order, the tonal responses between them all interact with each other and I move things around until it feels right.

Extreme Iceland winter trip

Everything you do needs to be presented well. Whether it’s your website, book, business cards, flickr account or facebook. Your work doesn’t end with creating and editing the photographs. It goes on and never ends. You are a visual-artist, so anything visually related to you has to have the same care and attention paid to it that you pay to your photography.

Fjallabak, central highlands of Iceland, 2018

With some of these banners, I have either used shapes - diagonals or curves to lead the eye into the banner (from left to right) and out of the banner (on the right). In others, I have maybe mixed light and dark images in a way that they alternate from dark to light and back to dark again. Some other banners it’s more about the space in the images: I will choose a collection of images that are all similarly ‘empty’ or similarly ‘busy’, so there is no imbalance.

Puna de Atacama, Argentina 2017

I’ve chosen to list most of the banners from this site back to 2014. I hope you enjoy them, but take a moment to study how I’ve chosen to sequence the images in each banner, and maybe also consider how my style has evolved / changed over the period also.

Easter Island

I find banner creation immensely satisfying. But again it doesn’t stop there, and I have to even think about the sequencing of the portfolios on the main web page also. Everything has been done with a great deal of thought behind it. I’m convinced that just this little bit of attention to detail makes all the difference. That extra 5% always seems to give the perception of being a whole lot more.

Bolivia

Senja, Norway

Hokkaido

Puna de Atacama, 2015

Patagonia, 2015

Isle of Harris, 2014

Should photography be a private endeavour?

Over the years of running workshops, I’ve had to do a lot of thinking about the ‘why’s. Why are some compositions good, while others are bad? For example.

One of the ‘why’s I’ve had to think long and hard about is the ‘why do we do photography in the first place?’. I think the answer is different for everyone out there. Even though I think it ‘should’ be simply ‘because we enjoy it’. But I don’t think the answer is as clear as that, or the only one out there.

We all do photography for different reasons. Some of us do it because there is an inner artist that just wants to create new things. I think this is where I come from: I see photography as a creative endeavour and one which allows me to show my own voice. But for others, being an artist may not even come into it. It could be a simple past-time, something that gives enjoyment for nothing more than itself. There is no desire to exhibit or complete work. Instead, the pursuit, the simple act of going out there into the world to make photos is enough. It’s certainly something I admire as I personally wish I was more inclined to be that way, than where I am today.

Running a small photography business like mine, means that it’s important that my work has some interest for an audience. I make my living from running workshops and tours, and people come with me because (hopefully anyway) they like what I do, and want to share in going to places that share the same aesthetics as my photographs. So there could easily be a pressure there on my part, to feel I have to deliver a set of good new images from time to time to keep my audience interested. I am lucky that I don’t feel that way: right now, I just create what I want to create, and luckily for me, there are others out there who like what I do. I’m very fortunate as I know this might not always be the case in the future.

So at the moment, my photography has become a very public thing. I use my work to help sell my tours and workshops and also my abilities as a photographic teacher. So my work has to be out there for others to see.

But I’ve come to realise lately, that I think photography is a very personal endeavour. It is something that, if I were not running a business, I would make my photography a private endeavour. Because I think that although some of us do hope to get kudos and praise from others, ultimately, we do what we do, for ourselves. It’s just for us.

I can envisage a time in the future, once I have retired, that I will be creating images, but I won’t feel the need to share them. You may think this to be crazy or just plain stupid. Why create the work, if no one is going to see it? Well, I think it’s ok to create work that no one is going to see. Because we create the work for our own enjoyment. I’ve certainly been made aware that even when others like what I do, they seldom like it for the same reasons I like it. So after a while, as much as it’s appreciated that others like your work, you realise that the thing that matters the most is how you feel about it. Everyone else’s viewpoint, as welcome as it is, is really secondary to the point. You do your work for yourself, and in that way, it can exist as something that has no purpose other than to be enjoyed in the making.

I think right now, we are living in times where kudos about our photography is taking too much attention from the actual act of just creating work. With so many platforms to share our work we can so easily get lost in a chase for higher like counts, or to win competitions. But the truth is, that the person who cares the most about your photography : is you.

I think I’m at a stage in my own work, that I’d really like it to be a private endeavour. I think I can do that by choosing which aspects of my work I would be happy in sharing, while maybe there may be a few projects each year that I keep for myself. I’m not sure you perhaps understand, but I think all artistic creative people need to keep a little back of what they do for themselves. You don’t have to show everything that you do, and I think there’s something deeply personal in keeping some of your more private work back.

We do photography for no other reason, than we do it for ourselves. Sharing is nice, but it’s not the real reason why we do it. Photography can be such a personal endeavour, with no need for other’s views about what we’ve done. We do what we do, for ourselves, and isn’t that enough?

The aura around image making

Way back in the days of film only - the 80’s, when I was around 21, I got my first film camera. It was an EOS 650 with standard lens.

At the time, pressing the shutter was a big deal. Because every time I fired the shutter, I had committed some light to film. There was no undo feature, no delete button, and there was no preview to check that I’d got what I thought I had. Learning was slow, because it was often weeks before I got the film back, and in that time I would have forgotten how I’d set the exposure of the camera.

Elgol, Isle of Skye, 2010. Image © Bruce Percy 2010

Everything about working with cameras back in the 80’s meant that firing the shutter was a pretty big deal. As a result, most of the time, you didn’t do it. Everyone, and I mean everyone, thought twice before they fired the shutter. It was a different time, a different place we were in. All we had were analog cameras and firing that shutter meant we had to be sure we wanted to make the shot.

Although these days I am in a position not to worry about the cost of film and it’s associated processing, I still find that pressing the button of my camera has remained ‘a pretty big deal’ for me.

Some things become engrained in us.

Sure there were financial aspects to pressing the shutter back in the 80’s, but there was also an aura around the process of making images. We had no preview screens with with to check the final image, and there were often days if not weeks before we saw the results, so learning from our mistakes was much slower. We had to learn to trust ourselves, and our judgement had to come before we fired the shutter, not as it is now for many where they fire the shutter and then cast judgment on the preview.

But most importantly for me: there was a sense of magic that happened between the point I fired the shutter and seeing the final image. Often what I saw with my eye and what came out in the film were quite different. Getting films back was like Christmas each time: rarely if ever, did an image come out the way I had expected and this meant that there were real surprises as well as disasters in the processed films.

This ‘aura’ around firing the shutter has always stayed with me.

Although I am now in a financial position not to worry about the cost of exposing film, I still find that firing the shutter means a pretty big deal to me. There is a sense of commitment to it, a sense of finality. What has been done cannot be undone, and I have to live with the consequences. When I think that I’ve captured what I was looking for, I have to make a decision as to when to choose to walk away from a scene. To be able to say ‘i’ve got it’, and to walk away requires trusting in one’s own abilities, but perhaps more importantly, allowing oneself to ‘let go’. It’s ok if the images don’t come out, it’s ok if I screwed up, but I have developed a sense of faith in myself to get it right. Trust in one’s own abilities only comes when you are able to let go of technological crutches, and these days I tend to listen to my gut more.

As a photographer I have learned to listen to how I feel inside before I fire the shutter. I make the judgement before I make the picture, rather than making pictures and then making the judgement.

How does it work for you? Are you aware of how you feel at the point you fire the shutter? And specifically, have you learned to trust your gut? Or are you still relying on the technological crutches (preview screen) to confirm what you’ve got?

1 Space available for Printing Masterclass

I have had a cancellation for next May’s printing Masterclass. Perhaps this is of interest to you?

Sold out

Fine Art Printing Photoshop-CS Masterclass

£448.00

Image Interpretation & Printing Techniques

2019, May 27 - 01


Price: £1,695
Deposit: £448


6-Day Photographic Mentoring Workshop
Wester Ross, Scottish Highlands

Introduction

This workshop will cover the technical workflow aspects of printing from Screen calibration, proofing to print evaluation.

As part of printing your work, we will cover the same lessons taught in my Digital Darkroom' workshop, because good prints are made from good edits. And good edits can only be verified by printing.

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Bad days of autumn and winter are approaching

The seasons have caught me out: it seems as if summer was only just a few weeks ago. The nights are now very dark here in Edinburgh and I’m finding the seasonal shift, of windy days and rainy nights comforting. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become accustomed to certain seasonal shifts and the weather they bring. Had I not become a lover of landscape photography I may dread the advancing winter and the dark wet days of autumn. Instead, I believe that my love for photography has allowed me to think that all days, of any kind of weather are beautiful. They all have a special character. To shoot in sunny weather is a really limiting factor on one’s own photography and for me, I’d much rather be out there in what many lay-people call ‘bad weather’.

I wish you lots of photographic potential and wonder this autumn and winter.

Adventure in the Central Highlands of Iceland

I’m just home from almost an entire month in the central highlands of Iceland.

I think I’ve made a lot of very special images from this trip, as we had some atmospheric / wintry conditions to shoot in. In the photograph below you can see some of my group and myself standing around waiting for a squall to pass through.

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Image used by kind permission. © Martin Bowen, 2018
September Fjallabak Iceland tour, 2018

In my view, fair weather photography is pretty one-dimensional. To open up your shooting options and to give your work some atmosphere, you need to shoot in all kinds of weather. It is not unusual for me to shoot in rainy, windy conditions. It’s the only way to get certain tones and atmospheres in my work, and I’ve learned a load in the process also. Besides, dramatic weather is quite exciting!

We had a blast. It was challenging trying to anticipate just how long some of the squalls would be. There were a few moments when we had hiked a little distance from the car, only to find ourselves in a white-out. Realising that we might not find our way back to the car if we stayed where we were, we would start to retreat while we could still see our footprints.

After a few days we learned to read the weather. We knew that most squalls that came through lasted for a few minutes and then things would clear. Learning to read weather and to understand the rhythms at play is advantageous. I’ve met a few mountaineers on my trips who have learned to do just that, and I often wish I had the same skill with regards to reading weather systems.

me checking for when the clouds would cover the sun. The weather would vary dramatically, with sunny weather followed by a snow storm, followed by zero visibility in some cases, followed by some sunny weather……
Image used by kind permission © Martin Bowen 2018

The best shooting was done was at the edge of the storms. Just as the snow would start to blow in, the black deserts would have a stippled effect as hail began to land lightly, before it would all disappear in a white-out. Then, as the squall began to pass, we would be standing waiting for it to clear and that was the other best time to shoot - as the visibility began to come back.

Photographing in clear weather is just so….. boring by comparison.

I’m certain I got a lot of new, interesting material from this visit to Iceland. I shot 51 rolls of film, and my cameras were often condensing up - the prism finders of my old Hasselblad 500 series cameras would become so hard to look through, that I just had to guess and hope that I was getting on film what I thought I was seeing.

You have to venture outdoors in all weather. Staying in-doors because it seems like a bad day will only limit your photography, and I’ve only ever had a couple of trips where the group and I couldn’t get much done because the weather was beyond bad. Otherwise we have always managed to get something.

If you don’t go, you don’t get.

Altiplano Book Sold out

Just a final note today to say thank you to everyone who bought a copy of my latest book. It sold out within a week. The standard editions sold out within about six hours. Quite a surprise. Thank you.