Creative flow (part 3 of 3)

Today, if you have time, I would like to suggest that you pick 3 photos from your recent efforts, and set a time limit to edit them. Just work on them quickly, take almost no care in precision of the work, just let yourself go with whatever happens while you edit them. Rather than applying a lot of consideration just apply the edits broadly.

Accept the following:

1. Anything you do that you didn’t intend : look at it and consider whether the unintentional is interesting / offers up something you might like to go with. If so, then go with it.

2. Accept that the work is transient. Disposable even. It’s just a task to see how fluid you can be.

This is all in the nature of seeing how fluid you can be. How creative you are, and whether the work comes together quickly. Don’t judge yourself too harshly on what you create, just try to see if you create new work, and to see if it offers up something you hadn’t done before.

if we are able to remove any sense of preciousness about what we do, we may be able to tap into a degree of fluidity. Not everything we do is going to be good and we need to get over that. It’s more important to just keep creating, rather than measuring what it is we do. Creativity is fluid, and it ebbs and flows. Some days your work will be average, boring even, other days it will be something else.

I feel we often over judge our work while we are creating it. I think this can lead to stagnation. This is why I think having no undo feature in your editing software may be liberating. It teaches you to just ‘go with whatever happens’, to understand that you are in a performance.

Performances are transient things - they are what they are while they are happening. If you can consider what you do as a performance, one way of doing something for just the moment you are in, then I think you can free yourself enough to let your creativity flourish.

Creative flow (Part 2 of 3)

Yesterday I asked you ‘what would you do if you had no undo?’

My own views are that creativity is a mixture of part performance and part control:

1. Performance - free flow, getting into the zone and just going with a flow. Less thinking, more intuition.

2. Control - noticing things in the performance that you like / don’t like, and tuning the performance accordingly.

I think there’s too much focus on the control side of creativity, and much less on the performance aspect.

Having an undo is part of the control aspect of creativity. I would like to put forward an argument that by avoiding using the undo feature, you are in the ‘performance’ aspect of creativity. Stop your flow to hit the undo button and you are breaking flow.

I sometimes feel that there is a need to over-produce work, that photographers want to have all options available to them, so that if they make a mistake, they can back up and correct it. But by having this ‘escape option’ available all the time, we’re less likely to just run with where the work is taking us.

If you were a live musician then you would be very used to your performances varying from one concert to another. But when we have endless options to go back and correct what we do, I think we can lose a lot of spontaneity in our work.

But the problem is much wider than this. I think that when we have too many options and a way of backing out, we never really ever commit, or finalise what we’re doing.

I hear too many points of view these days about trying to remove the need to commit to anything for as long as possible. For instance, just recently I heard an argument about not using grads in the field because they are ‘baked into’ the shot and cannot be undone later. It’s a terrible argument because it is trying to avoid introducing mistakes.

We have to make mistakes. Mistakes are part of the creative process. Mistakes allow us to find new directions through the unintended. We can often be surprised by what we’re shown when we do something we didn’t intend to do. Mistakes are part of experimenting. Creativity is all about experimentation, and experimentation means we do not really know what the outcome will be.

Mistakes also tell us that we need to work on improving our technique.

Avoiding any commitment, any final decision in what you do to the very end is, well, just a false view that you have endless options and therefore greater control. Too much control and the performance suffers. Spontaneity is removed and the work suffers.

Creativity is a mixture of performance and control. We need to be loose enough to find new things, and know when to hone and shape (control) what we’ve found. We also need to know when to let go and surrender to wherever the work is taking us.

Creativity is about keeping up a flow in one’s work. That can only happen when we choose to commit, choose to complete, and choose to move on.

I’d suggest avoiding using the undo feature for a while. See where your decisions take you.

Creative Flow (part 1 of 3)

Today i’d like to ask you a question: What if all the tools you use had no undo? What would you do, if each time you changed something, you couldn’t undo it?

What if you had to stand by each decision you made, whether it was the choice of focal length, the choice of grad filter, exposure, or choice of parameter change in your editing software?

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My latest set of Harris images, edited in one day, to try to be as fluid as I could.

Do you think having no undo feature, no way to change your decision would be beneficial or detrimental to your creativity, and creative flow?

What do you think?

Hokkaido space available

I have one space left for my Hokkaido tour this coming January. Perhaps you might like to join me?

The dates are : January 7th - 17th 2020.

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Good light vs ugly light

I’m in Iceland right now and today we visited one of my favourite lakes where we can get graphical shapes and tonal separation from the sand bars and water.

I’ve become more ‘accepting’ of shooting in the middle of the day, if the light is right. Where I once religiously stuck to sunrise and sunset only, I now shoot when I think the light is soft and gives me something to work with that is beautiful. But not all light is beautiful, and no amount of dynamic range in a digital camera will compensate for it. Beautiful light is beautiful light. And ugly light is ugly.

So here I was today, at around 10am at a lake in Iceland and the conditions were perfect as you can see from this iPhone shot. And so, I had to do a dance to celebrate it :-)

Image © Finnur Frodason

I'm going back to Harris next year

I’ve just published a photo workshop to the Isle of Harris for October next year (2020). If you’d like to join me?

Sold out

Isle of Harris

£748.00

November 13-18, 2025 (5-Nights)
November 20-25, 2025 (5-Nights)

Price: £2,495
Initial Deposit: £748
2nd Deposit of £748 due six months before tour start date

5-Day Photographic Mentoring Workshop

Introduction

Harris is a beautifully compact island with wondrous expansive beaches and a rugged eastern side. The Isle of Lewis and the Calanish stones are only 1 hour away from our base and we will head there in the evening to shoot the stones during sunset.

This trip is specifically great for simplifying your compositions as most of the beaches have a lot of space where only light and tone are the predominant features.

We are staying down on the beaches, in two different houses with our own private caterer. The houses are beautiful. Please note however that bathroom facilities are shared. Being near the beaches is ideal. The nearest hotel is 30 to 40 minutes away.

Date: Select Date 13-18 November 202520-25 November 2025

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The trip is now fully booked. If you’d like to join the waiting list for any cancellations, please just email me at bruce@brucepercy.com

The Pendulum Swing of Colour use

I find that each time I edit a new set of images, my application of colour varies. Some times the work has very muted tones. Other times the work has too much colour and I find that a few days later I’m re-adjusting the work to be more muted.

Part of the problem is colour constancy, or the lack of ability in oneself to correctly gauge the strength of colour, the more that one stares at the work. Part of the problem is that I’m still figuring out what my style is, and I find as my mood changes, my feeling towards the work also changes. Sometimes the work is stark and monochromatic, devoid of any colour at all. Other times the work is very colourful, and I feel a need to tone it down.

This is not just a case of my mood changing. It mostly has to do with how our brain ‘auto-white-balances’ what we see. Our visual system innately compensates. What we perceive is not always true .

And I’m sure I’m not alone. Most of us have a hard time judging the level of colour to use in our work.

I’ve seen some photographers who completely lack any colour judgement at all. The work is overly garish, the colours sci-fi, horrific in application because there’s just simply too many strong colours competing with each other. I am convinced that photographers who create this kind of work are at the beginning of their photographic journey. They haven’t developed their colour awareness yet, and are still very much in love with the need to over-excite the work they create. They are so enraptured by having strong colour in their work that we can’t get past it. I believe this, because I suffered from this in my early years.

When I look back at my earlier work, delicate application of colour is pretty non-existent. Despite thinking at the time that the colours were great in my photographs, I now realise that I was working from the belief that ‘more is good’. I had a lot to learn.

At the time, I had no idea about colour relationships, let alone that having too much colour, or competing colours in the frame could sabotage the composition. I also had no idea that composition was more than just the art of placing subjects within a frame. Composition is also about the application of colour, as well as tone and form. Each of these three elements has to work with the other for the composition to be successful. Simply plastering lots of strong colour across my images was clumsy at best, and at worst made my images look infantile.

And now twenty years later I’m still wresting with colour. In that I’m wrestling with ‘just how much’ to use. In other words I struggle with the degree of colour to use. I appreciate that colour is dependent on the subject matter, what the actual landscape offered. Some places are simply more colourful while others are naturally less so. So I understand that some photos or portfolios call for very little colour, while others require the colour to be applied selectively to aid the composition.

My recent images from Brazil are interesting because there appears to be a return to stronger colour for me. They are the strongest set of colour images I’ve made in a while.

But if I look at how I used to use colour over a decade ago, I’m aware that the application was more broad, more clumsy back then. Nowadays, I’m more selective. I feel I can produce a colourful image, without swamping the composition.

Colour is a balancing act.

Put too much in and you can swamp your compositions and ruin your work. Put in too little, and the image can appear dead or lifeless. Some sets of images require more colour than others, and of course we have our visual perception of colour to struggle with while we are deciding upon just how much colour is required.

The use of colour is a skill. Just like working on composition is as life long learning experience that never ends, so too is our application of colour. For colour application cannot not mastered overnight and we should expect our perception of it to pendulum swing from too much to too little, and back again.

Harris 2019

The Scottish island of Harris is an old friend. I’ve been coming here since around 2009. It’s taught me so much and has been instructive in the development of my photographic style.

 I’m not looking for the things I was looking for when I first came here. That’s what’s so special about revisiting a place after a few years have passed. You notice that you see new things, and not just because the landscape has changed, but because you have changed. What was once interesting to you has been cast aside, like the shedding of old skin, to be replaced by a new awareness.

The island hasn’t changed much, despite it turning into a photography mecca these days. There are so many photographic workshops and tours that run here each year, yet when I am there, I feel I have it all to myself. Which is wonderful.

And as for Harris ‘being done’, I beg to differ. Most landscapes are seldom ‘done’. The mere fact that I find myself seeing things anew, is a telling reminder. The landscape always has something to show us, we just have to listen.

I feel alive when I create new work

I’ve just completed work on a new set of images. Well, to be honest, I have a backlog of around four portfolios worth of images right now, so the shooting has been done. I just need to edit and arrange the work. The new set of images were shot in May this year, but it’s only this week that I’ve had the free time and space to review the work and edit it.

Lençois Maranhenses, May 2019.

For me, I feel alive and strong when I have finished new work. It’s always very empowering to find that I’m now sitting on top of a new set of images. There’s a freshness to it all: these are new! I’ve not seen them before, nor have I lived with them for many years…. they make me feel present, and they make me feel as though what I am doing is fluid, free, and on-going. Not creating any new work for many months gives me the feeling of being static, done, and tired.

“You’re only ever as good as the last great thing you did”, is a quote from a Prefab Sprout song. I’ve always remembered it, because it’s a reminder to keep creating, keep going forward. Keep producing new work. It’s the only way to feel that you ‘are’.

I ‘am’ a photographer when I create work. When I don’t create new work, but just go over my older work, I am no longer a photographer: I’m a curator. Curating one’s work is fine, but the reason why we do what we do, is to feel alive, and we feel alive when we are creating.

Keep creating. Keep moving forward.

Making art, or making product?

David Lynch expresses the difference between making ‘art’ and making ‘product’.

It’s quite insightful to see how frustrated he is with the workflow, schedules and budgets. How does one allow for some creative freedom while at the same time not go bankrupt? It’s a fine line.