For those of you who were considering coming along on the weekend workshop to Torridon this January 22nd - 24th, there are only 2 spaces left. Grab them for a christmas present (to yourself perhaps?) while you can :-)
These photos were taken last week while I was away with a private client for the week up in the north west.
It will be interesting to see what the light brings this January, as January - March can often be some of the coldest / frosty times of the year here in Scotland.
I think as I go on, I'm becoming more attracted to form and tone.
It's becoming more and more apparent to me when I put these 'contact sheets' together, that there is a simplification in the compositions and the colour components to my recent work. It perhaps started with Bolivia this year.
So here is a contact sheet of the images I've shot recently on the Isle of Arran and the Isle of Harris too.
I'm in the process of setting up a workshop for Arran. It's not an obvious landscape to photograph and requires some work; lacking immediately dramatic craggy mountains, you have to go looking for the subjects in a much more studied way.
I'm off to Asynt next week - in a camper van. I have to meet up with the BBC for an interview, and then I'll be trying to photograph the north, north west of Scotland over 9 days.
Last week I spent some time with a client up in Torridon on a private trip. During the evening, he wanted to show me some images by a photographer who shoots on a 1D. He was blown away by the resolution and detail in his images and he wanted to know how to achieve it.
I took a look at this particular photographers site and I'm sorry to say - my blood began to boil. These were not images with great clarity, these were images that had been greatly oversharpened at full size before resizing down.... all for vanity.
Yes the images looked superb, but the issue for me was that they don't accurately reflect the detail in the image you'd get from them if you bought a print.
Why do people do this? Putting perceived resolution into an image that isn't there, to impress the heck out of people on the web is vulgar but it's also misleading.
Here for your own benefit, are two images.... you can decide for yourself which one you prefer, but bear in mind, that they are the same image. One has been oversharpened to give the perceived idea of it being much more impressive than it actually is.
I guess for some folk, sharp images are everything. Perhaps they're the kind of folk that have forgotten to enjoy an image for it's smooth tones, and have to be impressed by hard edges.
Sharpening is BAD. It doesn't really make an image 'sharp', it just increases the contrast at the edges of objects in the picture. You should never apply it to your files unless you are preparing for final output on a printer, or applying a small amount of sharpening to recover what has been lost while down sizing for use on the web. Those images which have been over-sharpened to give the 'illusion' of a highly detailed image are misleading.