Old tools vs new tools

Just recently I upgraded something in my home music studio. Except that it turned out not to be an ‘upgrade’ but rather, two weeks of frustration because things stopped working, and I was getting some intermittent problems with audio.

This has reminded me that I am just as guilty of being seduced by new gear as anyone is. The strange thing is that when it comes to photography, I rarely buy anything I’ve not used before. In fact, I am perhaps guilty of holding on to the things I know work well, to such a point now, that I have bought spares of certain objects because they are no longer in production.

I realised many years ago that by keeping using the same gear, things become so familiar that workflow becomes natural and seamless. When you know your gear inside out, muscle memory takes over, and you just do things without needing to think too much. Each time I have bought something new for my photography, I have found that it often interrupts it. Disrupts the flow, and in a sense: either creates a pause in what I’m doing, or worse: is a step backwards.

An unfamiliar piece of gear can really screw with your creativity.

I should have figured this out when it came to my little home music studio. I had built up enough experience to know what the issues were and how to fix them when they came up. With the new audio interface I bought, I was un uncharted territory. I experienced a myriad of issues that took me a few weeks to figure out. And even now that I feel things are working again, I’m aware that I haven’t got much experience with this new device, and can still possibly encounter more problems as I start to use it in earnest.

The same is true of photography gear. When I take on something new, I do so, fully acknowledging that I will have to live with it for at least a year before I have enough experience to know whether the problems I encounter with it are more a case of being unfamiliar, or if the tool is just either a bad fit for what I do, or has some design flaw I can’t live with.

Go gently with new gear is my view. If you’ve got your process working well and you like it, leave it be.

I’ll leave you with a little story. I once bought a new ball head, only to find the clamp wasn’t as secure as I thought it was, and enjoyed watching, in slow motion, as my entire camera fell off, and dropped right into a silt river. It was an entire Mamiya 7II body and lens. I went back to using my older ball head after that.

Notes on weather forecasting, and predicting the future

I’ve decided to admit to something :-)

On my workshops and tours, I must admit that it drives me nuts when folks start to tell me what the weather is going to do. I’ve had folks saying to me ‘we better not go out as it looks like it’s going to rain in half an hour’, to ‘Looks like Thursday will be a write-off’.

Most of the time I’ve found that forecasts are wrong, and even when I have gone out and it is wet: I’ve often got interesting and good shots :-)

The adage ‘if you don’t go, you don’t get’ still holds true in my book, and there is something beautiful in ‘not knowing’ about what the future will hold.

Forecasting as useful as it is, shouldn’t be used to rule our lives. Reading into weather forecasts too much can stop you from going out, and besides, you don’t know what the weather will bring you when you do'.

Most of my best images were created in what folks would call ‘bad weather’. Only recently, on the Isle of Harris, the ‘bad weather’ days turned out to be our best. We had reduced visibility with the backgrounds becoming veiled and ‘foggy’ due to the light rain we had.

Conversely, photographing in dry weather (oh how much of a reprieve this may feel after wet weather), is often extremely boring: one dimensional. Like a postcard. Dull.

So my advice would be : unless the weather forecast is telling you that a storm will wreck your new hair style : go. Go and see what happens (and leave that forecasting machine back at the hotel).

You just don’t know what you’ll get, and that is the beauty and inspirational part of it all.

Japan is calling.....

Tonight I have been busy planning my hotel stay in Tokyo. I remembered that a few tours ago, I stayed at a hotel in Tokyo that had a robot girl as the checkin attendant, and she was accompanied by two Dinosaurs. One of them was definitely a raptor. While I was checking in, I had to listen to the ‘roar’ of the ancient forest.

I checked though my notes, to see which year this was, and it appears to have been my last Hokkaido trip in 2020 before the whole world went mad.

So I decided I should go back again. If you are interested / curious, the hotel is called Henn na Hotel in Tokyo. Looking forward to it. This is SO Japan !

Isle of Harris, or Bolivia?

This past month, I ran two workshops on the isle of Harris. I took this photo with my iPhone while we were there.

One of the things that I’ve learned over the past 13 years, is that each landscape can be a great teacher. Had I not visited Bolivia in 2009, I don’t think I would have embraced the minimalism that is available to me on Harris. Prior to my Bolivia trip, I was shooting Harris like every other beach is photographed. But Bolivia taught me to use space in my photos, and now I seek it wherever I go.

The Hálendi Tour

It’s been a long while in the making. But next September, I’m running a tour that goes right through the interior of Iceland up to the north east, and then back. This tour will completely avoid the ring road of the country, and focus on taking us into the heart of the highland landscape.

I decided that as much as I love my Fjallabak tour, it is time for me to give it a break (I need to keep my inspiration up), and so what we’re doing next September, is that we will journey through the two main ‘roads’ (I use the term loosely). The Sprengisandur road is perhaps one of Europe’s most stunning journeys. River crossings, vast empty deserts, glaciers along the way. It’s a beautiful journey.

We do stop for the first couple of days around the Fjallabak region, at the start of the tour, as it is only a few hours outside of Reykjavik, before venturing further north on the Sprengisandur road. The north east of Iceland is one of my favourite places to visit. It has some of the more spectacular waterfalls of the country and the return trip will take us to spend a few days around the Kerlingarfjoll area of the central highlands.

I don’t think I could stop coming to Iceland. I think it has become a home from home for me. As I look back at my first visit here in 2004, I would not have envisaged that I would come back so often, nor how Iceland’s landscape would become a teacher for me. I have often said that certain landscapes, when visited at the right time in one’s own photographic journey, can become instructors, showing you a way forward. Iceland has been one of those places for me, and I think that the repeated visits, and learning more and more about the country over so many years, has given my photography more depth than I would have gotten, had I only come here a few times. I am hoping I will keep on returning.