The stereotypical view of the serious landscape photographer is one burdened with a large bag and a tripod. But for some notable exceptions (Galen Rowell immediately springs to mind) this view has not much changed from the beginnings of landscape photography to the modern day. While almost all things have progressively miniaturised the landscape photographers baggage seems to have defied that trend. Quality comes at a price in terms of the amount of equipment needed to cover the bases. Although the old contention that it is not about equipment is true I suggest that most readers of this site have a threshold of quality for their serious work (target 30x20in print) which rules out the camera phone/miniature compact (e.g. LX5, G12) as an option but for a small percentage of their work. Personally, if I go out on a 5mile+ walk or am engaged in a main non photographic activity (like walking the dog) then schlepping even a DSLR outfit becomes impractical and a tripod a non starter - ever tried throwing a ball with a backpack & tripod ? A secondary factor is that the increased popularity of landscape photography and the accessibility of 'honey pot' locations there is a desire to get off the beaten track to find and produce original work - this normally means walking.

Figure 1: Kinlochleven to Fort William. Nex 5n

In the last few years walking has become more and more important to me and, in addition to between 7 & 10miles per day with our dog, I have walked the Isle of Wight, Wainwright's Coast to Coast, the West Highland Way, parts of Offas Dyke and the Cleveland Way and will be undertaking the Tour De Mont Blanc later this year. Typical days are between 12 and 18 miles exceptionally up to 25miles. On all of the walking I have done I have frequently encountered wonderful scenery or exceptional lighting conditions that just must be captured . Most importantly, I would not have gone to these places as a photographic trip so the 5x4 or DSLR outfit would be at home and as we know the worst camera is the one left at home.... There are some well known exceptional photographers who do carry heavy weight kit on remote locations but it is not something you can casually do, no more so than fell running or the equivalent and it is not for me. As a consequence I have watched (and sampled) the development of high end miniature compacts and Compact System Cameras (CSCs) with great interest in search of a camera that can deliver 'serious' quality and be practical to carry.

Figure 2: Langstrath Dale Olympus E-P1

How big is small ? Some learning points

1. A typical daypack for day or multi day (non camping) walk is 30-40litres in which there needs to be space for essential safety items, waterproofs, additional clothing, navigational aids (maps etc), food, a flask and water. This does not leave much physical space or headroom on weight before you need to increase the pack size (a big step) to maintain comfort.
2. From a mixture of observation and experience the camera needs to be packed but accessible without taking the pack off, if it is in the pack it stays in the pack and it is much too easy to walk on by a promising opportunity. I see quite a few walkers carrying a DSLR ' in hand' which is limiting over rough ground and also means both hands are full if you are using a pole, it always looks uncomfortable for any distance and cannot be safe.
3. A separate strapped bag, whether waist or shoulder, has not worked well for me. Another over the shoulder strap either digs in to your neck or is on the edge of the shoulder and is forever slipping off. A separate belt strap suffers a similar problem in contention with the waist strap of the day bag.
Nett of this is that a pouch (or pouches) on the belt of the rucksack is the best carrying option and really defines the size limits that the camera needs to meet. The pouch needs to be padded, weatherproof and not so heavy as to interfere with balance and integrity of the load distribution function of the belt system. I have found the Lowepro D-RES 10AW to be perfect for a basic kit.

Figure 3: Castle Crag Panasonic GF-1

Based on this, the limit is a small CSC and lenses, essentially ruling out any DSLR as a backpacking option. The good news is that CSCs are now at the point where quality is not compromised over a high end DSLR provided the principle that a CSC will not do everything but a DSLR could is accepted. If you only had one camera you would need to be pretty sure that this wasnt a problem.
What do I carry ?

My 'perfect' kit that enables me to do anything sensible while on the trail would be:

• Camera Body with spare battery and card.
• 3 high quality primes covering (in 35mm terms) 24mm, 35mm and 80mm.
• Graduated filter kit with 2 stop ND grad only & polariser.
• The camera must be usable in bright light as some models have viewing systems that are next to useless in bright sunshine.

Figure 4: Needles IOW Nex 5n

Over the last 5 years my fulfilment of this requirement has changed and not always perfectly met. My own journey has led me to the following observations:

High End Miniature format Compacts

Typically these cameras have fixed zoom lens , a miniature sensor and importantly cost sub £500ukp. Examples are the Canon G12 and Panasonic LX5

This is where it all started for me with the Canon G10. I carried one everywhere for about a year and but for better options being available I would probably still be using it. The G concept hits the requirement for 'travel lite' exceptionally well with a good zoom range, Image Stabilisation that really works and a brick like robust construction. The LX-5 is similar in its capability but in a smaller package (IXUS sized) and almost shirt pocketable. These 2 models are the most popular amongst my Large Format friends notwithstanding other options being available which share the characteristics. Quality for on screen viewing and limited printing is excellent providing conditions are good. These high end compacts take an adapter that allows filter systems to be added and I found that the camera with filter kit installed could be stored comfortably in the DRes 10 and always be ready for action. I did find the quality of the files limiting in the end as a single portable solution, great for the screen but... .

Figure 5: Nr Inverarnan Nex 5n

Compact System Cameras

This area has seen the most development and a huge proliferation in models over the last 2 years. I wrote a short piece on the Panasonic GF-1 and Olympus EP-1 for this magazine in the first issue and how things have changed since then. The range of pricing is equally large with a small system costing anything from a few hundred pounds to several thousand. For the purposes of this debate I will exclude the Leica M9/10 and Fuji X-PRO. The XPRO is hugely expensive, undoubtedly capable of excellent results but no more than I would consider an M10 as a backpacking camera do I consider this to be in scope for now. Nikon and Pentax have now joined the field but with smaller sensors and as such sit somewhat uncomfortably for me in between High End Miniature Compacts and this group, a discussion for another day but for now I will also exclude them from this assessment ! YMMV.
From the mainstream players any model will likely meet the basic needs. From my own experience these are factors that were significant differentiators:

Oddballs

The new Canon G1-X conceptually could fall into the miniature category being of 'G' pedigree and ethos and may work well. It has a larger than m 4/3rds sensor but comes with a fixed zoom lens similar to the G12 in coverage. Similarly the Fuji X10 at significantly less money (but with well documented quality issues in its first iteration) should be considered but I have no experience of this or seen people using one to offer comment.
Miscellany
Batteries and battery life is worth a mention. I have never had an 'in day' problem with any digital camera providing I prepared properly the night before. That said I observe that cameras seem to be getting progressively worse on battery life. The G10 would go on forever and I never used the spare, the E-P1 was pretty good with no worries over a week of shooting and still having juice left. The Nex5n chews through batteries by comparison, I used 2 of the 3 batteries I took on the WHW changing the first at 30% and the second had 45% left after the eighth day. The Nex 7 seems hungrier still but I am still in the battery conditioning phase.

I have used the Lee RF75 filter system with all my compact cameras and still find it the best and most compact. Must get a polariser soon....

Figure 6: Raindale Leica X1

Two high end fixed focal length compacts are potential 'travel lite' cameras in the Fuji X100 and the Leica X1 (soon to be X2). The fact that better sensors are available in the CSC camp along with flexibility to change lenses is significant to get to an ideal kit. I did use a Leica X1 for a few months until the Summer and found it unusable in bright light (worse than the Olympus E-P1), sadly the X2 carries over the same screen but with the improved Sony sensor. Results should be outstanding as the X1 delivered the finest quality files of any 12mp camera I observed from that time period but at a significant financial cost.

Final Thoughts

I walked the Coast To Coast with a Panasonic Gf-1 and 20mm lens only. I was happy with the results but really missed the IS and lost a few shots to camera shake at surprisingly high shutter speeds. As a consequence I moved to the Olympus E-P1 with the 'in camera' IS and the Panasonic lenses. Hit rate improved significantly and I really fell in love with the colour from this camera. I was lucky enough to try a Sony Nex 5n at Christmas 2011 and was so completely bowled over by the results from this little camera that it has become my mainstay, it is in a different league from anything else digital I have played with over the years. The files have a very easy to get at 'light box' quality to them. I walked the West Highland Way in May with just the 24mm F1.8 Zeiss and the Nex 5n and came away feeling that I could not have got better with any other camera / lens combination. The lack of IS does not seem to be an issue as it was with the Panasonic, I suspect because the ergonomics are different and the lens balances perfectly in the palm of your hand. I have since added the newly available 50mm F1.8 and a Nex 7. Initial views on the Nex 7 is that there is a lot more detail but it does not zing like the 5n, the pixels feel a little constipated when trying to post process them !

Figure 7:Calshot Olympus E-P1

So, to come back to the question posed at the beginning, I believe that the products now exist for uncompromised quality results from the latest batch of truly field portable cameras . Not 5x4 and not IQ180 as maybe but I find the prospect of walking the Alps for e.g as exciting photographically as for the walking and that is a good thing.

David Tolcher (http://www.davidtolcher.co.uk/)

When it comes to improving their photography many photographers fall into the trap of placing the equipment at the top of the list. They presume that the latest upgrade or the next model up the range will be just what they need to take better photographs. Now don't get me wrong, if you have great photographic craft then better equipment can capture better images but if you're starting out in photography, struggling to achieve what you consider to be successful images or just simply feel you are not happy with your photography then buying a new body or lens(s) is not, I would suggest, the best solution.

The purpose of this article is not to be an in depth tutorial on how to improve the situation described in the previous paragraph but to give you a roadmap to point you in the right directions. From this I hope you can go off in these various directions and work at being a better, happier photographer. The stuff I am going to discuss is not all free, some of it could be as much or more than that new lens or body but I strongly believe that the benefits to your photography and your contentment as a photographer will outstrip by a long way the benefits you might obtain from that equipment purchase. This roadmap is aimed at landscape or outdoor photography but the principles apply to all types of photography.

So we will ignore camera’s and lens’s for the rest of this article and I will try and lay out this roadmap that I hope will help you achieve these improvements.

In that first paragraph I used the word ‘Craft’, I feel that consistent good photography comes in three main parts which I put under this umbrella of 'Craft'. These are Knowledge, Practice and Patience. There is also another subject I wish to discuss which lies outside of this umbrella of craft and that is ‘other equipment’.

The first of those is Knowledge. When I use the term knowledge I don't just mean the nuts and bolts of photography - the understanding of all the many technical things that are required in the taking, processing and outputting the photograph - I also mean things such as empathy with the subject, understanding the light and imparting emotion into the final image.

You can improve your knowledge in many ways but possibly the most effective is going on a course of some sort, either a short one or two day course or a longer holiday. If courses and holidays are out of reach financially then other ways of improving your knowledge are with tutorial DVD's or reading books or searching the internet for articles and tutorials (and there are many good sites online such as that have very good information available). Some bits of this knowledge are perhaps easier to get to grips with than others, the easier bits are often the technical things such as the effect the aperture and shutter have on the image, the harder bits are usually things like getting emotion into the final image, these subtle and usually harder areas are often only mastered with the next part which is practice.

Practice makes perfect? Well that may not be entirely true but practice will improve your photography and nothing can really substitute for the good old graft of getting out and taking photographs. This is absolutely vital in improving your photography, not only will it enable you to put into action things you learn from the 'Knowledge' part, it will also feed information back into your knowledge. As you continue to learn how your equipment works, how light works its magic, how to read the weather, how to deal with tricky conditions, how to 'see' you will be constantly feeding information back into your knowledge. Never underestimate what you will gain from just getting out and being a photographer, you may not even realise you're learning but you are, and this learning while working process is something that never really stops no matter how good you get.

Don't forget that you can also stay at home and practice the 'processing' side of your photography, this is also a fundamental part of your photographic skills and while most photographers would much rather be outside taking photographs than sitting at home on the computer, putting into practice the knowledge you learn on the processing side is just as vital.

With practice, all the skills of photography will become second nature, the camera for instance will become an almost invisible part of you which will allow you to put all your thoughts and energy into your creative vision of the world, which is absolutely vital if you want to become a consistently better photographer. Practice will also help make you a calm photographer, and a calm photographer is more likely to bring home the goods than a stressed one.

Now we get to patience. Photographers generally need patience in bucket loads. We need it when we are standing by the tripod waiting for the light to change at the same location for the umpteenth morning in a row. We need it to put in the hours finding locations. We need it when the computer decides to throw a wobbly. And we need it at many other times along the road of photographic life. You need to develop a patient attitude towards photography, patience like practice will help you be a calmer photographer.

All of these three parts feed into each other, for instance if you are well practiced with your equipment and are patiently waiting for the light to change you will more than likely be in a calm state of mind. If you're calm you are more likely to see something you would not have seen had you been stressed and this new something may well add to your knowledge.

Finally we come to ‘other equipment’. One of the most important pieces of other equipment is a good solid tripod and head, and for this item to be of any value at all you must actually carry it with you and use it. Most landscape photographers use one all the time and for good reason. A tripod does many things other than the obvious one of making sure there is no camera movement. A tripod will slow you down and help you think more about the shot, and if you're thinking more then you have a better chance of creating something good. A tripod will help you adjust the viewpoint so it’s just right and then hold the camera in the same place while you wait for the light to reach perfection, which is important as often that little burst of perfect light will only last a few seconds and you don’t want to spend any of them framing up the shot again. A tripod is a very important bit of equipment, but as I said you have to carry it with you all the time to get the value of it so make sure you get one that is sturdy but light enough to carry wherever you go, as a tripod left in the boot of the car is no good to anyone.

Another piece of additional equipment are filters, these are important tools that allow the photographer to adjust, in some way or another, the light that hits the sensor (or film). Again there are many sources of information on the types and uses of filters but they should become an essential part of your gear as should a spare battery. How depressing would it be if you failed to get a great photograph because your camera battery died at just the wrong time.
A cable or remote release is also well worth having, this should help alleviate any vibration you might get as your excited finger stabs at the shutter release.

The next items of additional equipment relate more personally to you the photographer rather than your photography, but they can - and I believe do - have an effect on the quality of your images.
Most important of these is clothing. You should have appropriate clothing for the time of year and conditions that you are going out in. Apart from the potential dangers of not being adequately dressed it is also important for the quality of your photography. If you are cold and wet you naturally won't be giving photography your full attention, and that means you are more than likely not achieving the best photography that you're capable of, which is not the ideal situation to be in. So make sure that you have suitable clothing and footwear to keep you comfortable, as you can then put all your attention into your photography.
Food is also important, have a few rations with you as hunger can often be distraction but worse it can make you leave a location earlier than you perhaps should which may well cause you to miss the appearance of the perfect light.
Next it's good to have a comfortable way of carrying all your equipment (especially the tripod!), you are more likely to explore further and be more relaxed when you get there if you have a good comfortable bag or rucksack that also keeps your equipment dry.

Finally good preparation should become part of your routine, if you are getting up early then get everything you need ready the night before, plan where you are going and allow plenty of time to get there and get set up. Things happen with light very quickly first thing in the morning so you do not want to be rushing about in the morning and getting stressed, as I have emphasised before its all about staying as calm and relaxed as possible. And don't forget to set the alarm!

So I hope you can see that what I am trying to advocate with this article is that simply replacing a lens or body with a newer or higher spec version will not necessarily yield better results. If you fall into the categories I mentioned in the first paragraph then I feel your photography would be much better served spending time and money on improving your craft with the equipment you have - and perhaps some of the additional equipment mentioned - than it would be by spending that money on a new body, lens or camera. Once you have worked at improving your craft to a higher level you can review your position and see if you still think that new body, lens or camera is needed. I think you will be a better and happier photographer for making the effort.

You can visit Peter Cook's website at http://www.seeingthelight.co.uk

It was in October 2006 that I first set out to North Sands to take my first ‘proper’ landscape photographs. Armed with a tripod, some Cokin filters, and, oh yeah, a camera, I drove in the darkness along Cemetery Road, past skeletal remains of disused factory buildings and parked at the gates of the Victorian cemetery. Walking past gravestones is perhaps not the most inviting of ways to begin an adventure into landscape photography, but that’s how it started for me.

Once I skidded down the dunes and onto the beach at North Sands I was in another world. I set up my new tripod, fumbled around with numb fingers, trying to remember to set plenty of depth of field, and I let the camera set the shutter speed.

Branch and Jetty was the result of this debut outing. How lucky I was for that branch to be washed up there in such a perfect position. And the light! It would be a while before I made an image that satisfied me as much, but I was hooked. I was amazed that I could take images like this here at home in Hartlepool. It was a revelation. This light was everywhere, and anywhere is transformed in such light. I only had to travel a couple of miles to practice landscape photography, to study the light and to find new subjects on this small stretch of beach near my home. It was a place where I could experiment, learn and develop. Seeing as I had recently started a family, getting away on indulgent photographic trips leaving my wife, then girlfriend, holding the baby, were out of the question, so North Sands was my basic training ground.

This beach is no idyllic golden stretch of Northumberland sand though. A vast dilapidated coastal factory sits behind the dunes here. It’s a bloody mess, and its detritus finds its way onto the sand. Stuff gets washed up from ships. Sanitary waste appears when there’s a high tide and when there has been heavy rain. Fine particles of sea coal get deposited leaving a 1cm thick blanket of blackness across the beach. It’s this kind of thing that suggests why this coastline gets bypassed by photographers on their way north to Northumberland or south to the North Yorkshire coast.

I’ve enjoyed the challenge of dealing with the above, and I’ve no doubt it has contributed to my development as a photographer. Finding the frame can be a challenge here, but as time went on I found I could not turn my back on the ugly and unpleasant. I have ended up recording it as well as the beautiful scenes and have discovered a strange beauty in items washed ashore, or dumped on the sand.

So why go to the same location time and time again? Well, convenience certainly plays a role. If I’m pushed for time, I can be here in minutes. Joe Cornish has Roseberry Topping and I get a slightly soiled beach! Also, no two days are ever the same; the light is always different, the tide changes and the state of the sea changes. The prevailing weather conditions change everything again. Also, you never know when something interesting is going to get washed up. There is always something new to learn, practice or discover. I’ve grown to love this place, warts and all.

You can see more of Chris Pattison's work at landskywater.com

I recently spent a few happy hours searching for photography books in Hay-on-Wye, the second-hand book capital of Britain. On previous visits very little of interest has turned up, despite searching for hours through the racks – it’s strange how searching when we can’t find anything that fits our criteria seems interminable but browsing takes on the aspect of an exciting hunt when we catch sight of even a small amount of ‘game’. This time, however, I definitely struck it lucky. Virtually every bookshop that I went into had a few interesting titles. My haul - an appropriate word as my arms were brushing the ground by the time I finished - included a number of books that I’d never even heard of before (of course this might just be a measure of my ignorance): “Ansel Adams, New Light”, “William Henry Jackson, Framing the Frontier” and “Timothy O’Sullivan, America’s Forgotten Photographer”.

Timothy O'Sullivan - From the U.S. Library of Congress

The early American landscape photographers fascinate me as one aspect of their work – recording ‘wilderness’ - has largely set the tone for the majority of landscape imagery produced today. Of course the full range of their work was much more varied than the ‘greatest hits’ that are typically reproduced. O’Sullivan, for instance, photographed mine workings as well as images of ‘wilderness’.

O'Sullivan - Gould and Curry Mill

The mining images weren’t meant as criticisms of the despoiling of nature. He saw no irony in photographing both scenics and industry without ascribing precedence to either, perhaps because he didn’t feel our modern separation between nature and man. Even the great Ansel wasn’t above a bit of commercialism, one of his snowy images of Yosemite graced a tin of Hills Brothers Coffee. (However, Rockwell International’s posthumous and unauthorised use of “Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite”, in an advert supporting tactical nuclear weapons, was considered a move too far by the Adams’ Publishing Rights Trust!)

Yet, the view that we have of these photographers’ work, edited by successive publishers and writers, would suggest an almost saintly relationship to the land. A passing knowledge may well lead to misapprehensions so it seems blindingly obvious to me that anyone who takes their craft seriously should try and understand its history, and ideally in the broadest sense possible by looking at many different kinds of photography. How else might we come to a fuller understanding of our own position?

Unfortunately, some recent conversations with photographers have led me to despair of what seems like a growing insularity. To be fair, I’m not sure that photographic insularity is anything new, or, more accurately, perhaps it’s always been a characteristic of those who are relatively new to the medium. However, I find one thing very worrying; the explosion of published photographs via the web hasn’t been accompanied by an explosion of articles on the history of our medium in the printed press. The photographic horizons of these nouveau photographers are bounded by Flickr, ePhotozine and the popular photographic press. It seems that for these individuals, very little happened in photography prior to the digital age. They might have heard of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams but it’s unlikely that they would know of Bill Brandt, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy or André Kertész.

One up-and-coming photographic leader even asked who John Blakemore was and, depressingly for John, posed the additional question“…is he still alive?” Rather than art, these photographers are only looking to make ‘good’ photographs. And how is a ‘good’ photograph assessed? Why, just by looking at other recent photographers’ work - hence the endless repetition of ‘classic’ views and aesthetic points of view. Anything outside this milieu of ‘the recent’ is, seemingly, felt irrelevant. As they used to say in the 1960’s, if it ain’t ‘happening’ it’s nowhere. (That’s post-modernist irony, for any of you in doubt…) The photographic style that these innocents aspire to is, therefore, self-referential, with little regard for the wider landscape of ideas that is propagated throughout art. But we should always recognise that our current aesthetic sensibility didn’t arrive fully formed with digital technology. It’s the product of thousands of years of human development and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of artists’ work and that history shouldn’t just be ignored. An attitude that only ‘now’ is relevant leads to people pointlessly reinventing the wheel - and mistakenly believing that what they’ve done is really neat and novel. Knowing the history, on the other hand, can lead to ‘knowing’ photographs such as this collection of self portraits.

Leni, Ansel, Moholy, Anon

Lest you misunderstand, I should make it clear that I’m not blaming the newbies for their paucity of understanding. In my mind, the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of commentators in the monthly photographic press – I know, I know, all the photographic information you ever need is out there on the web! But you have to realise what you’re missing before you can find it. What we need is some positive education. I feel that educating photographers about the history of the medium (and not just telling them about the latest whizzo gadgets) should be part of the magazines’ remit. However, in their frantic scramble to keep things current, they never seem to think to set today’s photography within a wider historical context. Whilst I can understand that there’s no financial imperative (understandably, the major imperative they’re interested in is keeping the advertisers happy) I don’t see any reason not to explore the history of the medium in the magazines. I’m not asking them to do it out of the goodness of their hearts either. Such an article strand could, if written and presented well, help to keep readers on board, something they’re all desperate to do in these difficult financial times. I’ve heard that many readers cancel their subscriptions at the end of the typical 24-month cycle of technical articles when they start to see topics repeated. But there’s no reason why the magazines should ever run out of material on the history of the medium. And, for all the reasons given above, there would be numerous benefits to photographers from looking back. Surely a win, win situation?

Might not camera clubs and societies also take a more active role in educating their members? Perhaps I’m doing them a disservice but it seems to me that they do very little to introduce their members to wider influences, beyond inviting a few guest speakers. In “Ansel Adams, New Light”, John Pultz writes about a visit by Ansel to a Detroit camera club in 1941 and the influence his workshop had on Harry Callahan, then just starting out in photography. During the camera club visit, Adams was fierce in his criticism of people’s work and technique - so much so that it apparently set some people’s confidence back years - but this was exactly the shock tactic that Callahan needed to realise his dream of becoming a photographer. Describing the prevailing cosy camera club ethos that had failed to galvanise Callahan, Pultz wrote,

‘Camera clubs called for personal expression in their rhetoric, but in practice they discouraged it. Their members won guaranteed pleasure and satisfaction by forswearing spontaneous personal expression for strict adherence to conventions and formulas, which would ensure success in print competitions and juried salons. Camera clubs and photography magazines encouraged amateurs to abandon simple snapshot photography for more carefully structured “pictures”’

Plus ça change… It seems to me that there’s still today a formulaic approach to making images for judging in competitions. Whilst it’s hard to pin down exactly what might characterise this approach I think that those are the pictures that surprise us and may make us exclaim, “How did he see that?!” eloquently proclaim the absence of a formula.

*  *  *

Perhaps there’s no appetite amongst club and society members for this kind of education but I can imagine something akin to a book reading circle where great photographic works are discussed and critiqued. At the very least the governing body for photographic societies should provide a list of books for background material. (I’d be really pleased to find out that they already do, so please tell me if I’m wrong in my assumption that they don’t!)

And we shouldn’t just limit our horizons to the history of photography. If we are serious about thinking of photography as an art – and we should be! – then we need to look at the wider worlds of painting, sculpture and music. For me, the most exciting find, by far, from my visit to Hay was a pristine copy of “Memory & Magic”, a retrospective look at the works of Andrew Wyeth. I’m a long time fan of Wyeth’s austere and emotive style of realist painting. His work is a million miles away from the abstracted landscape photographs that I love to make but this doesn’t stop me learning something from his work. No matter how spare his paintings, each leaves room for the viewer to weave a story from the slenderest of clues and cues. On one level they are simply descriptive, in the manner of a photograph, yet each is packed with emotion. Studying them to try and feel how he achieved this emotional charge is surely a lesson worth learning and applying to photography.

Painters seem to see art in a wider sense, but too often photographers see photography as a special category and one that need only refer to itself. Of course, it’s not the only medium that has this tendency, movies and television are also famous for their navel gazing. But that doesn’t make it right. The only way out of this solipsistic trap is to try and broaden our horizons. (I’m very aware that I’m probably preaching to the converted here, but please bear with me as I believe that we can never know too much.) Tim has already done a sterling job of bringing photographic books to your attention and introducing some of the great figures such as Stieglitz. But I think it would be great if we could start a library list of photographic and art titles to expand our horizons. I’d like you all to suggest books (send ideas to books@onlandscape.co.uk) and I think we could build up a really broad and interesting selection of recommended books that could become a useful resource for photographers of any ability. To start the ball rolling I’ve written down the books that I have found most important and interesting for me and my photography. We're splitting these into groups of four so next issue we'll have another four to suggest to you next issue, until then.

You can see more David Ward at Into the Light.

The beginning of a reading list

As landscape photographers we are fundamentally solitary predators. Away before the dawn and skulking home long after sundown. Shying the pack culture. Lost in "the zone" of image capture meditation. It is a personal space of peace and calm I love to frequent. A place I feel I am at my best, away from intrusions and thoughts that invade much of the reality of the every day.

And indeed, when seeking to express through the lens ones thoughts and emotions of the scene before us I for one find myself horribly distracted when I feel constrained by the presence of external undesired intrusions. When out with other photographers whose style I know I have in the past found it difficult not to be influenced by their presence and have even found myself creating images that reflect their work more than my own. Time to retreat to the comfort of being alone with my thoughts and ideas. A much safer place to reside.

And there is definitively something to be said for this approach. Some of my favourite personal work has come out of these solitary excursions. To the point where I rarely consider taking my camera out if I am walking with a friend. This lesson I learned many years ago when travelling in Ireland with my brother and a camera. The "third party" on the trip did little for bon accord and at one point I was nearly left at the side of the road having apparently taken more than an hour setting up and wait for the light. My brother is a very patient man but this was the end of the line as it was my umpteenth stop to get a snap.

A decade and a half later I purchased and lived for a year in a campervan as I pursued the solitary dream concept of being alone with my camera in the wilderness. But as the weeks and months passed I realised that solitude, whilst having is place, is a lonely existence. At least it was for me. After about ten days out in the field I would rush to visit a friend or town for a modicum of civilisation. It was a very interesting time and I learnt a great deal about myself. I am sure some would survive and excel in such an environment and part of me wishes that I could but it simply wasn't the case. I love the solitude but not, obviously, over significantly extended periods.

So when I met my wife Morag a new approach to my photography materialised. As a fellow photographer we could go out into the field as individuals and yet at the same time learn from each others experiences, emotions and reactions to the moment. With digital technology we could even learn in the field, reviewing each others ideas and developing concepts as we went along. Sharing the joy of being in "the zone
" whilst out the field.

Our first "project" developing this very new way of working for me, was our Impressions series of portfolios, which we worked pretty much consistently and exclusively on for a period of some two to three years, barely taking any traditional images over that period. This Intentional Camera Movement (I avidly dislike this terminology as I think it reflects only the science of a capture method and not the emotion of the resulting image) at the time was a relatively new concept to single frame, in camera digital capture. The LCD screen allowed us to review and learn as each shoot progressed, enabling us to make step changes in our approach as we went along and examine the styles and techniques of the other which in turn we could use to influence our own images. We could instantly explore new themes and emerge from blind alleys. At some point one or other of us would take the image that reflected our combined vision at the time and that would become the statement shot for the shoot. It didn't really matter which one of us had taken the final photo as we had both played an equal role in arriving at the final shot. As such we adopted the joint signature approach for our collaborative work, which had the additional advantage of reducing marital competitiveness!

As we designed, built and subsequently moved into our new Eco-home in south west Scotland this approach continued with the commencement of the Zero Footprint portfolio. Having spent 5 years of our lives working to minimise our carbon footprint at home we felt it would be interesting to see if this could also be adopted in our work lives. With respect to any commission works we began to charge the client for "carbon dioxide free" petrol and planting native species of trees to offset the fuel use. More recently we have installed a domestic wind turbine to produce our electricity, and the digital darkroom for us is a more pleasant and environmentally friendly place to be (although there will always be a part of me that would love to dive back into that cocktail of pungent chemicals and muted lighting).

We then looked at our fine art work and decided that we could shoot a portfolio of work from the same location, allowing ourselves the luxury of any lens and shooting in any direction. Either one of us could take a photo at any time, as long as it was from the same location, the patio of our house (we are extremely fortunate that despite be a very remote location our house is blessed with a fantastic view). No travel meant no carbon emissions from the shoot.

At times we would work together and at others alone, it just depended on who was where at the time when the light shines gold (or grey or dark or bright). The project has remained collaborative and as such maintains the joint signature. With our current exhibition at the Joe Cornish Gallery we present the end of the first phase of this project, which depicts the amazing mists and fogs that permeate our valley throughout the year. These moments are rare and it has taken many hours waiting for the occasional few seconds when the tides of fog roll up and down the valley to reveal the mysteries beneath. In future phases of this ongoing lifetimes work we will explore a variety of techniques and approaches as we attempt to capture our glen in its many guises.

I still absolutely love and crave the solitude of being out there on my own and fully appreciate and admire those who adopt nothing but this approach to their work. But in collaborations with Morag, learning form every person that comes on our workshops and the odd shoot with fellow photographers in the field, I now feel as though I have a new string to my bow as I head to the hills and glens with my sole mates.

A recent article written by Ian Thompson on his wave photograph at Porth Cawl generated just a little bit more feedback than I or Ian expected. The main gist of the comments were along the lines of ‘this has gone too far’ or ‘this isn’t photography’. I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the idea of truth and photography in a little more detail.

The Camera Doesn’t Lie

A very famous phrase suggests that what appears in a photograph is a direct reflection of reailty. However, even from the very first photographs we have had varying amounts of metaphorical or literal distortion. For instance, Louis Daguerre’s photograph taken in 1838, supposedly the first photograph of a human being, shows a street scene where a single figure stands on a corner having his shoes shined. Anyone who saw this picture at the time would think that the street was empty, early morning possibly. However it was the extremely long exposure needed that made all the people dissapear (a technique used by many architectural photographers).

And if we are talking about landscape photography, many of the early landscape photographers (Gustav le Gray for instance) used to have a library of sky photographs that they could combine with their landscape images in order to create a convincing whole or would have to take multiple shots with filters to capture the sky and foreground (Frank Meadow Sutcliffe).  This could be taken as a necessity to capture skies because of the film used but they regularly picked skies from different locations for instance (skies that probably couldn’t exist in these locations because of atmospheric/geographic conditions). The following image by Camille Silvy is very well blended but for all we know those clouds would never form like that in that location. Although it is thought that they may be taken in the same location, there is no guarantee of this - hence the beginnings of doubt in landscape photography.

Camille Silvy, "River Scene" 1858

Or quite common in the mid 19th century are photo montages, combinations of multiple images into a single scene such as Henry Peach Robinson's "When the day's work is done". A scene as fictitious as the sentiment recorded and the following "Two Ways of Life" by  Oscar Rejlander - a blend of many, many pictures.

Most of us probably know about the intentional photographic lies where individuals have been ‘darkroom’d out of photographs such as Trotsky from images where he stood close to Lenin or the Reichstag Flag raising. More recent changes such as OJ Simpson’s ‘darkening’ in Time magazine show a different distortion that is insidious in its subtlety.

However, let us take a look at a photograph taken in 1939.

Dorothea Lange- Mother and baby of family on the road. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California. 1939.

What we have here is a mother and baby looking like they are enjoying themselves having just gone to pick up the shopping. The more famous version of this picture, taken a few moments earlier is this..

Dorothea Lange- Mother and baby of family on the road. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California. 1939

So here we have the image chosen by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration’s representation of the Great Depression. Which one of these photographs is the truth? Obviously the choice of photograph was made influenced by the message the FSA wanted to put forward. (more info here)

Both of these are a lies to some extent - the first is a lie where the subject has decided to show the photographer that they are happy and have a happy, clean baby (the father cleaned the babies face). The second photograph, the one that was taken first, lies in that it only shows a single aspect of the subjects life having just arrived at a food shelter after a long car journey (I look pretty bad after eight hours in the car too).

A more subtle lie that photographers make is through elimination and choice. For instance, a documentary photographer, Supanit Riansrivilai, was criticised recently when they produced a series of photographs depicting the Polish city of Krakow. The criticism was based on the fact that through choosing only to take photographs that depicted her own vision of what communist depression was about. This scenario mirrors the photographs taken by Russian spies of the US where they wanted to depict the human fallout of a capitalist state. By only showing one part of reality they created a new version of it that didn't exist.

Given these particular ‘lies’, lets try to construct a list of ways in which photography can lie without ‘manipulating’ images.

1) Through conscious choice and elimination of parts of a ‘reality’ in a series of images, thereby creating a distorition of the truth. This is particularly true in landscape photography where many people want to create ‘beautiful’ photography in crepuscular light, showing bucolic pastoral scenes. However, the countryside isn’t like this - much of it is agricultural, it spends most of it’s time under high sun with contrasty shadows etc and in many cases it can be quite dull or barren.

2) Through choice of subject or by cropping of the subject to represent a different truth. For example this image from the front pages of most newspapers at the time ...

.. looks very different when you see the whole picture?

. Does this photograph mean the same thing? I would say the story has changed substantually. We do the same when we photograph many of our favourite icons - eliminating the fact that they are next to main roads or popular paths and doing our damndest to make people think we are in the deep wildernerss. Take the tree at Lochan Na h’Achlaise (since blown down)

copyright Christopher Hawkins (cc)

this is literally a few dozen feet from the biggest road on the west coast of Scotland and yet a viewer would think it was in the middle of the wilderness and that the photographer was an intrepid explorer.

3) Through the use of non standard focal length lenses, particularly wide angle lenses. The most recent example of this in my experience was that when I visited the Isle of Eigg, I expected to see Rhum quite small on the distant horizon.

In actual fact Rhum sits quite close to Eigg and encompasses so much of the horizon that it is difficult to take photographs from the north side of the island without including it. Here is a shot showing how close Eigg and Rhum actually are..

In fact when the first very wide angle lenses were used, people struggled to understand what they were seeing in pictures because the distortion of perspective did not make sense - they didn’t recognise the locations in photographs for instance.

4) Through colour balance. Our eyes do a fantastic job of correcting colour casts in the real world, we are so good at doing this that we don’t notice that at midday in blue sky weather, the landscape is quite cold looking. Our eyes adjust for this and keep on adjusting until the sun gets very low in the sky and has become very warm. It is only when the sun gets very low that are eyes cannot compensate for the colour cast any more and everything takes on the hues of the ‘golden hour’ (which is why you can still get great light well before you can see it with your eyes).

With the camera though, we can adjust or fix the colour balance and show images with intense tones that are dramatically different than that which we would have experienced had we been there ourselves.

One of the intriguing things about colour balance is that we can override our subconscious and learn to see it. For instance, most people who have not looked hard at the world will not say that shadows are blue. However, if you get used to this fact, you start to see the blue shadows on clear sky days - so when one person says the shadow is blue and the other one says it isn't, who is correct and who lies?

5) Through saturation. Don’t we all know this one - I think everyone has seen a picture or two that has had their eyes itching and even the subtler levels of saturation boosting depict a strange form of reality. Although this is not necessarily lying, it is certainly deceiving to some extent.

A second aspect of saturation that lies is the total elimination of colour - black and white photography is the original distortion. By removing one of the important cues we have about reality, we are creating a fiction, however aesthetically pleasing that fiction is. Black and white also allows us to us colour filters to change a blue sky to a black one using a red filter or to make foliage 'glow' using a green filter.

6) Through the actions of the photographer whilst taking the photograph. I'll stick to landscape photography here to keep things on topic but there are many examples outside (include Capa's Spanish civil war 're-enactment' and various other staged ware photographs). I suppose the most extreme example of this is Edouard Muybridge's admission of clearing "trees by the score that interfered with the cameras / best point of sight". I suppose you could say he wasn't lying because that is what the landscape looked like, after he had finished with it at least.

Less invasive perhaps, but bringing up the same questions is our fond habit of 'gardening' the scene. Removing or arranging parts of the foreground to better suit our composition. Many photographers talk about this as being more morally correct that using photoshop to remove these items in post processing but I do wonder what the difference is in terms of 'honesty'.

Manipulation

So straight photography isn't purely truthful in the first place, even before you consider manipulation. But once we start to look at manipulation, a whole new set of issues appear. How far can we take digital (or analog) manipulation before we start to lie.

Reading through the hundreds of comments on Ian Thompson's article about the 'wave' picture that was composited from multiple photographs, it really makes it clear that this is an issue that photographers feel very strongly about (whatever their opinion). The points of view range from "the capture is sacrosanct" to "everthing goes" but at first glance there seems to be a few milestones along that path. I'll list a couple here..

1) The first milestone can probably be described thus "Items can be removed but not added and those items removed should be transient with respect to the landscape". So this means that it's OK to remove cars and rubbish but it's not OK to remove stone walls and trees. However, when you look closely at this, things get a little messy. For instance, some rubbish does not degrade at all - many plastics will be around long after we've died. And some things we think of as permanent could be gone, for instance the trees on Rannoch moor that have recently been blown over. Does that means we have to set a time limit on how long things last or do we class 'rubbish' as something that is OK to delete regardless of the amount of time it will be there for (and can we class pylons as rubbish in that case?). And as for transient, clouds are probably the most transient thing in most peoples pictures, is it OK to remove a few of them if they aren't adding to the picture?

2) "It's OK to add and remove things as long as the intrinsic documentary nature of the subject is preserved". This sounds easy to understand, the landscape is the truth and as long as we represent it as truth then we're OK. But what truth? It's probably a little fascetious but if a Llama wandered into your photo of Loch Sunart in Ardnamurchan would you keep it in because there are Llama wandering around the shoreline or remove it because Llama aren't a native species? The problem with a definition like this is that it's subjective - we all have our own interpretation of what the landscape is and this interpretation will dictate what we can or can't do - meaning what is OK for one person won't be for another.

So it seems that even when we have some form of shared vocabulary about our level of tolerance of  'distortion', the finer points mean that we might not be in agreement as much as we think we are. So let's take a look at where this idea of 'pure' photography comes from by looking at some of the 'masters' of photography (hopefully biased towards landscape).

Ansel Adams - One of the supposed bastions of truth in photography but the use of black and white images, strong colour filters and quite extreme darkroom manipulations - for instance in Moonlight over Hernandez was manipulated to remove many of the clouds from the top of the picture (particularly the clouds to the right hand side of the moon)

Bill Brandt - A British master of photography and one know to use the darkroom to quite dramatically change the tonality of his pictures. A good example of which is "The Snicket" which when printed straight shows a lot of detail in the building at the top of the cobbled street. Brandt's darkroom work creates a starker picture where any detail in the building has been completely burned in (darkened to black).

When colour arrived in full swing in the 1950's/1960's, photographers did not manipulate quite as much, mostly because it was too difficult to do so. There were a few colour photographers who did have the skills to manipulate and some of them chose to occasionally 'tweak the truths nose' a little. For example, it seems to me quite obvious that some of Michael Fatali's shots have been manipulated in terms of colour and tone but more importantly for our discussion, he also introduced (or enlarged) celestial and atmospheric conditions. Take the moon in this shot - according to some quick calculations, he would have needed a 1000mm lens to capture the moon at this size in the frame. Even on 8x10 this 1000mm lens is equivalent to a 180mm lens, hardly the wide angle suggested by the perspective of the composition.

Now that we live in a world of digital photography where even film captured images can be piped through the magic of photoshop before creating a final 'darkroom' print, the ability to edit images has been democratised. There is a huge range of free and cheap software out there that you can use to 'photoshop' your images, it should be no surprise that some people do so.

One of the questions that was raised during the discussion in Ian's article was 'Has the bond between photography and the truth been broken'. Having looked at some of the examples above, I would have to say that this bond was fragile to begin with. It may be that in the current era the expectation of truth in photography is weaker than it once was but I would say that it is up to the artist to decide how to answer the question "Did you do anything to that?".

This hasn't stopped people trying to regulate landscape and wildlife photography in some way, even going so far as to propose some form of kite mark to record what level of truth the image includes. Perhaps Ansel Adams' recent exhibition should have contained warnings about 'Moonrise' saying "significant darkroom work applied and elements removed" - would this have helped the viewer enjoy the image? Attempts such as this are always going to be difficult and self regulation seems the only real way to go - especially when the people who are the real villains are those who actively deceive people, suggesting that there pictures are straight out of camera (SOOC) when in fact they have applied all sorts of trickery. Michael Fatali famously set fire to some fire bricks to create some nice smoggy effects whilst leading a course and allegedly added or enlarged moons in many of his desert temple such as Back of Beyond and possibly pasting in mammatus clouds in The Crossing (a meteorologist friends assured me that mammatus such as that don't stretch to the horizon and would be quite small with a wide angle lens). Another photographer alleged to have manipulated his images that insists not is Peter Lik - his latest piece, Bella Luna, is almost certainly a combination of two or more images. The narrative associated with the image "I pressed the shutter, a feeling I'll never forget. The moon, tree, and earth." certainly implied a single moment of capture.

And that is possibly what people want to preserve when they talk about truth in photography - that a single moment of capture created the final image; not multiple captures that have been blended together to create a composite. However, this 'category' of straight photography, however blurred by gardening, subtle cloning etc. is only one aspect. Many photographers wish to evoke the memory or emotion of a place or moment in time and use whatever is in their creative arsenal to achieve this. Ian Thompson's image is perhaps a visualised moment that Ian was unable to capture in a single exposure but he still wants to share what he felt at the time and who is to say that what he did to achieve this is wrong?

Ultimately, photography has been used throughout it's relatively short history as a way of both representing reality and fiction - the viewer is not tied to a single way of understanding the image and it is up to the photographer to suggest ways of viewing just as the cinematographer adds 'based on a true story' to their works of art. No one expects 127 hours to all be the actual recordings of events that happened but they still connect it with reality. Likewise I don't think many people expect fine art to be a pure recording of the truth unless they are specifically told that it is.

As for the limits of what is and isn't photography, like many things in the english language, it is defined by usage and people call images that were primarily recorded by light onto a sensor a photograph. The problem we face if we try to provide definitions is how to cope with edge cases - a colleague runs a roll of 120 through his camera and then sends it to America to get another photographer to expose it again. The constructions don't record the same instant or even the same continent - are they still photographs?

The most sensible course of action is to let each person define their own moral/ethical boundaries and, where possible, help the viewer to understand what they are.

Photographic description alone will never be inspirational, never make a heart beat faster, never bring a tear to another's face. To achieve these things emotional messages must somehow be woven seamlessly into the photographic representation. But beyond what is baldly described by the light captured in a scene, the exact meaning of photographs is elusive. We read them but it’s not like reading prose, there’s no dictionary that we can refer to for definitions. Every viewer reads them in a subtly different way and their meaning may also alter for different viewings by the same viewer. Photographs’ descriptive power is almost overwhelming, sometimes it’s as if the images shout about the contents of their frame. Yet, almost lost in the cacophony of detail, deeper messages are being whispered. Despite the difficulty of hearing them, we know that the messages are there because we know that photographs can move us.

When a photograph evokes something beyond the mere description of what’s in front of the camera I think of it as transcending its subject matter. A transcendent image is therefore more than just an illustration: the message it imparts is more than the sum of the tones and forms that are amassed in the frame, more than the sum of labels that can be attached to its contents; a transcendent image moves us because of something beyond what is described. The question arises, how are these messages transmitted? Where is the emotional meta data held in a photograph? In this article I will be looking for the sources of this secondary information.

Consider this postcard image of the Austrian Tyrol:

When we ‘read’ a photograph, the first thing we do is to look for things we recognise and mentally attach linguistic or pattern labels to these objects. Our first read of this image might therefore go something like this: ‘tree’, ‘tree’, ‘tree’, ‘tree’, ‘tree’, ‘tree’, ‘tree’, ‘sky’, ‘sky’, ‘sky’, ‘mountain’, ‘mountain’, ‘snow’, ‘mountain’, ‘cow’, ‘cow’, ‘grass’, ‘grass’, ‘grass’, ‘grass’ more ‘grass’ and ‘cloud’. A list of nouns isn’t very exciting is it? (Incidentally, it’s a myth that in the Western world we read a photograph left to right. Our eyes actually move across an image in a complicated pattern, moving up and down, right to left and left to right at seemingly random angles according to what we find interesting in the image. We also frequently return to some points, such as the eyes in a face. It may be a convenient stick for a judge to beat an image with but it makes no difference to how an image is read whether the principle object in a scene is placed on one side of the frame or the other. The ‘preferred’ placement is simply a matter of tradition.)

You’ll notice that all the labels I’ve mentioned are nouns. Yet we rarely get an emotional response simply from a noun – tax-inspector being an obvious exception! To signify emotions we need to look for adjectives or adverbs in the image such as ‘green’, ‘blue’, or, even better, ‘peaceful’, ‘still’ or ‘sunny’. Obviously there is degree of consensus on the definition of some visual adjectives – ‘green’, ‘blue’ etc. – whilst others have more plastic definitions – ‘wild’ for instance. But the central problem with wanting to use photographs to express how we feel about our chosen subject is that whilst every photograph is heavily laden with visual ‘nouns’ (description) there is no single fixed interpretation of their emotional significance. To show how complicated the question of interpretation is let’s consider just the colour adjectives for a moment. Any colour has a wide range of emotional information associated with it, some of it cultural, some personal and, as I shall point out later, some of it hardwired into our brains. Red, for instance, is the colour of blood, said to be the most emotionally intense colour but it is also thought of as optimistic and sexy. In Russian there is a linguistic link between the word for red and the word for beauty. This might be why the Bolsheviks chose red for their flag. But even if it were not it means that red now also has a political connotation. It’s also thought of as aggressive, it stands for danger and stop! It stands out from the background better than any other colour; perhaps this is why some wag once suggested that RPS stands for red patch somewhere? That’s quite a range of possible responses and I’m probably only scratching the surface. There will be other attributes of red that are of personal significance to individuals; perhaps that shade was the colour of your first bike, or the colour of your beloved’s lipstick, or the colour of your favourite football team’s shirts. And it’s not simply a question of any sign being present; how it’s interpreted will depend upon its context. And how the viewer is feeling… Complicated, isn’t it?

So, our reading of the visual nouns would seem straightforward enough but for the fact that we all habitually and unconsciously attach a personal history and significance to objects and places which colours how we interpret them. Our personal experience and the cultural symbols that we have absorbed throughout our lives can lend significance to any part of an image. This level of meaning is classified as residing in signs. Hopefully you can see from my brief look at the colour red that the adjectival labelling is an example a subtle sign system. Signs can exist as text, images, symbols, flags, objects, sounds, colours, smells, facial expressions or physical gestures. Signs can be grouped into languages (body language for instance) in a similar way to words, though the boundaries between these languages are not as distinct as those between spoken languages. Signs are literally anything that communicates a meaning or emotion to us, whether that meaning can be expressed in words or not.

So anything that we see in a photograph might be suggesting something other than just itself. For adherents of the mystical tradition in photography a cloud in a photograph isn’t always just a cloud but, as Tim pointed out in his recent article, in the case of Alfred Stieglitz it was also an expression of how he felt. Beyond this personal perspective, objects or places have often been widely adopted in a culture to stand for things other than just themselves. To grasp this idea one need only think of how living things have been used as symbols to suggest specific attributes; a lion for valour, an oak for strength or an owl for wisdom. Sometimes, as in heraldic symbols, this system of representation is meticulously codified.

A rigorous study of signs began at the beginning of the 20th century when a group of philosophers began looking, as Daniel Chandler noted, “for ‘deep structures’ underlying the ‘surface features’ of phenomena.” These ‘Structuralists’ included the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. He proposed a study of signs; anything that signifies something to us and not just the kind that read ‘Keep of the Grass’ or ‘No Waiting’. Perhaps appropriately, philosophers can’t agree a name for the study of signs; it is known variously as semiotics or semiology - it hasn’t even been agreed whether linguistics is part of the study of signs or vice versa! Throughout this article I will refer to the insights Frenchman Roland Barthes who was for many years, until his death in the 1980’s, the leading theoretician using semiotics to analyse photography.

Linguists, like Saussure, realised that words are arbitrary symbols: there can be no innate link between the object and the word attached to it. Such a link would deny the possibility of naming the same thing ‘dog’, ‘hund’ or ‘chien’ - it would preclude the existence of more than one language. This arbitrary nature extends to all other sign systems and therefore any sign may have a multiplicity of meanings. Consider, now, how a photograph of a single crooked tree atop a rocky hill might stand for ‘loneliness’ or ‘deforestation’ or ‘perseverance’ or ‘old age’ or ‘life’ - or maybe even ‘wind’. Semiologists would recognise the tree as a sign and refer to its ‘standing for something else’ as connotation and its ‘standing for itself’ as denotation; so our example tree would, amongst other things, denote crookedness and hawthorn and might connote life and loneliness. As soon as you place two connotations next to each other the complexity of the result is much greater than just double, since it calls to mind yet more signs that evoke the same idea.

The principle difference between words (so called natural language) and other kinds of signs is that words have widely accepted definitions of meaning (otherwise there could not be dictionaries) whereas the latter usually do not – though of course the meaning of some is prescribed, just think how much more chaotic our roads would be if we didn’t all agree on what road signs meant! The lack of definition is because our reading of signs, other than words, is both culturally specific and partly subjective. It is also because, as Emile Benveniste asserted, “We are not able to say ‘the same thing’ in systems based upon different units.” Others, though, have asserted that all other signs can be expressed in written language; Marvin Harris opined that, “human languages are unique among communication systems in possessing semantic universality… [in being able] to convey information about all aspects [of experience] whether actual or possible, real or imaginary.” Lucky chap, he has obviously never been ‘lost for words’! Just think about how inadequate words can be for describing smells or colours and you will see that, whilst it may be true that we can describe anything with them, words are not truly equivalent to the thing described. In a similar vein, the curator, photographer and critic John Szarkowski wrote that, “The meanings of words and those of pictures are at best parallel, describing two lines of thought that do not meet. If our concern is for meanings in pictures, verbal descriptions are finally gratuitous.”

Signs that have a wider cultural meaning are referred to as icons and form a particularly interesting group. Examples from different fields might be Marilyn Monroe, Everest or a Rolex watch. Each of these icons connotes a wide range of subtle but powerful messages. For Monroe for instance we might read movie star/tragedy/beauty/glamour/sex. Icons are potent signs because their range of connotation is widely accepted. The inclusion of any well-known cultural icon in a photograph strongly affects how we read the image. (This has implications for how we caption images since the mere naming of a well-known place will to some degree alter how people think about the image.) Perhaps the best example of a landscape icon in the UK is the Buchaillie Etive Mor, or more correctly the east-facing crag called Stob Dearg. It appears in so many images because its shape mimics the classic pyramidal shape drawn by any child asked to depict a mountain. You might say that it represents mountain-ness in its most concentrated form – especially when covered with a mantle of snow. The problem with including icons in a photograph is that they have a tendency to polarise interpretation because there comes a hard to define point where an icon tips over into a cliché. For some people photographing Stob Dearg is still a dearly held goal whilst for others its mere mention turns them off because they see it as having been done to death.

When Barthes wrote in his last book, ‘Camera Lucida’, that, “A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see”, he meant that the meaning we gain from a photograph derives from a whole range of signs and symbols that we understand in a wider context external to the image. The key point is that we read a photograph; viewing one is an active, not a passive process. Some of these signs appear to be universal (e.g. some facial expressions), others are widespread but culturally specific (e.g. religious symbols) and still others are peculiar to the individual viewer arising from their personal experiences (e.g. I hate that shade of green!). The response to some other signs is very deeply seated, perhaps even hardwired. Research has shown that some of the light entering our eyes transmits signals directly to the hypothalamus, one of the oldest parts of the brain and part of the limbic system. Light shifted towards either the red end or the blue end of the spectrum evokes an instinctive emotional response from the limbic system relating to temperature. We even call these colours, respectively, warm light and cold light.

All forms of visual representation, including photography, share one attribute; the image is not only a mirror for the artist's experience but also for those of the viewer. The meanings that we extract from an image are necessarily flavoured by individual responses since every viewer brings his or her own intellectual and emotional baggage to the viewing. The precise source of these personal responses is by rights the domain of psychology and psychoanalysis in the Freudian or Jungian tradition and beyond the scope of this article but we must always be aware that these personal responses are inevitable. This individuality of response means that not only will single signs evoke different connotations for different people but also that any given sign may evoke no response at all in some individuals. There will be common points of contact but also areas where meaning drifts for each individual, in the same way that no two people will get exactly the same meaning from a poem. Just as the conjunction of words produce indefinable and unstable thoughts and feelings which change from one person to another, and sometimes subtly from one reading to the next, so the effect of an image on the viewer changes from one person to another. For some the reflection of the photographer’s viewpoint by the image is smooth and almost perfect, for others it resembles more the grotesque distortions encountered in a fairground Hall of Mirrors.

As I mentioned earlier, the great American photographer Alfred Stieglitz proposed that a series of his photographs of clouds where in a sense equivalent to how he felt about his subject. The problem with the notion of Equivalence is that not only should the object photographed evoke an emotional response in the photographer but that, by dint of his expertise and insight, he is thought able to evoke the exact same response in the viewer. John Szarkowski curated an exhibition entitled ’Mirrors & Windows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1978 that has greatly influenced subsequent ideas about the interpretation of photographs. The premise for the show was that all photographs are either mirrors reflecting the photographer who made them or windows presenting the photographer’s view of the outside world. The former tell us more about the photographer than about reality, and the intent of the latter is to tell us more about reality than about the photographer. In Szarkowski’s terms Stietglitz’s Equivalents are mirroring the photographer’s concerns and presenting them as a perfect reflection to the viewer. This could only possibly be true if there were single fixed meanings for visual signs and, as we have seen, there are none. Another American photographer, Minor White, offered little practical advice on how to achieve ‘equivalence’ beyond his somewhat gnomic comment that, ‘When a photograph is a mirror of the man and the man is a mirror of the world, Spirit might take over.’ However he seemed to realize that something more than a simple intent to express emotional response was needed because he added that, ‘It follows that “self-expression” as the aim of the photographer is not in itself sufficient.’

There can never be a guarantee of Equivalence, only a striving towards it. Individual responses do not mean that interpretations are cut entirely adrift, at the mercy of unstable currents of meaning. The photographer suggests a course by the content of the image but cannot ensure that the viewer will safely reach the intended port. The reading of an image can be directed further by captioning the image, which serves to emphasise certain aspects over others.

Is, then, a common inner meaning really unreachable and if so aren't we then left just with the surface gloss? Photographer and theorist, Victor Burgin insists that a single common meaning beyond a simple description of the contents of the photograph is indeed unreachable because, “There is no language of photography, no single signifying system… upon which all photographs depend.” This contrasts with classical painting. Many works by grand masters from the Renaissance onwards depicted scenes from the Bible or other mythologies. Figures and places depicted in these masterpieces had a range of accepted meanings, so the cognoscenti (i.e. the rich patrons and those involved in the production of such art) could read them. It’s important to note that the paintings were not equivalent to prose but nearer to stanzas of poetry, with all the fuzziness of meaning that suggests. Nevertheless there was an accepted codified system of signs. Such a painting contained a limited range of signs with broadly accepted meanings but in a photograph the signs are not so constrained. To return to my earlier question, we are definitely not left just with the surface gloss in a photograph, but rather with a very complex set of signs to decode.

In any single photograph we will read a lot of different signs, often from totally different sign systems. In a portrait photograph, for instance, we might read signs relating to the style of photography, body language (including facial expression), clothing, age, era, location, social status, race and so on. Some of the processes by which we read these signs are conscious but many are not. The photographer cannot know how the viewer might respond to any one of these signs, let alone the entirety of signs within the image. By careful composition, the photographer might be able to limit the choice but there will always be the possibility that something of personal significance to the viewer subtly changes or even entirely subverts the intended message.

So where does this get us when we’re thinking about making photographs? Landscape photography in the traditional view has essentially been a documentary practice in the sense of recording an image rather than constructing one but, as we have seen in the last issue of On Landscape, this is changing for many practitioners who use montage widely or even exclusively. The possibility exists for these photographers to construct a message from a series of icons. I feel that because the breadth of interpretation is so wide photographers might be tempted to pick icons with the narrowest possible interpretation. The danger arises of the message being clunky. Instead of it being subtle and seamless, like finely crafted prose or (more desirably) poetry, it might look like a group of disparate words. For the traditionalists, the search for symbolic meaning is necessarily constrained by what the landscape has to offer in any particular location. I feel that it is better to react instinctively rather than to try and consciously include signs. Whatever we do at a conscious level there is bound to be a huge amount of signification that we are only subconsciously aware of. Trying to control the signification completely is fruitless task, likely to result in a stilted conversation with our viewers. Where the notion of signs really helps is when we’re trying to understand why an image moves us, whether it be another photographer’s or one of our own. I feel certain that the accumulation of this understanding over a long period will help us to craft our images more skilfully.

'Honesty' and 'truth' are two descriptors which are applied very frequently to the subject of landscape photography. Typically, they will be applied by 'scapers who fall into one (or both) of two categories: the chap who searches tirelessly for the perfect scene and the perfect light (hopefully concurrently!) and the other who is not quite so pernickety but has little in the way of aptitude or skill to get the best out of his images in post production.  In the latter category, I have met no end of folk who eschew the very idea of altering even a single pixel, as so to do would disturb the twins called Honesty and Truth. Often the principle is propounded in a loud and condescending voice, and built upon foundations of clay. I know that there will be few of our readers in this camp!

“Why do we make photographs?” It seems such a simple question. But when I started to think about it I realised that actually, it’s quite a big question and one that few of us have a fully conscious understanding of. In this article, I will try to cover what seem to me to be the most obvious motives for capturing views of the world with a camera. Many of these are based upon personal insights gained from my thirty odd years as a photographer; some come from my interactions with workshop participants; and some from conversations with fellow full time photographers. A few of the motives that I will describe are necessarily specific to landscape work whilst others are, I feel, more universal. But I hope that as a whole they will give some understanding of an aspect of our craft that I think interests most of us. Hopefully, they will also provide a jumping off point for studying your own motives.

The reasons for making photographs are probably almost as numerous as photographers. But however disparate our objectives, there are - in my opinion - two dominant, conscious motives for photography.

Firstly, we make photographs to preserve a visual record of a period of time. This is the overarching reason for all photography. How can it be otherwise? It’s what photography does. It is also, not surprisingly, the principal motive for making photographs amongst the ‘non-photographer’ population – though in this digital age when almost everyone in the West carries a camera, perhaps we’re all photographers.

Secondly, we use photography as a way of expressing our love of a subject. This is the most prevalent reason for making photos amongst photography enthusiasts.

I’ll look at this in more detail after considering photography’s ability to fix a moment in time.

We live in a state of permanent temporal flux, perpetually balanced at the point where the future tips into the past. For millennia man has tried to hold on to some remnants of significant moments, tried to stop them descending into the dark and dusty canyons of the past from the sunlit - but ephemeral - upland of the present. Through the centuries we have done many different things to try and hold on to the past and to try to mitigate our sense of loss. On a cultural level, we commemorated events with ceremonies and rites, we erected memorials or we celebrated events through stories and myths. On a personal level, we had our portraits painted (if we were wealthy enough!), we wrote diaries or we kept mementoes - from commonplace holiday souvenirs to a locket of a loved one’s hair. But none of this was incontrovertible proof today of what had once been true. Photography changed this by holding on to myriad slender vestiges of moments and forever preventing their fall into the past. And, because our memories of the past make us who we are, in this way it provided a reassuring proof, both personal and cultural, of our identity.

Mrs C as a child, Mrs C's daughter and child, Mrs C's daughter and husband

Try for a moment to imagine a world without the family photo album and the memories it enshrines (it’s more likely stored on a computer today than bound in a book but it’s nonetheless a depository of memories): the twenty-first birthday party, the graduation ceremony, the holiday, the christening and countless other less significant moments are entrusted to the permanent vault of photographic representation for safekeeping. Our memories of events in our personal lives are now very often defined by accompanying photographs. Elliot Erwit once said, ‘weddings are orchestrated about the photographers taking the picture because if it hasn’t been photographed it doesn’t really exist.’ The mental image may fade but there is an air of irrefutability about the photograph that dominates our personal histories. If you can’t remember what great aunt Dorothy looked like, what colour hat she was wearing – just reach for the photo album. Memories of the faces of our social circle and events in which they participated are as much the memory of the photographic evidence as of reality. The time of our lives is made real by photography.

Fixing a point in time is also a prime motive for professionals (along with money!) but the difference is that they are preserving carefully crafted constructed moments. This is most apparent in the fields of advertising and fashion but it can be argued that it applies, perhaps to a lesser degree, to all professional photography. Since we inhabit the literal and metaphorical viewpoint of the photographer when we look at a photo, these constructed moments gain power because of their inherent link to reality. Of course, they might be heavily manipulated, both during the making of the image and afterwards, and in this sense, they might almost be thought of as false memories.

Fixing a period of time may be the overarching reason for picking up a camera in the wider population but I would argue that for enthusiasts it’s combined with an equally powerful one: love. I’m not talking about romantic attraction but rather a deep, abiding fascination. Most frequently this love is of a subject but sometimes it’s simply a love of the process of making photographs. In the case of the most committed photographers, the initial love of the subject becomes a love of photography as an aesthetic tool for gaining insights into our world – we can see this shift in the work of photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Man Ray, Minor White, Henri Cartier Bresson, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Elliot Erwit and many others. As the photographers strive to make their images transcend their subject so subject becomes of secondary importance to the exploration of seeing.

For landscape photographers, walking across the land and a concomitant desire to capture some sense of how it feels to be in the landscape are often their initial inspiration for photography. I know from conversations with Joe that walking with a camera – or even just walking – is a very important part of the joy of photography for him. I wonder too if the physical effort helps to form a positive reinforcement between climbing hills and making photographs. It’s well known that when we exercise at moderate to strenuous levels for prolonged periods the body produces a range of chemicals which give us a sense of euphoria – sometimes called the ‘runner’s high’. The chemicals produced include endorphins, serotonin, dopamine and endocanabanoids (related to cannabis!). Together, in a way that’s not yet properly understood, this cocktail makes exercise a pleasurable pursuit rather than simply a fatiguing or painful one. Of course, we mustn’t forget the opposing view as stated by Edward Weston: “Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn't photogenic.”

The love of subject can at times shade into obsessive behaviour. It is often jokingly suggested by fellow photographers that our craft is an addiction. Within any compulsive behaviour, there is always a spectrum of response. Whoever wrote, “If you saw a man drowning and you could either save him or photograph the event... would you shoot in colour or black and white?”, was clearly worse off than me but perhaps ideally suited to the life of a paparazzo.

I don’t mean to belittle sufferers of more serious and destructive addictions, but the compulsion to make photographs that takes over my life on a regular basis does seem like an addiction. We should be clear that we’re not talking about substance abuse but a form of addictive behaviour. (Opinions differ as to whether behaviours can truly be called addictive but for the sake of argument I will leave that definition in place.) Photography isn’t a destructive force in my life in the way that a true addiction would be. On the contrary, you could say that the craving I feel produces a positive creative outcome.

My photographer friends and I share some of the symptoms of addicts including compulsively performing deeds without the promise of material gain, getting a physical and mental high when the ‘drug’ is taken, feeling unhappy when we’re denied access to the ‘drug’, and a diminishing level of satisfaction with each ‘hit’ – we always want something bigger and better and our craving is never truly satisfied. (‘Bigger and better’ is hard to quantify when we cannot definitively say that one image is better than another. The unstable foundations of our craft can, therefore, make it hard to know for sure when we’ve had a good ‘hit’. And the longer we make images the quicker an individual image’s appeal is likely to diminish. And so we crave more… in an endless cycle.)

The behaviours that we don’t share with addicts are more significant. The level of compulsion is mild compared to true addiction. Photographers generally don’t, for instance, make images even when part of their brain is telling them that it’s a bad thing to do. Nor do they pursue their habit at the expense of their long-term health. Though photographic expeditions have caused me a deal of physical pain over the last three decades, I have only rarely endangered my life in an attempt to satisfy my yearning. I may be mad, but I’m not stupid. A life in photography hasn’t been an easy journey in other ways but it hasn’t cost me my job (perhaps that’s why I became a photographer!) or lost me my house. I’m certainly poorer than fellow graduates who chose other professions. And don’t get my wife and daughters started on my long absences and the pressure this can create at home. Yet, if I could live my life again I would not choose a different path.

I’m truly blessed that, although I’ve spent a small fortune on equipment, photography has provided me with a net income. This is a rare thing amongst landscape photographers who normally have to supplement their earnings with other jobs. But it’s worth re-emphasising that, whilst photography has earned me a living, money is definitely not the reason that I do it. Along with countless thousand others, I would continue to make images even if there were no possibility of a financial return. This suggests a deep compulsion based on emotional rewards. A chance conversation with a psychiatrist on a workshop revealed that the reason I’m not motivated by money might be because I’m affirmatively bonded to my art. Affiliative bonding is similar to the force that creates a profound emotional link between father and child.

Often the initial motive for photography may be slight. The reason given for picking up a camera might even be a pretext, a way of avoiding doing something else. In a phone conversation a few weeks ago, Tim suggested to me that some people might take up photography to look busy on holiday. They simply can’t leave the Protestant work ethic behind when they take time out from their occupations. Perhaps making photographs as opposed to lying on the beach makes them feel virtuous? "I'm not just lazing around, I'm making art!" Facetiousness aside, I can see that for some people photography is simply a way to while away the hours. For me, the thought of lying on a beach basting in sun cream and sweat is abhorrent, so much better to be making something. (I’ll return to the appeal of creating in point one below.)

In addition to the two principle conscious motives I mentioned above, I’m going to look at a further eight possible contributing factors or reasons for our mildly addictive behaviour. The list is not meant to be exhaustive; there are no doubt other reasons. Some of the ones I propose reflect a basic human urge – such as the need to create – some are intensely personal, others arise from our social nature and some are probably not consciously expressed by the photographer.

Here goes…

1. To satisfy the creative urge...

The drive to create seems to be an almost universal human trait though where it comes from is less clear. I've been told that Sigmund Freud thought creativity was the perfect expression of the id, our inner animalistic being. If this is true then creativity is driven by base biological impulses rather than being a highfalutin quest to make grand gestures of civilisation. What is clear to me is that most of the participants I meet on workshops and tours crave the opportunity to make something because they have limited outlets for creativity in their everyday lives. An interesting question to which I currently don’t have a complete answer is what is the reward for creativity? Why does making something make us feel happy? (I’ll return to this in point seven.) Freud thought that creativity was a sublimated sex drive. On the face of it this seems a plausible explanation. Making babies and making art could easily be seen as opposite sides of the same coin. If it’s true then there might be a plausible evolutionary explanation for our desire to create. But I’m not sure that the theory doesn’t say more about Freud and the age that he lived in than provide a true explanation for the urge.

2. Self expression…

The great American painter Edward Hopper wrote, “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” This is no doubt reason enough for many. Self-expression is an oft-used phrase but what does it mean?

Single photographs can have no consistent meaning because each viewer’s interpretation will be different – sometimes wildly so. Photographs are not like words with a range of widely accepted definitions. Therefore, the thought of being able to express how we feel or some more cogent narrative or idea in a single photo would seem doomed. We might, at best, be able to achieve some slightly out of focus image of our aims with a body of work. Appending a textual explanation would also help.

But I don’t think that most people are trying to express an idea. They just want to show their love of subject by making the most powerful image that they are able to. They want viewers to be entranced, to be fascinated or intrigued or in awe by what they re-present. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no doubt that great images spring from a deep love or understanding on the part of the photographer. There seems to be some alchemy at work since insights are gained yet no words pass between viewer and photographer. It’s apparent to me that when a photographer has a deep and abiding passion for his subject he is able to make images that reveal aspects and subtle nuances that would be invisible to others. It’s this insightful quality that makes the images great.

3. A chance to escape…

Many hobbies or pastimes spring from a desire to move beyond the bounds and bonds of our workaday lives. Photography can satisfy this with both practical and spiritual means of escape from everyday existence. In the case of outdoor photography, the practical escape comes in the form of a continual incentive for a literal change of scene. The majority of the working population now spends their lives indoors. Landscape photography gives people a reason to be outside, a reason to enjoy the natural environment.

The spiritual escape depends upon a certain amount of effort from the photographer but the rewards are great. If we are to master any kind of art, including photography, we need to think in a different way. In our everyday lives many of the tasks that we’re faced with call for convergent thinking, where there is only one correct answer to the problem in hand. A representative example of this type of thinking is an arithmetic equation: 2+2=4. But in the arts the problems we face are divergent. In other words, every puzzle has numerous possible and equally valid solutions. (That’s not to say that some solutions aren’t better than others!) Trying to solve this kind of problem calls much more for subconscious rather than conscious mental processing. This means that one is apt to fall into an almost meditative state where neither the physical discomfort of standing in the pouring rain nor the passage of time is of any significance This meditation is, from my own experience, both pleasurable and psychologically invigorating. I also can’t think of a more profound way to escape the mental restrictions of everyday life. (See point 7 for more on the attraction of solving puzzles.)

4. To hunt, to gather…

The phrase “take a photograph” has more depth than first impressions would suggest. I have written elsewhere that I think one of my motives for photography might be to capture beauty; one might say that I'm seeking to take an image of that elusive quality back to my lair so that I may feast my eyes upon it at leisure. But I think that there’s also a baser motive that might be typified as being a collector. When one looks at some online galleries, there’s a sense that the photographer is ticking places off a list, like the photographic equivalent of Munro bagging. This might be seen as akin to stamp collecting or train spotting, something now recognized as a mild personality disorder called Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD). This is distinguished from the more serious Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) by the fact that the effects of the latter (e.g. compulsive counting, washing hands until they bleed, extreme orderliness) are recognised by the sufferer as disruptive whereas the effects of the former (e.g. habitual practices, attention to detail, encyclopaedic knowledge) are seen as a boon. I feel that artists of all kinds benefit from a little bit of OCPD, but it’s a question of degree. The Wikipedia entry puts it succinctly: “habits tend to bring efficiency to one's life, while compulsions tend to disrupt it.”

A subtle variation on this collecting approach is the taking of trophies. The intention of these photographers is not to provide new insights but to gain bragging rights. Typically landscape photographs in this category were made after the photographer endured extreme conditions or are of well-known locations in spectacular light. Of course, both spectacular light and extreme conditions might be seen as worthy reasons for making an image but the accompanying text or discussion in the forums is on how hard the photo was to make rather than it’s aesthetic or artistic merits. A good photograph should do much more than proclaim how clever or brave the photographer was.

5. To belong…

Humans are social animals, we evolved and feel most comfortable as members of familial groups. But now we have the choice to join tribes who share our common interest and although photographers are often loners most still want to belong – they also, not incidentally, crave the approval of their peers. Joining a photographic society, club or online forum are all ways of making stimulating and satisfying social interactions with like-minded individuals. The huge success of web galleries like Flickr and ePhotozine are proof positive of our desire to belong to a group of like minded people.

6. A voyage of discovery…

It has become fashionable in recent years to describe various human activities as revelatory journeys though few seem to warrant this grand description. However, I think that this metaphor is quite opposite when applied to photography – perhaps even more so when applied to landscape photography! When Richard Child’s cited the urge to discover as the driving force in his photography (in his piece on “Why…” in Issue 27) it resonated with my own ideas about photography. For me, photography is a voyage of exploration. But unlike the famed explorers of the past, I don’t usually set out with the expectation of reaching a particular destination. When I set out to make images I do so purely in a spirit of enquiry, and this is the point of difference with the hunter-gatherers that I mentioned above. I don’t feel the need to achieve a specific target, to tick a box and say that I have taken an image of a particular place. I am striving to broaden the limits of what I understand and that doesn’t mean that I will always make a photograph. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that, ‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive’ and for me the voyage of discovery alone is sometimes enough.

7. Puzzle solving…

Making a photographic composition can be compared to solving a four-dimensional puzzle – with the added twist that (as I noted in point three) there is no single correct answer. In fact, if you stand a group of six photographers in one spot for an hour or two they will probably make dozens if not hundreds of differing compositions. Because there will always be some uncertainty as to how valid your ‘answers’ are, the satisfaction you achieve from making a composition isn’t quite the same as correctly answering all the clues in the Times cryptic crossword. There is still enormous satisfaction, however, to be gained from making the effort.

In Landscape Beyond I wrote about how a part of the brain called the limbic system forms the bridge between emotions and objective thought. It is the limbic system that provides us with the capability of reasoning so that we may solve problems and also provides us with the feeling that good solutions are beautiful. This makes perfect sense in evolutionary terms. Finding something that works beautifully is a rewarding experience and one that is likely to lead to positive outcomes for the individual. This also explains why the mathematician Henri Poincaré wrote, ’the longing for the beautiful leads to the same choice as the longing for the useful’. And it is why Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, wrote, ‘What is intelligible is also beautiful’.

As photographers, we can increase our pleasure by finding more novel solutions to the problem of composition. Since the compositional puzzle is a divergent problem there is always the possibility of finding an answer that stands out amongst the mass of images made by our fellow photographers. The longer we practice as photographers (and sometimes the longer we delay pressing the shutter) the higher the chances are that we will find such an unusual solution. Experience, through a thorough understanding of technique and a practised eye, allows us to combine the elements of the puzzle in new and interesting ways – yet another reason to abandon ‘rules’ which will only lead to mundane answers.

8. The pleasure of seeing…

One of my most enduring pleasures comes from the beauty that I find in the world around me, whether it be new or familiar. Photography has opened my eyes to this treasury by teaching me how to truly see. I suspect that this joy is one shared by most artists and hence a widespread motive. We take seeing for granted, it appears to be a transparent, simple process but is actually a very complex one.

As an indication of how we take seeing for granted, no one understood why we have two eyes until the scientist Charles Wheatstone discovered human stereoscopic vision in 1838. It had always been assumed that we had two eyes merely for reasons of bilateral symmetry. The mind does such a good job of combining the separate images from each eye that, apart from Leonardo da Vinci, no one had noted before Wheatstone that each eye had a slightly different viewpoint. Even the genius Leonardo had not realised that binocular vision afforded us the ability to determine the relative depth of objects in our field of view.

Vision only starts with our eyes, our brains do the majority of the work. However, we have evolved to take shortcuts in this ‘processor’ intensive procedure. We habitually use assumptions, patterns and routines to enable us to see more quickly. There’s an evolutionary advantage in understanding just enough of our visual environment so that we don’t get ourselves into trouble. So most of the time we glance rather than see. If we spent too long looking we might get into other kinds of trouble, like not gathering enough food. The mental processing is subject to misleading assumptions – this is why we have optical illusions. These illusions, such as the Necker Cube shown below, can reveal where the assumptions take over.

Visual artists have to turn their full attention to the world. I’ve heard it said that drawing is 99% observation and only 1% doing and I think that the same applies to making photographs. In order to make good photographs we must learn to see things for what they are and not what we imagine them to be. We must also learn to truly see proportion, line, colour and tone. I find this a deeply engrossing and satisfying process so exploring how I see and how a photograph can change how something looks has become perhaps my overriding reason for making images.

When Tim first proposed that I write this article I was instantly reminded of the fine collection of essays on this topic by Robert Adams. His exploration covered themes both grand and subtle – from the common desire to make art to the less apparent desire to tell truths about life through photographs. In nineteen essays, he looked at other photographers whose work inspired and informed his own and he also examined how working practice had changed in the last century and a bit. The book touched on the profane, the mundane and the personal – exploring sex, money and a love of dogs as reasons to make images. I would recommend it to all of you. I haven’t even attempted to emulate the range of his fascinating work in a mere four thousand words but I hope that this list has stimulated some questions and would love to read about your reasons in the comments.

Fascination is a good place to start in my art. It comes from the Latin for a spell and quite appropriately describes the feeling of wonder which beckons me to stop and admire something beautiful or intriguing. It gets around the demand for aesthetics in artwork and legitimises the expression of diverse interests. It also has universality by summarising neatly the feelings of the artist before his subject and the public before the work of art. Of course, it is not art per se but it convinces the artist to transform his subject in to a work of art. Equally, it convinces the public to transform the created object in to a work of art too. I take the stance that art is always created afresh and that it does not exist in the absence of the human mind; some may disagree. Whatever the belief, the need for fascination remains.

Landscape photographers are fascinated by a great diversity of subjects. Some are attracted to the sanctity of wilderness, others to graphic patterns, yet others to the simple pleasures of life such as a beautiful sunset. It is easy to dismiss this latter as a naïve response after having witnessed the depths of thought associated with the former two. But it actually draws me to something profoundly within me, something so basic that it is for many of us one of our first expressions. It may be the beauty of a sunset; it could also be the power of a waterfall, the magic of snow or the excitement of an approaching storm. These chime with our primeval instincts.

For all its edification, education has the disadvantage of silencing this set of reactions. They are ridiculed because they do not talk to the higher mind. As I develop my childish fascination in to an individual art of landscape photography, I build up my critical faculties. After a period, the beautiful sunset becomes yet another sunset, or the wrong kind of sunset. I invent reasons for not capturing the scene. I think it won't captivate my future self, or my peers, or that it won't be worthy of Art.

Intellectual concerns channel my thinking. While my power of thought may remain just as vigorous, it is constricted and guided. This pushes me to explore the ramifications of a narrow concept and build in-depth knowledge. The accretion of information on to such a small area lends gravitas to the work of art, for which the specialist public will commend the artist. The generalist public however will see the greater density of the rendition as a barrier to their understanding. The discussion now encounters a moral question over whether the purpose of the artist is to satisfy specialists, himself included, or make it easy for laymen. The choice of elitism versus demagogy is recurrent but a personal one which we should all answer separately.

Yet there are many good reasons for indulging my simple urges, foremost of which is that the original reasons why I loved the landscape can speak plainly for themselves. Much is made of how true to the scene photographs need to be: lifelike colours, a little gardening but no digital fakery are essential to the traditional, almost purist approach but not to the more progressive artists keen to let their imaginations run. Should we also debate whether the picture represents the artist's feelings rather than his education?

Without the imposition of guidelines, my art's evolution would be chaotic. With a modicum of control, my understanding grows in strength while my art returns regularly to haunting themes in order to re-appraise them. Then I can build in-depth knowledge of concepts and techniques in several areas, which in turn can cross-pollinate. It also allows for the subject of my fascination to alter and feed off the process of exploration.

I recently visited Wales with the camera gear in tow. I stopped off at Marloes Sands which I had never visited before. The tide was in and the wind was howling a gale but on the plus side, the sky was full of fluffy clouds and the evening sun was lighting them up wonderfully. For all my looking around and pondering, I failed to find a composition which could not be ruined by one criticism or another. I came away without a shot. A couple days later, I was now in mid-Wales, at Nant yr Arian. I had swapped seaside for moorland, my large format camera for a hand-held digital SLR, evening for middle of the day, and importantly a critical mind for an open mind, without fear of the results’ interpretations.

The changes brought about the pictures which illustrate this article. On the surface, they're about mother Nature. I am fascinated by Her diversity of forms, by the interplay of species, and generally by the many things which led me to a career in the life sciences. They also play with a concept which has fascinated the child and then the artist in me: colour. In what can seem a throw-back to Delaunay’s use of work on the simultaneous contrast of colours, I like to juxtapose strong colours.

The photographer in me has taken this further to a general love of contrast. As my art grew, I realised that one of the defining features of a successful picture (by my terms) was the ability to distinguish the visual elements within that picture. So I would use a subject’s colour (hue, brightness, saturation), as well as its textures (including sharpness) and forms. I also learnt to contrast meaning while perversely not varying the visual elements. By themselves, the photographs stemming from this investigation are mostly heavy going and not obvious out of the context of my thinking. Some however provided exciting results which have been used again in this series.

This fruitful walk in Wales has spurred me on to look again at what the landscape can deliver and not to get too hung up on the validity of the work within a narrow context. It’s important not to lose sight of what was fascinating initially. As long as I am enjoying myself, I am probably doing just that.

You can see more of Charles Twist's images at his websites www.chtwist.com and www.citiesandparks.com.

The teachers of my youth were seemingly embalmed in cheap tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, lightly coated in chalk dust, and masters of the withering stare – often closely followed by a well aimed chalk duster. Intimidation and coercion were their preferred methods for motivating their students. They singularly failed as role models, giving me little grounds to think that I would one day follow in their footsteps. But to my unending surprise, I find myself teaching for a living: and, worse than that, enjoying it! To be fair, the circumstances are somewhat different. I’ve swapped the dingy classroom for the great outdoors, and learning from dog-eared textbooks for hands-on experience in some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. There’s no security of tenure and the wages aren’t that great but the job satisfaction is immense.

For me, that satisfaction comes from two things; the broadening of my artistic horizons that teaching has brought and the pleasure of seeing my students grow in photography. The dialogue that I have with students and the need to analyse how I work has immeasurably altered and improved my photography. To teach a subject well you need to be able to dissect it and pass on your findings to your students. Before I was invited to lead workshops I made images more or less completely instinctively – at least at an aesthetic level, technique is something that has to be more consciously studied. I’m pretty sure that this is how most people work. There is usually a right way or a wrong way when it comes to technique – or at least an optimal and a sub-optimal way. Technique needs to be understood in a logical, straightforward way and this make it relatively easy to teach as you can take a step-by-step approach. But trying to pick apart our aesthetic judgements when making images is a much less straightforward matter. Most of us struggle to vocalise how we arrived at a particular composition or why we feel that it works or doesn’t work. In fact we habitually rely on feelings rather than analysis. In a way we can hardly do anything else because, firstly, there is no single ‘right’ answer when we make an image (more on this later) and secondly because we actively want the image to express our feelings about the subject and not to simply illustrate it.

But I feel that in order to become a good teacher of photography you simply have to find a way of explaining that procedure, either through looking at your own work or by critical analysis of another’s. The whole process of examining how I make images in order to be able to teach others has become a virtuous circle for me, leading to new revelations in how to make my own images which feeds back into new insights to pass on to my students. A good workshop leader doesn’t simply deliver facts to be learnt by rote, rather they have to be open to fresh ideas and eager to engage in meaningful conversations with each participant. These conversations, be they technical or aesthetic, should then be enlightening and enriching for both student and teacher.

When I began teaching photographic workshops I had no idea how involved I would become in the photographic journeys of my students. Seeing how students grow in confidence and find their own voices has been both a revelation and a deeply rewarding experience for me. For most students the journey that they undertake is quite modest; they wish to master the equipment so that they might make a faithful “copy” of a landscape that inspires them. For others it is a much longer and harder journey: one in which they move from making illustrations to making images that do much more than describe. It’s equally rewarding for me to see a student progress along either path.

Whatever their ambitions, two things are absolutely clear to me; the student needs to make a serious commitment – they can’t expect to improve without applying themselves – and they also have to believe in themselves. There’s no magic wand that a tutor can wave over the student that will transform them into a great (or even good) photographer overnight. As I noted above, technique is reasonably easy to pass on and I have seen workshop participants move on in leaps and bounds technically in a matter of a few days. But to me enhancing the student’s experience in this way seems the least that we can do. After all, mastery of technique alone won’t make them a good photographer. (Nor will simply plonking them in front of an inspiring landscape, as some photographic tour companies seem to believe.) To develop as a photographer one needs to pay as much, if not more, attention to aesthetics as to technique. It’s the tutor’s job to help the participant achieve the right balance. With such a guiding hand the student can develop their own voice, their own personal style of photography. Sadly there is sometimes an unreasonable expectation of how quickly one might progress. I’ve written elsewhere about how 10,000 hours practice is the minimum time required to become truly proficient at anything. So a one-week workshop isn’t going to transform anyone from a beginner to competent or from competent to masterful. There’s simply no getting around the fact that it’s a much longer journey than this.

You might find it disheartening that you can’t just read a manual in order to achieve mastery of photography but there is no getting around the fact that it requires regular practice combined with a focused way thinking. The key to this is adopting a different way of solving problems to the one we employ in everyday life. Most of the day-to-day problems we encounter in life present themselves as convergent problems with a single correct solution, e.g. 2 plus 2 irrefutably equals 4! In contrast, art presents us with divergent problems with many different but equally valid “correct” answers. This leads us to a question rather than a definite answer: which composition should we pick from the host of alternative possibilities available? This is where the tutor can really help the student by sharing their hard won expertise at the point at which an image is made. Lessons learnt in these circumstances really stick with the student. But there’s little benefit to be gained from the tutor being either prescriptive or proscriptive, taking this approach only leads to the production of artistic clones of the tutor. One man who travelled with Charlie Waite to Andalucia a number of years ago would always utter the same querulous phrase whenever the group reached a location: “So, Charlie, ver is ze picture?!” Charlie could simply have given the man a “Charlie Waite” but ultimately it’s better for the student if they are helped to find their own solution.

The leader, therefore, needs to allow the student room to make their own choices, including making mistakes! Sadly humans learn far more readily from their failures than from their triumphs. That’s not to say that I would ever leave a student entirely to their own devices. And there are even moments when urgent intervention is called for. On a trip to Provence four years ago the group were photographing the beautiful hilltop town of Gordes from a rocky ledge above a deep ravine. I noticed that one of the tripods was in an unstable position and was worried that the camera might blow over in the stiff evening breeze, something that happens surprisingly frequently. So I turned to the lady whose camera it was and proceeded to give a sermon on the dangers of not spreading her legs – always a delicate subject, especially when the client isn’t a native English speaker. At the end of my speech she stared at me blankly for some time and then said in a slightly puzzled voice, “But it’s not my camera…” The real owner was sitting shame faced a couple of feet away and had, perhaps wisely, chosen to remain quiet throughout my lecture.

My aim is to be available to offer advice and guidance whenever needed but most of the direction I offer is necessarily subtle rather than blatant. Some participants are unfortunately unable to appreciate the need for this – at least initially. I vividly remember a client on one of my workshops in the Scottish Highlands complaining that they couldn’t find any images at a particular location. I advised the man to find a spot and just sit still for a few minutes, “Inspiration will come.” I assured him. From the look I got I’m sure that he felt he was getting the brush off. But thirty minutes later he came over to tell me what a great image he’d found and what a profound lesson he had learnt.

So in some ways a tutor’s task is simply to steer the student in the right general direction for their artistic journey, helping them avoid the worst obstacles. A major part of what the tutor provides for the participant on a workshop is confidence. We each need quiet self-belief in order to manage our voyage of artistic discovery. Unfortunately self-criticism is essential to the process so we need to guard against self-doubt. Any photographer needs to believe that what they have to say is worthwhile. Only then will they have the confidence to move beyond making banal and vacuous pastiches. A poor mentor will prevent you from leaving their shadow but a great one will help you find your own place in the light.

I’m always very aware that clients have chosen to spend their valuable leisure time with me so I work hard to try and ensure that everyone is enjoying themselves. Sometimes I feel more like a Butlins Redcoat than a photographer, though you’ll no doubt be relieved to hear that there’s never a knobbly knee contest on any of my workshops. Perhaps I take the humour too far sometimes and people lose sight of my serious intent. A number of years ago a lady on a large format workshop borrowed a copy of my first book, Landscape Within, one evening. The next day she approached me over breakfast with a slightly shocked expression and told me in a very earnest tone, “There’s more to you than meets the eye!” A backhanded compliment perhaps, but one that I was happy to accept.

So what can a student expect on a tour or workshop? Well, it won’t be (as one recent participant was pleasantly surprised to find out) like attending the most boring camera club evening you can imagine but five days long! There will be plenty of laughs as well as amazing opportunities to make images. Many people worry before they go on their first photo trip that other participants will be snooty about a perceived lack of knowledge or high end gear. In my experience nothing could be further from the truth and everyone is very keen to share their knowledge, which further enhances the learning experience for all.

Another great advantage of going on a workshop or photo tour is the chance to completely immerse oneself in photography for a number of days without worrying about one’s significant other! We’ve all been in the situation at one time or another when we want to make an image but worry that our companions will become bored whilst we mess around or wait an hour and half for a cloud to move. Time should never be a concern on a workshop. I aim to go to between 3 and 4 locations in a full day out which gives plenty of time at each to explore and find images beyond the obvious. Much is made of the magical quality of the light at dawn and dusk, and I would certainly take the group out then if the weather is favourable, but it’s equally important to teach the participants how to work with different light and match it to locations. The leader therefore needs to know the area of the tour intimately and be willing to change their plans at a moments notice to make the best of the conditions. I will always have a number of different locations in mind during the day and keep my options open depending on what the weather throws at me.

You can dismiss from your mind – at least on my tours – the notion that everyone will meekly line up at my command, cameras on tripods, and make the same image. Last November, I was in California with a group and watched in disbelief as an American tour leader (I’ll save his blushes by not naming him) told his group to do exactly that. We were at the Patriarch Grove, 11,500ft up in the White Mountains and home to 5,000-year-old bristlecone pines, some of the oldest living trees. I find this one of the most inspiring places I’ve ever visited and somewhere that offers a huge range of possibilities for photography. Yet this other group stayed barely forty minutes and stood in a row to photograph a single fallen tree. My group stayed nearly three hours and spread across a wide area making a diverse range of images. In my experience (and I’ve now led close to 100 tours and workshops) it’s vital to give each participant the time and the room, both physically and artistically, to explore their own potential.

Anyone who regularly reads printed periodicals on photography (shame on you!) can hardly have failed to notice the proliferation of adverts for photography workshops and courses. Not so many years ago there were barely half a dozen providers in this field in the UK but I now estimate that there are over fifty. On the face of it this seems a very positive development. It would appear to show a healthy demand but I wonder if the clientele’s expectations are being met – or, more importantly, exceeded as they should be. There are two main issues that need looking at here: the provider’s level of experience and their motivation.

The question of experience is a tricky one - as one man’s expert is another’s beginner - but I wonder how large a proportion of the many people offering their services are actually equipped to do so in terms of expertise and teaching ability. Certainly the standard of photography on many of the providers’ websites is quite poor. And even when the images look good there’s no guarantee that the photographic leader in question can teach. People skills are every bit as important as photographic skills. My view on this should rightly be balanced with the realisation that not everyone wants to learn from a high profile photographer. Many find the idea of travelling with Joe or Charlie or another big name intimidating. They’re probably not looking to do more than travel with their camera and learn the nuts and bolts. The problem comes when someone advertises himself or herself as being an expert but can’t back up that claim with deeds.

If a tour or workshop seems fantastically cheap then the reason is probably because it’s not being run as a proper business. Some providers give minimal or no support to their clients because they are only taking a group in order to subsidise their own photography. I have heard many stories about photo tour leaders putting their image making before that of the clients – in one case a leader asked a paying client to move out of the way so that they could get a picture, in another an American wildlife photographer scared away a rare bird once he’d got his image. There are a number of reasons why, in my opinion, it’s important for leaders to make photographs:

• Doing so helps participants to understand how a photographer works – learning by example is one of the best ways.

• It can provide participants with fresh insights and inspiration.

• It helps the clients to feel confident that a subject that they wouldn’t normally shoot is worth attempting.

But tour and workshop leaders are, first and foremost, being paid to provide tuition and support. So making their images should never come first. If they aren’t being paid enough to make this the case, as one workshop leader complained to a client of mine, they shouldn’t be in the game.

Clients have paid for a photography trip but I don’t think that it should all be about photography. I want my clients to go home from one of my tours or workshops feeling not only that they’ve learnt something new and exciting about photography but, just as importantly, that they’ve had a great time, been to some fantastic places and met some interesting people. And for me it’s wonderful to pass on my knowledge to people who are eager to learn. Two of my regulars have travelled with me over twenty times without me ever having to threaten them with detention or lines so I hope this means I have the balance about right but one should never get complacent and the students must always come first. How different that is to how I remember my school days.

You can see more of David's work at his website Into The Light where he has recently posted images to his 'latest' and 'sketches' galleries.

It’s easy to get hung up on weather forecasts. I admit, I’ve been guilty of putting too much emphasis on predictions of cloud cover, visibility and precipitation that may or may not come true. Making the most of what you are given is part and parcel of landscape photography and it’s something I am only now coming to recognise.

At the end of November I planned my second visit to Assynt in Sutherland with friend and landscape photographer Steven Sellman. Forecasters had warned of a big Atlantic low pressure system for a while. In fact the forecast for the 4 days we had planned to be there was one of the worst I had ever seen. Heavy rain was forecast every day, along with fierce winds and little prospect of sunshine. I was so pessimistic that on the drive up I convinced myself that Snowdonia would be a better bet. We even came off the M6 and drove a junction down the M56 before we said, “Stuff it, let’s go”. It proved to be the right decision.

10 hours of conversation and bad singing after leaving Bristol and we were finally in Assynt. The wind was strong, the rain persistent and the darkness absolute. We set up camp with the car acting as a wind break. I was glad to have my Terra Nova Ultra Quasar, a 4 season mountain tent; the extra sense of security is great in unpredictable conditions even with the car nearby.

The following morning brought grey skies, showers, plenty more wind and brooding clouds. We headed out to a viewpoint over the mountains of Inverpolly and Assynt and set to work. One of the greatest challenges was stabilising my tripod. I use a Gitzo 2228 Explorer, not the biggest of the Gitzo models. Being able to set the leg angles to a wider than standard base proved useful, as did the soft peaty ground, which the legs were unceremoniously forced into. Using my own body as a windbreak seemed to take care of the last of the vibrations, although I doubled up on all my shots just in case.

I made several images and a couple of them worked for me compositionally. The image from the shoot shows an erratic of Torridonian Sandstone surrounded by a pool of water. It was a great start to the trip and the results pleasantly surprised me. I would never have gone out in bad weather on my native Dartmoor.

The main hope for the day hung on the broken cloud and heavy showers forecast at 15.00 by the MetOffice, it was the only spell of sunshine forecast for the whole trip. Sgorr Tuath looked an exciting walk and from my internet research, I couldn’t find any evidence of landscape photographers having visited (although no doubt one or two have). At the start of the walk, we had a break in the weather long enough to get a nice view of Stac Pollaidh but I didn’t hang around for long, determined as I was to reach the summit in plenty of time.

So began the long and boggy climb. Small by Scottish standards at 589m, Sgorr Tuath is completely unpathed though route finding, fortunately, wasn’t a problem. We did have the joy or driving rain and strong wind on the way up, but we were already getting used to the weather and well dressed to deal with it. Fifty meters from the summit and the sun burst through the cloud, I made a dash for the top leaving Steve behind.

The gusts on the summit were powerful and unbalancing. In my hurry, I still had to be very careful not to do anything stupid. A simplistic composition to frame the view was all that was needed and I switched my camera into a custom mode, exposure bracketing to shoot a 3 frame panorama (9 shots). In my hurry, I failed to get the tripod level and as a result, I lost some of my foregrounds when I did my final crop of the panorama, but I am still pleased with the result. The view encompasses from the left the peaks of Cul Beag, Cul Mor, Suilven and Stac Pollaidh.

Relieved to have captured the image I came for I set about exploring the summit, coming across a rather fascinating rock formation. I set up my camera, tweaked my composition and double checked my exposure just as the sun came out again. The resulting image captures the drama of the Scottish Highlands, something that I could never have hoped to do on a sunny day.

If there is anything to take away from the summit shoot it’s that physical fitness can really help, but concentration and preparation are much more helpful. Inclement weather doesn’t mean bad images and you only need one burst of light to see something spectacular.

Day 2 was a complete washout. We drove along the coast exploring future opportunities and stood in the violent wind and rain enjoying the power of the weather. I took a stormy image of Split Rock at Clachtoll but the 60-70mph gusts made it almost impossible to stabilise the camera and I ended up shooting at ISO 1600. The image I came home with won’t be going into the portfolio, but it was an enjoyable challenge getting it!

The third day began with more cloud wind and rain. We headed out to a popular view of Suilven, the region’s most iconic mountain. Although I didn’t really have much success photographically I did come very close. Whilst waiting for the visibility to improve 3 lightning bolts shot across the view. The first struck the peak, the second just to the side and the last arcing horizontally across the mountain. It was absolutely spectacular, a moment I will never forget, but sadly one I didn’t quite manage to capture on camera.

With the promise of more wind, rain and snow showers in the afternoon, we decided to head up to the friendliest peak of the region, Stac Pollaidh. Shortly after getting to the top we were enveloped by cloud and then hit by two flurries of snow. My hope started to sink of seeing the view again, but we stuck it out for two hours.

Shortly before sunset, the sun made a brief appearance lighting the ‘stacs’ of sandstone with the cloud adding some atmosphere. There is no doubt that had I not been more or less ready to go I would have missed it entirely. Being fast enough, or prepared enough to capture fleeting moments of light can pay dividends. ‘Waiting for the light’ is certainly the best approach of the two, but having a fast setup process gives more time to compose when the time is of the essence.

Minutes after the first capture sun had gone but the cloud had lifted giving me the change to shoot a couple of the surrounding mountains, Cul Mor and Cul Beag, desperate to avoid treading on the old ground of my previous trip to this mountain. The best opportunity for a shot came when a snow cloud drifted across the view but my images of it were ruined by an unnoticed water droplet on the lens. I must remember to check in future.

We headed down in the impending darkness as a blizzard hit. The wind sent the snow falling almost horizontal and it was difficult to see but the car wasn’t far away. It was an exciting end to the trip which surprised me in many ways. The images I got from these three days are amongst my favourites in conditions that I originally thought would produce nothing. Although I won’t be completely ignoring the forecast in future, I’ll be paying much less attention!

It struck me today that I have a strange relationship with my new photos. I suspect that this has to do, in some way, with working with film and its lack of immediacy but mainly because these images are new to me – only ever previously glimpsed. Of course, we've seen the photo before in some form – through a viewfinder, on a ground glass – but we've never actually seen the photo, and this can be quite a different beast.

This is particularly true of negative film, with digital or transparency we have a quick preview of the image, all the colours are more-or-less in the right place. With negative the true sense of the image can only be realised once it's been scanned and inverted in Photoshop (in my case) and the balance and curves carefully adjusted. Then we can step back and take in exactly what the camera has recorded. This image can only be a rendition of the scene as the mind remembered it – or as the mind thinks colours should be. I'm sure there are workflows that can automate the conversion process so that colours are rendered as the film is supposed to see them but I don't know what that workflow is, and to be honest I'm not that bothered for finding out. I like to interpret the negative to give it the colour space that I think it required to get over my feelings about the image.

There's an even greater sense of detachment with images captured digitally. I’ve asked myself serious questions about the worth of an image before I press the shutter when using a large format view camera – it costs a reasonable amount of money to make images this way and I want my hit rate to be pretty high. On a very good day, I might make ten compositions, on a less giving day, maybe just one or two. I know many (but not all - ed) digital photographers come back with an 8gb card chock-a-block with ‘captures’ (although this applies to some 35mm film photographers - ed) – there then comes the process of narrowing those down to ones with promise, ones without operator error (admittedly not a trait only reserved for digital photographers), and then, which one  works best – the landscape or portrait version, the one over there a bit, or the one a bit closer in?! I'm sure in some cases the actual best photo is binned before it had any chance of stating its case – shouted down by a more obvious view.

Once we've sorted out the wheat from the chaff we're left with a new set of photos, they are hopefully all compositionally acceptable, good exposure, reasonable focus and with enough about them to hold our attention. Once I've worked on an image for a while, adjusting colours, touching out sheep poo, and dodging and burning I use my "cup of tea" system to establish what I think of the image and the post processing. I leave the image on screen with a black background – no menus and then wonder off downstairs to make a cup of tea (or coffee/beer, doesn't matter which). My lack of office door means I can look at my photo with fresh eyes from a distance on my return – it can often look so much different after a short period away - colour casts become obvious, composition can be quickly re-evaluated and the need for more or less dodging and burning can stand out a mile.

One of the great things about medium and large format photography is that you are forced to spend time with the image. Unlike digital image post processing which can be much more immediate, these film formats demand time and close scrutiny. Whilst I don't particularly like spotting dust off a 450mb scan it does force us into getting up close and personal with the intricate details of a picture. In the same way that they say the best way to examine the bodywork or a car is to get the sponge and Turtle Wax out, there's no better way than taking in the detail of a hi-res image than ridding it of its dust! Who'd have thought there was a benefit to my dusty office! There's a wealth of interest to be found whilst exploring a large format scan, many of my  images contain layers of trees - branches and leaves underlined with a base of subtle grasses, detail resides in there that we could never hope to spot when composing the images, it can be quite a delight spotting the homes of spiders - and I'm sure one day I'll discover someone watching me from the edge of a distant forest!

After initial work is done on our new photos after they've made it through the judging stages to the dizzy heights of ‘portfolio worthy’, we still haven't got to know the photographs, they’re still relative strangers.

It's easy to be wooed with the excitement of a new ‘friend’ ready to be added to our collection of photographic successors. We must all have had that feeling of “Oh yes – this is my best photo ever” only to realise 3 days later that it's not even worthy of inclusion in the portfolio. There has to be an incubation period – to get to know the image, to live with your post processing and take it all in.

In its most basic form, the process of loving to indifference involves coming back to the photo repeatedly over a few weeks, months or even years. One of the really useful things I find about putting some of my images on Flickr is not the whole back patting "wow dude great perspective" comments (to be honest I don't get many of those), but the fact I can use it as a place to put my images to assess them myself – I even have a second account that I’m using for an ongoing project, I post everything that’s half decent up there so I can come back to them with fresh eyes to assess how the project is progressing. It’s also a good way of looking back to see how your photography is (hopefully) progressing. On occasion I've looked back through my Flickr stream and found a photo that I might not have been too bothered for at the time, but now fits in with my current way of looking at the world – if I’d have rejected them at the time, I'd have never have had the chance to enjoy them.

Some of you may well remember the dim and distant past when photographs were just that — photographs, not just a collection of entertaining pixels on the screen. This is way our photographs should be viewed, printed out and ideally, mounted up and framed. I made an image earlier on this year that was very un-me, a summer sunrise – and a view, on screen it was quite nice but it was only when someone requested a print of it that it truly came to life – I was surprised myself, printed on lovely Photo Rag it looked great and my appreciation of the image increased considerably, the blue sky looked fresh, the fields lush and warm – it almost made me want to do more sunrise views! I’d urge everyone to print out their new (and old) photos, it really is the best way to get to know your photos and your photography, they’re not meant to be on screen 600 pixels high! Once you've decided you've got to know your favourite images and their every detail, treat yourself to a few big C-Type prints, they deserve it!

I've included a few of my recent images here, I still don't really know them – they're not part of the family yet, I know a few of them will be welcomed in with open arms whilst others may get left out in the cold.