Kia ora tatou:

The books are on the water.

Out There South will be here in Aotearoa in a couple of weeks.

Chris Morton and I are going to have a launch in Auckland on August 26, at his place on the North Shore.

You are ALL invited!

So, if you have time, do come along, have a drink, see/buy some prints and get a signed, discounted copy of the book.

Most of the guys will be there.

And for those of you wondering what it is like, here is some teaser text….

(more…)

Cottages and cloud, Wedderburn-Sony NEX-5, Handheld Twilight mode

Kia ora tatou:

Those of you who have done my workshops know that I often ask you to do some..ummm..gentle visualisation exercises, such as the Phone booth one. I still meet students who remind me that I put them in a phone booth for an hour and asked them to make 60 different photographs. usually there is a degree of approbium….

As part of the Winterlight workshop I take them into the Black Forest, a small area of exotic forest outside Naseby, usually on a cold, dark winter afternoon, and ask them to write a letter to a friend describing what they are feeling. They have one hour for the exercise: 35 minutes to write in their visual diaries what they are experiencing, and 25 minutes to come up with a single image which talks to what they wrote. the following day the group share the images and text. There is method in my madness: I want them to slow down and learn to hear what the place is saying to them, to involve all their senses and respond to that. This is critical in landscape photography if we are to speak with our own voices and document that conversation between the landscape and us ( in that order!) so often I see the photographer’s ego shouting down the landscape rather than a response to it.

Here then, are a series of passages and images from this year’s groups. Names withheld.

(more…)

Kia ora tatou:

I am happy to admit it: I am anal about the technical quality of my landscape photographs. Come to think of it, I am anal about the technical quality in all of my photographs. The end result of what is probably an unnatural preoccupation with technical quality has led to a restless and relentless urge to make pictures of ever better quality. I suppose at this point I should be rather apologetic, but I have no intention of doing so.

In the last few weeks I have returned to the landscape and expressing what I feel about my own country. It has led to revisiting my artist statement and thinking about whether that really holds true for me. It does.

Living in the country should make it easy to develop a vision of the landscape, and I suppose the way it does. However, living beyond the city limits and living in a pristine and beautiful environment can lead one to becoming a little blasé about what is around one and, worse still, perhaps not acknowledging the blessing and the way that I should. It is too easy to take things for granted. Fortunately, my obsessive preoccupation with technical quality ensures that I try to keep pushing the boundaries.

(more…)

Kia ora tatou:

11,000 photographs, 6724 kilometres, 17 days, eight guys.

And now it is done.

Last  April Chris Morton from Auckland and I, along with six other guys, set out on a big adventure. We drove some of the fiercest four-wheel drive tracks in the South Island, got lost, got stuck, and saw places most people never will.

Now we have written a book about it. Published by Craig Potton Publishing, it will be out in bookshops in time for Father’s Day. Chris and I shared the photography while I wrote the narrative.

If you love the mountains and being out there, grab a copy.

We hope to do  few launches here and there, including Auckland…

Ka kite ano

Kia ora tatou:

In keeping with my policy of trying to vary what I write, and include images which have little or nothing to do with the post in question, some things I need to share:

1. Practice what you preach. For ages I have blogged on about backing up data to avoid the nasty event when your hard drive crashes. Last Sunday my copy of Hard Disk Sentinel shrieked at me that unless I did something about it, the 1TB drive with my landscape photographs on it was about to fail. (I wondered what the weird clicking sound was….) The drive in question contained all my landscape photographs, 150 000 of them. In a panic, I shut down, removed the drive and sent it away to be replaced ( hopefully, along with all my data). It turns out that it was a glitch in the system and the drive is fine. Yes, before you say anything, all the files are on MyBooks in my safe. But it would have taken me a week (at least) to put them all back.  Strikes me the $NZ49 which HDS cost me was well spent…. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Of late I have begun to think about format and its significance again. One format which has always fascinated me is the panorama and its practice. It is a topic I discuss at the Winterlight Workshops, one which is, of course, devoted to the question of landscape photography. Contrary to popular opinion, there is madness in my method, and method in my madness.

(more…)