Lyrical Scotland

I have been photographing Scotland, and a few other places in between, for 24 years or so and I cannot imagine doing any other kind of job for a living. I started out just recording scenes on a Nikkormat camera whilst travelling abroad in the early 80’s, very quickly I got hooked just from having a few mesmerising moments when I realised the difference between snapping and making a picture, it was a profound personal experience for me – I knew something was up.

Those early days were a mix of sheer joy and excitement mixed in with quite a bit of pain, I am not sure the pain thing is altogether necessary but I found that the urge and the concentrated desire to capture the subject caused not only various physical contortions but also an emotional involvement that probably made me rather difficult to live with – it was so important to get it right, both the composition and the moment became an obsession with me, if I failed I would indeed suffer. It was I guess, a way of learning - I learned to avoid the pain by getting better at it. I was probably just like thousands of other enthusiastic amateurs realising their own power to see things and make them special by commitiong them to film. I loved the excitement of encounter and the challenge to be ready to zero in on the moment. But I also wasted a lot of energy in those days, I could walk for miles over tedious countryside looking for treasure, I am much more economical with my energy these days and the camera does not even come out of the bag unless quite a lot of boxes are ticked.

In the early 80's I  travelled and working in S.E Asia, the most fascinating of the countries I visited country was undoubtedly Vietnam. The Americans had only been chased out 4 years earlier and the land and its people were visibly traumatised, it appeared chaotic and very poor but populated by the loveliest people.  I was absorbed with the politics of the time and had first hand experience of “boat people” mostly in a fairly desperate state that came by the oil rig I was working on. But these were also heady days and I was fortunate to have the time and resource to indulge my growing passion. After a couple of years of work and travel I grew restless of living in Singapore – it was a State dedicated to control and showed a great paucity of free thinking  I knew I had to get out.  On reflection I realise that although travelling stimulated me and encounteing the new and the unfamiliar it all seemed fascinating, the Tropics generally present a quality of light that pales in comparison to my native Scotland - I did not entirely realise this until I returned.

I did a stretch of work offshore in the North Sea from 81 to 86 and it was during this time I started to take practical steps towards leaving the oil business and focus and making photography my career. I made good use of my free time offshore by photographing life on board the various oil rigs I worked on – this phase was in photographic terms where I cut my teeth in producing what I hoped would be a unique and coherent piece of work based on images I captured offshore, subsequently a book was published - it received artistic but not commercial acclaim.  I had no formal training of course and I rather fancifully saw myself as an art photographer in the making, it was naïve of course and in financial terms it was a reckless move but the obsession showed no signs of relenting and so my last job was offshore Holland in 1986. By this time I had published a range of postcards of my home territory here in Galloway and the early signs were encouraging. One day I had a spare room full of postcards and a print bill, next day I was out on the road knocking on doors selling; it kind of worked at that level, a calendar and other products followed. The national market was harder to penetrate however and I made mistakes trying to get into the mainstream. I learned the hard way that the market responded better to images of places that were at least vaguely familiar and that curious or vaguely esoteric subjects were just not commercial.

Late eighties and early 90’s were relative boom years for Scottish tourism and the visitors were consuming vast quantities of the new look postcards being produced by a number of independent up and coming photographer/publishers. Trade levels in postcards are nothing like that now due in part to the onset of mobile phones, digital cameras and an aversion to postage stamps. I would say that the standards are much higher now and people understand better what makes a good image and what good reproduction looks like. Things are moving fast and so with the very best technology at hand and available to all it is even more important that a photograph posses both content and impact because technical competence is more or less taken for granted.

I have spent scary amounts of time and money beating trails up and down Scotland over these years – usually in one of many elderly motor homes or converted vans I have owned and for the past ten years accompanied by my faithful Labrador Tara, she know the rules and we hunt together – her quarry is of course olfactory, my visual but it can be a lonely business so she is an important team member. We have had some truly great times in fantastic places; it is a simple life in many ways but to be effective it requires total concentration and the energy to focus on the changing light and the logistics involved. There is an image of how a landscape photographer strolls around with a camera clicking away whilst enjoying the views – it is very rarely like that. People often ask me “how long did you have to wait for this or that particular shot” and of course the answer is often but not always that It was more or less immediate because I was in the right spot at the right time. It is unusual for me to wait specifically for something to happen, perhaps a planned for steam train snaking up the Glen, but then sod’s law would have it that the sun would disappear just at that moment. At other times especially with architecture, careful planning and repeated visits to the right spot until the light is right will usually get the required result. Many of my favourite or successful pictures seem like gifts but as I recall I may have had to scramble over a few hills or cycle arduously up the forest track to get there.

I am primarily interested in getting images that really celebrate and describe a sense of place, and usually places that could not be just anywhere, I like rich textures and engaging but comfortable compositions, I think a picture’s highest accolade is if it can aspire to end up in a frame on a wall where it induces a warmth with the viewer, a longing to be there or perhaps a sense of peace – any number of agreeable emotions in fact.