Maybe backup isn't enough?

Today is Friday which, as Doug Chinney would say, makes it #backupfriday. Like Doug I’m quite obsessive about backups. I currently have 4 copies of my images plus one in the cloud (using Zoolz. Check Doug’s review of this here). You may think this madness, and I'm not totally dismissive of that point of view, but when - not if - something goes wrong I’ll be feeling pretty smug that I have a robust backup system. Or will I…?

Back Story

With the move to Australia I was concerned about how I would bring my image catalog with me. I use a MacBook Pro which only has a 500gb SSD which only stores my most recent images. Everything else is stored on an external hard drive which is then synced with another 2 external hard drives and my NAS.

The introduction of fresh regulations in the UK regarding electronic devices in hand luggage aboard flights (read here) meant that I couldn’t take my mains powered external HDs onboard with me, they would have to go in the hold (a call to Manchester Airport confirmed this). Having heard horror stories about this I was a bit paranoid.

So I bought a 2TB portable hard drive to store my images on, and used 2 smaller 500Gb portable hard drives for my most important images. These came with me in my hand luggage. The external hard drives went in the hold.

Back in the UK I had my NAS with my images on, as well as 4 spare 1TB drives that I copied portions of my catalog onto. These will follow me in the shipping container with the rest of our worldly belongings. So in actual fact, I have 6 full backups across the world, a couple of partial ones, and everything in the cloud too. Paranoid, moi?

The good news is that everything arrived off the flight safely and all appears to be operating ok. However my paranoia kicked in. What if they’d zapped the external drives with some X-ray and wiped some data (which doesn’t actually affect them I believe, but still!), or a heavy handed luggage handler had somehow caused a malfunction or corruption on one of the drives. For my own peace of mind I had to make sure that all of the drives and the image copies were 100% ok.

Image Verifier

Researching the best way of doing this I came across the aptly named Image Verifier. All you do with IV is point it at your images and it will work through the folder hierarchy checking the images. How does it do that? There are two ways.

Hash Checking

The first is called Hash Checking. This will generate a checksum (also known as a hash) which is a bit like a fingerprint for a file. It puts the file’s data into the checksum generator and it gives you a magic number that uniquely represents that file. Put the same data into the checksum generator and the checksum will be the same.

If the file has changed the checksum that is generated will be different. IV will flag this difference up as something to investigate. The reason for the change could be completely benign. It may be that you re-edited a TIFF file and the different checksums are because you did actually change the file.

However usually RAW files are stored in their original form and never changed. When using Lightroom any image edits and metadata you add are stored within the Lightroom database rather than saved back into the RAW file. If you use Bridge to add ratings, keywords, etc then these edits are stored in a ‘sidecar’ XMP file - a wee file that sits next to the RAW file, the RAW itself is unchanged.

Knowing this you would expect the checksum generated for each RAW to be absolutely the same every time you run IV on your images. Any changes in the checksum point to something happening to the RAW file. This needs investigating.

Structure Checking

The issue with checksumming is that the checksum generator doesn’t know anything about the data in the file. It treats all numbers in the file equally and just hashes them altogether without trying to understand them. It can’t tell you if the numbers in the file are the correct numbers.

This is where the second form of verification comes in, Structure Checking. Structure Checking tries to understand the contents of the file and ensure that it is correct and usable.

IV has built-in libraries to open and check the contents of JPEG and TIFF files so that it can confirm that files are in the right format for those file types. For RAW files, IV delegates the job to Adobe’s DNG Converter utility. The DNG Converter has wide compatibility - usually equivalent to Adobe Camera RAW/Lightroom - in terms of the RAW files it can process. IV passes the RAW file to DNG Converter which then attempts to convert it to DNG.

If it succeeds the file is assumed to be fine. The converted DNG is thrown away; it doesn’t save it to your image library or anything so don’t worry about that. However if DNG Converter returns an error then there is likely to be an error in the RAW file that needs investigating.

It seems to me that Structure Checking is most important when you first get started, to verify that the images in your catalog are good and can be opened successfully. Once you know that they are ok then hash checking can be used to detect any change in the file going forward. In other words, there’s no point starting with hash checking - it will generate a checksum ok, but if the file has already been corrupted then the checksum is just that of the corrupted file rather than known to be a ‘good’ checksum.

My Story

So I set IV off and left it running overnight and then some. In total it took just over 30 hours to go through my full 75k image library. Considering that in effect it was converting 75k RAW files to DNG then this probably isn’t too bad. But the results shocked me.

In total it confirmed that 74887 image files were good, but that 163 were invalid. 163 invalid, say what?! But but but, I backup!

Oh no! What Happened to my Honeymoon Images?

When I saw that a number of corrupt files were in a folder called ‘Honeymoon’ I started to panic a little bit (and checked that my wife wasn’t looking over my shoulder).

I worked through the errors, selecting each file and clicking ‘Reveal in Finder’. Sure enough, the image preview in Finder doesn’t look good. Certainly I don’t remember taking photos of a white rectangle on a black background.

If I try to open the file into Photoshop, ACR gives me an error telling me the file can’t be opened. If I open the file in Iridient Developer (ID) then it manages to open the file but the image presented confirms that that the file is indeed corrupt. Uh-oh!

My next step is to have a look in Lightroom and see what is going on there. Weirdly I can’t find the image in there. I then realise that the whole folder  ‘2007/Honeymoon’ where the corrupt files are living isn’t in Lightroom. Instead I have another folder ‘2008/2008-02-12-Honeymoon’ which makes more sense given that my honeymoon was in February 2008.

I check to see if IV reports any errors in the "2008-02-12-Honeymoon" folder but fortunately not and the images in Lightroom look fine too. Thank goodness my honeymoon images appear to be safe! I live to fight another day.

It’s a bit of a mystery as to how I have a duplicate and corrupted folder of Honeymoon pictures. These were made in the days before I got on top of my image organisation, so it could be the result of a number of things. It’s just good to be aware of them - and in this case know that I can delete them.

False Positive Results with TIFFs

Looking further down the list of errors there are various TIFF files that it flags up as invalid. I open each of these up in Photoshop and double check in LR. Fortunately these appear to be fine and are what we call 'false positives'; the verification has flagged them as invalid but manual checking confirms they are valid. I'm not sure if there may be something not awry that's not immediately obvious here, or if IV struggles with certain aspects of TIFF files that means these were flagged up.

By the way when checking images in Lightroom, make sure to go into the Develop module. In the Library module the LR preview file is used and so won’t confirm any problems in the source file.

Corrupted DNG Files

Looking further down the list I start to see some other DNG files being flagged as invalid. One from 2009 appears to open fine into Photoshop until Adobe Camera RAW pops up to tell me the file is damaged. In what way I don’t know. I can continue and actually open the file into PS and so the nature of the damage remains unknown. Though the file looks fine I don’t know if I can fully trust it.

The most recent example of a corrupt RAW file is in June 2012, which is worryingly recent for my liking. The RAWs either side of this file are fine, it’s just this one that is damaged. What has caused the corruption is again a mystery. I don’t know if my old PC (I moved to Mac in May 2013) had a faulty drive that quietly corrupted this and perhaps the other files.

Once corrupted, when I’ve copied it across to my new Mac’s external drive and then replicated against a new set of external backup drives I’ve unwittingly copied and replicated the corrupt file. It may be that I have intact copies of these files on my old backup drive still installed in my PC but I can’t confirm this until my shipment arrives.

I’m reassured that it’s not a problem with the memory card, card reader or import process as the file was originally converted to DNG successfully - as noted earlier, the DNG conversion would fail if the original was corrupt - so something has happened to it once on the computer.

A Narrow Escape

Having checked each of the TIFFs manually I’m reassured that these files are ok. Of the 115 invalid RAW files I’m perhaps lucky that these are mostly from that strange duplicate Honeymoon folder, but there are a few more recent ones that give me pause for thought. These aren’t images that I intend to carry forward and so will delete, but imagine if the number included some of my favourite images?

From now on I’ll be running Image Verifier on images as I import and back them up, first using structure checking and then using hash checking to ensure they don’t change later.

Going back to my initial point, backups are not a guarantee of image safety. Perhaps the worst kind of hard drive failure isn’t the ‘big bang’ type where you lose everything on the drive, but where errors are silently written into files. If that's your primary source file then backups won’t save you, the corruption is just mirrored onto the other drives. Checking through my backups for the corrupt files here confirms that the backups are also corrupt.

This is one potential problem with automated backups. They’re great at creating regular mirrored copies of your images but the automation also risks pulling over corrupt files as well as any ‘manual error’ changes and deletions that means that, ye, you have multiple copies, but all of the copies are damaged.

Of course the purpose of multiple backups is that if corruption happens on one drive it is incredibly unlikely to happen in the same place on another drive. This means that problems such as this can be detected and avoided by restoring a corrupt file from a backup. So mostly I expect this is an issue with images being corrupted prior to backup, or if a backup is used in the assumption that it is good when in fact there may be some corruption.

Nonetheless my experience with IV has made me realise that it’s important not to just delegate the task of backup (and verify) and hope it all works out, but that you have to check things yourself to fully trust them. I think running Image Verifier on an occasional basis will help give me that extra peace of mind that my backup routine is truly robust.

Building the Photography Habit

One of the main motivations for our move to Australia was the hope of a better lifestyle. Since arriving Down Under I’ve embraced this by building a set of positive habits to help bring that about. Early rises, daily runs, green tea, reading and writing are all part of the ’new me’. Bacon butties have even been replaced by fruit and yoghurt for breakfast, and my alcohol consumption has dropped dramatically. I'm conscious that when jumping into similar health regimes, I've been motivated for about 2 weeks and then it’s all blown up with a return to lie-ins, beer and pies. So given I'm only 11 days in I should probably remain cautious about this being life-long change. Yet  I'm confident I'm on the right track.

The Healthy Habit

Normally diets and exercise programmes are decided on a whim, usually when you’re having a ‘fat day’ or some such. This isn’t a deep seated motivation and so once the try-hard bluster has passed the new lifestyle normally drops away.

I haven't always been a big bloke. 7 years ago I was training 3 times a day for triathlons. What feels like yesterday is actually now 'once upon a time'. When I was training I was strongly focused on building positive habits in terms of nutrition and training. I knew that dedication to healthy eating and exercise would lead to positive results. Most of this was automated by habits, I would train and eat well without thinking about it or missing anything. Indeed the thought of not training and breaking the habit was worse than the physical pain of training.

Ultimately the need for hip surgery and laying up for 6 months meant that all of my good habits ended and a descent into unhealthy living began, yet to be reversed.

What's different this time from my subsequent failed attempts is my determination to rebuild these positive habits, knowing that in the long term they will reap health benefits. Instead of worrying about results - how many kilograms I have lost this week, how few calories I ate, how far I can run, etc - my goal is to ensure I perform the habits daily and trust that the results will come. It’s easier to focus on pulling on the running shoes each morning than it is to worry about the longer term goal. One step at a time.

The Photography Habit

For those readers who are already fit and healthy I’ll halt the fitness talk here. I may post another time if anyone is interested in my plan and my progress.

However thinking about this led me to reflect that most success in our lives is achieved through adopting positive habits, whatever they may be. And this would include photography.

For example, I recall that a real turning point for my photography was when I realised that it wasn’t enough to just go out with the camera when I could or when I felt like it. Instead I made a conscious decision to sacrifice other things (sleep mostly!) and develop the habit of going out for sunrise every Saturday morning.

When that alarm went off on Saturday morning regardless of the rain on the window or a lack of phojo (photographic mojo, gerrit?) I would pull on my outdoor gear, grab my camera bag and go and make photographs. More often than not these would be rubbish. In some ways my Lightroom catalog is littered with the equivalent of photographic corpses, those mornings where I’d force myself out to make photographs and come home disappointed wondering what the point was.

Poor Results are Inevitable

But from such frequent and repeated trips out I have also made some of my best images. On mornings that looked totally rubbish, the light would change or I would suddenly find a subject or composition I loved and everything would click. I always like to think that the mornings of disappointment are not wasted rather they’re necessary steps to become a better photographer and produce better images.

Your process and your vision are muscles that need exercising, and you have to keep them in shape. As with running you won’t run a personal best every time you pull on your runners, but those slower runs help you build up to deliver the PBs in later runs. And so you can’t produce your best work every time you venture out, but all of those failed attempts lead you to the point of doing so. Dedication and hard work are always rewarded.

Phojo

I often hear photographers say is that they’re lacking phojo (I say this too btw). I wonder if having this habit of just going out helps get through that. Not focusing on the result, or expecting a moment of inspiration, but just putting the shoulder to the wheel and working through it.

I’ve found that when I’m struggling I don’t see a distant light at the end of the tunnel getting closer and closer. Instead I tend to burst out of the darkness into the bright light most unexpectedly. Once my eyes adjust I know what I’m doing and what I want to achieve, and I enter a state of flow. That’s not going to happen sitting at home.

I think particularly for the developing photographer turning photography into a habit rather than something you fit in makes a huge difference. It helps put us in the right place at the right time, knowing we wouldn’t be there without the times that didn’t work. It helps us to get beyond lack of motivation rather than hoping for inspiration to strike. It helps build our Vision, improve our process, and practice at becoming a better photographer.

Don’t expect and don’t worry about producing great work every time; it's impossible, just like a runner won’t set a PB every time. But if you keep getting up, keep going out, then the results - I guarantee - will follow.

5 Things that Might Help

Here are 5 things from my own experience that might help with building your own photography habit:

1. Find a Trigger

The trigger is the event that  makes you perform the habit. Think of it as "when X happens I do Y" where X can be any notable event and Y is photography. For me the X is 'when I wake up'. For you X might be when lunchtime arrives, and Y might be go for an hour long walk with your camera. Or when you've had your evening meal then you go out with the camera.

A habit is much easier to maintain if there is an identifiable trigger because then it is easy to automate the decision making in your head.

2. Remove obstacles

Obstacles are those things that block you from the habit, normally as a result of some internal thought process. "The forecast looks rubbish." "It's raining". " "My new lens hasn't arrived". "I'm tired". "I'm hungry and have no food". "I don't know where to go for the best image". And so on. My head can throw up an inexhaustible list of reasons not to go out.

Make it easy for you to just do the habit without thinking. Have the bag packed up and everything else you need by the front door. Prepare something to eat the night before. Put the alarm clock on the other side of the room so that you can't switch it off and keep sleeping. Getting up is the hardest bit, once you're up everything else is easy.

You want to make it as easy as possible to get from your trigger to on location as possible, and remove the opportunities for your mind to trick you into not going out.

3. Communication is Your Friend

Most of us are time challenged because of family and work commitments. It's unlikely your boss will be very sympathetic when you try to negotiate for photography time (worth a try though!) but hopefully your partner will be. Those that love us want us to be happy and want us to achieve our goals. They will try to help us if we're not being unreasonable.

Try to agree a weekly 3-4 hour period or whatever you can where there's an expectation that you'll go out. Saturday early mornings were perfect for me and I'd often be home for breakfast so it didn't disturb family life too much.

Be aware of danger number 1 here - time creep. This is where you start pushing your luck and keep asking for more and more time. Then your partner no longer sees 'photography' as that positive thing you really want to do, but rather sees it as a threat stealing you away from your family responsibilities (been there, done that!).

4. Prepare to Sacrifice

Believe it or not, there ARE enough hours in the day, it's just that we either don't use them wisely or are trying to do too much. We are all trying to cram more and more into already busy lives.

If photography is a priority in in your life then that probably means that other things need to take a back seat. That might mean getting less sleep and drinking less on a Friday night. It might mean missing an important football match or your favourite TV show. It might mean spending less time on social media to get other things done so that you can go out. It could mean any number of things. The important thing is that if you already have a busy life then 'finding time' for photography on a frequent and regular basis becomes nigh on impossible. If it's something that's important to you then make the time by giving up something else.

Conversely photography might be something that you like to do when you have the time or when on holiday. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, enjoy it for what it means to you. Be realistic and see your results in the life context in which you make them, rather than falsely judging yourself against the masters of photography who dedicate their life to it. Better yet, don't judge yourself against anyone and you'll be much happier!

5. Be Kind to Yourself

Yes, conditions were rubbish. You didn't get a good image. You didn't bump into Inspiration once while out in the field. It was a waste of time. And so on. Don't do this. Remember we're in it for the long game, and that means some days will just be totally rubbish. I have more failed shoots than successful ones, it's perfectly normal.

They are balanced by the awesome days. Perhaps not fully, but remember the phrase "it's morning's like this that make it all worthwhile"). Stay positive. Believe in the habit. Believe in next time. If seeing other people's amazing images make you feel even more inadequate, unplug from social media for a while.

Keep On Keepin' On

Hopefully that gives you some food for thought and some ideas for building the photography habit. Many words have been written on the 10,000 hour rule, the 10,000 photos rule, that work and dedication always win out and so forth. Photography is no different. Just because this is 'art' doesn't meant that we have to leave our fate in the hands of mystical muses and eureka  moments of inspiration. As Pablo Picasso said, "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working". Build the habit. Keep going out. The results will certainly follow.

I read Superhuman by Habit recently which helped me to recognise my good and bad habits, and issues I've had in the past with habit forming. As with most good advice it's not rocket science and some part of me knew it already, but this book really laid out the challenges we have with habit forming which I instantly recognised. If you feel like you have also been a poor habit former in the past, then this short and pretty cheap book may help you in the way that it's helped me. You can get it on Amazon here (affiliate link).

G'Day World! (Aka a New Life Down Under)

Last week I moved to Australia. Can you believe I just said that so flippantly?! If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook this may not come as a surprise to you. If you don’t, it quite likely does! The story behind our move is probably one for another time. For now I just wanted to say ‘hello’ and share a few initial thoughts on our first week here.

Blue Skies. What the...?

It’s fair to say that photographically I was apprehensive about making the move to the bottom of the world. Burning sunshine, bright blue skies and red rocks seemed to be the antithesis of what I’d adopted as a dark, moody, and desaturated photographic style in the UK.

Of greatest concern to me was the weather. Blue skies lack all of the mood and drama that get me excited. It is said that the worst time to make photographs is in the middle of the day, and I rarely venture out during the day unless the weather is poor. I've been worried that Australia would be like shooting in the middle of the day all of the time.

Yet the creative spirit rises to a fresh challenge. Whilst my style is certain to evolve, I'm confident that the experience will be a positive one. A totally fresh photographic adventure, another step on the journey.

I’m relieved to say that after a week here I’ve already found ample photographic opportunities - and even some clouds and fierce waves! - and have really enjoyed numerous forays along the coast from my base here in Yamba NSW. Already I’m confident my photography will prosper rather than suffer. Indeed I’m now actively relishing the prospect.

Vastness

Until you get here it's difficult to comprehend just how big this country is. Ok, you know it's big, but the scale of the place is incredible. It's the world's 6 largest country at nearly 8 million km². Contrast that with the UK's 242,900 km² and you begin to appreciate that a 'long drive' to Scotland for a photo trip is like a trip to the shops here! Ok, not quite, but being 4 hours from Brisbane and 10 hours from Sydney there are a lot of kilometres to cover to get anywhere.

Where I'm based we're surrounded by national parks. Compared to the UK, national parks are very common and unsurprisingly very large in Australia. Nonethless they're still a bit of a drive away. I have a couple very local to me (one within 5 mins drive) but it's inland to the mountainous wilderness of the New England Tablelands that I find myself strongly drawn to.

Part of the mountainous spine running down eastern Australia known as the Great Dividing Range, the New England Tablelands are the largest highland area in Australia. Most people don't think of Australia as being mountainous thinking instead of beaches and vast desert but these are proper mountains. For example Round Mountain is 1,586m making it 242m higher than Ben Nevis, the UK's highest mountain. There are 25 national parks here, 3 of which are World Heritage Sites. The opportunities that lie up there are mind bending. Plus one of the national parks is Guy Fawkes National Park, named after my great great something uncle, so I have to go don't I?

The downside is that although these are 'close by' they are still several hours away from me here. Whilst I expect to visit them regularly it will be relatively infrequently, spending several nights under canvas to make the most of it.

I don't believe in over-travelling to make photographs. Setting aside the environmental concerns, I think finding locations to work with nearby is important for repeated and frequent visits. This also provides a more personal challenge to produce more intimate and deeply satisfying images than relying on dramatic and iconic locations alone, and helps with my creative progression.

So I'll be picking my way along my little stretch of coast. We sit on the mouth of a large river, the Clarence, with a ferry required to cross. A five minute drive to the south is Yuraygir National Park which at 65km is the longest stretch of undeveloped coast in New South Wales. So I've got between here and there to work with before I have to pack the tent and pull on the hiking boots (which I will of course!).

Hey Dude, Where's My Twilight?

Beyond the size and the seemingly perpetual sunshine, the other thing that has struck me so far about Australia is how short twilight feels and how quickly the sun rises.

This morning I was climbing over rocks by head torch only 30 minutes before sunrise. Once the sun is up, it rises into the sky very quickly giving the ‘middle of the day’ problem of high contrast white light. In the UK I would expect to be shooting for up to an hour before the sun came up.

At the other end of the day the sun sinks and darkness seems to set in unbelievably quickly. One minute I’m making an image, the next I’ve got the head torch on trying to find my way back to the car. We don’t so much get a Blue Hour and a Golden Hour as 30 minutes but Golden Half Hour doesn’t sound quite as good!

The weather also reduces the shooting window. Post-sunrise in the UK you often get more usable light due to ample cloud cover. This is one reason I love being out when it’s cloudy. If it’s overcast you can basically shoot all day. So far I’ve experienced little cloud cover so the light quickly turns harsh forcing me to pack up the camera. Of course part of my adaption to this new landscape will be making best use of this light. I don't believe there is such a thing as 'bad light' rather it's about adapting your approach to the available light.

Nonetheless as a Scot living in one of the wettest parts of the UK, bright sunshine is a bit alien to me and definitely provides me a challenge. With time I expect my images will become lighter, and will play on light and shadow and the graphic shapes they produce. I am also sure that I will be ever more grateful for the short windows of blue offered to me by twilight.

Some Images to Finish With

Anyway that’s a few opening thoughts on my time here. It’s a big country, full of fresh wonder and adventure for me. Already my early apprehension is fading, filled with renewed confidence and excitement that I can produce some great work here. I hope that you stick with me to see some of the results.

Here are some images from the last week. You can see more in my freshly created Australia gallery.

Quiet Contemplation

I've just arrived back in Lochcarron after a long trip back up from the Patchings Art Festival at the weekend. I was invited to talk and exhibit in the Outdoor Photography tent and I'm delighted to say it went well. Thank you to everyone who came along and also for the positive reception; I'm really pleased that what I had to say about the Elemental Landscape resonated with so many people. If you weren't able to come, I'm hoping to put a re-record on the website in the near future so 'watch this space'! For much of the 500 mile return journey I've been turning over some of the thoughts raised in the other talks at the Festival I had the pleasure of attending. Chief amongst these was something that David Ward, Paul Wakefield and Dav Thomas talked about - paraphrased as 'quiet contemplation'.

Many of us spend our time in the field dashing around making photographs. We may take a couple of shots of the same or similar compositions before we move on to to find something new. I think our intention here is to get as many shots in the bag as we can during the session. Even if we tell ourselves we're not trusting to luck we're secretly hoping that there's something worthwhile waiting on the memory card for us when we get home.

I often see this on workshops. Attendees will quickly find a shot, make a couple of variations within the space of a few minutes and then go and look for something else. I myself have fallen victim of this, being pulled up for it by Bruce Percy when I attended one of his workshops a few years ago.

So when I say 'we' of course I mean 'me'. We all need to sloooooow down.

This is the chief advantage of using a tripod I think. When we're setting up and bound to the tripod, our shooting rate is necessarily slowed down.

Further the oft quoted advice of 'work the scene' also caused me to slow down and take my time. Instead of spending minutes with a composition, if I find something that draws me in I will spend 30 minutes, maybe even an hour, slowly and intentionally changing the composition of my shot. 'What works?', 'What doesn't work?', 'How can I make this shot stronger?", 'What if I tried...?', 'What is this shot about?'. I find that this iterative and interrogative approach really helps to make stronger images. Sometimes the first image I make in a series is the best, sometimes it's the last, and sometimes it's one in the middle. Not all of my refinements work, but at least they are made with purpose rather than hope.

But at the weekend, this idea of 'slowing down' was taken to a whole new level. Dav talked about sitting eating sandwiches, just watching and absorbing. David Ward talked about being still and waiting for the scene to 'reveal how it wants to be photographed'. For my sins I can't remember exactly how Paul Wakefield described it, but he keeps diaries of his thoughts and things he collects as he sits and takes in a scene.

I remember Bruce Percy talking about the same, about letting the 'landscape seep into your bones'. I also remember watching a video with David Chalmers in conversation with Joe Cornish (here) where David talked about just relaxing in the landscape, even taking a nap, waking to the landscape afresh.

Much of the work of the artists mentioned here is described as 'contemplative'. We wonder how they do it. We rush around the wood, the seashore or wherever trying to recreate it, trying to work out what the trick is.

But perhaps the trick is exactly that which makes their work so; quiet contemplation. For all their vision, craft and genius these artists would no doubt fail in their intention if they too rushed around the landscape snapping images. It seems absurd to suggest that the way to create quiet, contemplative images is to...be quiet and contemplative. Maybe it's too obvious to point out but it seems to me to have been missed by many - myself most of all.

That time taken to absorb our environment, to be at one with the landscape (hippy sounding or not), to awaken our senses so dulled by our urban and digitised lives, perhaps that's an important part of the equation. Perhaps the key part of the equation.

Let's use 10 to represent how many of us start running around at full speed, taking as many images as possible and being ultimately disappointed with the results (and I still do this when I'm particularly excited by a location).

Maybe a 5 can be used to represent taking some time, slowing down to make a really good job of a few images once we find them.

And maybe a 1 is really slowing down, taking a nap, sitting for an hour or two, enjoying some food and listening to the wind rustling the leaves on the trees. Letting the landscape speak, and taking the time to listen. Maybe that's a 1, and maybe that's the - incredibly obvious - answer for better and more contemplative images. Quality, not quantity.

Wild Camping on Applecross

I've been trying to resist the temptation to publish too many of my images too quickly from my time here in Wester Ross. For a while now I've been consciously trying to increase the amount of time between taking an image, and processing and publishing it. If I'm too quick in my posting, I often regret a decision I've made at a later date - either disliking the image entirely, or a processing decision I've made.

Working in Series

Further I'm trying to organise both how I work and the images I publish into better defined series than as individual images. I find for me these tend to coalesce over time rather than being immediately clear up front. Generally speaking I think a little distance from the images I'm making is a good thing. It seems strange being up here and making all of these images without sharing but I think it's right that my focus is on making the images in the field and saving their completion and publication for later.

A Great Night Out

However I had a great night on Saturday night camping on a beach on Applecross that I just couldn't resist sharing some images from. The forecast was promising for sunset. Foremost on my mind however was that I had scouted the location a couple of times and had decided that it would be at its best at high tide which would coincide with sunrise on the Sunday morning.

As I find is often the case, with a lower tide means there's a lot of seaweed and other distracting elements in the water. Having been here at a low tide the fantastic geology and rock formations that I found were distant from the sea and so difficult to include into images with the water. There are large, beautifully rounded boulders of warm Torridon sandstone. As well there are a number of rocky outcrops with channels carved through them by the sea which I thought would be a great subject with a high tide.

The sunset certainly didn't disappoint, it was the most vibrant I've seen since my arrival. Even though I was concerned with the tide being further out there were still some really interesting rocks in the surf. I spent several hours during and after sunset gleefully making images. I didn't manage to pitch my tent until 11pm. After a few whiskies I decided to hit the hay, a warm red glow still clinging to the horizon.

Awaking 4 hours later - these long days are a killer for us landscape photographers! - and the horizon was still red. I wondered if it had ever turned truly dark as I slept; it often doesn't at these latitudes in the height of Summer. As is often the case sunrise was a more muted affair of soft pastels, with a weather front from the east snuffing out most of the colour. The high tide didn't disappoint and I found a number of images amongst the rocks that I was really happy with.

Whilst Others Sleep

Despite this the highlight of the morning was my first ever - albeit distant - sighting of a wild otter, one of my favourite animals. One of the great privileges of being a landscape photographer is that I witness and experience things that many rarely or never do. Animal sightings, spectacular weather and light events, amazing views and the landscape looking at its finest are all enjoyed while many are asleep or watching TV. I don't mean to sound (too) smug but such things are an incredible reward for our efforts. I later photographed in the company of seals and, perhaps most bizarrely, a Royal Navy submarine in the Sound of Raasay. A great morning.

Wild Camping and Photography

I'm conscious that my last post was about wild camping on a munro and this about wild camping on the coast (an altitude difference of 1000m). I wouldn't want it to sound like wild camping is a necessary part of my photography.

However when I'm driving one hour back from a location to drive back only a few hours later, camping is very much a time and fuel efficient approach as well as being rather enjoyable. It's much easier to climb into the tent at night and roll out again in the morning mere minutes from being able to make images. On this particular camp I was barely 50 yards from the car, so camping doesn't demand any real endeavour.

Perhaps more importantly camping is a great way to bond with a location. No longer is it somewhere we drive to for a couple of hours but it's our home for a night. Camping always feels like a very primal thing to do, it heightens my senses and awareness. Places I've camped always feel very special to me in a way that places I've 'merely' photographed may not. I highly recommend it.

Tunnel Vision

Given it was the point of this post, let me leave you with some images. I made about 400 - about 200 were of the otter mind you! - and my final selects and processing will no doubt change given time. Hopefully they give you a flavour of the conditions and the type of image I was going for on location.

Note how there are a range of different styles in this selection - from details, to more usual seascapes, to telephoto shots. I'm as guilty as anyone of getting 'tunnel vision' where I spend all of my time trying for a certain type of shot. It can be quite depressing coming home with 200 images that are essentially the same, where I  might select a handful and consign the others to a lifetime confined to the hard drive.

I'm very pleased to have come home with a range of different images that I'm happy with. I might have upwards of a dozen that I will go on to publish. The key I think is to snap out of the tunnel vision, to be observant and to be open to opportunities that arise.

I also found it useful to have two cameras on location with me. The Canon 5D3 with 24-70 was what I used for most of these shots, with a Fuji 55-200 mounted on an XT1 being used for the others. I've found this combination extremely useful on this trip. Not having to change lenses constantly is a real bonus, and at times I'd be making a long exposure or shooting a time-lapse with one whilst framing another image with the other.

This is somewhat counter to my regular argument of sticking with one piece of kit you're familiar with and focusing on getting the most from it. I still need to consider if this dual-camera approach will lead me to making stronger images or just more images, and will no doubt blog about it in the future.

Ok, finally, here are some images.

As a sidenote this location is one that we'll be visiting on my 5 day Torridon - and Applecross - workshop on Friday. It's not too late to join me. You can find details here.