Long time no post...

Where did two and a half months (since my last 'serious' post) go to?!? Perhaps I'm just having a senior moment... but, no. I do recall. Since I last visited you and the other reader I have been engaged in various projects for Light & Land as well as finishing off work on my next book Landscape Beyond.

The text for this was finished back in August but the final image selection and layouts weren't completed until late October. I'm relieved to say that it has now gone off to the printers – though not as relieved as the tireless Eddie Ephraums who has done a sterling job despite my interference/involvement in all stages of the process.

So, how do I feel about my new baby? Well in some respects I think that I'm still too close to it to judge properly. I'm reasonably pleased with the images but don't feel that I can really judge the text yet. I think that this book is more personal than Landscape Within and I felt more outside my comfort zone than when I wrote LW. I owe a big thank you to Eddie for the inspiration for the book. When he and I first sat down to talk about my "difficult second album" he asked me to name the three attributes that I felt essential in the creation of a great landscape photograph. I surprised myself by instantly responding, "Simplicity, mystery and beauty." And a book concept was born. Of course the tricky part was writing the text...

The images used were largely already made. I like to approach the making of a book with a set of images from my 'library' rather than shooting to illustrate the text. I find that this suits me for a number of reasons. Firstly, I'm not the most prolific photographer and the idea of making a set of images to order is frankly very scary. Secondly, because the images aren't meant to be literal illustrations of the text but to stand as works on their own there really isn't the need to shoot specifically to fulfill the brief. For me, the words and images work together and separately, they are interleaved but distinct.

The inspiration for each of my images comes from the circumstances of its making rather than from some grand plan. In fact I find it more or less impossible to make anything other than bland illustrations if I have an external structure imposed before I make an image. Some might see this as a weakness: it means that I feel unable to work on image series. I tend to feel that my photographic work to date is in a sense one very large series charting my explorations in photography. There are many examples of artists having periods working on the same or similar subjects (Picasso's Blue Period is perhaps the most famous) and I do this too. I make series inadvertently (and each image is widely separated in time) because I have a 'weakness' for certain subjects such as ferns or windows. I often worry that rather than working through my approach to a topic I might simply be pointlessly repeating myself. Yet, just when this feeling gets really strong I usually find some new approach and reveal something new to myself and hopefully whoever views the images. Perhaps I should go away and think on this some more...

In between work on the book I've made two trips across the pond to visit the Canadian Rockies in September and Montana & Wyoming. Both were reasonably successful photographically (the image above was made at Biscuit Basin in Yellowstone) and I'll write more on them in future posts.