Open Wide 🌄
Hello and welcome to Field Notes… not sure that works in text. A bit of subvocalisation for you there.
Today we are not talking about dentists or teeth we are talking about wider vistas, wider landscapes. It's something I've moved away from a little over the past year, which is daft really, seeing as I'm about to put the finishing touches to my next zine: Volume 3 of CREATE. Every image and every subject in it is dedicated to the wider vista, the wider viewpoints I've captured over the years.
Yes, the zine series continues, and if you didn't already know, there are two publications out there already, one dedicated to street photography, and another to my love of trees. Go check them out here. Honestly, this is one of the best ways to support what I do, and if you love my photography, there's no better way to experience it than in print, a zine, a book, or a single print you can hold. Thank you to everyone who's picked up CREATE Vol 1 and Vol 2 so far, it means more than you know.
Some of the images in this next volume span a huge stretch of time, from 2012 right through to the present day, which has made putting it together a genuinely reflective process. There's a future post coming on that subject too, looking back through the archive. I think the images we amass over the years need to be revisited every now and then, sometimes re-edited with the new skills and eye we've picked up along the way. I've never rated myself, and I've never pretended to be anything other than a photographer who loves making photographs. But of course we improve and change over the years, through continual practice and a desire to represent the beauty and wonder of the landscape properly. We don't move forward by making our old work look worse in comparison, we're all just chasing an aesthetic that pleases us and pushes us forward every time we pick up the camera.
I won't get too deep into the fact that Adobe and Instagram, at the moment, seem determined to give weight to AI, even to the point of labelling photographs I've taken as AI-generated when they absolutely are not. I'm looking into this at the moment. My hunch is it's a setting within Lightroom that Instagram is picking up on and misreading, flagging the whole photograph as AI-created when it isn't anything of the sort. Anyway, I went off on one there, didn't I? I'm back in the room now.
This series of wider vistas has been a genuinely interesting one to put together, going back through old files and remembering the moments behind each frame. These kinds of shots lean more heavily on memory than most, the memory of the moment, of who you were with at the time, or of being entirely alone in some cases, and then the memory of the light, the weather, and the excitement of the scene unfolding in front of you. That's a huge factor in photography for me: the romantic teleportation back to a place in time, encapsulated forever in a single photograph, and the way it can awaken that whole moment again in your mind. Isn't that amazing, when you think about it? It's exactly why I feel it's so important to make a zine, to make a print. When it's in your hand, you stop, you feel, and you're transported straight back to that day. Yes, that can happen digitally too, to some degree, but there's something more connecting, more grounding, about holding a slide, a 6x4 print, or a zine or book in your hands.
Take the image above. This was taken at the end of one of the days on my Elements workshop in Scotland, driving back to base, tired, cold, and still buzzing from an incredible day out shooting. We were winding along the open roads when this scene opened up to our left. STOP THE VAN! I'm so glad I did, because even though I love the photograph itself, I also love remembering the faces and the excitement of the attendees in that moment, and the way nature gifted us this fleeting scene of falling light, drifting mist, and a valley draped in this mystic, almost otherworldly atmosphere. It's not a perfect photo by any technical measure, it's an impression, a feeling. And if that feeling transfers to the viewer, then we've got something special. If you feel even a fraction of what we felt standing there taking the photograph, then we've transcended into something really special, that connection from artist to viewer, that equivalence, has been created.
That, for me, is one of the hardest parts of photography: conveying a moment to the viewer in a way that makes them feel something, excitement, calm, joy, or simply the enjoyment of looking at the image. It's a big part of why I do this. It's absolutely fine to say I shoot for myself, and I do, but it matters just as much to me to pass on a feeling, to inspire, and in turn to bring joy, happiness, and a genuine emotional connection to the person viewing it. I call these completion moments, the point where the image finally does what it set out to do.
That's it for this week's Field Notes. Please keep an eye out for when I officially announce CREATE Vol 3, and in the meantime, take a moment to look through a few of the images below. Drop me a comment, and if you're on Substack, do join and subscribe there too. For updates on when I release these zines, and more besides, join my mailing list today.
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