FRAMES Photography Podcast
FRAMES Photography Podcast
Damian Shields
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In today's episode, W. Scott Olsen speaks with Damian Shields, a Scottish landscape photographer and visual professional based in Glasgow, originally born in Toronto and raised in Scotland.
You can visit Damian's website here.
Find out more and join FRAMES here.
Basically, a chord was twanged in my mind. Um, when I saw the way the clouds were basically congregating, and the way the little breaks in them were starting to allow these little spills of light, and the direction of the light coming from the top right to the bottom left, and the way it was starting to paint up the side of Stop Nan Kabar, and the light was starting to glitter off the wet rock on the side of that hill, it just cut straight through to me. And as I said, it was almost like a little kind of twang noise inside my head that it spoke directly to me, and it was something, although it was a reactive moment to something that didn't last very long, and I was so glad I got the shot. That the fact that it spoke to me and it might not have spoken to somebody standing right next to me in the same way, speaks to for me who I am and what my past is, what my story is, and how I got to the point where I see the world in the way that I see it, which is different from the way everyone else sees the world. We're all unique.
SPEAKER_03Here is your today's host, W. Scott Olson, with another fascinating conversation.
SPEAKER_04Well, hello everyone, and welcome to another podcast from Frames Magazine. My name is Scott Olson, and you know, today I'm going to tell you a story because I think this happens to all of us. There is a picture or there's a setting, there's something that we're chasing, and we've been chasing it for a long time. And we get close, we get, you know, almost there, but we keep realizing that there's something about this particular image, whatever it may be, that eludes us, that keeps stepping away from us, you know, just at the minute that the moment that we're stepping closer. And I'm bringing this up because I've had the good fortune over my life to spend a fair bit of time up in the Highlands of Scotland. And I've gone there with students many times. We've hiked something called the West Highland Way, which is a hundred-mile hiking trail uh up into the Highlands. It's just so gorgeous, so wonderful. Um, and because of when the school break is here where I teach, we've always done this in the last week of October, which means it's autumn, it's the midges are gone, that's good. Um, but the weather is changing, the light is fantastic. And I have stood on the West Highland Way, especially when you get up into the Glencoe area, thinking I don't have the talent to capture with my camera and lens what I am seeing with my eyes. And so you start chasing it and you start, you know, going after it. Um, been up there a couple of times, even without students, just for no other reason than to take pictures and felt inspired, felt, you know, a sense of magic, and always felt like I need somehow to be better, uh, to capture emotionally what I'm seeing visually. Now, fast forward to just a couple months ago, uh, I'm in London for a completely different reason. I've told this story once before, but I'm gonna tell it again. And I'm walking along the Thames, walking along South Bank, and I get to the embankment bridge where I have to cross over the north side. And there's some construction going on there. So I get up on the bridge and I'm paying zero attention. I'm I'm I'm just huddled in my coat. It's a cold and windy day. Uh, and I get to the north side of the bridge where there's some construction and then a wall that's up, and I'm just flabbergasted. Right there, right off my left shoulder is a picture. And it's on sticky paper, it's an art exhibition, you know, uh, from the Photographer of the Year awards. But right there, right at eye level, there is a picture of Glencoe in Scotland. There is a picture of sunlight just breaking through the clouds, illuminating a mountain. And it's the picture I have been chasing for years. I am at this moment absolutely humbled and impressed. And I, of course, look down in the corner of the picture, and there's the name: Damien Shields, Sunday Times magazine choice classic view from the Photographer of the Year Award. It is a gorgeous landscape picture that is just filled with emotion, that is filled with tonality, that's filled with all the kind of things that you would expect. So I come back to my computer, I type in Damien Shields, and look at the Scottish landscape photographer of the year, you know, shortlisted, commendations, exhibitions all over the place. Here is a landscape photographer working in an absolutely magical part of the world and getting it right. So gotta have them on the podcast because I am impressed. Damien, welcome to the Frames Podcast today. How are you doing?
SPEAKER_02I'm okay, man. I do suffer from terrible imposter syndrome, so you just scared the life out of me.
SPEAKER_04Okay, well, we're done. Um, no, I mean, man, I gotta tell you, I I've been up there a number of times and I saw this picture. And like I said, I was humbled because you nailed it. You got it right. And I started digging into your history, and you are, to use a technical term here, damn good. Landscape photography is a lot more complicated, a lot more technical as well as philosophic than a lot of people understand. So I wanted to get into your history, I wanted to get into your head a little bit and talk to you about uh landscape photography, talk to you about Scotland and especially the challenges up there. So I'm looking at your website, and I had a real chuckle about this because you list your influences. Yeah. And it's a long paragraph here. And it's everything from your dad to the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to the Beatles to William Eggleston to you know, memories of your granny's Ministroni soup. You've got a cool story. You know, you went to art school, but you thought you were going to be a painter first. Tell me the story of how first the image, the painting, you know, became something you were attracted to, and then how painting morphed into photography for you.
SPEAKER_02Um well, basically, um my father, um Dennis, is an artist, and he was studying sculpture at Ontario College of Art. So I was born in Toronto, and we didn't stay there. I mean, I was there up until I was about say two or two and a half when my parents emigrated back to um Scotland. My dad's from Liverpool, um, my mother's from Scotland, and um they met. Well, they were both respective families, we're living in Canada at the time. And um, so my father being an artist, and also my mother's father was an artist and an art teacher, as well as my father was an art teacher as well. Um, they both taught art at um St. Margaret's High School in Airdrie, it's like a secondary school. Um my father actually took my grandfather's job when he retired. Um so it was kind of handy the way things worked out. Um, so I was always surrounded by art as a kid. You know, my my parents were complete hippies and we were just surrounded by psychedelia, and the house was absolutely chock full of imagery and sculpture and uh is it is it all visual art or or is it music and sculpture and dance and everything else too?
SPEAKER_04Oh just everything thrown into the mix.
SPEAKER_02Um so you know, from from you know being a uh you know a baby or you know, right through you know through the 70s and um into the eighties, you know, um growing up in that sort of environment, you know, I was constantly, whether I was aware of it or not, was like absorbing everything through my pores with this constant Miles Davis jazz soundtrack going on, and um yeah, it was just mental. Um, so I mean, we um my older brother and my older sister, there was just three of us. Um I had two sisters were born subsequently after that, but in that environment, during that period of time, there was just the three of us, and um we're talking um pre-internet days as well, right? Um so a lot of your spare time, you know, for self-entertainment was basically getting a big box of crayons or you know, the felt pens, and just like my dad would just maybe sit something in front of us and say, Right, draw that, kids, and um, you know, we'd sketch away. So, you know, it was something I wouldn't say my dad's um sort of drummed it into us or kind of forced us to do anything, it was just a natural progression. Um, and we were all we all were pretty creative um in our own ways, um, and I started to kind of display an aptitude, especially through secondary school, for drawing and painting. So the original plan for me was to go to um art school. I wanted to apply to get into Glasgow School of Art, and it kind of felt like that was the expectation that was placed upon me. Although when I was getting to sort of you know the end of high school, I started to have second thoughts, although I did apply and I didn't actually get accepted, but I was interested in other things, you know. I was quite drawn to the sort of technical side of things. I was getting interested to the emergence of home computing and gadgets and electronics and things like that. It's funny how just the way things have kind of you know mapped out over the years and how photography has become a perfect combination of the two sort of you know sides of me. Um because I actually ended up going to do um a course in applied physics and electronics, ended up down in Wales studying a BA and humanities, I did a few other different things, but it was almost like I never completed anything, you know. Um, but I kind of had to get a certain side of me out of my system. Um, because I was a good drawer and a good painter, I always felt there was the expectation, especially from my father, that art school was the place for me to be. Um was going to be my natural environment, but I did have this other side of me that I had to kind of balance out and I wanted to explore a bit of that and to see where that might take me. But inevitably I ended up coming full circle after getting these various experiences and these sort of disciplines out of my system and deciding that they were they weren't for me. So I decided to make another go of art school, and um, but I didn't want to make a hash, I felt like I kind of made a hash of it when I left high school. It was a bit rushed, and it was really just the kind of you know, the daft we sort of drawings you did um, you know, in the classroom in the high school where the teacher would maybe set up still life, or you would kind of pair off with somebody and you would do portraits of each other, and it was quite limited in range, you know. It was, you know, obviously it was just a kind of you know, like a normal sort of, you know, where I was Roman Catholic high school, and they only had so much of a budget to pour into their various departments, so it was all pretty spartan and basic, and it was just you know because it was part of the curriculum, you know, it wasn't so much like art school where a lot of heavy emphasis and sort of finance was poured into this, and it was like you could diversify diversify into different areas of art, you know, it was very basic. So, so this time around I thought, you know, I'm gonna do this properly, and um I saw that there was um like a portfolio portfolio preparation course at a place that no longer exists called Strathclyde Art Centre. It was a big old sort of uh Victorian building by um the M8 in Glasgow um near Anderson, and um they did a portfolio preparation course where you could basically do a variety of different disciplines that reflected the courses that were available to you when you applied for art school. Um so there was a wee bit of sculpture, a wee bit of environmental art, and there was drawing and painting and of course photography. So I used to really enjoy going to that, especially enjoyed the life drawing, and um, you know, halfway through the course there I was still, you know, under the illusion that you know that was going to be my thing. But it was when I started getting into using the dark room and um started shooting, we were shooting with, you know, just kind of like what was that again, X-Pan or something, just black and white film, 35mm cameras. And again, it was this kind of pair-off thing. I remember having this moment when I was paired off with a friend of mine's and we would go into this huge big hall, very, very dark, and they'd just big kind of long, dark, black, sun-blocking curtains that went from the the ceiling to the floor, and they would get pulled over, but then they would get separated just enough to allow a shaft of daylight to come into the room and illuminate. So you would stand, I would stand my friend across from me, so the light was just hitting them on the side of the face, and I was taking photographs. And I remember that feeling magical at the time because one of the um the things that I loved um was looking at painters like Caravaggio and just the concept of uh Carriascuro and just this idea of having like you know, like in uh Jan Vermeer's paintings, you know, where you just have this single point of light illuminating a scene. So that kind of excited me, you know, like because that kind of like um especially when we were developing our own film um for the first time, that's what I learned, and then doing our own prints under the enlarger on the dark room, and to see these images emerge in the dark room as well, it was a very exciting thing for me.
SPEAKER_04You know, a a lot of people will say the darkroom is where the magic first appeared to them. Some people say it's it's the machine, the gadget, the camera, some people say it's the field. You know, a lot of people say, but in your early painting experiences, you were doing a lot of charcoal work and now it's a black and white photography course. Is that just accident, or is there something about understanding light in black and white that was appealing to you?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, definitely. It was just the um it was almost like um it was almost like a different route to the same thing that I was after. There was something in simple just charcoal work where it was just a reflection of filling in shadows and light. It's like, you know, the light would be the absence of the shadow, and the shadow would be the absence of the light, and just the play between the tones to create a three-dimensional thing and to give a sense of space, a sense of three-dimensionality. And it's like here was something that was like um you know being revealed to me that spoke to the same things because it was just that kind of gradual understanding. If it wasn't necessarily the medium that you should get so caught up in, it was more kind of like how do you realise your goals, how do you realise your vision and the things that excite you, and how do you get closer to the thing that you're producing that you know gives you something back that excites you, and this excited me tremendously. Um, and I remember like from that point, you know, I decided, much to the consternation of my father, um, that I was going to apply for the fine art photography department photography department instead of the drawing and painting. Um so yeah, he wasn't he wasn't too happy at the time, but um but assured him that everything would be fine and he could see how excited I was. So I thought that was the way forward for me. And subsequently I got accepted based upon the portfolio I'd put together at Strathclyde Arts Centre. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And and like I said, it's just stellar work. But okay, you you're going to school, you're gonna be a photographer. You could be a photographer of anything, it could be sports, it could be weddings, it could be, you know, rock and roll, it doesn't matter. And and you turned to, I mean, you yes, you do have some urban shots out there, you've got some portraits, you know, your portfolio is really large, but it is primarily and and insistently this relationship you've got with landscape. What about landscape and nature photography you know, got under your skin?
SPEAKER_02I would say that um I mentioned before earlier about being born in Toronto and moving back over to Scotland when I was about two or three. Um, it was a very discombobulating time where we actually ended up because mum and dad didn't have a coin between them. Um my mum had to quite quickly find a job. My dad, because of his qualification from art school, had settled into um a primary school, a Catholic primary school called St Edward's. It was actually my first school that I went to living in Erdry, and he got the job as um an art teacher there, and subsequently ended up a couple other primary schools before going on to St. Margaret's High School. But we moved around um a few different places. We have we stayed with my grandparents for a while, uh, and I remember the first house, and I remember well, I don't remember much about the first house, but the second and third houses, they weren't, let's just say they weren't particularly pleasant places to live. Um where I live in North Lanarkshire, it's one of these places that seen its heyday during the sort of the turn of last century where it was like really it's like a post-industrial kind of town where it kind of there's lots of clues here about that speak to the the glorious past of the area and industry. Here it was like steel and iron and mining it, and you can see by a lot of the buildings and a lot of the areas that at one time it was quite an up-and-coming place and there was a lot of money here. And similar to where I grew up in Airdrie, um, it was these kind of places that were just basically schemes that were kind of almost like breeze block, kind of grey, sort of uh, you know, they weren't particularly bonny places to be. Right. But as a child, I mean that was the great thing you could rely upon as a child was your imagination and how you could construct your own entertainment. And a lot of that was spent outdoors, letting your imagination run riot. And lucky for us, um, the second house we were in that we spelt we spent a spell of about three or four years living there. There was a place we used to kind of everyone used to nickname it the Glen. It was just basically where the colder water, it was like a little river, little burn used to run down through this kind of little valley at the back of this scheme where we lived. So that so that was their little pocket of nature. That was their little pocket of excitement and wonder and a place you could go and explore. And used to go looking for maybe trying to catch uh bumblebees in jam jars, or you would try to look for newts in the kind of swampy bits and try and catch a newt and bring some frog spawn home and watch it hatch. And um so it was this basically this kind of steep-sided kind of valley that cut through with a river running through the bottom, and uh and there were stories about the history there as well. It was kind of an odd perhaps that it was monks that lived there, and they had some kind of a pottery down there, and there was other kind of structures there, old ruins down there. But I mean, as kids, you just kind of made up in your head what they might it may or may not have been. But it but the point was it it was exciting. But the other thing was as well, it got us away from the sort of uh the immediate environment so where we actually lived into this other place, the place we could look forward to going to, and it was a place we could hold in our memory when we came back home to the grey breeze block nightmare and carry with us when we sort of fell asleep at night, this kind of dreams of you know what might be a little bit further. And you were always testing yourself because we were all pretty nervous, especially me. I was the youngest of three. I mean, I personally I remember getting sort of a picked one at school because I looked different, because my parents were like hippies, I had this long hair and the kind of flared dungarees, and it was like you know, coming to West Central Scotland, you know, and they were asking you what team you support, and you know, whether you were a Protestant or a Catholic and things like that, you were always getting squared up to in the playground and getting interrogated. So there was a wee bit of fear involved in it, definitely. It was this fear of the unknown, the fear of my immediate environment. And the only way I could find that would make me feel slightly better was to actually push the boundaries of what was known and what was unknown, and that involved trying to venture a wee bit further each time I went out to play. We would go a wee bit further and a wee bit further, and we'd be explore the end of the glen that we hadn't been to before, and we'd follow the river upstream, and we would go a wee bit further each time, just pushing our boundaries, and then we could basically map this place in our heads so we could explore it in our minds when we weren't there, and it so I guess it started from that. It was almost like trying to get over a fear of the unknown, a fear of where I was, and also to gain a sense of place, a sense of to put your stamp down and say, This is home, you know, this is where I live, and to feel comfortable within it. When did you start bringing the camera along with you? Oh god, um well when we eventually moved to what became the sort of the longest-running house that we lived in as kids in uh Coat Bridge in North Lanarkshire. It's just a neighbouring town to Airdrie, which was the original place I was talking about where we kind of first grew up. I got my first um bicycle, a little racing bike, a little rally racing bike. And um fortunately, like Colt Bridge is a kind of slightly rural on the outskirts. There's a lot of farmland um around about my bedroom. Um I used to be able, when I looked over the houses, the rooftops, I could see a set of hills. There's there's a set of hills called the Kilsythe Hills in the Campsys to the north of um North Lanarkshire. It's just like a dividing line before you kind of like actually hit Scotland proper in terms of the highlands, you know, and with things start to get a bit more hilly. But but it was this this is my first awakening to the mountains, you know, the hills, something that was, you know, substantively, you know, a big thing. I mean, we used to climb hills all the time when we were kids, but they weren't really hills, they were just bumps, you know. Yeah so I I had this view of these hills, and so I got the bike, so I used to basically cycle out, cycle a lot and just hitting these little backwards, these little country roads, and explor I used to love just exploring them. And um and then eventually I would take a camera with me um just to document, you know, where I was going, things I'd seen. It might be like a oh, there's a white horse in a field, I'll pull up the bike and I'll go up to the fence and Hello to the horse and take a picture of the horse, or there's a beautiful round tree by a river, or somebody's built a swing. Basically, they've hung a rope to the tree to um you know swing over the river. It just these interesting little things that we'd find along the way, you know, we'd take pictures of. So I guess that's where it started. But but in those days it was really just kind of whereas before when I was a child, it was like you were bringing things back in your imagination, but this time it was like I was bringing things back, but it was something tangible, something I could look at.
SPEAKER_04Do you remember do you remember early shots where you would have them developed, whatever, and you would look at them and they were more than just a document of that afternoon. You said, Oh, there there's something better about this or larger about this?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it was just and it wasn't even just the landscape. It was like I remember I used to go down to this old scrapyard, it was all these kind of like um old kind of cars and it big piles of engines and stuff like that. It was just it just became about here's something I find on my travels, and it's something that visually exciting about it, something kind of speaks to me, something that I want to I want to make a you know, I want to record it. I want to bring it back with me and look at it, you know, because I can't stand here all day looking at this pile of engines and you know, so I wanted to make a sort of an actual physical note of this thing and just bring it back with me. Yeah, and it just got to the point where I, you know, I had a in those days you used to take your film and drop it off at the chemist, you know, and you used to you got all excited when you went down to to collect it and um open it up to find that practically everyone had a sticker on it to say that it was like overexposed or underexposed or just unprintable. Um you know, but that was uh that was really exciting in itself, you know. When I used to take the film down to to Boots the Chemist or whatever it was, I think it was I can't even remember the name. So it's most of these places are well gone now, don't exist anymore.
SPEAKER_04But so, okay, so you you've got this love of place, you've got this this habit of documenting, you know, your explorations, you're going off to art school, but there there's still gotta be a moment where you a little mental switch. Suddenly you're not thinking, oh, there's a horse, you're thinking here's a composition. You're not thinking, you know, there's a hill, you're thinking the light is going to do something really cool here. When when did you become aware that the landscape and you know that you're loving and your understanding of art might become something um to follow as a career or just as a life thing?
SPEAKER_02I mean, that there wasn't it like a like a you know, this wasn't a Tuesday afternoon at three o'clock? It wasn't like this road to Damascus sort of um you know, this um shining light that appears over my head or anything like that. Right. It was just I guess it was just an evolution. I mean, I didn't actually get into landscape photography till well after art school. I mean, art school was kind of mainly a wake-up call to kind of like focus it um my mind into well basically to focus my mind, I guess. And and that's where it focused, that's where it kind of fell because it almost made me kind of look backwards rather than forwards to like, well, what was it about things that I was doing prior to that that excited me? Um what spoke to me and the landscape, I guess, like I said, it's I mean, it's definitely you know to do with exploration, but yeah, I I know what you're saying, it was like it obviously I was drawing upon what I had learned um from my father and my grandfather. My grandfather was um like an abstract impressionist, you know, he was like looking at people like Miro and Kandinsky, and um, you know, I remember when I was a wee boy, he he had a studio set up because I love to go up to theirs for the weekend and stay over with them, and he had a little studio in his his house in Airdrie. And I'd go in and you know, he'd be in the middle of working on uh one of these paintings, and um, you know, I'd be pointing at it and saying, I must have been about four or five or something like that, asking him to explain it to me because it couldn't make sense to me. It was all just a bunch of squiggles and lines, you know. Um very heavily influenced by Kandinsky. So if you imagine a Kandinsky in your head, you can imagine this sort of a this array of like um texture and shape and form and colour, it's all in this kind of living and breathing and pulsating kind of space of everything happening all at once sort of thing. You know, it's very similar, but you know, and he was talking to me even those days without me realising at the time, but it's only now I look back, you know, they these were like my early groundings in composition, you know, him saying that how two different um, you know, like how a circle might be placed on the top left of the the paper might complement, you know, like a radiating circle of you know, varying sort of sizes, circles emanating out might contrast a very um different contrasting shape at the bottom right might be like a a very angular-looking cross that looks very kind of you know, just these different forms and colours and shapes, but how they're put they're placed within this two-dimensional space, you know. I I got that, I absorbed that at the time without realizing it. But looking back, you know, that was very sort of an early sort of realizations of that what he was talking about was composition and placing with things within a two-dimensional space and how shapes and forms complement one another and how you can create this visual energy, depending on how close or far away these shapes are and how they might resonate in terms of how colours resonate resonate on the colour spectrum.
SPEAKER_01Let's take just a quick break. We hope very much that you are enjoying today's episode. The very fact that you are listening to this podcast suggests that photography means a lot to you. And if that's the case, you might want to have a look at Frames, quarterly printed photography magazine. We truly believe that excellent photography belongs on paper. Visit readframes.com to find out more about our publication and use the coupon code POMDCAST to receive a recurring 10% discount on your new Frames magazine subscription. And now, back to today's conversation.
SPEAKER_04The images that I've seen, and a lot of the images is in your portfolio. Um, you know, the Scottish landscape. It is, if anybody listening has been there, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't been there, buy a ticket this afternoon. It is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. It's also one of the most challenging places for a photographer because of the shape of the Monroes, of the mountains, the shape of the weather that's going through in the clouds. It is the kind of place where you do want to think in advance of what you might be doing, but it also works actively to defeat any kind of plan you might uh have come up with. Um given a sense of composition, how do you approach such a changing, colorful, dynamic, uh energy-filled landscape as the Highlands of Scotland? Because it it's it's never the same thing five minutes after five minutes after five minutes.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, weather forecasts, um I mean I do a lot of pre-preparation, you know, before heading out with the camera. Okay, well what what do you do? What what what is pre-preparation for you? I mean, uh I'm I'm lucky now that, you know, because I've I've been most places in Scotland with my camera, so I already have that sort of underlying underlying sort of basic um grasp of the the lay of the land. Um but there's probably a lot more went into early on. I don't have to do so much of that sort of side of things now logistically. Um but I mean I as you alluded to the weather is one of the the biggest things. So I have two or three different websites which I meticulously pour over in the coming days. So I maybe look at a long-range forecast. We say long range, I maybe look a week before heading off somewhere, I'll maybe look again three days before I go, I'll maybe look again the day before, I'll maybe look again the morning before or the night before. Um, and as you alluded to, you know, forecasts ain't worth a shit for most areas in Scotland, but at least it gives you the sort of the general gist. The general gist is enough. I just think you have to be prepared to react um to any given situation, and that takes time. Um you can pre-prepare for all you like, but there's going to be so many different situations. That's the beauty of Scotland. It's like it throws these things at you out of the blue, and and the the day that the image um of minds that you you were talking about earlier on that you saw in London. I mean, that was a perfect example. It's like that's when pre-visualisation and preparation just goes completely out the window. I think as a photographer, especially a landscape photographer, you have to kind of get yourself to a stage where you are ready and prepared with a lot of the aspects of the technical side of the camera, where you can quite quickly and instinctively, more importantly, lock in the correct settings to deal with any given situation that might be throwing your way because there was no kind of as may usually be the case, setting up the tripods, you know, just like unsnapping the locks and the legs and folding them down and adjusting the head and getting bending over and getting through your bag and deciding which lens to put on there and any sort of in-camera filters, or that there's none of that sometimes. Sometimes it's just literally a case of like shit is kicking off, and you need to grab that because you know from experience that sometimes these things can only last a matter of seconds.
SPEAKER_04Well, walk me through that particular image in the setup because the there's a couple things about that. First of all, um, that mountain is the most photographed mountain uh in Scotland, and it is ripe with opportunity to be cliche, to be, oh, I've simply taken the picture that 85,000 other photographers have already taken. I have stood there on the road and I have seen photographers basically get out a chair, a side table, a tripod. They have, you know, 85 filters, and and they're gonna sit and just wait for the world to move by them. And then I've seen people approach that composition or some version of it almost like street photographers, you know. Oh my God, you know, whip whip the camera up real fast. How do you, I mean, knowing how popular that vision is, how do you make it your own? And how did you make it your own on that particular day?
SPEAKER_02Because it spoke to me and no one else, because it was the light, the the nature of the light, the diagonal line of the light. My grandfather was a very religious man, and he had a lot of religious Renaissance art around the house, um, and a lot of the artwork he did. Um, he did a lot of um crucifixions and heads of Christ, and um and and one of the iconic um pieces of imagery that always stood out to me and always remember from those days was the story of the Annunciation, which ended up calling the picture, and it was you know when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and announced her that she was going to be basically, you know, yeah you know, bringing forth the the Messiah. Um and traditionally he's depicted on the left-hand side of the scene, and um and I was also exposed to a lot of um metaphor and symbolism in art, you know, through my father and the countless art books that we had around the house that we used to pour over, and and also conversations I used to have with my grandfathers. And you know, I a lot of the time I start to see things um as visual metaphor as they're happening, and and and and basically a chord was twanged in my mind um when I saw the way the clouds were basically congregating, and the way the little breaks in them were starting to allow these little spills of light and the direction of the light coming from the top right to the bottom left, and the way it was starting to paint up the side of Stop Nan Kabar, and the light was starting to glitter off the wet rock on the side of that hill, it just cut straight through to me. And as I said, it was almost like a little kind of twang noise inside my head that it spoke directly to me, and it was something, although it was a reactive moment to something that didn't last very long, and I was so glad I got the shot. That the fact that it spoke to me, uh and it might not have spoken to somebody standing right next to me in the same way, speaks to for me who I am and what my past is, what my story is, and how I got to the point where I see the world in the way that I see it, which is different from the way everyone else sees the world, we're all unique. So it was this kind of combination of here's something that's subconsciously pre-visualized versus something that is spontaneous and where the two collide, and I see this thing happening. I see I see this kind of congregation of elements and weather forming in front of me, and I start freaking out, and um and I run down across this fallen tree, I remember, and it was all very kind of boggy, and you're down by a river there as well, and it was just a bit kind of I was just kind of I had to kind of quickly find plant my feet somewhere and steady myself, and it was all shot handheld, and I shot about I can't remember about 20 odd frames and um to make sure I got it. But for me, it was it was always just because looking back, not obviously I wasn't all this shit wasn't going through my head at the time. I'm thinking about it now and talking to you about it in a very kind of risk retrospective light and and having considered what was happening, and I realise that now about myself, a lot a lot of the things that kind of make me who I am and give me my own personal eye for photography and the things that I see is basically as a direct result of who I am and what my history is and what my background is and what excites me, and it's I guess it's the same for for everyone, and in any sort of uh you know opinions or likes you have about thing, whether it's music or food or whatever it may be, you know, that all feeds into how you may react differently to Kevin's situations. Um I've just very I just remember the excitement.
SPEAKER_04Well, yeah. Um, and you know, I'm gonna disagree with you a little bit and actually agree with you at the same time because I do think this was all in your head at the same time. It's our life's experience. You know, it we carry into the field with our cameras, we also carry our third grade birthday party. Um, you know, it's it's in our head in terms of what we value, in terms of um what calls to us. And you have long experience in this environment, so you know where the river is, you know where the rocks are. Um you you know, you may not stop and do an explication, you know, and say, well, this is going to be in the bottom one-fifth of the frame. Um, but it's it's intuitive. It's it's part of the the active RAM memory that we're all carrying around with us. So when when it does appear, everything matters. Everything is all already there. At least that's the way I think about it.
SPEAKER_02No, I I agree with you. I mean, that's kind of what I was alluding to before. It was almost like you have to bring yourself to a point where you have to lock in certain things that that that become knee-jerk and that you do things correctly in a given situation, uh like a situation like that where you have to be spontaneous because you're reacting to something that might not last very long. And it's difficult as well because of the excitement factor, too. It's like you know, your hands start to sh visibly start to shake, and and and because you you're simultaneously taking a record of something but really enjoying it at the same time. I just think that you know there's certain things, you know, as a photographer, you have to kind of get out of the way so that you can enjoy that experience of spontaneity, you know, you have to lock in, as you say, it's like things you've learned and things you've ingrained in yourself to the point where you don't have to think about it, you just go through the motions of knowing what the right thing is to do. And as you say, having the the pre-preparation of you having your your familiarity locked in of these areas.
SPEAKER_04Talk to me a little bit about style and voice and and um how you know self-definition as an artist, because I'm looking at your work and and you know, knowing the area, um, you know, especially the highlands, there's 85,000 shades of brown up there. Um, and and it that that's a challenge in and of itself. A lot of your work, you know, I could say, well, this is from the Hudson River School in the in the Americas, you know, because you you've got this kind of soft pastel approach to color. And then I turn the page and here you've got a high contrast black and white, uh, you know, from someplace else. Is is your sense of voice and style something that you're trying to uh, I'm overstating here, impose on your work, or is it more responsive to the landscape that is revealing itself to you?
SPEAKER_02I have to be very selfish with what I do. I mean, obviously there's a lot of post-production involved in there. Um, but you're looking at things like split toning in my images and the way they've treated things and whether I've made the conscious decision to move to black and white or keep the colour and things like that. Every step of the way, there's there's choices being made there, and a lot of it is very selfish. It's it it but it but it's me just basically trying to bring it to bring in an image to a place where it's how I remember it to be to me, what is my memory, and everybody's memory might be different, everyone's experience might be different in terms of where it exists in your memory when you're no longer there, you're somewhere else, and you conjure up a memory of a place and how it spoke to you at that time, and and what it said so th th these are emotional compositions more than uh documentary. Definitely, definitely. Um to me it's more about the feeling to me, and it's about me being able to recapture that feeling so I can go back to that much in the same way as I did when I was a kid. It's about invoking something for myself, um, to remember something, something that affected me, something that made me feel a certain way, something that excited me, something that stirred something deep inside me, something that felt spiritual, something that you know terrified me sometimes. Um because nature will frequently do things like that to you. Um yeah, and it's just it's just been able to bring bring that back for yourself in a very selfish way. And and I just see it if if it I mean man, if you if you see my work sitting on a wall in London and it says something to you, to me, that's a bonus. It's not it's not my purpose to make you happy. I'm glad you you are happy and I'm glad you enjoyed that image. Um so glad. But but at the end of the day, for me, that's that's a bonus that people look at my work and they enjoy my work because it does come from a very selfish place. Um, but I'll but I'm also a great believer in you know one hand feeling selfish about it, but on the other hand, I I I I I love, I want to share my work, I want to share my experiences because I want people to hopefully my goal um if I have one, um, is to kind of like hopefully people look at the work and they'll imagine and they'll get a sense of how I felt and see the things that I saw and maybe take take away some of that.
SPEAKER_04Talk to me both in the field and in post-production, how you avoid uh the cliche. I mean, if you've if let's say you're on sky and you're doing the fairy pools or something, you know, okay, been there, done that. Your work, even places where I've stood, I'm thinking this is absolutely original, that this is a vision. So when you're in the field, are you composing mostly about color or form? And then when you're in post-production, what are you and I know you're going after an emotion, but you know, more technical than that. Uh how are you making the image original?
SPEAKER_02Um, I guess I mean the two things. I mean, the physical and technical side of it, uh, which I'll get to in a second, um, is something else entirely, but I guess originally stent from deliberately going out my way to get new takes on old, you know, these kind of hackmed honeypot locations were because I thought to myself, I guess that there's a I felt that there was a necessary evil in that as part of my journey as a landscape photographer, I really should, you know, engage in a bit of emulation and a bit of like, no, go to Bucalette of Moore and take that shot from that waterfall and you know, go down Glen Ettliff and take that shot of that lock or go up to Sky or the Fairy Pools. And it's almost like part of your your journey is to engage in that. But then you get to a point where you think, well, I'm just adding to the pile here, and then it became a phase of, well, how do I get the hell away from that? And it was like consciously making a decision, not on any given day, and suddenly switching to doing things differently, but evolving gradually to like saying, Well, I want to that this doesn't speak to me. Okay, I'm learning shit here, you know, I'm picking up skills, I'm getting out, you know, I'm going to places, I'm learning about being on location, I'm learning about composition, I'm learning about dealing with the elements, I'm learning about becoming a better at preparing for these things, I'm learning a wee bit about post production and file management, all that kind of all that stuff. But at the same time, getting a bit restless and thinking, well, this is this is this is uh isn't actually doing anything for me uh in terms of you know, it doesn't speak to me uh or my voice or it doesn't it's I I seem to be falling down this trap of like you know looking at other people's work and buying photography magazines and um you know going on at at the time you know the big one was Flicker or Tumblr and places like that and um and almost like trying to recreate things that you saw in there. But but I do look back in those times I think well that that was a necessary progression for me to do that. But yeah it did eventually evolve into like you know deliberately trying to avoid um the cliches and um going out my way to find new compositions or just approaching subjects at certain times of the day or certain times of the year that that weren't the norm and to get different sort of you know aspects of something familiar and then progressing away from there and and seeing where that kind of led me.
SPEAKER_04So then talk to me about the next day you're sitting at the computer you got a nice cabernet sitting there and and you're re you're looking at the raw file thinking what yeah I'd be sitting looking at the raw file thinking what you got me there um yeah just I mean do do you just it is post processing a matter of adjusting or a matter of discovery?
SPEAKER_02It can be a well it's both I guess. I mean the thing I like about it is especially using um when I first started using Adobe Lightroom um here was something that was I mean this kind of like I ended up clashing heads with um Thomas Joshua Cooper who was the head of the photography department at the time and because I was spending so much time using computers and I discovered Photoshop in one of the other buildings I think it was the architecture students had a little computer lab and they had a few Macintosh computers and they had a scanner flatbed scanner and I was like oh wow and um because it was an expensive course to do um so and I I was drinking most of my grant money um so and this was a way of like avoiding having to you know buy expensive films and papers as well um but but I was fascinated by it just the idea of sitting in a brightly lit room um you know scanning um my prints and and being able to adjust them um the same way you know like techniques like dodging and burning and masking and things like that you know things I was doing in the dark room I could do them in this brightly lit room as I said on a computer screen albeit it was very very very slow um at doing anything it's like if you ran a sharpened filter used to have to go for a coffee and you know wait for it to finish what it was doing. But yeah that was exciting and then going on from that later on you know like with Adobe Lightroom it was like you know very familiar it just feels um natural and organic to me coming from a film background you know to be using a bit of software like that where you can approach um how you treat an image in a similar way albeit a lot of the stuff in there is is far more advanced than what you can do in a dark room nowadays. But yeah and and it almost becomes part of the if you want to call it if I'm going to be pretentious again and it's like the you know the art form you know it's part of the art it's part of the creativity it's that it just just doesn't end with you know you you know you pressing the button on the shutter and because you take it through to the next phase um of its you know emergence you know before it's actually you know before the image is born kind of thing this is a kind of a stage where you know you get to exert even more of you and and control upon it and how you push and pull an image and how you creatively dodge and burn an image and you introduce things like split toning and how you decide to crop an image as well is hugely important because what you you leave out is just as important as what you leave in and um you know all these things come into play here and this is an art form in itself and I don't think it gets enough respect because there are a lot of detractors you know from post-production um processes it's almost like you're kind of messing with something especially from the analogue film crew it's like you know it's like the dark arts um but to me it's like you know when it's used properly and it's used with a dedication to you know true creativity where you say it's just yet another layer of you exerting something that comes from your mind and and your vision and your skills upon the image.
SPEAKER_04I and you know I'm looking at your portfolios here and and yeah there are a number of um composition or I shouldn't say compositions a number of locations here that I recognize and there's 5000 of them that I've never been to um and that I've never seen photographed before and you have a way of making these all you know original and present and and really emotionally powerful. I've just discovered one a couple of seconds ago as as I you know you were talking I was scrolling in whiteout on the on the couple in Glen Edo. It's just a gorgeous gorgeous picture um which makes me wonder you know as a landscape photographer are you a bad weather junkie?
SPEAKER_02If the weather turns south are you say time to go um yes and no I mean I'm getting to that age now Scott when I'm just kind of knees are getting a wee bit more creaky and I'm liking my bed a wee bit more. You know I I I've never really been bothered I mean there was always this kind of thing about um you know sunrises you know getting up at like four o'clock in the morning and jumping in the car still half asleep and spilling coffee all down your lap as you drive off in the dark and and um you know I'm I'm not done with all that now it's like you know it's not don't get me wrong it's not that I I won't get up for a a sunrise anymore I did not that long ago um the weather doesn't bother me I mean I get I get excited by it and obviously I I'm no I'm no daft and I've been out and about in the landscape especially in Scotland long enough to understand the pitfalls and the dangers that are involved and there's a lot of pre-preparation goes into that and making sure you're you know you're correctly you're kitted out properly and you've got um you know people know where you are know where you're going and you're you're dressed appropriately and um you make sure you've got like mapping software with you and things like that and just a whole host of things. So you know what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_04And um you know as long as you're prepared and but even then it can be dangerous you know we do not talk enough about how dangerous landscape photography can be um I I remember one day my students and I were going to hike over to Kinlock Lave and and as we're leaving the hotel the lady hands me a piece of paper and it's the mountain weather forecast and it says right up at the top 100 mile an hour winds in the passes. It's like oh kids come on back we're not doing this hike today.
SPEAKER_02It's hugely important to me because part of what I get um from being in the landscape especially somewhere that's quite remote is this sense of um just how a small speck of shit you are um compared to it and how you should you should be afraid um and you should never let your guard down and it it really does help feed into this sense of putting everything in perspective it's something that always you take away from every excursion into the landscape you come home with a sense of just how small you are uh how insignificant nature does not give a shit about you whether you live or die and no matter how much you try to romanticize about it and sort of project onto it all these different values and you know metaphors it's like at the end of the day nature does not give a toss about you or anything and and you've always got to be prepared for that but at the same time there's something nice that you can take away from that is you just your general appreciation of what you have and what's round about you and the things you care about you know always bring that home with me you know just the general appreciation for these things.
SPEAKER_04Yeah you you are um in in another life also a picture editor a multimedia um image editor does the professional work and the personal work compliment each other or is there a tension there?
SPEAKER_02Um well I mean it's funny um no it's not funny um it it's part of my work I basically um as a picture editor um you're exposed to a lot of um live news and I can I can't escape it you know it's just it's part of my job part of my part of my role so you're looking at obviously you're looking at a lot of stuff off the Getty and PA wire and AP day in day out and you see a lot of you know it does get under your skin and it's but also part of the reason why I do what I do because it's what gives brings me a bit of peace in my life is to go out into the landscape and commune with it and bring home this appreciation for our place in nature because you see a lot of horrible shit through my job of stuff that's going on in the world and I constantly can't help but stress about that and and worry where we're going as you know a race and where humanity's going and you know what's happening politically what's happening with the planet it's just is it's it's not a great time um to be a human being at the moment. And it's now more than ever that I mean the the the the the the weird sort of irony and flip side of that is I've never appreciated anything more than I do now at this point in my existence because the juxtaposition of this concept of fear and worry versus making you take stock of what's really important and what you should be really thinking about and what you should really be appreciating. And my job does that to me and it can be a release and it's something that I always feel I need to immerse myself every now and if I don't I've got to go a bit stir crazy. I have to get out of the camera I have to go and it's not even just about the photography it's just getting out the house getting in the car just heading north going staying away somewhere for a few days being on my own with just me and my thoughts in the landscape.
SPEAKER_04Damien I I'm I'm a fan and I am intensely glad that that your image was up on the embankment bridge um I and I going through your work I am impressed I am grateful um and frankly feeling lucky that I've come upon upon your work. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_00I have enjoyed this conversation immensely me too Scott listen I really appreciate you asking me on as I said I've got the terrible imposter syndrome and uh I'm just happy you asked me my advice is get over it I don't want to get over it because I'll end up becoming a pompous asshole with a huge eagle frames because excellent photography belongs on paper visit us at www dot readframes.com