Reading can help you find that elusive 'me'.

Every now and then, I read a book which helps me understand myself better. Some authors can eloquently put into words feelings and experiences I struggle to. 

This summer I read Richard Holloway’s autobiography Leaving Alexandria. I had listened to him on Radio Scotland and he sounded like he had an interesting story to tell. 

I really enjoyed his biography but it was his meditations on some of his past experiences that resonated with me. I found myself pausing my reading and thinking, ‘ that’s me he’s describing’ or ‘that’s exactly how I feel’. 

Anyway, I wanted to collect some of these passages from the book in some blog posts, I suppose as a way of giving them further thought and to share with anyone who might read this. 

Quite early on Richard found that 'he was theoretically qualified to do something he was actually incapable of performing. He had the air of confidence and of appearing to be knowledgeable about something he was actually making up as he went along'. He was winging it with his gift of the gab.  I found this part thought provoking:

The toughest lesson life teaches is the difference between who you wanted to be and who you actually are. And it can take a whole life to teach it. (p.10)

Later on in the book he returns to this realisation of how time can steal everything from us and leave us feeling disappointed in how we turn out:

Any normal human heart feels the knife edge of regret at moments of retrospection and self-examination. But there is another kind of regret that is more difficult to explain. It is sorrow not over what we have done but over what we are. It may even be sorrow over what we are not. And I don’t mean handsome or rich or charming. One of the lessons a long life teaches is how formed we were by characteristics that were entirely beyond our control. Being who we were, we were bound to act the way we did. To have acted differently we would have had to be a different person. Maybe a better person, because, tragic as it may appear, even unfair, there are good people, not so good people, and bad people. And the big discovery we make in life is the person we have been revealed to be. We don’t have that knowledge when we start out. We imagine there’s a list of characteristics we can acquire if we fancy them, whereas the main lines of our own personality were cast before we knew it. This does not mean that we have no control over our decisions and choices. It does mean that we will have little control over them till we acknowledge who we are and accept the reality of the hand we have been dealt to play. (pp.226-227)

More later. 

Quotes from Richard Holloway’s autobiography Leaving Alexandria.

James Ravilious

A while back, BBC Four had one of their 'photography nights' which they do occasionally. I recorded them on DVD to watch later. Among the many programmes was one on a photographer I'd never heard of, James Ravilious.

When I saw his images I was impressed, very impressed. They seemed to be carefully crafted, perfectly composed and had a surreal quality to them.

James was the son of the famous painter Eric Ravilious and you can sense the influence painting and in particular, British painting had on James's work.

I find the images of rural life in Devon he did for the Beaford College stunning. The quality of the black and white images is superb, with detail in the shadows and highlights, even when he was shooting into the sun. His compositional skill is what I admire the most. James was a great admirer of Cartier-Bresson and many of James's pictures have that 'decisive moment' feel but also touches of surrealism.

James managed to achieve many candid shots because he had a strong relationship with the community he was photographing. He was accepted and his subjects were relaxed in his presence.

His images of rural life in north Devon is much more than just a record of a way of life in steady decline. They are poignant and beautiful. He captured all aspects of rural life in that area and created a tapestry of scenes of a way life which was disappearing. There was no real narrative I suppose, with a beginning and an end, it just was what it was, before it changed forever.

My own images of abandoned communities lack the sort of people that populate James's images and my images have less of an impact because of this absence of characters. It is for this reason that I pour over his images with a mixture of admiration, inspiration and pleasure but also with some sadness that 'my' characters, 'my' subjects have gone and left only silence.

All images © James Ravilious

Why do I like Diane Arbus and what can I learn from her work?

I have written about my admiration for the work of Diane Arbus before in this blog - Aberdeen Art Gallery;  Barcelona;  the impact she had on me to get back into photography.

Strangely enough, I have never asked myself why I like her work. What is it about her images that I find so intriguing and interesting? After all, the photographs I take are nothing like her work.

I am finding it hard to put into words why I like her images.

I too take images of communities who lived on the edge - on the margins of civilisation, remote, far from amenities and facilities. Outsiders perhaps?

Yes, my images also contain ugliness and a lack of beauty but then we all know what they say about beauty.

I can't say I challenge the viewer as perhaps Arbus's work does, however I am trying to alter the experience of the viewer to decay, debris and to stuff that was once loved and admired but left behind. Some see Arbus's images as portraying people full of despair but I find them intriguing and remarkable. Her "deviant and marginal' people seem to be doing the best they could under some difficult circumstance, within a society that rejected their lifestyle and for some, rejected their shape, size and sexual orientation. Her images are, to me, full of energy and life, as well as compelling. Her work is raw, at times disturbing, unflinching but what an insight we get to a world we would never have seen otherwise.

There is no doubt you can feel like an intruder, a voyeur when looking at her work. Her subjects and the lives they led are almost 'run of the mill' these days, with TV programmes filling late night spots with 'embarrassing bodies' and the like. Looking at my images of someone else's home, albeit abandoned and in a state of decay, may feel like intruding and you may want to look away or you may get a feeling of foreboding - "what will happen to my home, to my 'stuff', when I'm gone?"

Many of Diane Arbus's images hold my attention but also make me want to look away and perhaps it is that conflict that, for me, makes her work so captivating.

So what can I learn from her work? Eric Kim asked the same question regarding his street photography. I have changed his blog post to consider rural exploration/abandoned communities instead of street photography:-

1. Go places you have never been

Arbus shares some of her thoughts:
“My favourite thing is to go where I’ve never been. For me there’s something about just going into someone else’s house. When it comes time to go, if I have to take a bus to somewhere or if I have to grade a cab uptown, it’s like I’ve got a blind date. It’s always seemed something like that to me. And sometimes I have a sinking feeling of, Oh God it’s time and I really don’t want to go. And then, once I’m on my way, something terrific takes over about the sort of queasiness of it and how there’s absolutely no method for control."

I constantly read local history books and scour maps to find new places, never knowing what I'll find. The planning and the journey to find the abandoned place plays a huge part in my work.

2. The camera is a license to enter the lives of others

As Arbus explains:
“If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, “I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life.” I mean people are going to say, “You’re crazy.” Plus they’re going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that’s a reasonable kind of attention to be paid."

Documenting abandoned and disappearing communities deserves attention and my camera, my project, has got me into properties to capture the fading memories of lives long since past.

3. Realise you can never truly understand the world from your subjects eyes

"You might have a certain intent when photographing, but the result can be totally different. Not only that, but what we may perceive as a “tragedy” may not be considered as a tragedy to your subject:
And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect. I mean if you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic. You know it really is totally fantastic that we look like this and you sometimes see that very clearly in a photograph. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intended it.
What I’m trying to describe is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s. And that’s what all this is a little bit about. That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own“.

I feel many emotions in empty cottages, but they are really what I imagine it must have been like either to live there or how it felt to have to leave. They are only my emotions.

4. Create specific photographs

“A photograph has to be specific. I remember a long time ago when I first began to photograph I thought, There are an awful lot of people in the world and it’s going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them, so if I photograph some kind of generalized human being, everybody’ll recognize it. It’ll be like what they used to call the common man or something.
It was my teacher Lisette Model, who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be. You really have to face that thing. And there are certain evasions, certain nicenesses that I think you have to get out of."

More and more I am taking shots that, may not have the compositional appeal or be pleasing to the eye, but mean something to me. I may have been moved by something left behind or some part of the cottage may have brought back a personal memory - either way, the image I take on those occasions resonate with people much more than the bog standard abandoned cottage shot.

5. Adore your subjects

“Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still adore some of them, I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe."

I think it is clear that I love local history!

6. Gain inspiration from reading

“Another thing I’ve worked from is reading it happens very obliquely. I don’t mean I read something and rush out and make a picture of it. And I hate that business of illustrating poems.

But here’s an example of something I’ve never photographed that’s like a photograph to me. There’s a Kafka story called “Investigations of a Dog” which I read a long, long time ago and I’ve read it since a number of times. It’s a terrific story written by the dog and the real dog life of a dog."

I think it is clear that to be a better photographer, it is important to embrace life, to get inspiration for many aspects of life be it reading, music, travel, walking, etc.

7. Take bad photos

“Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it. They become methods. It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you had seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again."

I am realising this more and more. The more I fail, the more I learn. But I can't fail if I don't get out and shoot. Of course it is crucial to understand what went wrong and how might that be fixed. Accidents are a different thing altogether. 

8. Sometimes your best photos aren’t immediately apparent (to you)

“Recently I did a picture—I’ve had this experience before—and I made rough prints of a number of them, there was something wrong in all of them. I felt I’d sort of missed it and I figured I'd go back. But there was one that was just totally peculiar. It was a terrible dodo of a picture. It looks to me a little as if the lady’s husband took it. Its terribly head-on and sort of ugly and there’s something terrific about it. I’ve gotten to like it better and better and now I’m secretly sort of nutty about it.”

Oh, how I would love to have a picture editor! So important to go back over old work with a new mind.

9. Don’t arrange others, arrange yourself

“I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things if I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself”.

Very rarely do I move stuff around to make a better picture. I'm not sure why I have this approach. It could be that I want to show respect to the previous owners or that I feel it is important to show the property as I find it. The jury is still out on this one.

10. Get over the fear of photographing by getting to know your subjects

To overcome her fear of shooting junkies people in a park (who frightened her) – Diane would revisit over and over again, and found out over time she became less timid. Not only that but she got to know the people there, and asked for permission. This helped her feel more comfortable and photograph the people in the area.

I have overcome my feeling of intruding, my fear of been 'found out' and continue to work on my confident manner when approaching locals or when confronted by concerned individuals who want to know what I'm doing. Often the conversation ends in my favour when they tell me about other abandoned cottages.

11. Your subjects are more important than the pictures

Although Arbus was criticised much during her lifetime (and even now today) for seemingly lacking compassion – she certainly did care for her subjects more than the photos themselves:
“For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. I do have a feeling for the print but I don’t have a holy feeling for it. I really think what it is, is what its about. I mean it has to be of something. And what its of is always more remarkable than what it is.”

I have to give this one more thought because I think I amy be going in the opposite direction. Initially, it was all about the history of these abandoned glens and documenting them before they fell into even more ruin. Other photographers suggested I focus my work more on the details of the cottages, more on producing images that evoke emotions and memories. I'm trying to do this and enjoying the challenge but, to be fair to myself, I sense it will make me want to delve even deeper into the my interest, my passion, to hopefully produce better images.

Diane Arbus was not only a ground breaking and controversial photographer, but she also had deep feelings and emotions with and for her subjects. This clearly comes across in her photography. She followed her heart in her photography and took photos of subjects that not only interested her but felt compassion and warmth towards.

( All Arbus quotes from Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph.) 

"FREEDOM!" No, wait, "CONSTRAINTS!"

One of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim gathered data from across Europe in the late nineteenth century to study the factors that affect the suicide rate. His findings revealed that people who had fewer social constraints, bonds and obligations were more likely to kill themselves. Essentially, freedom can be hazardous to your well being. (Hear that Wallace?)

Durkheim found that people living alone were more likely to kill themselves; married people, less so; married people with children, still less. He concluded that people need obligations and constraints to provide structure and meaning to their lives.

Many years of further study have confirmed Durkheim's diagnosis. If you want to predict how happy someone is, or how long that person will live (genes and personality aside), find out about their social relationships.

Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life, speeds recovery from surgery and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders. OK, it is a tad more complex than this, but essentially true:-

  'a very happy individual is likely to be a happily married optimistic extrovert, having an active social life with a network of good social support, who feels fulfilled at work, is religious, enjoys active recreational pursuits, exercises regularly and feels they are in good health. He or she is also likely to have their basic needs met and live in a democratic country which respects civil rights and freedom of speech.' 

Giving support and caring for others is also important to happiness. 'We need to interact and intertwine with others; we need the give and the take; we need to belong.' (Baumeister and Leary, 1995)

Think hard before you break the bonds that may be extending your life and bringing you happiness, for example leaving homes, relationships, jobs and cities, in search of personal and professional fulfilment. Such an ideology of extreme personal freedom can be bringing on unhappiness.

Seneca got it right when he said, "No man can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility'. 

(Some Sunday night thoughts with the help of The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt.)

'Joy's soul lies in the doing'

Trotternish Ridge, Skye, a photo by James_at_Slack on Flickr.

Going for a walk is never a waste of time. Fresh air, exercise, hopefully some sun and a dose of Vitamin D and time away from the screen and LCD. It also allows time to think and perhaps have the odd creative thought. Pursuing a creative urge, or just trying to achieve anything you desire, is a journey with a destination we long for and hope it will bring contentment and satisfaction. But often the destination fails to satisfy for any length of time - like the instant relief of removing your rucksack after a long walk. But you soon plan your next journey, your next 'fix' because you feel you could do more, do better, overcome your limitations and weaknesses.

As Shakespeare wrote: Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.

Going for a walk and failing to imitate your hero.

Today I was walking up a track which had about 6 to 8 inches (20cm) of snow on it. Some people had been on the track days previously and had compacted the snow and their footprints now formed ice. I tried walking on the virgin snow but it was hard going so I went on to the footprints of the previous walkers. It was slightly easier but the footprints were not matching up with my stride so I kept slipping and wasn't having a comfortable journey. I was following in their footsteps but doing it to my stride. This situation made think back on a book I had just read.

In Austin Kleon's Steal Like An Artist, (yes, I know, I'm rather late to this party), he suggests, 'don't wait until you know who you are to get started'. You should just get on with being creative. Study and imitate those you admire and want to emulate; look at their motivations and inspirations to help inspire you. When you try to emulate your inspirations you will undoubtedly fail to create another Bresson, Arbus or whoever it is you're trying to emulate. But, and this was the interesting bit, it will be your failure to completely imitate your hero that will eventually help you find your path, your footing, your style, your voice. 

Yesterday I went on one of my rural explorations of abandoned crofts - 'croft crawling' as I call it. Just as I was about to enter a ruin, I decided to try and imitate a photographer Rob Hudson who has been creating an interesting and fascinating set called Songs of Travel.  I wasn't sure how he creates these images so I just tried 10 multiple exposures and moved forward at each shot. My results were nothing like Rob's but it did make me think about where and how I could use such a technique. Here's one of my efforts:

So I was trying to walk in Rob's footprints but not hitting his stride and failing. However, I was learning, I was having fun and I thought more about the technique for my situation.

My formidable foe and food cravings.

It has taken me a lifetime to realise fear is furtive and has many disguises and because of this, it's no wonder it is such a formidable foe.

Fear about your own ability can prevent you from doing your best work and fear about how your work is received can prevent you from doing your own work. 

What I'm also taking time to realise is that uncertainty is essential for creative work to emerge.

On to more lighthearted reflections. 

After eating 'fresh fruit' from local supermarkets this wintery morning in Scotland, I crave the oranges I ate every morning for 2 weeks in San Francisco; I crave the peaches I devoured in the Okanagan Valley in Canada; I crave the small Tenerife bananas. Ach well, the porridge was good and some Scottish smoked salmon is lined up for 'brunch'. 

Food cravings anyone? 

'Blooming, buzzing confusion', switchtasking and 'sometimes reinforcements'.

Tomorrow I go back to work after a two week break and, as usual, I dread the thought of it and kind of look forward to it at the same time.

Like most people I love being on holiday. We live in a stunning location in rural Aberdeenshire. In 2012 we improved and modernised existing rooms in the steading (barn) attached to our cottage and this festive period has been even better with the luxury of the new living areas. I could quite happily work from this home!

As some of you know, I'm the Principal Teacher of History at a secondary school (12 - 18 year olds) and I get great satisfaction from teaching. I love my subject and the pupils make the job. They are often an inspiration to me. Yes, all of us in education face the continuous interference from politicians and so called 'experts' who force on us ever more 'new thinking' and 'new approaches' which can seem totally at odds with what your particular school and pupils actually need. But at the end of the day, it is a far preferable job to the one I did for 14 years in the oil industry.

So, returning to work brings things to look forward to and things that I could do without in my life.

But here's what gets me the most about the end of holidays - all the books and magazines not read; all the movies not watched; all the blogs and websites not read; all the walks not taken; all the photographs not taken; all the friends and relatives not visited; all the stuff still on my 'to do' list! Clearly I was unrealistic about what I could do during what is a busy holiday anyway. Worst still, there are so many distractions nowadays.

I'm currently reading The Pleasures of Reading in an Ages of Distraction by Alan Jacobs.  A few years ago I was trying to speed up my reading but Jacobs explains why you shouldn't if you really want to get more from what you're reading apart from just uploading information to our brains without giving time to consolidate and consider the information. Reading will always seem slow if all you want to do is pass your eyes over page after page and tick the book off as 'read'.

However, reading slower will mean I will get through less pages before I'm distracted by Facebook, twitter, Flickr, emails, cats, the scenery, the need to get outside! Technology has brought 'intermittent reinforcements' as B.F Skinner calls it, into my life and to rid myself of most of them, I'll have to alter my habits. It's this 'sometimes reinforcements' that causes the 'addiction' to keep checking social media. 

'The philosopher William James famously wrote of the "blooming, buzzing confusion" that constitutes sensuous experience for babies, who have not yet developed the filters necessary to organise that experience into discrete and meaningful units, but our daily technologies threaten to return us all to virtual babyhood"(my italics). [Jacobs, p.79]

Lately, I've been feeling this 'blooming and buzzing' has had an impact on my reading - not only the quantity but also the quality. My mind drifts much easier than it used to. This blog post is admitting my awareness of the 'condition' and how I want to do something to address the imbalance.

Essentially, I need to make it difficult if not impossible to go online for part of my day/week so I can get back to quality reading, studying, thinking and doing. Many years ago, I managed to stop smoking and drinking so surely I can do this? Jacobs talks about e-readers like Kindle which place emphasis on the text and 'hiding' the 'connect' command. ( I don't have a Kindle so can't comment on this.) So technology can be part of the solution, but I fear I may be too distracted still. I can't multitask, not because I'm a male; no, it's because none of us can, according to new research. Dave Crenshaw points out that genuine multitasking is impossible and a more accurate term is 'switchtasking'. We are really in a state of 'continuous partial attention'. Boy, does that describe perfectly how I felt much of the time in 2012!

At the moment, I'm still working on how to use social media and the internet to keep me informed, educate me, entertain me, promote me but not distract me so much. I will be 'experimenting' with possible solutions this year which may see me on Facebook and twitter a lot less but then again, ...

To be continued (and hopefully resolved).

Well done if you managed to read all this without getting distracted!

New music, new books and old but useful advice.

Some new music I bought in 2012:

Funny how so much of 'new' music sounds like old music to me. Must be a part of getting older. Interestingly, the older the musician the more contemporary the music, e.g. Karine Polwart, Richard Hawley and Lau.

Some books that held my attention in 2012:

I read others and went back to old favourites.

I've mentioned Art and Fear in a previous post. It describes some very familiar traits! It does provide some good advice and points to consider:

'What you need to know about the next (image) is contained in the last (image).'

'...ideas are diluted to what you imagine your audience can imagine, leading to work that is condescending, arrogant or both. Worse yet, you discard your own highest vision in the process.'

'...the world offers vastly more support to work it already understands - namely, art that's already been around for a generation...'

'..the real question about acceptance is not whether your work will be viewed as art, but whether your work will be viewed as your art.'

'....the audience is is seldom in a position to grant (or withhold) approval on the issue that really counts - namely, whether or not you're making progress in your work.'

'Outliers' by Malcolm Gladwell is worth a read. There are some gaping holes in some of the conclusions and analysis but it is thought provoking and helped to explain a few 'twists and turns' in my own life. I still need to work on my 'practical intelligence' I reckon! The chapter on why Asians are generally better at maths is very interesting. Also, the learning that goes on outside of school by students of more wealthy parents has more impact on attainment than I ever thought.

This morning, I was all ready to do a blog post about feelings just now and soon realised I can't better this and should move on.

I think I've managed to stay on the bus.

Days are shorter and the harvest is in. Blogs are neglected.

How many blogs have you seen start a new post with apologies like: 'Can't believe I haven't posted anything for x weeks now!' or 'Sorry for not posting for so long', etc.?  Well, I'm not going to despite weeks having past since the last blog post. Why post something when you have nothing to say? In my case, I've just been letting myself mull over thoughts and trying to make some sense of them. Anyway...

I've been experimenting with titles for my images. Titles I find difficult. Some say you should let the viewer create their own association/story looking at the picture. I can agree with that but a title can help to hint at the atmosphere of a place.

When I visit abandoned communities and cottages, I genuinely feel that sense of isolation, hardship, abandonment and loss. As soon as I enter a property I can almost see the husband and wife going about their daily routines, trying to keep it all together against rising rents, falling prices and the growing lure of the big city or abroad. Standing at the bedroom or kitchen window I can quite easily imagine how they felt or what might have been going through their minds at various stages of their life.

So I started to give images titles which were essentially the thoughts I had at the time of the shot. The reaction was generally positive which surprised me a bit. Have a look at some of these images here, here and here. Not sure this approach has much mileage though.

Another change I'm working on is how I organise my images. Initially I organised them by location because it made sense and I believed (and still do) that many people search for images of abandoned places by the name of the property or area. That's fine. But at a Scottish Photographers' meet up in Dingwall, it was suggested I organise all the interior shots together and make a portfolio of them. So for the next meet I quickly (last minute everything!) gathered a set of interior shots of places all over Aberdeenshire. The effect of doing this was instant. I saw a theme, a story, a body of work I hadn't fully realised I was creating! Yes, I'm that dumb. In a book I'm working on, I can see me including thumbnails on a page which could have a whole set of fireplaces or windows on it for example.

With such straight forward and useful advice, my approach to my photography has moved on a bit. I just wish I could meet up with more photographers and artists on a more regular basis. Something to work on for 2013.

Conversations on twitter have helped me stay focused on what I want to do and not be swayed off course by being affected by lack of views, comments, likes, favourites etc. Thanks to Rob and Lucy I've stayed on the bus.

And finally some images of a fortunate find. To locate abandoned properties I tend to read local history books, tour the countryside on my bike or in my car and scour maps at home. Some I find by chance when looking for another place and this particular cottage I found that way but better than that, it had some of the best and weirdest graffiti and art work I've ever seen in a ruin.

If you're wondering about the post title read this. 

We all feel like this right?

Recently, I changed the title of this blog from 'James Dyas Davidson Photography' to just 'James Dyas Davidson'. The reason I did that was because I asked myself what was the purpose in keeping the blog?

Well, way back, this is was the answer. Essentially it was recording my return to photography. Looking back I think, 'Who would be interested in that?' and of course nobody was. It was good to get my thoughts on 'paper' though.

Reading photography books and blogs, you learn that embracing life and following YOUR passions could make you a more consistent and interesting photographer. Great. That led to this post.

So you go and shoot your 'passion' and soon find many others have the same passion and do it better than you. You need to find your 'voice'.

But you get distracted by requests to shoot the odd wedding, events, promos, etc. You try the odd competition. You try to emulate cool stuff you see in magazines and websites. Essentially, you don't shoot your passion and you don't get the praise and adulation you thought you might and you hit the ground with a bump.

You start to worry again about technical stuff, your workflow and your post processing skills because compared to others, you suck.

You go back to what kind of photographer are you? and that dreaded creative block hits. You need some inspiration and lo and behold, they tell me to shoot my passion and embrace life. Oh yeah, you lost that for a moment there.

Your off again on the right track for a while. It's beginning to all come together. Shame you can't do this full time perhaps? (At this point, for me, illness and time off work forced a rethink.)

Great, it's all sorted - you know what to photograph and why, you will remain a 'hobbyist' photographer and you're getting the hang of social media and websites. Positive feedback and comments begin to flow in you get some work requests. Oddly enough, not in the type of photography you shoot but hey ho.

Ah, but old habits die hard.

Time to learn the history of photography, learn about the past masters and to see what has been done and how you could add to that legacy in your own small way. (Many of my posts in 2011 were about the history of photography.)

Your blogs posts get closer to what you want your blog to be but again, 'life' happens to you and you have to deal with other stuff.

You meet or read about other photographers who 'say something in their work' and reflect their age. You want to too, but what are you saying? what is your world about? You ask around.

Your thoughts about what part do you want photography to play in your life is a recurring thought.

You start to get annoyed with yourself for going round in circles and always promising to not go back over old ground or to stand still. One step forward to your goals - always.

But good God! here you are blogging about losing focus again and how you're not going to again!!

You stall.

Then you listen to this and think, 'I am not alone. I am not a loser. Why don't more people talk about such things as fear, procrastination and self doubt?'

After all, don't we all feel like this?

So this blog is really about me, my struggles and what interests me, not just photography. Hence the name change.

The Pattern is Predictable.

I stalled.

"The pattern is predictable: as you see error in what you have done, you steer your work towards what you imagine you can do perfectly. You cling ever more tightly to what you already know you can do - away from risk and exploration, and possibly further from the work of your heart. You find reasons to procrastinate, since to not work is to not make mistakes. Believing that artwork should be perfect, you gradually become convinced that you cannot make such work. (You are correct.) Sooner or later, since you cannot do what you are trying to do, you quit. And in one of those perverse little ironies of life, only the pattern itself achieves perfection - a perfect death spiral: you misdirect your work; you stall; you quit."  From Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

But I haven't quit. Far from it. I can see now that the imperfections of my previous images are the seeds to my next attempts at creating images.

The Nike slogan and Lent.

A wee story about myself:

At school, I did better in the Humanities subjects and art but was ‘persuaded’ to follow a science path because ‘there would be a better chance of getting a job’, which in reality was true. In my late twenties I had a bit of an early 'mid-life crisis '. I knew I was in the wrong profession and needed to get out of the oil industry, despite the good money I was earning. I did OK in the job I was in and became qualified in electronic engineering and applied physics but the company owned me and I was unhappy.  

There was a ‘creative urge’ inside me that was being ignored. So I turned to self help books to see how I could move from one career to another. The good thing about reading these self help books, which many people mock, was I started to study with the Open University and gained my Honours Arts degree and got out of the oil industry, did a Post Grad Teaching course and eventually got into teaching. 

I became a Principal Teacher and settled into that position, a job I love doing. But I realised I still wasn't satisfying the creative spark inside me that had been snuffed out by guidance teachers and adults who said art was a waste of time and something you can do when you retire. After a Diane Arbus exhibition in Barcelona a few years back, I decided there and then that photography would come back into my life.

The point I’m making here is I became a bit of a self help expert and came to the conclusion that 'Just Do It' is probably one of the best pieces of advice you can give anyone. Stop thinking and start doing - have no worries or fears. Making a complete mess of things was OK as long as you learned from it and progressed. I try to overcome that fear of failure by failing and the only way I can fail and improve is to just get on and try it. Each time I learn from my actions and efforts, my self confidence and self esteem increases (well, most of the time!). 

I still struggle with this approach in some areas of my life, for example doing some DIY around the house like plumbing or car maintenance because the consequences can be a bit messy and costly to put right! However, for Lent 2012, I thought I would try hard to think less and do more. (I'm trying hard not to think about what a bad idea this is because I will probably fail!!) Wish me luck. 

(Above is a picture I took of the Peel of Lumphanan last weekend. The Peel is difficult to photograph because it is hard to isolate the Peel from the surrounding countryside. I thought I had it when I saw the dusting of snow on it and none elsewhere. Sadly, I didn't quite execute this shot as well as I could have - a bit of a failed shot but I know why and learned from it.)

When the teacher 'gets' his own lesson!

Last week I was teaching a Religious Education lesson (that’s another story) about worship. To get the pupils thinking, I drew a flower growing from its roots underneath. I asked them to think about their hobbies or what they are passionate about. Then I got them to think of all the outward signs of their hobby, e.g. photography would be a camera, a bag, going to places of interest, taking pictures, processing pictures, printing pictures,etc. and place these around the flower. Next, I got them to consider the more ‘inward’ signs of participating in their passion, e.g. happiness, relaxation, self-confidence, de-stressed, at peace, excited, etc. These were placed around the roots. 

The pupils got it immediately - they could see how one feeds the other. If they couldn’t do their hobby then they felt unhappy, frustrated and stressed. Likewise, if they were unhappy or stressed or lacking in self esteem, then they tended not to perform their hobby very well. 

It was one of those lessons when I felt we were all having a wee ‘light bulb’ moment, myself included!

(The above picture was just a snapshot taken with the wee Canon Ixus 70 camera whilst I was out for a morning stroll. )