Just before Christmas we asked our readers for a bunch of questions that we could put to Joe Cornish when he visited next and the response was fantastic. In the end we recorded two hours of audio but to keep installments to a useful length (a lot of people say they listen to them over breakfast or during a commute) we’ve split it into half hour sections.

So, a big thank you to Joe and everyone who submitted their questions and here’s the second section..

We've also included an incidental collection of snowy images to run alongside this item.

and a transcription...

Tim: Next question on Twitter from JM Images. ‘What long-term project trip has yielded the greatest disappointment? Sorry but hearing heroes fail cheers me up’ from John.

Joe: Thank you John. Right well, in a way it would be ridiculous for me to think I have been successful in anything. That may sound strange, but I always think that I could do better and everything feels a little bit like 'work in progress' in some ways.

When doing Scotland’s Coast and Scotland’s Mountains, which are both books I am proud of, the projects were fraught with the difficulties which accompanied working in Scotland itself, battling with the weather a lot of the time and the conditions. On both occasions there were ideas that I wanted to work on, images that I expected to make that I never made because of the conditions not ‘playing ball’.

With Scotland’s Mountains particularly, which is a step up in difficulty from Scotland’s Coast, I learned fairly early on that I was not going to be able to create these mythical images that I had in my mind and that I would have to simply deal with what was there. The learning journey for me was in not actually having these masterpiece images at the forefront of my mind, but simply to be, to quote a zen-ish phrase, ‘in the present moment’, to accept it and to simply ‘go with the flow’. So, in a way, that was a successful discovery but what I am trying to answer John’s point by saying is just because the outcome looks like it was all intended, it may not be really really.

In many ways, the project for me will always be ongoing and Scotland’s Mountains, as a book, is a snapshot in time for Joe Cornish and that’s the reality of it. I am proud of it as far as it goes in that sense. I think one of the difficulties with photographers and photography is that there tends to be this pursuit of the hero picture.

Tim: Yes

Joe: Alex Nail, if we go back to him, Alex has made a few of those images, I hope he won’t mind me saying that, terrific images and great credit to him for finding himself in those places and achieving what he has done in places that require great endeavour to have reached them.

I actually tend not to look for those images so much anymore, not that I wouldn’t be happy to receive them if they came to me, but rather to actually simply go with my camera in a kind of ‘what if?’ state of mind and to discover what I find; to try and fuse the elements of the day with the process of the walk and see what I discover. So in a way it’s as open ended approach as it possibly can be.

Tim: Is this something you discovered with time, that a lot of photographers find it difficult to work in some conditions? I know we were talking earlier about the intense blue sky with sun at midday, that when you learnt more about using those conditions, you become a happier photographer? Is it more productive?

Joe: I think that’s a good point. I think there are a number of ways of being happier, but I think before that comes, the consideration is, how many pictures do you want to take every day? Because one of our problems generally is that those that are shooting digitally, shoot too many pictures and one of the lessons that I learned shooting large ...