On Landscape - Passing Through

We put a call out for question for our third lockdown podcast with  Joe Cornish and David Ward and the response has been fantastic. We’re going to have to split the questions across two chats so sorry if we miss your questions this time.

As mentioned in this episode, we are looking at having a mini ‘in your house’ photography challenge. All three of us are going to give this a  go and we invite anybody else who wishes to take part to submit some work. The only rules are that it has to be inside your house, not in your garden or out of a window.

We also mention that we’re having a mini book club chat next week where myself and David Ward are going to talk about Edward Muybridge, in particular the book “Motion Studies” and me and Joe Cornish are going to talk about Robert Adams book “Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values”. We’ll be discussing these in two weeks time if you’d like to read them and ask us questions about them, please let us know.

I was having one of our regular chats with Joe Cornish last week to catch up on things and we both talked about making the most of the fact that we were both available to record some audio content for our readers. We’ve tried having online chats before but had problems with internet bandwidth when we were based in East Yorkshire. However, now we’re in the Highlands we were hoping that our increased bandwidth would let us do more (a quite surprising 30Mbps instead of <1Mbps near York).

We ran the idea past David Ward as well, who was positive about the idea and like most of us didn’t have anything else to do, and so we recorded our first episode using GoToWebinar. Unfortunately, there was a bit of lag/delay on the connection which made for a stilted start and the final audio quality wasn’t great. However, we enjoyed the process and I went away with the task of trying to work out a better process for next time.

We ended up sending separate audio recorders to Joe and David and although we had our conversation on our phones, which got rid of the nasty lag, we used the recorders to get a good quality record in each location and also used video conferencing software with the audio turned down to make sure we had the visual cues that conversations sometimes need. The end result of this was much better and we’ll stick with this going forward.

All of this description of our process is by way of explanation of why our second conversation is actually our first proper one. However, the first conversation was still interesting and so we’re including it here with the quality warning.

What did we chat about? Well, for our lower-quality chat, we challenged each other to choose a question to ask of ourselves and the second, better quality chat we had a discussion about what we have been doing since the lockdown started and how it’s been affecting us

What we really want to do is to continue having these conversations but make things more interactive with our audience. So if you have any questions you’d like to address to Joe or David (or myself) then please add them to the comments below, send a message via our Facebook page or via email to [email protected].

We also want to include other photographers in our chats and if you have any suggestions for these or want to nominate yourself, please let us know!

Back in January, Mark was in between two workshops he as running based in Kentallen. This village is on the coastal road from Ballachulish to Oban and approximately 25 minutes from Glencoe. Tim and Mark met at the Joe Cornish Gallery when Tim had just started using his large format camera and since then Mark has transitioned from using large format to digital photography. In this podcast, Mark talks about how and why he transitioned from large format, the challenges, and why he enjoys printing workshops.

On our 200th issue, we decided to have a special Passing Through podcast. David Ward and Joe Cornish are running a workshop in the area and Ted Leeming and Morag Paterson are in Scotland also. We decided to invite them to dinner followed by a roundtable discussion on what we as landscape photographers can do to help protect the environment and mitigate climate change.

Our goal was to be specific about the types of activity that would be specific to us as photographers but we also discussed some general adaptations that anybody can make. Charlotte and I included ourselves not only as enablers of the discussion, but also, I hope, because we have made adaptations in our photography business to try to have less impact on the environment.

If you have any questions for David, Joe, Ted, Morag, Charlotte or myself, or have ideas of your own, please add them to the comments at the bottom of the article and we’ll try to follow up this discussion with a separate article bringing the community into the discussion.

I’d like to add a little bit of news to the discussion as well. At the end of last year, the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild gave the Award for Excellence to a campaign website, Save Glen Etive, David Lintern and I built. The website made dramatic use of photography donated by Joe Cornish, David Ward, Colin Prior, Michael Stirling-Aird and many others. Sadly the campaign didn’t stop the development but it raised awareness to the point where we had tens of thousands of supporters and petitioners.

As Margaret Soraya was passing through Glencoe, she lives near Loch Ness, we enticed her to drop in with cake, tea and biscuits.

The landscapes Margaret captures, typically on the remote islands of the Outer Hebrides, Inner Hebrides and Orkney Isles, are a reflection of her solo time in nature, being still and embracing quietude. In this podcast, Margaret talks about her exhibition and what she finds in the quietness and solitude of the islands that keeps pulling her back.

See Margaret Soraya’s landscapes from the Outer Hebrides, Inner Hebrides and Orkney Isles in her exhibition ‘Quiet’ at Bosham Gallery, 1 High Street, Bosham, West Sussex PO18 8LS from October 5-December 14, 2019.

Margaret has a talk on Saturday 30th November | FINDING YOUR OWN CREATIVE SPACE Artist Talk With Margaret Soraya | 3-5pm | Bosham Gallery

A couple of weeks ago, Al Simmons from Teamwork came to visit to demonstrate the latest camera system from Phase One, the Phase IQ4 150 and also the new technical camera solution, the Phase XT and its range of 23mm, 32mm and 70mm electronic-shuttered Rodenstock lenses.

We went out to Glen Nevis to take a few photographs, test out a few features and, after coming back, recorded a chat about what the new system does and what it means for photographers who may use it.

Below the podcast, I’ve included a few photographs with samples of zoomed sections. You can also find out a lot more about the Phase IQ4 and XT Camera System on Teamwork’s website (links on the home page to both). Al Simmons has just come back to spend a day with us where we tested the camera more extensively and we’ll be featuring an article about this in a future issue.

If you’re on a mobile, please click here for the podcast as there’s an issue with the mobile theme.

Here’s a photo down the length of Glen Nevis taken with the Rodenstock HR Digaron 32mm with a couple of 100% crops. You can see a fullsize jpg of this image by clicking here.

The red boxes show the area of the 100% crops shown below

We also tried out the frame averaging on some rapidly flowing water to check out how it work (seamlessly) and also how much dynamic range we could expect. The following shows the full image and then +/- 5 stops of exposure adjustment and finally a crop of a dark area before and after +5 exposure applied.

50s, Automated Frame Average

Alister Benn joined us at our Highland headquarters for a chat about his recent trip to Sweden, where we randomly bumped into each other, and his forthcoming move to Lochaber!

If you’re on a mobile device, please click here for the podcast as there’s an issue with the mobile version of the site.

Alister Benn and Ann Kristin Lindaas working the abstract in Sweden

Are you passing through Glencoe in the coming weeks or months? Why not pop in for a cuppa tea and a catch up? We’re looking for other stories from our community, whether it’s talking about a trip, a project, some of your favourite images. Drop us a line and we will get in touch!

In the start of a hopefully regular series, we are taking advantage of the many passing photographers by bribing them into the house with tea and biscuits in return for a quick chat about photography. In the first edition, we’re talking to Paula Pell-Johnson of Linhof Studio and our own Joe Cornish where we cover ground from megapixels to film and some of the new products that Paula is excited about in the coming months. One of these ‘interesting’ new products is the Hasselblad CFV II 50C.

As a drop-in back for old Hasselblad medium format cameras, it’s a little bit interesting but once you introduce the tiny 907x body adapter which will take X1D lenses and with converters for Hasselblad mount (and via other converters to Mamiya, Bronica, LF lenses, large image circle 35mm lenses, etc) we have a system that is incredibly flexible. The final inclusion of an electronic shutter means you could mount it to a coconut and use it as an organic pinhole camera if you really wanted! It’s the first really flexible MF back which should appear at a top-end DSLR price. We hope to get our hands on one in the coming months.

We should apologise for the slightly less than perfect sound. The recording was made last-minute via our Macbook microphone. Future instalments of “Passing Through” will hopefully sound a little better.

If you are on a mobile device please click here for the podcast as there’s an issue with the mobile version of the site.

Are you passing through Glencoe in the coming weeks or months? Why not pop in for a cuppa tea and a catch up? We’re looking for other stories from our community, whether it’s talking about a trip, a project, some of your favourite images. Drop us a line and we will get in touch!

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 fourth and final section..