As we head towards the end of 2024, it is natural to start reflecting on another year of photography. Personally, 2024 has probably been my most productive and my most satisfying since 2014 when I completed my Mulgrave project.
Partly this is due to finally stabilising my digital equipment on a solution that is right for me. A year ago I made the transition to Phase One so I now use an IQ4 150, a range of Rodenstock lenses in Copal shutters and my lighter Cambo Actus DB technical camera with a long rail attached. This gives me control over camera movements, much better quality colour output compared to my Fuji GFX and a level of consistency in experience that is right for me. Separately I will do a blog post on what is in my bag and why. Importantly, I got out with this equipment for many 100s of hours during 2024. Repetition and a consistent process made handling the camera muscle memory. It disappeared in my hands the same way my Linhof Technikardan 45s camera system used to - a perfect alignment of my craft and vision.
However this is only part of the story. A year ago I penned an article for on landscape called ‘Retrospection and the value of closed loop photography’. I consider that it is putting the principles outlined there into practice that has made the biggest difference to my satisfaction with my output. What follows is an updated version of the article. You can see the original here.
Artistic photography, like all creative art, is a process not something that emerges out of thin air. More importantly it is a circular or iterative process that can be summarised as imagination (vision), realisation (craft) and retrospection (closing the loop and feeding the ideas and lessons learned back into your vision). I wrote extensively about Vision and Craft back in 2011 in a series of essays but had not fully appreciated the role retrospection was playing in the pace of my development at that time.
Retrospection is a formal process used in many modern agile development practices. The retrospective is an opportunity for a software team to pause and consider how a recent period of time has gone. What worked well? What could have been better? What learnings can be incorporated into future practices to get better performance and results? Given my software background it was natural to apply these principles to my photography.
In particular as I reviewed my work over the year 2023 I noticed that I had started to systematically 'close the loop' again in a way I hadn't done since I stopped shooting on 5x4 transparency film. Here are the three biggest changes I made.
1. Creating a physical artefact is key to retrospection
5x4 transparency film displayed on a light box was the artefact of my photography for most of the film era. The fact that the transparency was scanned for printing or posting to the web was an afterthought that received very little attention.
There was a vibrant community of LF photographers at the time and most of us carried a box of the latest 'trannies' that would be ritualistically put on a light box, reviewed and critiqued in small groups in the optimistic hope of soliciting a rare 'CUB' rating from the audience.
The physical artefact lent itself to extensive incremental analysis and micro adjustments of factors like exposure, composition and lighting as well as broader philosophical discussions of what made a good image. This retrospective process meant that I and many others worked on extracting every nuance of improvement possible for each artefact. For example I fine tuned my manual exposure craft to within less than a third of a stop of accuracy. The sheer cost of making images and the relatively few images we made meant we extracted every last ounce of lessons learned from each transparency whether it worked or didn't.
About 15 months ago, mostly inspired by seeing Joe Cornish's exceptional prints, I committed myself to making and iterating the best prints I could manage and carrying about the recent prints in a box. The goal was creating prints that had the same impact as top notch transparencies. A3+ prints were a practical size for carrying and handling and were large enough to see small nuances in the print. Importantly the act of signing the print had a huge psychological impact for me - it promoted the print from a mere random byproduct of a photographic process to an end game artefact with meaning. And an image processed for the best print possible is in good shape for other formats like books or websites.
When I get together now with other photographer friends the ritualistic review of prints is as invaluable to me as the review of transparencies was in the LF days. As an aside I had also forgotten the value of workshops, especially the time and space it gives you for retrospection and the inspiration you can get from seeing how others make their art.
Until 18 months ago, most of my images languished on the computer, maybe enjoying their second of fame in the social media 'like-fest' (stroking the ego but little else as it is impossible to see all the creative nuances in a low resolution jpg file). Very few images realised their true learning potential and rarely did I use them to close the loop. More importantly there were simply too many digital images and I couldn't see the wood for the trees.
2. Digital processing is 10,000 hours all over again
For the longest time I was in denial about this reality. There is an old adage that mastering any creative skill takes 10,000 hours of study and practice. My mindset in 2018 was that I had spent more than 15 years learning my location and camera craft. I am technically savvy and I understood how digital cameras worked so I was pretty sure I could be home and dry fairly quickly in my transition to digital.
The reality was sobering and as I committed myself to making prints, the gap in my digital processing skills and my understanding of all the nuances possible in a print became self evident. I would estimate at least 80% of my self improvement in the last 12 months has been due to the coaching I have received in this skill and due to closing the loop by making images that I can visualise right through to a print. I would also consider that there is lots more room for improvement in this department not least because there is so much more to learn and perfect but also because the tools available are constantly improving.
3. Post-visualisation closes the loop
Again this was something I did extensively in the LF days. Photographers often talk of pre-visualisation, imagining how a print might look and be processed whilst out in the field as a precursor to setting up an image. Post-visualisation is imagining how a print or image could have been better in terms of composition, conditions, lighting, timing etc and taking that idea back out into the field to either re-iterate the image or inspire another image. It also means working out what worked well and working out how to repeat or to build on that success in a different context or location.
In addition, key to this retrospective process is identifying ideas for themes or seed images that could inspire a further sequence of prints (for example 2,3,6, then 12 prints) that might eventually form into a portfolio. As the portfolio grows, organising the images into a provisional sequence and naming the portfolio helps to identify gaps which again can be used to feed back into the imagination stage when out in the field or even dictate where and when to go to make images. Doing this kind of retrospection brings organisation and structure to a body of work.
This retrospection process does not take away the value of spontaneity in the field. Rather it feeds the imagination.
So to conclude, getting the right camera solution for me has been instrumental in restoring my ability to realise images that match my vision. However that was never going to be enough because in the digital world it is only half the craft. It has been closing the loop again by learning to make the best physical artefacts I can manage and restoring the value from small group and individual retrospection sessions that has helped me to become much happier again with my photographic output.