Beginnings

On the beginnings of learning my craft

2006 was the year I made the transition to working with technical cameras. After years of using fixed 35mm cameras, I bought my first 5×4 camera with movements - a Wista - in April that year and I took it to Venice in May. If you are going to take any camera to Venice - a beautiful wooden old-fashioned Wista was and probably still is the one to take!

However I was still coming to terms with using a technical camera. I knew much of the theory of its use (‘View Camera Technique’ by Leslie Stroebel still has the ability to send me off to sleep!) but that’s not the same as using it in practice - I was still a bit fingers and thumbs when setting up. This was the workshop that fixed that.

The workshop leader, Joe Cornish, was a master of the view camera craft and I learned way more from just watching him set up and make an image than any amount of book reading. The precise, deliberate nature of his setups, the way the equipment seemed to be totally under his control was remarkable and a real inspiration. Years later when I was analysing my own photography, I associated periods of successful photography with periods where the camera felt like it had disappeared and was an extension of my own hands, operated entirely on muscle memory.

I made 2 or 3 images on that trip that I was proud of. One was of the Old Man of Storr - what has now become a ridiculously over-photographed view. Back then though it was much less popular and we were alone on the top that morning. But it still feels somehow dated to me.

The second - the main image - was the most memorable. Made in the rain in the south of Skye, we stumbled across a most beautiful stream with lovely Rowan / Mountain Ash trees complete with a full display of red berries. We took it in turns to photograph in pairs with each photographer having an assistant to hold the umbrella as we set up.

This became the first image I made that I remain satisfied with after all the intervening years. Universal so to speak. It was also the workshop where my own general theory of what makes good photography began to form. The alignment of vision, craft and opportunity became core tenets of my thinking from that point onwards. It was only later that the roles played by meaning and narrative in successful image making became elevated to the same level.