Snowdonia

On how I kickstarted my photographic recovery with several unintended consequences

This workshop marks the beginning of the end of what I have called my Interregnum - the period of time I was slowly and painfully transitioning from film to digital. After the finish of my Mulgrave project around March 2014 I had had so little time to devote to photography and was so super critical of what I was producing that I made very limited progress. In particular my photography felt perpetually forced - like I was constantly overthinking images. I used to see my best images in a flash of inspiration and I couldn’t really remember the last time that happened.

I had started to take time off to spend on photography through LOAs (Leave of Absence) at work and for this autumn period I made a pivotal decision - I decided to start the time off by attending a workshop again - my first for 8 years - on the advice of Dave Tolcher. I connected again with David Ward and booked on his Snowdonia Workshop. It turned out to be a momentous decision with consequences I couldn’t have imagined.

We were staying in a fabulous old building - a converted church - and although I had walked the mountains of Snowdonia several times including the amazing Crib Goch ridge I had never photographed there. I relaxed almost immediately. On the first day I made an image of some coloured rock - the alternative image made at Parys Mountain - the first that I was really happy with for some time.

I hadn’t met any of the photographers on the workshop before but everyone was friendly and in particular I connected with Dave Mead - a Yorkshire photographer and farmer. He lives fairly close to me in Farndale, a valley I knew and visited as a child. It turned out we have a very similar attitude and approach to photography.

That was cemented on the fourth day of the workshop when we visited Coed y Brenin Forest Park. The rain had started to come in and we were getting wet. We were walking back to the van along the track chatting when I suddenly saw the main image. It happened in a flash - just like it often had in the pre-Interregnum days. I stopped and took out my Linhof viewer - still in use as a hangover from my film days - and I got excited. Dave spontaneously offered to assist me and he used my umbrella to shield the tripod and camera as I set up. It was a straightforward image and with Dave’s help I was able to execute it fairly easily.

That chance encounter at the workshop has turned into a great friendship and we have photographed together in our local area on many occasions as well as meeting on several more workshops since Snowdonia. The time spent just relaxing into my image making in the ideal conditions created by David and his partner Saskia together with the coaching I received on image processing and the diversity of input from other photographers kickstarted my recovery.