 A cool little thing, all right, so let's just check. So we are live, I think. Yes, hello, everybody. We're all here in, well, we're in sunny England. We've got a man from sunny Scotland joining us tonight. So who have we got here? We've got John. Hey, John, you're from DC. Oh, okay, so that's nice and cool, lovely, all right. So where about some DC, John? Because I have some friends who lived near there once upon a time. So yes, anyone, everybody, how's it, how's it? So we have tonight a Mr. Alistair Ben, who has joined us from, away from Scotland. Where about some Scotland, Alistair? I live right on the West Coast. First of all, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure. Pleasure, pleasure. Talk on your channel. I live right on the West Coast of Scotland, almost as far west as you can go on the mainland. So out near a place called Harrenmurten, which is the furthest west part of the Scottish mainland. So it's kind of remote and with a very small village with maybe three or four people and it's very quiet. Lovely, yeah. And I'm sure you're going to have everybody trying to pronounce the name of the village. It's, I mean, you know, it's one of the things, lovely. So let's just see if we can turn up Alistair's volume here a bit. I'd love my voice. Yeah, if you've got, it's John's A. So let's just have a check, guys, because obviously, as you know, this is the first time that we're doing two people together. It might be Echo from my side, because unfortunately, I am in a big room that is quite bare and devoid of things. So if there is a bit of Echo, it's from my side, I'm not honest as he has a professional looking setup and I just have an empty room, which unfortunately has a lot of things. So we've got Steve from Eddabaugh. Hey Steve, I used to live next to the castle actually on John's The Terrace for a couple of years in Andy. Fam, so Alistair, you know, so obviously you are, well, you were brought to my attention by, I think actually it was John, who's in DC at the moment, who mentioned you in the last live stream. And I looked up your channel. I was very taken. I think we're on the same sort of wavelength. So can you tell the guys who are not familiar with you what it is that you actually do? Okay, well, I started in photography in just about the early 2000s, about 2001, and actually started as a bird photographer. It was my passion for birds. And I was living in the Far East at the time with my other career and my other work. So I've been photographing for about 20 years. I turned full-time pro in about 2000 and started a company in 2006, but turned pro in about 2009. So I've been doing that full-time now for about 12 years or so. I'm mostly engaged in education material, so new books and videos. I'm rather comfortable with expressive photography, which is also the name of the YouTube channel. Now, up until March of last year, I was running a lot of workshops. I was maybe doing 25, 26 weeks of workshops a year in China and Northern Spain and here in Scotland, of course. The Gobi Desert, Tibet, where I spent a lot of my time. And then COVID hit and all the workshops disappeared. And suddenly I had to realize that there had to be another way to make a living. So I kind of started the YouTube channel in earnest about March last year. We grew that to a size of audience that was significant to get my message out there. Expressive photography is heavily focused on the why of photography less than the how. So it's not really about gear. It's more about personal development. It's using our photography as a creative and expressive outlet that is good for us. So it's more about personal development and using art and creativity to help ourselves to become better people, really. OK, oh, good. You may have seen that I have... We're just hidden the chat. That now people can actually hear you. Apparently, there we go, because I've forgotten to think. Because this is... I was saying to Alistair earlier, we did sort of something out earlier. And then, of course, idiot here was messing with something. So if you didn't catch... Or if you didn't catch, because I know some people didn't manage to catch it. So Alistair does a lot of landscape. I think it's fair to say your focus is landscape photography, correct? And obviously, COVID, like for most of us, threw a lot of curveballs in there. And I think, in a way, did you find that that was actually a good thing? Because it almost forced us to reevaluate a lot of not just our photographic sensibilities, but the way that we kind of approach... Well, how have we approached life, really? Yeah, 100%. I mean, it seemed... When COVID was at its peak, it seemed trivial to me to be coming onto YouTube or writing books about art. You know, it seemed such a trivial thing to be talking about when people were dying and having to deal with grief and having to losing grandparents or family members or friends to this horrible disease who they couldn't even mourn, they couldn't go to funerals, they couldn't go and reunite with people. And it just seemed really trivial to me to be writing and talking about art and creativity. But I realized how fundamentally important creativity is to our mental health. You know, to have that outlet, some people aren't very comfortable in talking about their feelings or their emotions, but they can put that into a photograph. And so I realized that there was a huge amount of therapy associated with creativity. But going back to your actual question, yes, when you lose all of your income, essentially all of your income, in the blink of an eye, I was actually on a workshop when the first lockdown was announced. That's a great idea. And to convince people to go home. You know, I had to basically say to an American and a couple of Australians, you need to leave. You need to go back to your home country before they close the borders. So, yes, there's two types of people in the world. There's people who don't deal with change well and struggle at times like this. You know, when they lose their main income stream. And then there's other people who look on it as an opportunity to reinvent themselves or to look at alternatives. And that was the course that my wife and I took to try and do something that we thought was valuable. Because when you run a business, a photography business, if you're not passionate about it, if you're not caring about the outcomes, then it's a pretty shallow existence. So, yeah, I mean, actually, ironically, I've enjoyed it. The business side of things. It's interesting because Ravan has asked questions like how do you make a living out of landscape photography? And of course, that seems to be because you would have thought, I think, from an outsider's perspective. You sort of go, oh, well, COVID and stuff that landscape photography is obviously, for the most part, outdoors. So you're not dependent. Whereas I ran a studio. So people coming in and even prior to the lockdown the first half of March, I was like, I think I had about 20 cancellations in that first little week and a half. It was just like, oh, you know. But of course, with the landscape, you said, oh, it shouldn't affect one's income. But of course, it does beg a wider question. As a landscape photographer, what is the bread and butter in terms of being a working professional? Right, well, that's changed massively over the last 20 years since I've been involved in the business. When I first came into it, there was a very strong stock business going out there. People were still buying prints. There was far less photographers in the marketplace in every genre. And getting your work seen by collectors or people who are wanting to use your images commercially was an easier thing to do. By 2010, 2012, that number of players in the market had increased exponentially. They'd probably trebled in the previous decade, if not four times, 400%. And it became increasingly difficult. And as social media grew the marketplace and as people started to travel more for their landscape photography or any photography really, it just, the number of outlets to make money from photography diminished. Magazines stopped paying for photographs, stock died. You used to get thousands of dollars for the use of an image and now you get pennies or cents. So the market for stock is gone. So really what happened was the only way to really make an income as a professional landscape photographer was through education. Either direct face-to-face workshops, which is the majority of what people do, and or writing eBooks or producing video series, educational videos, because the IP in our heads turned out to be the most valuable thing. Wasn't the images that was our IP? So what happened with COVID was that the workshops stopped. So for anybody who had a successful workshop business, it just disappeared. Like I said, I was probably doing 25 to 25, 26, 27 weeks a year, which is quite a lot. And we made a very, very good living from that. So I had to start writing books more prolifically, releasing videos more prolifically, doing mentoring online, one-to-ones, that type of thing. So the whole business just changed online. In terms of getting out into the landscape to be a photographer, that was also heavily restricted as well with the travel restrictions and the local travel restrictions in terms of how far you could go away from home and so forth. So we have been locked down more or less up until just the spring, I suppose, April, May. We were locked down here for more or less over a year and barely left our local area, which is very beautiful, luckily. As I said, I'm reasonably familiar with the West Coast. Although my time in Scotland was mostly East Coast. But that, I think, segues very nicely into one of the things that when I first came across the channel, I was listening to you, is I am half Scottish myself and I have a soft spot for Scotland, I think it's fair to say. And my maternal grandfather was actually kind of along with my father. I think the person who kick-started my photography career and with that also, I've got very fond memories of when we were younger, I'm going to visit him up in Glasgow, he lived in Glasgow, but we would then go off to the Trossacks and places like that. So for people who are not familiar with Scotland, the Trossacks are, I wouldn't say wilderness area, but it's a nice kind of rural area, it's very scenic and it's very lovely. And that's sort of, so when I spoke to you, when I listened to what you talked and stuff, it reminded me somewhat of my grandpa Willie, because you can't, of course, you can't be anything but a grandpa Willie canny with his name like that from rather good, and it was nice to see somebody who was talking about landscape photography from a sense of being connected to the land as opposed to somebody who's using the land as a tool almost on which to dump some processing, if you want to sort of call it in that sort of perspective. And that's something that I've lost, I haven't really done much landscape photography for a while, although when I was a student, that's what I wanted to specialize in. And if you were talking about, I think you mentioned something on your channel about five triggers, some of that nature. And I forget one of them, but one of them was about, is it connection or an atmosphere? Atmosphere is the word, because obviously from my recollection, you talked about sort of color and some other things. Do you want to run through those for the guys who are not familiar with them? Sure, yeah, how long you got? This is, my whole attitude towards creativity is that your life is best when you're passionate about things. So finding something that you're passionate in just makes everything not work. It just makes it feel so wonderful. So basically I had been making photographs up to about 2016, I'd become a real scholar of landscape photography to the point that I had read all the classic texts. I had spoken with so many of my peers. I mean, I'm connected to pretty much the greatest landscape photographers in the world. Working today, I'm part of that peer group. And I became very adept at going into the landscape and finding what I was looking for, which were classic, pretty aesthetically pleasing landscapes and then having a certain amount of skill in front of the computer to make them look believable, three-dimensional and real. But I didn't know why I was making photographs beyond seeking external validation and popularity. If you want to grow a business, you make popular photographs. It's a very simple situation. Whether you're a wedding photographer or a portrait photographer, you make successful photographs and you become a popular person to make photographs. But I felt a bit of a void in that. I've always challenged myself quite a lot to try and be the best version of myself I can be. And that's a work in progress. I don't profess to being the best version yet, but I'm working on it. So anyway, in 2017 early, I went to the Gobi Desert for the first time and was in this very alien landscape at minus 26 degrees Celsius, camping out for weeks at a time. And making traditional landscape photography in that environment is really, really challenging. So I got into this very innate and intuitive style of shooting. Whereas if something caught my eye, I would point my camera at it without analysis, without thought, without rationalizing it, without overthinking it. I would just literally see, shoot, and engage in a very intuitive way. So over the subsequent year or so, I was back in the Gobi Desert a few more times and ultimately went seven times. And I developed this concept called the Five Triggers and ended up writing three books about it. And the Five Triggers are luminosity, contrast, geometry, color, and atmosphere. So each of those triggers has attributes that attract our attention. So if you're walking through any landscape, any environment, if you're sitting in your room right now and you see what, if you notice what catches your eye, if you notice what engages your attention, it is going to be luminosity, contrast, color, geometry, or atmosphere. Obviously you don't get a lot of atmosphere in a house, but when you're outside, there's a lot of it. So flowing water, mist, rain, snow, fog, even depth of field is an atmospheric. If you think about Boca in a portrait, a blurry background creates atmosphere. Yeah, it doesn't have to be rain or fog, it can be depth of field. So that's an atmospheric element that adds a feeling. So what I did over the years was I attributed feelings and emotions and the consequences of how we engage with those Five Triggers. And the way I see the world now is purely, I don't see subjects. I don't go out looking for compositions. I don't go out looking for pretty pictures. I go out into the landscape as Alistair Ben today and I interact with the landscape as it is now. And that creates a very unique set of circumstances. The landscape is unique in that time. I am on a timeline and I'm kind of unique at that time. And when those two things collide then interesting creative things can happen as long as you don't have all these grand ideas about what you're going to do every time you go into the landscape. So I think I've kind of developed a very intuitive, relaxed self-development, self-actualizing, non-judgmental, quite accepting relationship with the landscape so that when I do notice something I kind of understand why I'm noticing it and how I can arrange that within the frame to capture the kind of essence of that emotional reaction with the landscape. It's interesting you talk about obviously, because one of the things I think when people ask photographers, certainly people are new to photography, they sort of say, what are you looking for when you go out to photograph? And I was doing an article about Alex Webb, I think it was, who said that he doesn't really go out with any sort of preconceived ideas. And that seems to be a theme that runs through quite a lot of photographers is that if you go out with a preconceived idea or something specific in your mind that you close yourself off to so many opportunities that could present themselves because you are not looking for them, you're looking for a very specific thing. And that's kind of, I think it's one of the most important lessons for new photographers to learn is that for a lot of more established photographers, people lose a little bit more control of their technical aspects, let's call it that, is that we are probably more in tune with what's going on around us because we're not consumed by the idea of having to think about the technical aspect of photography. And that kind of, I wish more people would think about that and that's why I like the approach that you take on your channel is that it's not necessarily about post-processing. There are other channels that talk about the process of taking a photograph, so your landscape. And half of that is the processing side of things. And I know that you do have done some work on post-processing but from the videos that I've watched yours, it's a very small element in the grander scheme of things. And Alan was talking here, he's asking, what's your view on post-processing? Because he sees a lot of bland landscapes that are really kind of an exercise in what we sort of call sort of lightroom gymnastics rather than seeing the image. It's kind of like a polishing a turd kind of thing that what are you trying to do? So what are your sort of thoughts on that? Okay, first and foremost, I think people can practice photography any way they want. It can be an incredibly rewarding experience to go into the landscape with a plan, with a vision of what you want to achieve. This word, pre-visualization, that got bandied around for quite a few years became quite a popular concept. People can practice photography any way they want as long as they enjoy it and as long as it gives meaning to their lives. Now, if that means fabricating landscapes, if it gives them pleasure, then that's fine, but we have to consider the viewer and whether they're being deceived by that. I know a lot of land photographers who talk about this sort of implied contract of trust between the photographer and the viewer. And I kind of adhere to that somewhat now, bearing in mind I've been through my funky phase in the mid-2010s, you know, it was very, it was very invoked to do that. We've all been there. Because you want to push your boundaries and don't forget that it's an evolution of the art form where we were pushing boundaries at the time because it was impossible to, we couldn't do what we wanted to do because of the limitations of the tool. And then we got to the stage where we overcame the limitations of the tool to the point where you could do anything. And that's where the morality and the ethics came in. In terms of processing, of course, every photograph that I make begins its life in camera and then ends up in Lightroom and then, of course, Photoshop if required. But what I focus on with processing is what I call emotional processing. We're understanding that everything we do to an image has a consequence and it changes the articulation of that photograph. So you can make, as Alan said, you can take a photograph that was a very bland, low contrast scene that had a very calm and possibly melancholic feel to it and you can change the white balance and the contrast and the clarity in all sorts of added light and whatever and turn it into a celebration of something else. So the consequence is just whether we really listen to the photograph. My argument, I think, is I responded to something in the landscape that made me feel a certain way and therefore the content in its own right has some kind of voice. It has its own intention. And I think as an artist, it's up to us to listen to that voice, understand how that marries with our own perceptions and our own feelings and our own metaphors, et cetera, and how those two things can combine. Can we add something to the landscape or can the landscape add something to us to become greater than some of the parts? Can we, creativity shouldn't have boundaries and creativity shouldn't have rules. We should be allowed to do what we want within reason. I also don't believe that we have to declare everything that we do in our photography. I don't believe that we have an explicit need to articulate our existence. I certainly agree with you on that idea. This idea that, you know, telling everybody exactly what you do. Because then, when you end up, you end up with some of your like, you know, Hansel Adams giving you a whole folio of explanations next to the image, saying, I did this, that, the next thing, you know, and the same goes for paintings. You know, the great painters don't discuss with the viewer the underpainting and all the techniques that they've employed to make you feel whatever emotion is that you feel through your photograph. And I just wonder if we, sometimes on that side of things, slightly overthink about the honesty in photography. I think less so possibly in landscape and portrait. I think that's more of a conversation that happens and certainly in photojournalism, where I think the element of trust is far more important. 100%. Yeah, whereas obviously you can see, you know, there's pictures that come up on Chromecast and stuff like the little screensavers. You know, some of those pictures, you look at them and you go, okay, well, this is obviously complete fabrication. And that's fine because they made it. But you sort of look and you go, well, you've got the sun over there and the sun over there and it's like, so we've kind of thrown out reality. But again, you know, it's fine. It's what people want it, how they want to express themselves. And that is kind of, I think, an important aspect that there are certainly some fundamental rules that we all learn as beginners, you know, about how to use our equipment, about how to, you know, create something that's not just a complete mess. But we get to a point where we really need to kind of, not worry about it too much, just throw off those rules and say, you know, okay, fine, we'll take them as what they are, which is suggestions on how to do something in a certain way. And then we can start expressing ourselves. So I can see, you don't, I don't know if you necessarily agree with that. I can sort of see, see if that's there. If you give a child some paints and a canvas, they have no grounding in art theory. They have no grounding in composition theory. They have no grounding in society's expectations of aesthetics. So if you give a child a blank canvas and paint, depending on that child and the age of that child, they're going to paint or express themselves, however they feel they want to express themselves. And there's a beauty in that. There's an absolute perfection of innocence and unpolluted creativity. And then what happens to children is they get educated and confined and categorized and graded. And then they go through their lives where they have to find peer groups and find partners. And then they might go on to further education or into the workplace. And then you have to get on with your colleagues or your classmates. And it's a challenge, you know, growing up as a challenge. And if someone said to me, Alastair, you can go back to being 14 tomorrow. I'd have to seriously think about whether I would want to do that or not, you know, to go back 40 years, you know, to have to go through that again because I was a very sensitive child. Bitcoin is going to be huge, by the way, so invest heavily in Bitcoin. Yes, yes. My pocket money would be great if it was Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah. It is a thing, you know, because that raises another topic, you know, where people talk about, oh, you know, learn to see like a child. And you can't, because obviously you cannot experience things like a child because we have, whether we want to or not, the emotional world that we built up over our lifetimes. We can't just disregard it. You can't just switch it off and go, I'm going to, you know, because you only experienced something for the first time once. You can't go back to just wipe all that experience off. So, you know, it's interesting that people sort of fall back on these things that actually when you think about them, they make no sense because you can't, you know. The thing about, yes, we can't go back to being children. You know, we, you know, I've got 54 heavy years laying on my shoulders these days, you know. So, you know, we've seen a lot, we've done a lot, we've experienced a lot, we've thought a lot, we've considered things a lot. And I think that's part of our development and art and creativity are inexplicably linked to our own development. And I think to go back a couple of steps to one of the things we talked about in terms of image manipulation or making images that are going to, whether they're intentionally deceiving or whatever, it comes down to motive. Why are you making that photograph? And I think a lot of those photographs, and this is only from my own perspective in terms of why I made them, when I made them, was popularity. It was popularity and ego. I wanted to be seen to be a competent photographer and to make that type of magnificent, awe-inspiring, beautifully rendered scenes of semi-fiction was seen to be a skillful photographer. Now, that was for me, personally. Now, many of my friends have moved away from that style of photography now because we're more interested in introspection, personal development and understanding our innate and intuitive relationship with the landscape. We understand, ironically, that what sells today is individuality. So there's that shift, but skipping back forward now to the childlike thing, there are other attributes of being children that don't require immaturity, but there are certain attributes, such as judgment and acceptance and inquisitiveness and enthusiasm that we tend to lose somewhat as we get older. You know, we tend to be serious about things. We're thinking about our pensions or our 401ks or what our kids are going to go on doing. My son's 27 now. You know, so his life is very important to me. So we change our priorities, but when I'm in the landscape, I am a child. I'm childlike, inquisitive, non-judgmental. I'm very accepting. If the rain's pouring down and I'm driven to go somewhere, I'm fine with that. You know, I'll find something that excites me. I'd imagine that living in Scotland, you kind of have to be fine with the rain coming down. Funnily enough, the last couple of years, we've had some really amazing spells of weather. Not for the last two months. It's persistently rained. It's one of the things. So you talk about obviously being in the landscape and being as a child and seeing, I don't know, would you say seeing in a childlike way or just kind of having more of a childlike sense of awe and wonder about the things that are acting upon your senses as a human being in that landscape? Well, something you touched on earlier was if you go into the landscape with a vision of what you want to achieve and you don't find it, then many people are going to... I mean, people have limited time. People have limited time that they can go into the landscape. They get limited opportunities. The fiction that professional landscape photographers spend their entire time in the landscape is a fiction. I think I've been out five times this year, because I'm spending more of my time sat in front of the computer writing books and so forth. So when I'm in the landscape, I don't want to think about making photographs. I want to think about nothing. I want to get away from thinking. So I think that landscape photography or any type of photography, whether it's macro or still life or architecture, there's an opportunity for us to explore other parts of ourselves. Now, consciously, we're more influenced by our education and our experiences. Unconsciously, we are less so. You have a much more intuitive relationship with things when you're not thinking about your relationship with it. You're just there. So I think what I like to make photographs of are the things that catch my attention on any given day. So if tomorrow I threw my camera bag in the back of the truck and drove off into the forests and unpacked and went for a walk, it would be something would have to ask me to point my camera at it. And it will be luminosity, color, contrast, geometry, atmosphere. It's one of those five things or a combination of those five things. So bright, warm light is energetic, cool, dark, moody, oppressive scenes feel differently. Now, if I'm in a very introspective mood, I might be more drawn to the melancholic moody scenes or a bright, magnificent sunrise might change my mood and make me more light-hearted and elastic for that. So we have an ability to find our own inner landscape, side in the landscape, and equally the landscape can guide us and change our mood. The analogy I use often is if you've just been dumped by your partner, like when we were kids and you've been dumped, and you walk out of the house and it's a beautiful sunny day and the birds are singing and there's fluffy clouds and it's just poppy. You look at that landscape and you resent it for its joy because your world has been crushed. So it doesn't matter what the landscape looks like. And equally, if you've just fallen in love and you're walking down through the pouring rain, and I did that in Edinburgh funnily enough, driving through the middle of Edinburgh in an open-top MG when I was 20 years old, with a girl by my side getting poured with rain, listening to Bon Jovi really loud on the stereo, getting soaked and we were laughing our heads off. So it's not the landscape that we take our landscapes with us into the landscape. Our inner landscape is the thing that's going to dictate our creativity on a given day. And this is pretty much what I bang on about on my channel and in my eBooks all the time is this slightly different take on our relationship with our art and our creativity. It's not about going out to recreate something that we've seen or to find a template that's gonna make a pretty photograph. It's to go out to explore the landscape from a very personal level. It's interesting you mentioned, I was touched on when you said they're about template, because obviously in the modern world, there are lots of photographers who sell processes, effects, whatever you want to call them, to recreate their look, their photographs. And I think that certainly for people who are probably new to the art form, gives the impression that it can be very much a checkbox exercise, that you need to just kind of find this and then you put that one with this and you put it that with that. And that leads to this false impression that you just need to find some of those things and you've created a good photograph. When of course the real element that's making an image have some depth and some substance to it is this, is what we bring as a photographer to our photographs, no matter whether you photograph a landscape or portraiture or what have you. It's how, as you mentioned, this thing that we are photographing is influencing us and how we respond to this thing that we are photographing because that and that's why you run workshops, you know what it's like, you have five or 10 people all photographing, the same thing and you have five or 10 pretty different results. And that of course is the joy of photography that we do all see the world through our own unique lens. And there's, I don't want to get on a soap box because we know it's a Sunday night. If I get on a soap box and I'll be up here and you won't be able to see, you'll just see my fancy sweater. And, you know, but it's like, you know, wish more photographers would just kind of have the courage to a little bit, just be a bit more free, to free to express themselves in their own way without worrying about what other people are going to say about their photography. You know, and that's kind of, it's a lesson that took me a long, long, long time to learn, was to not be afraid of if somebody says, hey, your photo's crappy, man, it's, you know, it's, so what? You know, it's not for them, it's for us. I think that like I said earlier, you know, people can practice photography in any way they want, just the same. I mean, you can't see it in the screen. I've got five guitars behind me, which I play. And we, there's a big difference between people who are trying to make a living as photographers. And the only reason I articulate all of this stuff so much is because I'm teaching. Everything I do as a photographer, I do intuitively. And I push my boundaries and I study and I look at things and I think about things. And, you know, that's my definition of being a professional photographer is putting in the time to your craft and then thinking about why you do things. You know, that's the definition. Now, amateur photographers can do that, of course, as well, but they don't have to justify it. They don't have to articulate it. They don't have to tell people why they're doing it that way. So I think at the end of the day, the big difficulty is, and using a musical analogy, I have some very beautiful guitars behind me. They don't make you a great guitar player, you know, going into a store and spending $50,000 on Jimi Hendrix's Strat does not make you play like Jimi Hendrix. Any more so than walking into a camera store and buying a brand new phase one is going to make you a better photographer than using your iPhone. Yeah, yeah. That's just a fact of life. But the illusion for people who are beginning their photographic journey is that all you need to do is buy a nice camera, walk out into the landscape and point it at the landscape and something beautiful will happen. And that's just not the fact. Now, my channel and my approach to education needs to be very realistic with that, that photography is a skill set that if you think of my guitar playing point of view, if you want to be a guitar virtuoso, you need lots of technique. You need to know lots and lots of scales and chords and techniques and how to pick and how to do all sorts of different weird things and have effects and nice amps and all of that type of stuff. If you just want to play like the Sex Pistols, all you need is attitude, you know? Three chords and go for my band. Yeah, yeah. Three guitars and broken glass. It was pretty much their approach. And it was the same with Nirvana. When Nirvana started out, it was just attitude. And whereas if you listen to Genesis or Pink Floyd or Yes or all of those prog bands from the 70s, there was so much technique, but it didn't necessarily make the music any better. It's just different. So you can make photographs with tons of technique, you can make photographs with no technique, but I've polled my audience many, many times over the last few years, really for the last decade. And many, many people are looking to discover their creativity, you know, releasing your creativity, finding your unique voice seems to be a very strong driver for anybody who gets into the arts. Now, the only question I'm going to ask people to consider is going out and taking a photograph, putting it into Lightroom and hitting a preset button and then putting that JPEG on Twitter or Insta or whatever, isn't creativity, you know, because you haven't made creative choices apart from what you've pointed your camera at, which is part of it. So that may be a very creative composition. I could see a large portion of Instagram has now, for instance, exploded with hate. But yes, you're right, it isn't. The simple act of sticking a filter on something is not really creative because you're taking something that's made by somebody else and sticking on a thing and saying, hey, look, I've made art. And then, of course, you open up yourself to these discussions of people saying, but what is art? You know, and that's a whole, I think that's another stream for another time. But it is a creative endeavor and I do sort of struggle, certainly internally, with the idea about what is the difference between, I don't know, it seems like a mistake, right? Let's call it a mistake. Something that isn't right and then something that I've done on purpose, for example. I don't know if that's, sorry, because my haggis, my cat, is now decided off-screen to start, yeah, yeah, to start rummaging in the box. So he threw me a curveball when I was sitting there. But this kind of thing, you know, a lot of people will go, oh, look, I don't need to care about rules. I don't need to care about X, Y, and Z things because I'm being creative. And so whatever I wanna do is creative and that's, I suppose, fair to a point. But then they sort of, they ask me, how can I improve? How can I become more creative? And then, as soon as you start talking about rules and ideas and, you know, and I was about to say formulas, but formulas is kind of the wrong word, but you just try to give them some guidance and how they could improve in various ways. There's quite often, certainly my own limited experience, some pushback, because they don't like being told that something they did is not kind of possibly going down the route that they wanted it to go. They think that it's going down. Did you get that in your workshop at all? No, no, because the way I run workshops, here's an analogy, and I've used this before and I find it's in terms of creativity and understanding how your unique creativity exists. And this is the fastest track to finding your own creativity that I can think of, which is, and I've done this on workshops, which is, everyone who's listening to this right now, we hit the coast, we go to the beach, we leave the cameras in the car, and instead of having a camera, you have a notebook and a pen, and you can wander wherever you like, for as long as you like, and the only guidance you have is that every time you notice something that catches your eye, engages your interest, or makes you feel something, you write it down in your notebook. So if it's a thing. So it's like a physical, just like a little drawing, or just an idea, or yeah. Just a little sketch or a little note, just a little note, just something like beautiful red starfish in a rock pool, or the sound of the waves makes me feel very energised, or the light makes me feel very melancholic, or there's a dead thing on the beach that makes me feel sad. Anything, anything you notice. So people, let's say we spend two hours at the beach making notes. We all head back into this big room because there's hundreds of people listening, and we sit down and start comparing notes. Who has the best notes? Yes, yeah. So how can anybody judge somebody else's note? How can I, let's say Alex, you've been sitting on a rock and you've been looking at the way that water's been rushing round some rocks, and you've been fascinated by that, and you've been talking about shapes, and flow, and energy, and all of these different metaphors that come to your mind when you see this, and all the different feelings, and all the different aesthetics that you've experienced. And other people have been going, looking at patterns and seaweed, or the one has been looking at the sun rising behind the giant, you know, a beautiful sea stack, or there's some, whatever. Yeah, yeah. Every single note, if it's important to you, that is where your creativity lies. Yeah? If it's like, oh, well, Alastair's been to this beach a hundred times, he's been making notes with, for 20 years, he's such an experienced note-taker, his notes are better. That's not the case. It's just not the case. You know, it's like someone picking up a guitar and playing something like Dave Gilmore, him picking up a guitar and playing something that's so empty and spacious, and then Joe Satriani picks it up and plays a thousand miles an hour. Yeah, yeah. Who's the better guitar player? They're just saying different things. And all a camera is, is a notebook. It's a very expensive, fancy notebook. And instead of making notes on a pen, sorry, on a piece of paper with a pen, we're making notes with our cameras. Yeah, yeah. Individual frame is a moment in our life when we were engaged and we were somehow outside of ourselves engaging with something in front of us that was somehow speaking to us and making. We chose, you know. I've always said we start our lives with a blank book and we have a finite number of pages and we don't know how many there are. If we did know how many there are, we would live different lives. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely, it's a very profound thing, a thing actually. We have an empty book and our lives are filling the pages of that book. So if you go to the coast to make photographs, you better think that you're writing that day's diary. A time that you're engaging with something, if you're being frustrated by it, then there's a different perspective that might allow you to appreciate that moment for something better. It's interesting you mention that because you've talked, obviously, your example uses the coast or the coastline as a setting for the photography. Kitty cats, sorry, go away. They're not really, they're not trained very well. And they've chosen tonight to be otherwise. Yeah, so you mentioned obviously you're being in a setting of a seascape or a seashore. And I've always found those actually extremely difficult mostly because I'm not really drawn towards the sea as an element. I'm more a kind of hills or mountains kind of person. That's the landscape I prefer to be in. And I've often approached being in a place from a, now you have to do a certain type of photograph. So seascape, it wouldn't naturally involve the sea. That's my knee-jerk reaction to being in a place. And because obviously the sea on a seascape is the most dominant element, I think that's probably a fair thing to say. And I've always kind of just stopped there. I've never really explored, but now that as you were talking, I was thinking about the times that I have been at the coast and I've been actively taking photographs. And I think about the things that I have missed probably not so much in the wider, you know, the sea and the sky and all that sort of stuff, but the minutiae of what's around it that is more in keeping with the sort of thing that I like, that the rocks and the texture and the groins are never groins, groins, you know, the wooden bits. Yes, groins. Yeah, yeah. Those wooden bits and concrete breakwaters and things of that nature. You know, they are more kind of in line with the sort of things that appeal to me that sort of stand out. And I think it's a good lesson for everybody in any sort of photography is to, there is an overall theme about the thing that you're photographing will be a landscape or documentary or portraiture or whatever, but is to not forget that there is so much more there than just the surface element. And it's kind of about, I think, somewhat of our jobs to look beyond the obvious, to explore the possibilities of the scene in a way that connects with us and it moves us. And it's possibly what, you know, why certainly I've found in the part of a lot of, a source of a lot of frustration is because I'm trying to almost fit a photographic square peg into a round hole and, you know, not being true to myself. You know, that's kind of, I'm just gonna, in case you've joined us quickly, I'm just gonna do a little PSA. Alistair Ben is joining us here from expressive photography. He was pointing out to me a couple of weeks ago, I think, on one of these live streams. And yeah, I'm very pleased to have you here, Alistair. It's awesome. It's nice to get such a different, you know, sort of perspective. Well, it's certainly one that is, you know, I think in line with a lot of the way that people on the channel sort of thing. So if you're not following Alice's channel, there is a link both in the description box below and then in the tickle along the bottom. His channel is absolutely worth checking out some of his pictures of the Iceland. And what was the name of the mountain, I guess? Kirkafell. Kirkafell. There we go. I think we've all kind of seen some of the pictures, but Alice has got a couple of pictures up there that are different to the norm. I think the story of you climbing into a little ice cave to take a picture is quite nice. Anyway, so if you have just joined us, so that's what we are talking about here. So we've got some questions that have come up in the chat while we've been talking. And we've got here, let's see. So Aranakas says they're late. Well, that's, I don't know, is there gonna have to, 10 lines, I feel like it's at all. So John is asking Alice, do you, and we'll direct these towards you, do you print your own work? And if you rotate your wall display, so basically, do you print your own work and do you actually put it up on your own walls? Well, I know John. John is one of the people who's on my expressive photographer as a community. Actually, I think it was John. John, was it you who suggested Alice to me? I think it may have been. So if it is, anyway, thank you, John. Yeah, thanks, John. Thank you for bringing us together, man. I was going to lean this way. Oh, yeah. Yes, we do print. We live in an old church. It's from 1875, it's a very old house. And we have lots and lots of wall space, but we've been renovating. Now, I am an avid collector of other people's work. We've got a number of artists' photographs on our walls because I believe in supporting artists and I love their work. So it's just an automatic thing for me to buy prints from. And they're all my friends, so it's really supporting my friends. We are going to have my preferences for very large pieces. So when I have printed my own work, it tends to be big, you know, one and a half, one and a half meters or something like that. So sort of six feet, you know, up to six feet square, perhaps. We do like big, big. Six foot square. Yeah, that I think that falls into the realm of reasonably big. Well, the ceilings in our kitchen are seven metres high, though. So we've got OK. OK, so you're not going to stick an egg by ten on the wall there, are you? No, no, so we tend to. So the stuff I do print. We do sell prints on basically on Inquiry. I'm not making a big deal of promoting prints at the moment. I've got a book that I'm working on, which will be coming with a deluxe version with a print, which I'll be doing all of those myself. OK, cool. They'll be they'll be so. So, yes, in terms of, yes, I do print, but in this house, we don't have any of my work on the wall at the moment. Now, my wife is also an incredible photographer. And so there's going to be quite a lot of competition, because I like her images. And she images as is natural in a household. So, yeah, but most of them, because of the size that they're going to be, there's not going to be a huge amount of rotation, and which is why we're really holding back, because if you're going to put something, yeah, when you talk in that kind of size, it is. It's also just from a financial point, it is, you know, it's it's a big, big thing. And so I have it. OK, cool, cool. Yes, Andy has been asking a couple of questions. I think he's quite keen to know is that as he's asking, like, what is what is one image that you've taken you're most proud of, you know? That that's a hugely difficult question for me, actually, because my relationship with my work is quite transient. In that there's almost a part of me that looks on making a photograph, almost like performance art, you know, it's it's a. There's usually quite a long period of time between taking a photograph and processing a photograph. And that's just the dynamics of being a professional photographer. You know, you might make a photograph in January, and I might not process it until October of the following year. And so I process images that speak to me who I am right now. So if I opened Lightroom, I'd scroll through and something we'd just say now. And so it would almost be a very spontaneous thing. And those moments, once they're passed, I can look back on them. And I appreciate all of them, really. There's been a few in my career that have proven to be very, very significant. The cover of my my night photography book is a very beautiful photograph from the north coast of Spain of these jagged, fang like sea stacks. And it was a night shot taken under a full moon. That that image has a lot of significance to me. And I took another photograph in Tibet. Looking out towards the Himalaya and again under moonlight. And there was just fog drifting in front of the the the mountains, creating these incredible layers and emotional textures. And because it was Tibet, I've got this really strong. But the body of work that has the most significance to me is my Gobi desert images, which I'm working on the book called Out of Darkness. Because I've spoken about this a huge amount on my channel is that for many, many years I suffered from depression, not chronic, you know, not like sort of not being able to get out of bed, but living under a shadow, you know, really living under a shadow of fear, a lot of fear and panic. And the images from the Gobi desert healed me to the point where I haven't suffered anything like that for over three years now and have a very, very different relationship. And my mental health has massively improved. And I'm just generally happier and just much more accepting and non-judgmental. And I don't put so much pressure on myself. So the images from the Gobi desert are an evolution from darkness into light. So that's a pretty, I couldn't pinpoint the same. Yeah, I think it's always tricky when somebody says, what's your favourite image? And it's a how long is a piece of string question because they all mean different things to us. And John's asking about me printing my own work. And one of the things is that for the longest time, because I was doing lots of printing for other people because of the nature of what I was doing in the studio. You know, when you're when you're doing, you know, 10, 15 family sessions a week and then processing those sessions and having them all printed and getting them all frames up here, you find that there's not much time to have your own stuff printed. So I kind of fell out. I would go through getting prints made for things like Taylor Wesson Portrait Awards. And that that was quite that was quite rewarding because I was also making 40 inch prints, which which of individual people and families tend not to do 40 inches of their kids. So so that was great to see work that I'd taken specifically for things like Taylor Wesson to be done. I think what would be a reasonable portrait size, you know, because the figures are in there was one to one. And that's, you know, that that was an extreme rewarding thing from my own personal photography that I take day to day. I went through a long period of not printing any of it because I think like Alistair, like you kind of touched on. I had a long period of feeling uncomfortable with my with my mental state regarding photography is that on the one hand, I was I was running a student. I was doing I was doing what a photographer was supposed to do. But at the same time, I was suffering immensely from a quite crippling sense of, you know, imposter syndrome, which was which is always kind of looked, I think for a lot of creative people, there is this this idea and it looks around. And one of the ways that I I sort of dealt with that one of the symptoms, rather, was that I didn't focus too much on my personal work. I didn't print it. I didn't spend too much time looking. I would take it and I would take the images and then not almost want to see them because I felt myself in a very odd place that I would look at them and go, I find that really uncomfortable because, A, I think it's not as good as it could be or not as good as I think I should be. But also, on the other hand, I would have this thing going like I'm a lot better than I'm giving myself credit for. So it was a lot of tension. A lot of, you know, this kind of weird creative thing. So I kind of just, you know, just I had a very love-hate relationship with my personal works. I didn't really print it. Having said all that, though, and part of the my growth out of that issue has been with the photographic eye was starting this channel and having not a platform to talk about and stuff, but it's made me reconnect my love affair with photography, certainly from the wider sense of things. And through sharing with, you know, sharing with what are you guys? What are you guys up there? It has made me a lot happier about my own photography, probably because, as they said, the best way to learn is to teach. You know, that's that's always a good, a good thing to do. So now that we've moved into this very large house, he says there are lots of bare walls in. I think, you know, yeah. So I now have I have a similar issue to have, so I have lots of big walls that need work. So I have I have some of the things that I have salvaged from bits and bobs over the years, but I think I'm going to have to go on a and an odyssey to start finding work to print, because I'm not really going to stop printing up pictures of other people's families on my walls, which is just kind of like odd, you know, and is it so Lux or Lex? I can't say Lux Luther, I think he's say Lux Leather. Sorry, so we're 20 by 30 of one of my images I printed and framed. So that's the I think that that's great. I think, you know, anybody who is watching is who hasn't made prints of their own works. And I mean like proper prints or say proper prints, but the sizable print. You are you missing a trick. It is a very different experience, isn't it, Alistair, to to see your work physical and at a reasonable size than it is on a screen. Yeah, for sure. And again, you know, I think I think social media has got a lot to answer for in terms of how photography has changed over the last 20 to 30 years. My wife and I are avid photo book collectors. We have literally hundreds of photo books in the house. And very quickly, do you have a favourite knee jerk reaction straight off? Bruce Percy, Helandi. There we go. Bruce Percy, because somebody was asking if you have a favourite monograph. So that's Bruce. Bruce Percy is a fellow Scott from Edinburgh. OK, yeah, yeah. And is a wonderful landscape photographer, truly wonderful. Are your monographs mostly landscape or do you kind of like genres? My wife is a much broader aficionado than I am. She likes a lot of cultural work and travel and, you know, more, more looking at social issues and human geography and things like that. Whereas I am a landscape photographer. There's something about that. I grew up in the landscape and I think in the landscape and I work in the landscape and I believe that I have an inner landscape. So I like looking at the aesthetics of landscapes because there's a resonance to my own inner landscape. I understand the emotional connection to that. But, you know, like I said, you know, we have hundreds of photo books and we sit and we look at them. You know, we don't just buy them to support the artist and stick them on a shelf and forget about them. You know, we take them out and we sit and stick some nice music on and we sit and we look through photo books. I mean, it's something we do. And seeing work in print is so different for me. Absolutely. It's such a different experience, isn't it? Yeah, it's do you not think it's even just a tactile nature of holding a book? Well, it's what it represents as well. You know, the I mean, I have a kindle because I travel or used to travel anyway, you know, because having hundreds of thousands of books in the house isn't very practical. If you want to move from it, it's not very practical. But yeah, I mean, you know, a print is. It's a physical manifestation. And the thing about it is they demand engagement. You know, you can see so much more in a print. You can experience a print. The the choice of paper, the choice of the the processing, the choice of presentation, all of those things have a huge bearing on the experience. Whereas Instagram teaches us to to not consume in the same way. You cannot get the essence of a photograph in two seconds. You cannot experience what the artist is trying to convey to you in a fraction of a second. I've always said there's three three levels of engagement, three tiers of engagement. The first one is instantaneous and we have no control over it. It's pure gut reaction, like, don't like. You see something you like it or you don't like it. You hear a piece of music, you like it or you don't like it. You meet someone, you like them, you don't like them. It's it's an instantaneous thing with photographs. The second tier of engagement is pause. You know, it's there's something about this. It's if I don't and you can do it with images you don't like just as easily as the ones you do. Why don't you like it? What is it about it that's rubbing you up the wrong way? Is it a technical flaw or is it an aesthetic flaw? And then with images you do like that level of engagement can proceed to the third level where you are moved to the extent that it can change your life. You know, think about an image of Kirkefeel. It made hundreds of thousands of people want to go to Iceland. Yes, yeah, indeed. So that changes people's lives, you know, making a journey, going somewhere, you know, earning money to travel because of a photograph you've seen. So, yeah, I believe 100 percent in printing work. And I believe everyone should do it, you know, even if it's sending sending JPEGs off to Bay Foto or Loxley in the UK, you know, send them off, get them sent the costs. You're trying to support Scottish Scottish industry with Loxley. But it is a it is a thing. I think, you know, it's so many people do not experience physical prints and and and don't print things out. And and and, you know, basically in our personal lives, we've stopped printing things. You know, it's only now that my, you know, my son came along that I said to my wife, I said, you need all those pictures on your phone that you take of him once a month. Go and get them printed. They don't cost you hardly anything. You know, I mean, what's, you know, those snap fish prints and stuff, you know, they want like, you know, 10p for half a million prints or something. At least get them printed, because then we have them. We have them as tangible physical objects. And and I think that there's possibly a misconception, certainly about people when they're new to photography. Once they start to get to know a little bit about photography, is that they they see somebody talking about making big prints and doing this and doing that and, you know, and get hit up in color spaces and and, you know, all these things instead of just going, do you know what? Yeah, take the JPEG, send it to Loxley or whoever and get it printed. Have it sent back to them. You know, don't worry about what the people at the printers are going to think. They see they see thousands upon thousands of thousands of images and they don't sit there behind closed doors, laughing their asses off things. You know, and and you never know. You may find that even if you are just printing for yourself, even if you are, you know, doing making prints for no other reason than just because you like to have them done, it is a there is a possibility that the print house will go they'll phone you up one day. They go, by the way, Alistair, do you mind if we use one of your pictures on a sample, you know, and then you go, wow, that's awesome. You know, I mean, I know. In fact, I'd imagine in the States is the same thing. All of the pictures are supplied by users of the print, the print house, you know. So I think anybody who's who's worried about having their work printed because somebody else might see it, a person who, for one of a better word, who's in the know would see it and scoff at it, I wouldn't worry about. I've never heard anybody in a print lab talk negatively about photography or any of the photography that comes through there. There's actually no, I wouldn't even consider it to be a thing and what have you, you know. But that's the sort of thing. So yeah, we've got some any sort of any questions for Alistair because I know he's he's been this awesome awesome stuff, dude. I really like it's nice to have this this sort of back and forth because I think, you know, we haven't really talked about gear, which is fantastic. Because I think that gear is a bit. I did see I did see a question earlier on about digital analog. Oh, yeah. And I shoot both. I have an old Hasselblad six by six, which I shoot with. And I, of course, use an icon date 50. So I use both of them. And they they're both very different experiences when you're out in the field, of course, you know, having to meet her with the Hasse and, you know, the film and then the latitude of the film and what that's capable of in the dynamic range and understanding the limitations and, you know, what the what the gear is capable of. But I think what I'd like to come back to is photography is both extremely simple and essentially infinitely complex at the same time. And I think the big danger these days is there's so much photography on social media that's misrepresenting reality that that's implying that it's just a case of go to this location, point your camera at it and something remarkable will be on the sensor waiting for you when you get home. And I think the motive that most people have when they come into photography is to get outside to have a nice healthy lifestyle to spend less time inside, you know, to get to go for hikes in the countryside, you know, to to release their creativity to to be more expressive to push their boundaries to learn a new skill. You know, there's all of these amazingly healthy things that come associated with taking up photography. But after a while, we get consumed by a lot of negatives, self-bought imposter syndrome. I like I said earlier, I am part of a peer group of photographers who are probably the world's best landscape photographers. I'm very gracious. I've just been made a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, which is a huge honor is that, you know, that that's saying something about where I've got to as a photographer, but I still have imposter syndrome. So this is something, you know, we get riddled with self doubt. We question ourselves. We we worry too much about external validation. We ask all of these questions of ourselves when we should just be doing it. And if it brings you pleasure and it brings you passion, then that's good enough. You know, and as Alex has just said, you know, as we've all watched Free Solo, the Alex Honnold movie where he solos El Capitan in usability. If you haven't seen it, treat yourself, watch it. And he says in the movie, just do the hard thing. If there's something that's a barrier to you, just do it, you know, because once you've done it, you you realize that you're a different person from who you thought you were. And so things like printing or putting your work out there for public consumption or writing something emotional about your own work, just do it because it yields and it nurtures, you know, photography can be anything we want it to be, but we all funnel ourselves down in this really narrow aperture where with everyone else and we're all kind of shouldering our way to try and be seen and heard, whereas it's the mavericks that actually have the freedom to just do whatever they want. So I think just be passionate about your own creativity and your creativity doesn't exist outside. It's only inside. There's nothing outside of me that helps my creativity. Yeah, absolutely. And also this though can be such a barrier to, you know, we talked about because you do you start questioning yourself and and there is that kind of that. I don't know. It hasn't. It's not the done in Kruger thing, but it was a similar sort of curve, you know, the more you know this, you know, sort of things like that. And and I think, you know, if you practice photography for any length of time, you go through so many of these peaks and valleys where, you know, you think, oh, my my works in a zone and it's doing really well and I'm finding the process of creating photographs really fulfilling, really enjoyable. It's everything just seems to be clicking to excuse the pun. Then and then a week later, just something is like a trigger and all of a sudden it is not coming. It's not. It's like the gold scorer who's suffering a, you know, a gold drought. It's just not happening. And then the more that you try and force it, the more that you try and go, I'm going to do it today. I'm going to go and be creative. The more that it just kind of slips, it slips through your fingers, you know, because I've just felt that, you know, inspiration and there's this kind of intangible thing that makes us connect and all the things come together is so delicate and so fragile that if you try and force it, it just, it just does not. It just doesn't, you know, and people find that so frustrating when you tell them that. So how do I be crazy? Well, you just have to not try. I think unfortunately that there's a lot of truth in that and one of the things I've always tried to do with my channel is to be authentic. I think we have a great responsibility as educators to be honest and realistic. And the reason I don't do top five tip videos or top 10 tip videos is I don't believe in them particularly. I think the odd one or two can be quite useful. But on the whole, I don't believe because I think they, they, they nurture repetitive behavior without thought, you know, they basically say, do it this way and you'll be successful. And that's a definition of success that might not, might not relate with you, you know, it's like someone coming into my house and saying, you know, walking up to my turntable and putting a piece of vinyl on and saying, listen to this, you know, this is what you're going to listen to for the rest of the evening. And that's their preference, but it's not my preference. You know, and I think it's, I'm such an advocate of individuality and freedom of speech and freedom of expression because it's ironically that level of uniqueness that's, that's the only definition of your creativity is actually your unique perspective. If I pick up one of these guitars and play a Dave Gilmore guitar solo, it may be performed well. It may sound very similar to the original, but I didn't create it. I'm just performing somebody else's arrangement of notes and maybe adding a little bit of my own feel, but that's not creativity. Me picking up a guitar and creating something spontaneously, which represents how I feel or is a motive in my mind that's been running through my head for a few days or I'm responding to something or I'm, I'm just noodling and something comes out that I think, oh, I like that. And that forms the basis of something that I can compose. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a very different thing. You know, so yeah, I think we spend an awful lot of our lives asking questions and building barriers for our own creativity. I've written this so many times in books is barriers between us and our creativity and the vast majority of them are self, are self generated. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't feel that there's ever been a moment where the thing that's been holding me back has been some sort of technical limitation per se. You know, it's been always a lack of my own faith. In what I'm capable of producing, you know, the, you know, it's just one of those things where you kind of you're in a situation and you just, you just want to sit down, you know, I, I'm not very good at this. I'm not feeling it today or whatever. And you just, you kind of just second guess yourself out or you talk yourself out of anything that's working and it's like if you, when you stuck at home, what, trying to watch a movie that you've kind of watched before and you play it a fast forward in your head and you're going, yeah, it's not going to work. And you, and I tend to do that sometimes with my photographs is that I have an idea, you know, for something and then it's almost like a fast forward in my head to the end result and go, no, it's not going to work. So I never tempt it and never actually see the results because obviously as soon as we start down a path of trying something, then we might find a little, little nudge that takes us in a direction we weren't expecting. So then we find where that creative is coming from. But because we, you know, I tend to just block off the avenues or the options to explore in pursuit of there's create, there's a goal at the end of this road to the following. I don't often find it and it's extremely frustrating when you do that because you know that you're kind of, you'll know that you're sabotaging yourself. Right, and I've experienced that in the past and but this was the big epiphany for me in the Gobi was, was suddenly realizing there was an alternative to that. And for the last four years, I have absolutely lived and breathed that alternative and I've never been happier. Absolutely as a photographer, I don't have any self-doubt. I don't have any restrictions. I can do whatever I want. I can photograph anything I want and I don't feel guilty about it. I can immerse myself in a ditch at the side of the road, photographing raindrops using shallow depth of field for 40 minutes or a frozen puddle in the middle of a road or a track. And I don't feel any self-consciousness about it because I believe that all of us have experienced those periods of in our lives where the world falls away from you and you feel totally alone. You feel totally as if living is the hardest thing you're ever going to have to do. You know, just getting through the day is going to be a challenge. And it can be through grief, you know, if we've lost a loved one or a friend or accidents or all diseases and illnesses. There's all of these things that make our lives difficult. And I got into rock climbing really young and I'd just been dumped by this girl. And what I found was, climbing very steep, overhanging rock faces where if I fell off I was going to die didn't allow me to think about this girl who'd just dumped me. You know, I was... You're hanging on. It somewhat focused the mind, I feel that... It focuses your mind. It gives your mind something more important to focus on than your own self-loathing or grief or whatever or feeling sorry for yourself. And photography does exactly the same thing the way I practice it, which is when something catches my attention I can... I mean, you're a professional photographer I'm a professional photographer. Our income relies upon the work that we do, you know. If we're not being creative, if we're not being inspiring if we're not being motivational, if we're not being educational if we're not adding value to our audience then we are not adding value and therefore we have no right to make a living from it. So there is a pressure on us. So we're constantly thinking especially during this current climate of how to compete in the marketplace and to add value. So when I go out into the landscape quite often I'm under pressure. You know, mental pressure from numerous things that are demanding my attention. But when I go out into the landscape if I see something that catches my eye and it can be something super innocent like just the way the light is filtering off a water surface and there's a nice reflection or something when I put my camera to my eye and I look through the barrel of the lens everything else disappears and what you're focused on becomes that whole focus of your attention and that moment of your life is the same as climbing an overhanging rock face. You forget about everything else. There's no room for anything else and that is therapy. So it's interesting that you mentioned that kind of that you know the... Oh, what would be the word I'm looking for? You did that clarity of focus when you're looking through the viewfinder. Yeah, because I was just reading a book recently that was talking about how one can fall into the trap of allowing what's going on around you. The senses that your ears and the temperature and what did the wind and all that sort of stuff and thinking that that will translate into the photograph. You know, because you are physically experiencing that place that there's so much more acting upon you than there would be on the viewer who of course made look at it in a completely different environment and how we should be aware of trying to a block out those senses so they don't distract us from the matter at hand of taking the photograph but then putting those feelings into the photograph and it was like such a like... Like how do you take away the wind and the rain and all the bits that are physically acting upon you disregard them and then reinterpret them into the image in front of you in the lens so that the viewer at a distant remove will then feel the wind and the rain and the cold and all that sort of stuff. It's like... It's one of those things like how do you do this? Right. Well, you know, as you would expect I've got an opinion about it. I would expect nothing less. No, no way. And I wouldn't expect anything less of myself either. As soon as someone says to me you should or shouldn't do something that's a red rag to a bowl in my lexicon. Someone tells me I can't do something or shouldn't do something. Now listen, driving on the wrong side of the road. Fine. I can live with that. You know, not jaywalking. I can live with that. There's certain things, you know, juggling sharp knives. You know, there's sensible things that shouldn't... But when it comes to creativity and when it comes to my experience with the landscape it goes back to this note-taking analogy that we used earlier. It's like saying, okay, you can make notes but you can't make any notes about the weather. You can't make any notes about how you feel in this moment because you've got to focus on the job at hand which was the word you used. The job at hand, as far as I see it when we're in the landscape or walking through a city with a camera or on assignment or whatever. Assignment photography is different. You do have a job at hand. You know, you have a brief from a client and you have to fill that brief. Whereas in the landscape, 99.9% of people don't have a brief. They don't have a job at hand. And I consider my purpose of being in the landscape is to be in the landscape and that is a full five senses experience for me. In fact, the more savage they experience quite often the more I'm enjoying myself. Now, there are technical considerations of shooting in bad weather and we could talk about that for half an hour. But at the end of the day, immersing yourself in that experience and understanding there's times. I've had hundreds of clients on workshops over the years. Hundreds and hundreds in fact. And I had a guy once and he used to agonize when we got to the location. He came in a private workshop and we would drive out to this beautiful coast and he would stand there for an hour just agonizing, trying to rationalize the whole landscape. And I said, why do you do that? And he said, well, I want to make photographs perfect. And I said, well, why don't you just shoot what you what interests you and then you can agonize later? You know, do you want to be agonizing about a potential photograph that you might make six months from? Or do you want to immerse yourself in this moment and just love being here? So there's a good time for, there can be time for reflection. If we think about education in a classical sense, it's theory, practice and reflection. There are the three stages of classic education. That is a classic educational structure. So the theory is understanding the how of, you know, using the tool, not how to compose but using the tool. The theory, there's a certain amount of things like light and depth of field and things like that, how shutter speed affects emotion. That's a theory. And I can't think of a more accurate reflective medium than a photograph because you see something in front of you. And if you create something, you can reflect on what you've created and learn from it. There's so much benefit that we can get from photography but we agonize over these little minutiae that really don't help us. You know, they're more often another barrier rather than therapeutic or beneficial to us. So it's interesting because I think I was going to ask you because we'll have a last little section. We'll sort of stop wrapping up. But it's going to be a big section because I do like the topic. Yeah, yeah. It's obviously throughout the conversation that we've had, you have, through some of the theory that you've talked about, some of the ideas that you have, it's quite clear that you have had some sort of, I suppose, well-read background in photography. It seems that you have, you're at least aware of people like Sontag and what have you, who talk about photography in a, it's got a more theoretical, more sort of academic sort of way. And I do like the way that you have taken a spin on some of those concepts like you talked about not the five, oh, sorry, the five triggers, but you talk about three other things earlier. And that sort of goes back to sort of the Rollin' Baths saying, you know, punk them and pick them and that sort of stuff. And I thought that that was a very nice way of making the concepts accessible and understandable. And I think that's part of what a lot of this kind of writing, which can be very useful, but it's not in all photography. It can certainly help some photographers, you know, express themselves more clearly, at least understand them why a little bit better. But it is wrapped up in so much. I've been using Stokey Bed recently. You know, the sort of thing, somebody who sits there in fact and just put, yeah, just like, I'm clean-shaven, you know. But yeah, it's, you know, the people who sit, they go, oh, yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure. You know, like, but you know, that sort of thing. It made me very self-conscious. Come on to the TPE and feel self-conscious about your facial hair choices. No, it's a bit, you know, this sort of thing. I mean, we've all, we have all met people like this who, you know, who talk about, you know, talked about, you know, setting off the weather and all those other things. And talk about the theoretical and the academic. So that's called the academic rather than the theoretical, theoretical, different thing. And make photography more science, more psychological science than art form. And I think that's a great shame because it puts a lot of that sort of knowledge, that lot of experience at a little bit of an arms remove from a lot of people who want to just enjoy the photography but whom I feel would benefit from at least having more of an awareness of these kind of concepts because it would help them to see a lot more. And also understand that process. You know, you talk, you mentioned instinct and photographing on gut reaction and understanding what the difference is between I'm hungry and this is, I want to take a photograph of this. So in your growth as a photographer, how did you start? I mean, did you come to photography, you know, from a young age or did you only sort of pick it up from middle age and what was your growth as a photographer from, let's say, complete noob? Right. Told you it was going to be a thingy. It's going to be a long section. Settle in, get yourself the hot chocolate because we're going to be... I'm just going to open the door of my office because it's really hot in here. It's got rather warm. Right. Yes, I had a camera when I was a kid. I had two older brothers, one six years older and one nine years older. So I was very influenced by them. So I always wanted to be older whereas now I'm the youngest so I'm really happy about it because they're both in their 60s. So I did have a camera when I was younger but I had no theory, no understanding and I was just running around pointing at things that I thought were cool. And then I pretty much put it down until I was in my 30s again. So I had about 20 years of not really having a camera. And when it was birds that got me back into photography I've had a lifelong love of birds. I've been watching them my entire life and I was living in the Far East and there's lots of beautiful birds in the forests of Malaysia and stuff. So I got a camera to go and photograph those. Very steep learning technical curve. Photographing birds in dark forests. I can imagine, I was just asked, yeah. You need to understand how to use flash really well. You need to understand exposure really well and you're using big lenses in tough situations so there's a lot involved. And then you've got to understand behaviour what the bird is going to do next anticipating what the bird is going to do next. So it's quite an involved process. I'd read one book. It was the art of bird photography. I think it was called, it was out of the birds' art or the art of bird photography by a guy called Arthur Morris. Real mainstay book back in the day. This is like 2001. And then I got into landscapes kind of by accident. I was on vacation in Canada, bought a landscape lens in Calgary and was in Banff National Park and was just photographing pretty things. I started then, and I started posting in a nature forum, naturescapes.net and the Nature Photographers Network, the first version of it. And basically started to look at the work of other people becoming aware of other photographers, starting to study the history of landscape photography, so obviously Ansel Adams and Minor White and Gail and Raoul and a lot of the bigger names in landscape photography. I've always been a studious person. I traveled internationally for 20 years in my previous career, so I was always reading books. I was reading books and I read all the classics, all the philosophy classics, the psychology classics, all of that kind of feeding my mind type stuff. So I've always had a very thoughtful approach to things, but I've always been very interested in the human aspect of creativity. But what I really did between about 2004 and 2016 was I learned the classic approach to being a photographer. So it was the rule of thirds, compositional templates, understanding how we read landscapes, understanding aesthetics. And I very much became a robot in the landscape where I could go anywhere in the world and make a pretty photograph. An accomplished photograph. I could control the light. I could control the scene. I could compose it. So it was as logical and aesthetically pleasing as possible. And of course they're hugely popular. They're very, very popular photographs. But my evolution, my true evolution came when I realized that I wasn't fulfilling my own brief of why I started to be a photographer. I started to be a photographer because I was passionate about making photographs. I was passionate about being in the landscape. I was passionate about birds. I ended up stopping bird photography in about 2007 because I'd lost my love of birds. It became so obsessed about getting the shot that any imperfection in the scene just annoyed me too much. And every time I was out without a camera, if I saw a bird, it was, oh, what an amazing opportunity and I'd feel bad about not having a camera with me. So it became a really horrible thing. So at the end of the day, I think I realized that my true passion in photography was self-exploration. It was understand. Because I think I was like a lot of people I just wasn't very happy with who I was. I just wasn't, I felt that the person who was inside was very different from the outside. I was living a life that wasn't authentic to me. It just didn't feel as if I was fulfilling my own potential as a person, as a husband, as a father, as an, you know, I just felt there was something missing. And ultimately, my photography has allowed me to explore this relationship with myself by using my creativity to unweave some of those corners of my mind that were resistant to conscious analysis, if that makes any sense. But I think we should really get the waste paper bin and write the words judgment, should, shouldn't, non-acceptance, expectation, all of those words we could write in a piece of paper and throw them in the trash because they serve no good purpose to us. Having expectations that are unfulfilled, it's our relationship with our expectations are a barrier to our creativity. Not accepting what is in front of you and wishing it was something else is a barrier to our creativity. Not believing that our voice is valid is a barrier to our creativity. Thinking that we can't make photographs that are dark and sad is a barrier to our creativity. We have a spectrum that we live on that's as broad as the histogram on a frame. The dark end is just as valid as the light end. The mid-tote is just as important as the shadows. All of the spectrum is exciting. The cool and the warm, the light and the dark, the texture and the atmosphere, all of these things are valid. And we can explore all of it. And I've worked with so many people over the last few years, and I always say to them, do you want to define a very, very small box that you can live in? And that is where you create or would you rather play with the infinite of possibility? Because that's what we have. We've got a supercomputer in our brain. We've got an incredible array of skills and emotions that we can feel and express. But we choose to pigeonhole ourselves in this tiny little compartment that everyone else is trying to muscle into the same little segment because this is perceived as the only place that you can make meaningful photographs. And quite honestly, my job, I see it, is to challenge that status quo. And say there is a valid alternative, which is we can make photographs that we like for ourselves that are meaningful to us and we can actually live more fulfilling lives through our own intuition. See, there we go. Guys, if you're not subbed to Alistair's channel, you must go once the video is finished. So immediately, immediately to his channel, hit sub there because his videos, his content, it is this. And I've talked similar about the word should, which crops up from time to time. And it's absolutely, in a nutshell, we shouldn't use should. It must be or not, it is not. Photography has as many different versions of it as there are photographers. And that is really, I think that's a wonderful thing about that very just quickly. Fernando has asked, he says, if we go looking for or think about the decisive moment, you know, in our photography, and certainly from my own perspective, it depends on what I'm photographing. I'd imagine Alistair is somewhat similar for you that it's not, it's not, there's not always going to be a decisive moment in all images. You know, there will be some that have, I think, potential for a decisive moment to happen. And then there are others where I just kind of go, I like the light or like this or what have you. And there's not going to be, I know that it's a fairly static image. You know, like if I look in this room right now, there are some things I think have potential for being a photograph. But something unusual that's going to elevate the photograph is unlikely to happen. He says, just before the roof caves in or something. But that's the thing, I don't know Alistair if you agree with me that there are, there's potential sometimes, but not always for a decisive moment. I'd probably disagree, I think, purely because, but I think it depends on why you're there and I think it depends on what your expectations are. I agree that certain conditions are hard to get excited about. And I think that's probably, but that again, you know, we are products of our education and we do spend an awful lot of our lives being confined. We do spend a lot of our education being conditioned to think and behave in a certain way. The argument I've always used is I was married to a Chinese woman for nearly 19 years, actually 18 years. And she used to write incredible poetry in Chinese, so Chinese characters. And her ability to articulate herself in Chinese characters was incredible. But she used to have to translate it to reach a Western audience and lost everything in translation. And the thing about it is is that if we, I think an awful lot of the time when we're looking for a defining moment, what we're actually doing is we're asking the question, are other people going to like this? And if we say yes, then that's the decisive moment rather than I am so into this and I don't care if nobody else likes it. Because I think that you, I think we miss a lot of potential decisive moments by walking past things that we would engage with, but we don't think they're interesting enough to show the rest of the world. So, you know, again, I find questions like this somewhat restrictive, you know, because they're kind of, they're pinning a definition of some ideal on either the experience or the photograph when really I think there's a broader opportunity to just try, you know, and it might not be decisive moment until a year later when we find something on Lightroom and think, oh my God, I took this photograph and now I understand why I made it, you know, because we evolve. And I think we, I think there's a tendency to overthink a lot of the time. And I know that's ironic coming from someone who teaches photography and I have to overthink all the time because I have to articulate why and how and what I'm doing. But at the end of the day, if photography is not your livelihood, I would encourage everyone to just go and point their cameras at stuff that they find joy in or they find exciting or engages them or speak to them in that moment. And the defining moment is that you're alive. You know, you're alive and you're breathing and you're walking through a forest or you're walking through the mountains or you're sat beside a lake, you know, experiencing reality. That is a moment. That is a defining moment. So I would encourage people to appreciate every single breath that you have as a human because one day you will stop and that is a defining moment. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that is a very defining moment. And I will take that. We'll take that. We're going to end it right now. That's it. One day you're going to take the pictures and one day it's just going to stop. You know, it's going to stop. But yes, I think it's getting on to 10 to 11 here. And I think some people it's sort of dinner time for people. It's always amazing, you know, how many people are like, oh, it's like for us, it's 10 to 11. And the same people are always like, it's dinner time. It's like six o'clock. And some people are like, oh, I have to go to the gym now. It's early in the morning. It's like, it is. I think that's one of the amazing things is just all of a sudden, you know, if I think back to, you know, certainly when I started photography in the mid nineties, the idea of being able to do this is to talk to people all around the world to share our photography. If I think about my, you know, my initial experiences with photography, there was nobody else at school who was interested in photography. It was purely me and there was no photography club or anything like that. And then I went to photo school and then it was a group of, I think across the three years, maybe 50 students. And that was it. So that was that was my world of photography. So to have this opportunity to speak to, you know, like yourself in Scotland and all the other people who are joining us from around the world, it is just, it blows my mind that, you know, and never more has been this idea that there are so many different approaches to photography. And it means so different, radically different things to so many people. And I think this is the absolute joy of photography. And I'm pleased that there are channels like yourself out there who are focused on this kind of, this way of thinking about photography as opposed to that standing up and doing the banner of should worship me if you want to have a better phrase. But this is, this is me. This is how cool I am. Check my ego and check it and be like me. You know, whereas, you know, you are very much in the mold of saying be your own person. Well, I think what I would, how I'd summarize that is, I think that the best, the best cure to imposter syndrome was when I realized that I'm the best in the world at being Alistair Ben. You know, I am literally the best in the world at being me. And for everyone who's listening and watching that is your banner, is that you are the best in the world at being you. No one can do you better and no one can tell you how to be you. And that is the freedom of personal and creative expression. Absolutely. And I see that Carlos has said, come to San Fran for a live forum. Okay. Listen. There is ultimately one day I would love to have a forum like this in person. I think, you know, you know, for those of you who, I imagine your workshops are similar that there's obviously there's talk in the evenings, you know, over dinner or what have you. And, and when it does move on from the gear chat because there's always a little bit of gear chat. These kind of conversations in person are, I love them. This is great, but to be able to sit in a room with so many people and get, and feed off of each other. And the rest of things. So, so when the world opens up again and everything's a little bit easier. I'm actually going to be in the States for a, for two months next fall, I'll be running workshops all through October in the States. And East Coast, West Coast, Central? Obviously West, Colorado, Oregon and California. Okay. Well, there you go, Carlos. I think, you know, the, the, the Alistair Ben Roadshow is, is kind of in your area at some point, which would be nice. But, I feel like it's some really cool things happening next year. So, I'm really excited. Oh, good. Good. Well, I'm, I'm pleased. Well, I will keep the guys on the T.P. updated about everything. But yes, a gentleman and a ladies and gentlemen. I don't know why I say gentlemen. Yes. Thank you ever so much for being here, Alistair. Thank you again for sharing all your, your, your experiences and your thoughts. I think that's, you know, a lot of people said thought-provoking. Absolutely thought-provoking is a lot to, to digest in here. And, and I've certainly found it very useful to talk to somebody who is as connected to the landscape as, as their photographs make it feel. And if you say, if you haven't checked out Alistair's work, he does have a website. Alistair, so I didn't put your website in the, in the link box. Do you want to just tell people what to do? Sure. It's expressive dot photography. It's not a dot com. It's an expressive dot photography. Well, there you go. But there's obviously, there's, I think there's links in all of the videos. There's links to the website. I think if you go to Alistair's channel, you'll probably find it. So, expressive dot photography. Anyway, thank you ever so much, Alistair. And thanks every, all you guys for, for listening to, to, to us just talk for, for, well, almost two hours, which has been fantastic and lovely. And, and we'll see you do it again. So that's, yeah, so, yeah, new episodes Monday, Wednesday, Friday at four o'clock UK. And we'll do another live stream soon. Anyway, so thank you ever so much. And we'll have a great Sunday. All right, cheers guys. Pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks everyone for watching. And thanks to Alex for the invite.