I won’t bother you with a biography on him, instead I encourage you to go look at his website to see what he does. For the sake of conversation I’ve included below an image from his site; the image is posted at http://www.brucepercy.co.uk/#/harris-2014/.

My discovery of Percy is very recent so I don’t know much about him. This is mainly to say that I have no idea how much post-processing (or what kind) he puts into his images. I suspect he does a lot of work to them, but that’s pure conjecture. Maybe I’m totally wrong and he works in analogue, or some combination - I read some of his site and he mentions something about “working” on his photos, but since this isn’t really about post-production or philosophy or anything like that I’ll just disregard how he makes his images.

Yeah, it’s kinda cliché to say, but when I saw his site and the photos he makes I was captivated because they mix the technical detail and abstract emotion that I’ve had in my mind for a while. Well, more that I knew what I wanted to make but it wasn’t fully defined until I saw his images.

So, two things. First, I don’t really care how he made them, I love his landscapes. Second, they depress me because I realize that no matter how much I want to make images of that kind I probably won’t spend the time on post-processing that I think is required for something like them and because I’m learning that to make great images of a place you have to spend a lot of time there. I don’t have the resources or time to go to Patagonia and study the land; and we don’t live in Harris. Thirdly, now I’m conflicted about post-processing; interested in the possibilities, but not really keen on all the manipulation. Probably I’m being closed minded. And yeah, I know that’s three things, not two.

But the real point is that I don’t want to be an amateur any more. When I learned how to prepare digital images I was fascinated with manipulating local contrast; now I see so many of that kind of image all over. Today I can’t stand it, I’m not sure why I cared so much about such artificial definition. To me that heavy-handed faux-realistic processing is the sign of an amateur, and that’s not what I want. I’m too old to make pretend images.

This means my original sentiment about not having time or resources to study far off, exotic lands is a bunch of crap. We have opportunities that most don’t have, and besides, I’m being very closed minded about what land is constantly around us. So I’ll go out and shoot it. Myesha and I were just saying we need to put more energy into following ideas, and that’s what we will do.