North Coast 500 | Scotland Road Trip

In-camera pano shot on the X100V with the camera in the portrait orientation.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

The road trip. It fires up a romantic notion in most of us; fuelled by everything from car commercials, old films of Route 66, and even childhood holidays from a time before every trip had to begin with a plane ticket. I started to get the urge for a road trip when I bought my fourth Land Rover, just a couple of months before COVID 19 appeared on the scene. This was obviously put on hold for the past 18 months, but with a reluctance to sit on a plane for multiple hours, the road trip became the best option. Not only that, after the various lockdowns during the pandemic, the urge to just hit the road and be free was pretty overwhelming.

The North Coast 500 is one of the worlds most beautiful and epic road trips. Starting and ending in Scotland’s most northerly city of Inverness. The choice of going clockwise or anti-clockwise is up to the driver, but we opted for the latter, travelling up the east coast fairly quickly, then slowing down to take in the epic rugged landscape along the extreme north coast and then back down the west coast. We camped, we stayed in hotels and we stayed in hostels. Wild camping is legal in Scotland and usually better than any campsite when it comes to pitching the tent in a great spot.

For a full week, I had no urge to pick up my phone and look at any of the garbage it’s connected to. The battery went flat and I couldn’t have cared less. I took an iPad and didn’t use it once. I took my kindle but didn’t read a single page. There was nothing but driving, photography, setting up camp, cooking and sleeping. It was just what I needed and just what I’ve been craving ever since.

The highlight of the North Coast 500 is the road leading to a remote village called Applecross. The road is called Bealach Na Ba and as far as I know is the highest road in the UK. A sign at the start of the road alerts drivers that it’s not suitable for large vehicles, caravans, motorhomes, or learner drivers. It has gradients of 1 in 5 and has hairpin bends. It doesn’t mention the vertical drops if you veer off the road, but you soon find that out.

We clocked up over a thousand miles on our 500-mile road trip, including the drive to Inverness and back. But we’re already planning our next road trip, but first, we need to get a roof rack to give us more space inside.

SHOT WITH FUJIFILM X100V, WCX100, X-PRO2, 18mm F2, LENSBABY COMPOSER PRO & EDGE 50 OPTIC

Headless

This image, from Robert Catto’s essay Broken Threads was my starting point for this essay.

This image, from Robert Catto’s essay Broken Threads was my starting point for this essay.

Why is it that the head, and particularly the face, has so much importance in people photography? Convention states that the face should be the bright, in focus and get to be center stage in the composition.

A couple of Robert’s pictures of headless statues made me think about the importance that is generally put on the head/face in photography. While the rest of the body can tell the story just as well or even better. I’ve never been afraid to make a picture that doesn’t include the head but until recently I also never deliberately set out to not include the head in pictures.

So in the last couple of days I tried to do just that when taking pictures around the house.

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In the last few months, I’ve been also busy figuring out and creating a new body (pun not intended) of work. And one of the the aspects that I’ve been experimenting with is not including the face of the subject.

So what are your opinions on headless photography? Is it acceptable? Is it still portraiture?

Broken Threads

Broken Threads

I got a message recently from my sister in Toronto, to say that our dad’s gravestone had been installed in the cemetery where we laid him to rest one snowy day last year, before the pandemic began.

She’d also found an older family plot, in a different part of the same cemetery, and had spent a day there cleaning up the monument—and unearthing the stones of some of our ancestors that had been covered in dirt and grass, over many years…

Negative 25

Clue number 1: A curved piece of…some kind of…part of a thing

Clue number 1: A curved piece of…some kind of…part of a thing

PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

As soon as I looked at the picture of the thumb in Patrick’s last essay, I was reminded of the movie ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, directed and starring Ben Stiller. In the movie, Stiller’s character goes in search of a missing negative (number 25) that is to be used on the final cover of Life Magazine. It’s a great film and self worth seeing; especially if you are a photographer.

From New Monuments by Patrick La Roque

From New Monuments by Patrick La Roque

One of my favourite shots in the movie is when Walter walks away from the camera, but the focus stays fixed.

One of my favourite shots in the movie is when Walter walks away from the camera, but the focus stays fixed.

Clue number 2: The Thumb

Clue number 2: The Thumb

I remember watching Walter Mitty (more than once), a few years after it was released, and at a time when a few of the themes in the movie struck a chord in me. The mixture of the film and the soundtrack had an alluring effect, which was a bit depressing at the time.

It’s easy to get sucked into the idea that everyone is moving forward and succeeding, while you are either stuck where you are or feel like you are going backwards. This is especially true in the Facecloth, Instasham, and all the other antisocial media platforms out there.

These days, I no longer have time for social media, nor care who is moving forward or backward (if there’s even such a thing). I’m too busy working, burning through gigabytes of pictures and video three or four days a week and struggling to keep up with the editing the rest of the week. Be careful what you wish for! One minute you’re feeling bad about not having the work and the next you’re overwhelmed by it. One minute all you’re doing is personal work and the next you are struggling to find the time to do any personal work at all.

If there is one sure thing, it’s that nothing stays the same forever. Just make the best of where you’re at at this moment, because a change is gonna come whether you like it or not.

Get vaccinated. Grow a little tail, and wag it daily!

25 is missing

25 is missing

The spoiler

The spoiler

Not actually the motto of Life Magazine

Not actually the motto of Life Magazine

Park Life

Park Life

My biggest chance to shoot has been when my nephew (for whom we’re a support bubble) has come to stay for a few days. Eager for any opportunity to go out and shoot and with my newly purchased X-E4 to try out he has been my little muse for these government-enforced dry spells. And, whilst my ever-patient nephew has generally accepted my photographing pretty much his every movement with a winning-smile (or at worst, a disdained stare), there is just one caveat on which he insists … “PESE CAN WE GO TO THE PAAAARK DADA?”

Over The Rainbow

Over The Rainbow

A little while ago I found an essay online, written by my grandfather.

I never met him, he died in 1960, almost a decade before I was born; but through an accident of timing, he spent WWI in a German prison camp. Instead of becoming a concert pianist, which is what he was studying there at the time, he became a psychologist and professor, and wrote a book about the society that sprang up in the camp in the years he was held.

Later, while working for the Canadian government during WWII, he wrote for Maclean’s magazine about how difficult it was going to be for the soldiers and prisoners returning from the war, the trouble they would inevitably have returning from that experience to “polite society”, and how their imaginations of life back at home after all that time away would inevitably lead to disappointment with the real thing.

I think that’s what the return to relative normalcy will be like for all of us, as the pandemic starts to get under control around the world…

Anything but the Highway

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PHOTOGRAPHY AND BERT STEPHANI

I chose this picture by Derek Clark from his essay Death by 74 cuts to use as my theme. I love the graphic nature of that image although I’m usually trying to stay away from highways. I had a busy week and very little spare time to get on my bike AND shoot a story, so I tried to combine both.

Anything but the Highway

I get the idea: the fastest way to go from A to B. It’s useful but the fastest way is usually not the most interesting one. Whenever I can, I take the backroads. And ever since I saved up enough money to buy my first mountainbike when I was 16, I’ve been attracted to the even smaller unpaved roads. For decades one after the other was asphalted for the sake of progress. But in the last few years, it seems like there’s a renewed appreciation of unpaved roads and paths. Even some new slow roads are built without concrete or asphalt.

It was only when I was brainstorming about this story that I came to understand that the unpaved roads serve as a metaphor for the ways I choose to travel in my life and career as well.

Death By 74 Cuts

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PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

I chose this picture by Patrick La Roque from his essay Puddles Are Windows and Fissures are Roads to use as my theme. I almost chose dogs, as I can see two dogs in the top left corner, but in the end I chose differently. The converging lines in that same corner reminded me of roads, and the top of the picture feels like decay. Possibly converging lines cutting through the underdogs?

Death By 74 CUTS

The city of Glasgow, like a lot of highly populated places, is going through constant change. The always present cranes across the city skyscrape erect building after building, rubbing out the old and redrawing the new. But this only makes the places that are being left behind stand out; a slow painful demise. Tradeston is one such place, an industrial area that has been neglected for years. Decades of decay joined with decades of graffiti and vandalism.

In 2011, the M74 motorway was completed. Although construction started in 1966, the M74 didn’t reach its intended destination until 2011. This monster of a road rises up on stilts as it cuts a path straight through Tradeston, barely revealing what lies beneath to the unsuspecting drivers. But still, I’m drawn to this place, and I will probably return to document it more before it gets torn-down in favour of luxury flats or offices.

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DEFINITION 45 | Looks Like We Made It

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PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

I reached the grand old age of 55 last month. The number in itself is nothing special, but it’s the age that my sister Joyce died of a brain tumour in 2018. Dark humour has always been a part of my family and when I visited Joyce on her birthday, she gave me a rendition of Barry Manilow’s ‘Looks Like We Made It’. She of course meant she had made it to another birthday. She died less than two months later.

There is a naïveté that makes you think these things are more acceptable when someone is older, even just two years older. But as I reached 55, I realised that I feel no different than I did at 53, nor 43 for that matter. My dad passed away in 2019 pretty much of a broken heart, so to say that death is never far away from my thoughts is probably an understatement. I don't know if it's my age or recent events, but I find myself wondering how many more days I have left before I will wake up dead myself. Maybe mid-fifties are the age when these thoughts start to creep into your head more often, but my sister got 55 years, what makes me so special that I would deserve more?

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We took my mum away for a few days in October. It was the first anniversary of my dad's death and we didn't want her all alone and rattling around her house dwelling on it. While we were away, my wife Fe got word that the unit at the care home where she works had cases of Covid19. She knew there was a high risk she would become infected when she went back to work, but she, of course, went in anyway. Because while Joe public is fighting over toilet rolls in supermarket isles, carers, nurses and countless others are putting their lives on the line.

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Four days after she. went back to work, the symptoms started. A trip to the local testing centre confirmed she had the virus. Eleven days of cold and flu symptoms and we thought she was starting to get over it. But then it really hit. She spent the next three days flat on her back, too weak to do anything but be sick. Even now, three weeks on, she still gets tired doing small things. Nine elderly people from her unit passed away from Covid19.

Janel and Fe both had birthdays this month. Janel turned 13 and found the new normal for blowing out candles is not normal at all. I could mention how old Fe is, but I’d rather the candles were stored in the cupboard than in me.

It is almost December, and what should have seemed like a drag of a year has actually flown by in a flash.

So if you're reading this, almost a year into the Covid 19 pandemic, - It looks like you made it too!

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Definition 36 | Libertas Restrictus

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PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

Anyone who has seen the movie Braveheart will remember the character of William Wallace, played by actor/director Mel Gibson, cry out the word FREEDOM. Although a bit overused since the movie done the rounds, freedom is not something I've taken for granted. The ability to go wherever you like, whenever you like is not something all people in all countries are able to do. So I find the obsession in the 21st-century to obtain fame bizarre and self-destructive. Fame might bring the financial ability to afford to go wherever you like, but the freedom to walk down a busy street unnoticed is true freedom. To go where you like in total anonymity is bliss!

Coronavirus has removed or restricted freedom in 2020 and possibly into 2021. In the beginning, it looked as though lockdown was just a way to get people to stay at home so that the government could change the batteries in all the birds, but there was a shortage of toilet roll, not batteries, so I guess that wasn't true :o)

Freedom for me is to take a train somewhere and to wander for miles with a camera in my hand. Most of my pictures include people. But as a street photographer, I had no one to shoot on the streets, as a music photographer, I had no bands or musicians to photograph. As a musician, I had no audience to play to. Life really did come to a standstill.

But even now, I feel the rust taking hold of my photography and creativity in general. I don't have the time to shoot long enough to allow the brake pads to separate from the disks. There is a feeling of being trapped, fenced-in, and on the outside of where I want or need to be. Parts of the country, including where I live, are seeing increased numbers and more restrictions being re-introduced. So even now, as we move toward October and the long dark winter, there is as much uncertainty as ever. But I’m not ready to paint my face blue and shout FREEDOM. Not just yet.