On Landscape - Any Questions

Tim Parkin (00:00)
Hello and welcome to On Landscape Any Questions. This is episode four and we're here with our usual hosts, myself, Tim Parkin and Joe Cornish. Hi, Joe. And we're here with our special guest, Colin Pryor. Hello, Colin.

Joe Cornish (00:13)
Bye, team.

Colin Prior (00:19)
Good afternoon or good morning. I'm not sure when you're putting this out, but welcome.

Tim Parkin (00:26)
Morning you'll do. what we do with the format here is we've got a few questions from our readers and from ourselves. Me and Joe have got a few questions for Colin here. And we'll start off with one of Joe's questions as well. And this thing is you're known as a mountain photographer, primarily from your Scotland Landscapes books, Scotland's mountains books.

I mean, how I started off photography, I got one of your books. How did you get going as a photographer? Can you give us a little bit of background about how you started and if there was anybody particularly introduced you to it, Colin?

Colin Prior (00:59)
Well, not really, it just grew within me. I won a competition back in 1981 called Beneath the Waves. It was an international competition for underwater photography and I won best newcomer to underwater photography. And I think more than anything, it just gave me the confidence. It confirmed what I already believed was, which was that...

I felt I could see. I didn't know what see was, but I just knew I could see. But I still had to put that seeing into practice. And I was working with my father. It wasn't his company. It was sales director there. And I'd worked there for five years. And when I won that, I knew I had to go off and do something myself. So I left with the naive.

thought that I'd become a professional photographer. But I was quite determined and I realized I had a huge mountain to climb, metaphorically and literally. And that's really where I began. But having said that, I was conscious of the fact that there was no way I could make a living as a professional underwater photographer.

because I could see a very thin line between professional underwater photographer and beach bum. So I started to develop an interest in landscape photography. And, you know, with the proximity of the Scottish Highlands around me, started to go in little forays into the mountains with a Nikon FM to begin with and then an F2.

Tim Parkin (02:58)
So did you go out? I mean, I know you used to go out with your father on some of your trips. Did you take him out or was he taking you out at the time?

Colin Prior (03:10)
Well, he retired at 62 and he kind of had a bit of time on his hands. And it's always good when you've gone into the mountains in the winter to have someone else there in case you have obviously have an accident, slip, fall, whatever. And of course, there was quite a lot of weight to carry when we began camping in the mountains. And he was quite happy to come along and help me.

I mean, he'd done a little bit of hill walking in his youth around the Arakhar Alps and one or two others, but he really wasn't a Monroeist or a photographer. But his help was invaluable to me, one, for companionship, and two, because of the weight issues that are necessary if you're gonna shoot elevated views in mountains.

Tim Parkin (04:11)
Yeah, one of the things about your photography in the mountains was very much the format you use. And the 617 camera was a bit of a signature look for a lot of what you did. And it works so well with the panoramic books you released. How did working with that format come about? Obviously, that's why everything was so heavy, because it's quite a large camera with all the lenses.

Colin Prior (04:37)
It was really a fascination. There was something that really captured my imagination about that three by one format in a way that no other format did. And it was also a format that lent itself to high elevation photographs, because it revealed a great deal about the character of the environment you were in.

of while and because it was essentially a large format image, and it had so much resolution that you could see the detail of the landscape there also. And I think at the time, nobody had really done anything in Scotland with that format. And the magazines, the newspapers, everyone,

out there were very keen to publish these images. So it gave me great exposure in the media in a way that I probably wouldn't have had any other way.

Joe Cornish (05:43)
I remember seeing your work in the late 1980s, I think it was, probably at Linhoff in central London when Paula still had her shot there. And it was just, I wanted to say, it made a big impression on me. And I'm sure it did on a lot of people. And I'm actually really intrigued to know

a little bit more about the genesis of 617, because I think some people may, well, now, the younger generation probably aren't aware of the fact that you did this really kind of almost revolutionary series of calendars for British Airways. And that was a really remarkable commission that went on for a few years. And so I'm intrigued to know how it all began, where the 617, when you first started using it.

because it is such an important aspect of your legacy, of that historic side of your photographic output. So if you can tell us a bit more about that, it'd be really fascinating to hear it.

Colin Prior (06:46)
Well, I think the first time I saw three by one images, ironically, they weren't shot with a specialist panoramic camera. They were actually shot with a 10 by 8. And the photographs were in a Nikon magazine. And they were Nikon large format lenses used on a 10 by 8 camera. And they've been cropped to three by one. And they really lit up my imagination. And

The only other photographer that I knew at the time who was using both these formats, well, when I say both, both three by one and two by one, was a photographer called Harry Dezita in America. And he also did a campaign for UPS using the 617 format. And I thought, I thought this is, this is for me, this is really exciting. And...

I mean, we're all as artists looking for a way to differentiate ourselves. And as I mentioned, at the time, nobody was actually shooting in that format. And the reason was that Linhoff, who originally made that 617 Technorama in the 60s, had stopped manufacturing it. And just before I bought the first re-engineered model, that was the first one that came into the UK.

which Paula got for me in 1989, I think that was the second hand price of the 617 original model had more than doubled. So there was a growing aspiration for that format. But when the 617S as it was, was introduced in 89, it was a big improvement. And of course,

Tim Parkin (08:27)
Wow.

Colin Prior (08:40)
A few years after, Fuji improved their GF617, which was a straight copy of the camera, but much better. And much better for mountain photography, because the lenses were protected by these bumper bars. And I'd had three shutters fitted into the Linhofs that I had, because it's so easy when you're, you know, climbing mountains to bump.

the lens and if you think about it, there were a big lump of glass and a big lump of metal with a shutter sandwiched in the middle. So if they got a bump, you found that your images at the right and the left weren't particularly sharp.

Joe Cornish (09:24)
Not surprising, I suppose there's so much scope for error as soon as you get any misalignment. But I suppose also, you know, the just the nature of what you were doing must have seemed very, very innovative at the time. And taking such a camera up the hill, I, you know, I think that, you know, we all knew back then of American photographers who used large format out in the American landscape, but they weren't having to cope with the sort of wind speeds that

that we do in the UK, for example, and typically those sorts of large format cameras were used in much more benign conditions. So it really was something quite different. And did you start photographing the mountains before the British Airways Commission?

Colin Prior (10:13)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, the British Airways kind of picked up on the exhibition I had at the Linhoff Gallery, which you alluded to there. And, you know, through that exhibition, I picked up a publisher. I mean, Constable were very keen to do a book with this format. In fact, I had three publishers that were really keen to do a book. But because of Constable's legacy with publishing Scottish books.

I decided to go with them. But it was a remarkable format. But it was a remarkable format, I think, for books if you were working only in that format. It was a format that didn't sit particularly well with smaller formats. And it took me 25 years to get it out of my system. But I reached a point where I felt I'd said what I wanted to say.

with that particular format and it was time for me to hunt new game.

Tim Parkin (11:14)
I'm interested in when you're using 617 or a large format like that in the mountains And you're going to the top of the mountains a lot of it's about getting the right conditions and being in the right place and the framing isn't quite as flexible. So would you say a majority of your photography Was about planning in advance or was it opportune at the time?

Colin Prior (11:35)
It was a bit of both really, to be honest. I mean, there's always the pictures you don't expect to get. But more often than not, I'd been there before and failed. And I mean, the analogy that I used was it was a bit like a military strike. I'd done the recon, which was the most important part. And then I mean, I still do this to this day, and I'm sure you guys do as well.

you know, when I come back from a shoot, everything is, you know, sorted, clean, charged, and I repack my camera bag so that I don't, if I decide to leave quickly, which I usually do, I don't need to think about what's in that bag because I've already checked, and it's about preparation. And then the final part's a straight when the weather looks good.

And it's simply a question of driving, you know, maybe to Torrid in the sky and climbing the mountain in the same day. So it was a big day to get up there for sunrise. And if you're doing sunrise, it's an awful lot easier to camp up there than it is to try and, you know, chase the sun up. There's nothing worse than

trying to get on a mountain top and you feel you're gonna be late, it's an awful feeling. Whereas if you go up in the afternoon, you might shoot something in the evening that you don't expect to, and you can have a good meal and a good rest. And then when you're waking up in the morning, you've got this huge potential. You're about to witness something that nobody else will. And sometimes it happens and other times it doesn't.

But the problem I had really was, you know, if you're gonna make that investment of both time and money, you really needed to be going when the weather was good. And that inevitably in Scotland meant an anti-cyclone where you had high pressure. And sometimes the weather was just a bit too perfect. But...

you can't really take that gamble when it might rain or the cloud base was going to come down because it's just so much investment of time, effort and money to do that. And now, I don't quite do that as much as I once did because if I go away now when shoots, I really want to have three nights away. One because...

I'm going to burn less fuel than going up and down to say Glencoe in a day. And it also means that it allows me just to take a bit more advantage of time. So I might be trying to shoot something as a military strike, but I also want to go somewhere and either wreck it or just discover what I might find there. It'll be somewhere where I think there's great potential. And sometimes there is and sometimes there isn't, as we all know.

Joe Cornish (14:47)
So, because I wanted to follow up briefly, at least, on the 617, because you obviously gave us an insight then into your working method, particularly. And that's ongoing, regardless of the type of camera.

But, you know, having we've all been through the kind of experience of having to perhaps let go of film and move on to digital, although I think, Tim, you're probably heading in the other direction still. But I just I just was wondering, Colin, whether you'd had any regrets or what your feelings were having left 617 format and film and now shooting digitally.

Colin Prior (15:30)
Well, I mean, it was a fantastic time with that format and I had specific photographs that I wanted to take with it. But I mean, that three by one format defined my career and just in the way that the five by four format defined your career. And you know, back during that period, that was important, that was really important.

But these things aren't important anymore. You can't define a career with format. So I don't really have any regrets because I'd actually reached a point where I'd shot the images that I wanted to shoot in the Scottish Highlands with that format. And I mean, I haven't done a huge number of minros. In fact, I've been on a lot of mountains.

And I've been 15 minutes from the summit, 20 minutes from the summit, and I've been so tired. I just can't be bothered to go there because I was where I wanted to be. Not on the summit. And it was irrelevant to me, the summit. I didn't need to stand in the summit. And but there are there are there are a huge number of mountains in Scotland that I haven't been on, but I think I've been on the best ones because there are really.

there are really quite a tiny number of mountain summits that are great for photography. I mean, they're great views. I mean, when you're up high, you get a great view somewhere, everywhere, but there's not a lot of summits that really lend themselves to strong compositional lines. And if you're in Glen Afric, for instance, or Malardach, or in the Cairngorms,

You've got very flattish mountains. If you compare it to Glenshiel, for instance, or the Kulin, or Torridon, or Assen. These are all places or locations where you've got very angular mountains, you've got shapes. I mean, it's a bit like the Karakorum for me. It was part of the reason I get drawn there because of these shapes, the graphics in the mountains. Whereas if you go onto the Cairngorms, you're on an elevated plateau.

with recesses below. And it's very difficult to get any visual drama out the Cairngorms. I mean, there's a shot down Loughan, which to me is the best shot in the Cairngorms. But with a panoramic camera, there's very little else that you can shoot there that's not monotonous. So I just, I wanted to really go back to a camera system with interchangeable lenses that gave me

focal lengths, wide angles, macro and telephoto lenses. Because I think I love shooting telephoto landscape lenses. I love shooting telephoto landscapes with the longer lenses and the compression you get with them. It's what you miss with that 617. So ultimately I found a creative straight jacket.

And what I was doing was going back to the best mountains. That, you know, I would go back. I'd already shot a picture there. That box in my mind was ticked. But you would end up going back and maybe getting an inferior image. And I thought, this really isn't a good use of my time.

Joe Cornish (19:09)
That was fascinating. Tim.

Tim Parkin (19:12)
Yeah, I've got a question from The mike smith from and it's regarding your Karakorum book and it's about where the transition from the scotland's mountains was scotch mountain books And over to the caracorum because that's A completely different kettle of fish as far as mountains go and what was the inspiration for the start of that caracorum? And did he try and approach it in the same way initially?

Colin Prior (19:40)
Well, first of all, the I didn't give up the Scottish mountains for the caracorum. I went to the caracorum in 1996. That was my first trip there on British Airways budget. And I don't think I'd even well, I hadn't published Scotland the Wild Places by then. So this was running for a very, very long time in parallel with the Scottish work. And it didn't.

supplement it. And the initial inspiration came when I was 23 years old and we used to have a library, I lived in Mogaï, there was a library in Bearsden, and I discovered this book called In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, and it was Galen Rougal's book of the American Attempt on K2 in 1977, published by the Sierra Club.

And if I mean, if you saw the book now, you would not be particularly impressed. But there was one image there of the Tango Towers at the front. A double page spread. And I thought, what sort of place is this? And that was where that seed of inspiration came from. And I had that book permanently out from the library. I took it back every two weeks and got it re-stamped because it never been out before.

and it used to sit under my bedside table. And I used to look at the pictures and eventually I got there in 96. And then I went back on a private trip on which was self-funded in 2004. And I'd made my mind up I was going to do a book there. And when I got round to about 20 tight, sorry, 2010, and I realized I realized that the clock was ticking.

and that if I didn't find a way to make this book happen, it would never happen. So I spent quite a lot of time and effort, we created a brochure and I got a copywriter and I got my designer to sort all this out and we got that printed. And I sent it out to all the brands and I went round.

I went to Photokina and I went to a couple of other photographic exhibitions and outdoor exhibitions. I used to exhibit at the outdoor exhibitions anyway, so I knew quite a lot of people there. And I managed to get corporate funding because when you're going into the caracorum alone, you need a team of people to support you there. And it costs quite a lot of money when you know you've got a jeep, which one person's in and not four.

So I managed to do that and I got three brands to commit for four years to support me in the Karakorum. I subsequently got another brand to support me for two further years. Because by the time that I got through the four years, the people within these brands had all left and the companies had been bought over and nobody even knew a single thing about my Karakorum project.

despite them giving me quite a lot of money. So that's the madness of it all. That would never happen now. I mean, first of all, the brands don't have the money. Certainly, the photographic brands don't have that money. And if they do have that money for other things, but they're most probably gonna be video orientated rather than on stills.

which is a great shame. So I mean, I think, I mean, there was a huge spend on that Karakorum project. And I kind of feel in a way that it was one of the last big international photographic commissions. I mean, I hadn't been commissioned by a publisher to do this. I just had self-commissioned it. But there's not the money available internationally to do.

projects like that over a period of, well, I made six month long trips to the Karakorum and there's very few people ever going to get the opportunity to do that again. So it was a really, it was for me a great privilege to have that opportunity.

Tim Parkin (24:16)
In terms of approach of composition, you know, you work in a 617 format, you also worked in 35mm 3-2 format. How did you approach the Karakoram project to begin with? Do you think about doing it as panoramas or was it always going to be a more of a standard shaped book?

Colin Prior (24:39)
No, I mean, the caracorums are vertical landscape. And I knew from the outset that 617 wasn't going to cut it there. I did take on the earlier trip in 2004, I took both a 617 and an X-Pan with me there. And I did shoot one or two panoramas, but the vast majority of the images I shot on later images, this the...

the sponsored ones as it were, I was shooting with 3.2 formats and both Canon Leica, well it was Canon and Leica I was shooting with predominantly on these trips. Both the 006, the S006, which produced a CCD sensor as you may recall, and produced some

really beautiful black and white transitions. And I had a range of Canon equipment, which with longer lenses that I was shooting other images with. And the great thing about the Karakorum is because of the scale of the landscape there, it does lend itself to telephoto lenses, which means you can get long shots, very, very clear air.

and you're not getting any of the distortion, the key stoning or the convergence that you'll get with a wide-angle lens from the base of a mountain, for instance.

Joe Cornish (26:16)
Yeah, I can imagine that they just working on, well, thinking of the Triangle Towers is obviously such an incredibly iconic image, but the views of K2 as well, you could presumably be at least two or three miles away and still get a frame filling image that isn't shot with an extreme telephoto, but just having that wonderful distant perspective does produce something that is really, really monumental and your book is full of images.

like that really do show those mountains at their very best.

Tim Parkin (26:47)
in terms of the colour, it's a very challenging environment. You've got a very typically quite a lot of blue cold light and there's not much not much apart from rock and snow there. Did you find it challenging to work in colour or was any consideration of working perhaps in black and white for the whole book?

Colin Prior (27:07)
Well, these were thoughts, Tim, I also had out there. And what I was aware of acutely, having quite a number of mountaineering books from different parts of the world is that when you pick these books up, spectacular though the photographs are from summits that I don't have the technical skill to reach, they're dominated by two colors, blue and white, blue and white, blue and white, and...

You might then turn a page and there's two climbers in red or a yellow tent, but it's predominantly a monotony of two colors. And I felt in many ways that because of the graphics within the caracorum, that removing the color data and working on a monochrome palette would probably offer a better approach. And whilst I'm happy enough with that decision,

I'm still not convinced it was the right one, but it was the one I decided to make at the time. So I focused on monochrome and I picked out the strongest color images to help break the image up, to help break the black and white images up. Because the Caracorum is not really a landscape where there's a lot of.

intimate landscapes in there. It's not like the Arctic where you might have some ice details that you can focus on, because the glaciers are, you know, they're dry glaciers anyway. So the...

The approach really I felt had to be that way. And the other thing I used, and I'm not sure if retrospectively, I mean there's one or two people that have said they would have cared or they don't care for the portraits that I put in the book. But again, I used that, it wasn't because I knew these people, some of them I didn't know, they were just randoms that...

you know, were part of another expedition and, you know, I met them at Concordia. But again, I used that to try and change the pace of the book, to try and avoid the monotony that I think is easy to achieve in any mountaineering book. But interestingly, the middle section of the Baltoro, where

you've got snow on the mountains. Certainly, I mean, I'm going there usually early in the season in June, early June. There's where the trangos and cathedrals and the Uli Bahia tower is. There's some fantastic mountains. That's where a lot of these towers are and minarets and they're really striking. And as you move up the Baltoro.

you're obviously increasing your altitude as you move up towards Concordia, but the mountains kind of change character until you get to Concordia and then you've got K2 which is just such a powerful pyramid and you've got the Gashabrums there, that whole range of the Gashabrums, one to five, and these are really striking mountains, lots of very angular shapes.

G4 is a striking mountain, Gassabrum IV, an absolute striking mountain. And as I say, it was a great privilege to be able to go there solely with the purpose of photographing these mountains because, I mean, mountaineers dream about mountains, but they dream about standing on the summit of a particular mountain.

And I dream about mountains, but my dreams about mountains are very different to theirs because I'm not a technical climber. And what I would say is that there are many very talented mountaineers that can take great landscape photographs when they're there, but they're essentially recording what they're doing there. And because I'm not climbing, it gives me

the ability to carry more cameras and a tripod obviously and larger format cameras. And I'm able to prioritize the mountain photography in a way that they are not.

Joe Cornish (31:43)
that was fascinating to hear about the Karakoram. And I'm assuming that I also I just, you know, on a personal note, wanted to say that I envy Colin so much over the years, the work that he was doing, I never had the courage to, to go out there myself. And in a way, now I look at

I look at his book and I think, thank goodness I don't have to go because I can still enjoy the perspective on this incredible landscape without actually having to go to the trouble of going there myself, which I'm never going to do now, I know. And I'm sure many people would probably feel the same. Having said that, when you hear his stories, it just inspires you to want to go and see it yourself as well. But yeah, it's a...

It's exciting. And Colin, I'm assuming, you know, based on conversations we've had not too distant past that project is now over for you. Can you see yourself going back or not?

Colin Prior (32:42)
I think my time in the caracorum is over. I've had a book published, I was lucky enough to have that published. It's almost out of print, in fact I'm going to have a conversation with my publisher this afternoon about a potential reprint on it. I could spend more time there, but I don't have corporate money and I would need to go looking for it again and I think that would be a great deal more difficult, particularly when a book has been done.

And, you know, I'm not getting any younger. Life is finite. And there's other things that I want to do.

Tim Parkin (33:24)
I've got a question from Jeremy Carmichael and he was asking about who was your inspiration for mountain photography? And there's a few, there's a few people come to mind, but I'm interested in where you saw, where you saw mountain photography the first time, which I think you've already mentioned, Gellan Rowell. Is there anybody else that provides inspiration for your work or mountain photography that you enjoy?

Colin Prior (33:48)
I think it was Galen because that book wasn't photographically fantastic, but it then published Mountain Light in 1986 and, funnily enough, the picture of the trangotowers was really the double-page spread as you open the book. It was one of the main pictures in the book and there was

It came at a time when I was just beginning, you know, my photography in Scotland. And I thought to myself, you know, he's done this internationally, you know, captured mountains and different parts of the world with these fantastic photographs where he shot dusk and dawn, captured amazing colours. And I felt that I could achieve much the same thing in Scotland. The great irony

is that as I've got older and learned a bit more, and this has also been confirmed by two other photographers, well-known photographers whose opinions I value, I realized that much of what was in that book was the result of Galen's use of sing-ray filters. All these red, pinky, purples on the mountains are not real. And the pictures...

that really spoke to me deeply. And what's so ironic about this, Galen himself was so anti-manipulation. I mean, Photoshop was in its infancy then and he really hated the idea of any sort of change to the image, but he was doing it in camera. He was changing the reality of what he was seeing out there.

But he still did me a favor because it was these photographs that inspired me to do what I did in the Scottish mountains. But I captured that for real without filters. And the light that we get in Scotland is very, very special when it happens, which isn't very often, as you may know. Subsequently, I picked up a copy of Vittorio Sella's book.

called Summit. Now that was published after I'd made, I think, two trips to the Karakoram. I mean, it was photography from another era, but he was a very, very talented photographer, despite the rudimentary equipment he was using at the time. He was a real artist. And I think what...

what both he and I have benefited from, and you also, and yourself Tim, is the fact that throughout our early careers where film was the only way we could capture images, that we worked in large format and that large format has subsequently been scanned and printed. And the reproduction, as we all know, is superb from those large format transparencies.

Had I been a wildlife photographer, I'd been trying to shoot, you know, birds in action with a hundred ASA film, uprated to 200. Now, I mean, wildlife photographers are regularly shooting at four and 5,000 ISO and higher. And so your archive would really be a shadow of what it might have been if you'd had the technology that was available today.

And I think we are quite lucky insofar as that the work that we produced when we were younger in film still really stands up to the reproduction of modern digital cameras. But what I mean, what we're getting from modern digital cameras is outstanding now. It's just unbelievable.

Tim Parkin (37:57)
Thank you.

Joe Cornish (37:57)
Yeah, I must jump in because I think that one of the things that Colin's point sort of directs me to is the fact that Galen Rowell, who you know, we, I think we all agree, is a great photographer and a huge influence on us in different ways perhaps. But his work, which was all shot on 35mm back in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, maybe early 90s, I can't remember the

that Galen died now. But his work, unfortunately, okay, when you see it reproduced now at large print sizes, it doesn't look great. And that's because it was 35 mil. So not surprising. And I've often wondered what he would have done if he'd had 60 megapixel mirrorless cameras.

Colin Prior (38:31)
Good reason. Thank you.

Joe Cornish (38:54)
to use, I'm sure he would have made some wonderful photographs with it, with or without SINGRAE filters, because he certainly wouldn't have needed them now. But yes, it has been a huge, huge change for us, whether we like it or not, the technology has forced us to think differently about photography and the way we use it.

Colin Prior (39:15)
But I think, I think Galen was a prolific photographer. I mean, he was, he was a very, very talented artist and such a fantastic writer as well as climber. I mean, he was a very talented individual.

Joe Cornish (39:30)
Absolutely.

Colin Prior (39:33)
And Sean the light for a great deal of landscape photography, genres of landscape photography, both the big mountain pictures, but also some of the details that he would shoot in the landscape as well. And people, he regularly photographed the people that he encountered on his trips.

So, apart from Galen, there was another photographer that influenced me greatly, which was a Japanese photographer called Shinzo Maeda. And I have a number of his books, but the book that I favor most is called Kamikoshi, which is a national park in Japan. And he really put the intimate landscape on my radar screen.

He shot with 10-8-5-4, but predominantly Hasselblad. He had a big range of Hasselblad lenses. And I think in his lifetime, he published 17 illustrated books and had a huge picture library, which made him a great deal of money at the time. So that book, Kamikoshi, is actually fantastic. Particularly with these telephoto images shot with him.

the 250 sonar Hasselblad lens on sort of distant images of forest. But he used the full range, including the super wide, and also shot quite intimate studies with the 5.4 as well. Beautiful work.

Joe Cornish (41:15)
Absolutely. Tim, are you familiar with Shinzo Maeda? Does this work?

Tim Parkin (41:19)
I'm a huge fan. Yeah, I think I've got as many books I could get. I think I've got eight of his books out in the out in the shed. They're all they're all really good. I've got a few a few different ones as well. I mean, the is a blade of grass is one of them that was published in Germany really nice book. So

Joe Cornish (41:36)
I had that one. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? Because we think of Eliot Porter as being the kind of really the, and in some ways Eliot Porter is the kind of grandfather of the intimate color landscape. But Shintaro Maeda's work, I think, had a probably a more extensive influence. And he comes a little bit later than Eliot Porter as well. But I think his work really is outstanding. It's important that it is kept alive in the...

kind of contemporary photography if possible. So, because it represents such a, a lot of it is very innovative. And he was a, you know, as Colin hints, the use of all those different cameras is fascinating when you look at the back of his book and you see, you know, he was technically brilliant and obviously very curious and experimental in a way, in the way that he approached what he did. But at the same time, nature is the, is the real star of his photographs.

Colin Prior (42:32)
I mean, I would say that.

Tim Parkin (42:33)
And from that side of things, the

I was going to go ask you about your project Fragile, Colin, which takes elements of landscape and connects it with the wildlife in a fascinating way. I mean, I'm a big fan of that book. I think it's fantastic the way you've worked on it. Can you give me a little bit of background about how that came about?

Colin Prior (42:57)
Well, I mean, believe it or not, I started thinking about that book in 2010. And I had this idea about eggs because I was familiar with the beauty and the texture and patterns of eggs. And I thought how I could look at the landscape in a different way and use the eggs. I mean, I.

I'm not really a wildlife photographer as such, and I didn't want to have to go out and try and shoot birds and the landscape because you either have to do one or the other. You've got to concentrate on one or the other because one approach is nearly the antithesis of the other. So I thought about photographing the eggs in a museum and taking a habitat photograph.

and creating a diptych where you've got an egg in one page that's connected in many different ways to the landscape. And we did book covers back and I've still got them in 2012, even really before I started to find a way to make this happen. And I mean the big problem was the technical.

approach that I would need to adopt to try and photograph the eggs. And I did I did some test shots with a Hasselblad and a 150 lens and a close up tube. And I mean, even if 11, 16, you know, the top of the egg and a few more millimeters of sharp. And I knew that I would have to focus that. But to, you know, I couldn't justify going out and spending.

I mean, you probably wouldn't get a lot of change out of 35,000, 40,000 now for the flash, the stacking unit, a cambo studio stand, a table to shoot them on. But on one of my workshops, I met a chap called Derek Rattray, who he came along for a weekend workshop and I ended up

chatting to him about this idea I had about photographing eggs. And he said to me, I've got all that equipment. You can borrow it if you want. And I'm thinking, where's the catch here? You know, there's got to be a catch. And he said, no, you can borrow it. He said, the only thing I would say is I'd quite like to be involved in the process. So I said, fine. So we got together. I moved.

the equipment down into my own studio here. And I set it up because I had to prove a lighting technique to shoot the eggs. And once I had achieved that, we moved it all through to the Museum of Scotland, who I'd previously spoken to. And the curator there, the curator of birds and eggs, a chap called...

Bob McGowan, who retired a couple of years ago, he was really enthusiastic about it. And, you know, the project began that way. But in the interim, even though I hadn't photographed the eggs, I was thinking about habitats all the time. So I was shooting images that I knew I would be able to use in the course of the time.

with the eggs that are finally photographed. And I think we did that in 2018 and 2019. My shot, I think a total of about 280 eggs and we used focus stacking. But I mean, the Cambo studio stand, which he had weighed 200 kilos and you need that to support that rig above the egg.

Tim Parkin (47:03)
Wow.

Colin Prior (47:07)
So I enjoyed it immensely. It was very, very satisfying. And I put my heart and soul into that project. And there was partly scientific information that I had to source as well. And I was fortunate that, you know, I got both Bob McGowan.

and one of the professors at SNH to contribute essays to, Des Thompson, to contribute essays to the book which has given it a bit more authority.

Tim Parkin (47:53)
Joe, do you have any last questions for Joe?

Joe Cornish (47:54)
I think it's a great book. Yeah, one more question for Colin, but just to finish off what Colin was saying there about fragile, I think it's a remarkable achievement. And I know that from conversations I've had with Colin, it may not necessarily have been your most commercially successful book, but certainly, I think creatively and intellectually, it's one of the very best.

and I know a lot of people who really, really admire it. So I hope you're proud of it. Anyway, you should be.

Colin Prior (48:24)
Well, I'm very proud of it. And it's not been a particularly great commercial success, but Waterstones didn't embrace it very readily. And the RSPB, with whom I had quite a close working relationship with, they chose not to take it up and put it in the shops. And it's not a book about bird's eggs. I mean, three generations of people.

The public haven't seen bird's eggs. Bird's egg collecting has been long extinguished, which everybody is quite delighted about. But I think it's a little bit, I suppose it's the subject, it's the history, it's a bit like slavery, or it's a bit like whaling. You know, the chapters in human history that we're not particularly proud of.

And it suffered a wee bit from that. And I'm disappointed because it kind of, I suppose, deterred me from trying to find an exhibition for the work. Because it would lend itself very much to that. I mean, you can imagine children walking in and seeing the egg of a golden eagle or a robin blowing up to maybe three feet.

it would be quite striking to see that alongside the habitats of where these birds live and procreate.

Joe Cornish (50:05)
Yeah, really would. And that's fascinating. I hadn't appreciated that the it's slightly damned by association with a collecting because clearly what you did was photograph something that has a historic legacy. But yeah, I mean, anyway, it strikes me as being very, very worthwhile project. And finally, what I wanted to just try and get your view on it was

was how much, as a landscape photographer like myself, with decades of experience, we've seen lots of changes in the natural world, partly as a result of climate change and partly because of human exploitation of the land. And I'm just wondering, I mean, I feel that historically that most landscape photographers who care about these things have done everything they could to

to make things better. And I think of Ansel Adams, of course, and Peter Dombroskis, and there've been other photographers who've campaigned for landscape preservation and conservation, and yet at the same time, you and I know that also the photographs that we produce can attract people to places, and that in turn can cause damage. So I'm just wondering what you feel now about the role of photography in conservation, whether it has a...

a role to play or whether we're part of the problem.

Colin Prior (51:38)
Well, it's a really good question, Joe. And, you know, as I've said to you before, you know, I take responsibility for taking people, other photographers, into some of the locations that I go into myself. I mean, as you know, I run tours and I take people to these special locations and inevitably they will go back. So...

It is increasing footfall, but I mean, my association with that is that footfall is minute compared with the footfall that is, for instance, going through Sky on a daily basis or an annual basis. I mean, Sky...

has some fantastic landscape there and people want to experience it firsthand and why shouldn't they? But I think the more fragile areas are more of a contentious issue. And I mean, certainly there are locations in Scotland that I've seen huge deterioration in over the last 30 or 40 years.

there's far more footfall. There's places that were absolutely pristine and it's not uncommon to find, you know, a poly bag full of Budweiser bottles or a tent that someone's tried to set on fire because they can't be bothered taking it back or disposable barbecues or tires that have been thrown into a lock in Achilles. I mean, I was there recently and I could not believe the trash that's lying in that lock.

I mean, when I went up there to begin with in, you know, 88, 87, you felt you were standing in the wilderness. I mean, there wasn't so much traffic in the road back then either, but there was there were few paths, if any, around the sides. And and now it's just it's just so sad to see what humans have done to that location.

But it's because it's easily accessible. And if you move not far from the roadside or from lay-bys, you can get back onto the less beaten track, as it were.

Joe Cornish (54:06)
Yeah, it really is ironic that the very reason that most people want to go to these places is because of their beauty, and yet they are quite happy to leave those places less beautiful than they found them. And I think that's just shocking, and unfortunately it seems to be a malaise of humankind. I still feel personally quite hopeful that photographers can contribute in some way by

you know, by I suppose recording the appearances of the world in all its forms, be it, you know, we think of Ed Bartinsky's current exhibition down at the Sarche Gallery in London, which shows the incredible types of industrial exploitation of landscape on the one hand, but at the same time, we all know there's still a great deal of beauty left and trying to find some kind of balance where you can inspire people to believe that there is hope for a

better future. I do think is also part of our role. If we only show people the negatives, then maybe there won't be hope. And when there's no hope, there's no incentive to live to improve the world if you possibly can. Although it's very difficult to know what actions we can make as photographers other than to record what we see. And it's just a question for us of deciding.

what our priorities are and where we want to put our energy. And also what gives us inspiration. And clearly that's very important. But I do think trying to get the message out about how we can behave responsibly in the natural world and leave it undamaged and if possible better by collecting litter perhaps as we do, we walk around with our cameras and our tripods. I think that's one small thing that we could do at any rate. But it's a worrying...

theme and thanks anyway for your answer because it was enlightening. Thank you.

Tim Parkin (56:11)
I think one of one of the nice things about having been up quite a few mountains around the Scott, Scotland's area and around Glencoe, which is a very popular area is once you get beyond about 300 meters of a mountain, there is very little litter, there's very little left behind. I think it's, it's very much a, a malaise of people who don't spend time in the landscape that, that don't have any consideration for it. So the more, even though it's sad that it's getting damaged, the more people who do see the beauty of it and spend more time in it, the

the less likely they are to damage it. It's the infrequent visitors that tend to do the worst. But yeah, thank you very much for your time, Colin. That's fascinating stories, and I'm looking forward to getting this out there for people to look at. So I was going to ask as well, would it be all right if we do a little article about you in a follow-up for OnLandscape?

Colin Prior (57:05)
They have been lighted Tim, absolutely lighted.

Tim Parkin (57:09)
That'd be great. We can include some more of your pictures. But thank you very much, Colin. And I'll round that out for OnLandscape today. Goodbye.