A Year Amongst Trees
Exactly twelve months ago to the day of writing this sentence, I would have been sat at home enjoying our traditional Boxing Day turkey stew, looking forward to my final shift as an employee of a international organisation which I was due to work on New Years Eve.
If I had my way, I’d have finished at the beginning of December but I agreed to sacrifice a few more weeks of my life to allow the team some extra time to find my replacement.
This delay only served to strengthen my desire to leave but, on the sharper side of the sword, allowed feelings about the fear of the unknown a little more time to manifest.
I’m generally very capable of remaining here in the present moment after many mornings practicing photography and years of bodybuilding and meditation whilst out in nature. After 10 years of consistent employment, however, I think even a Buddhist monk may have allowed some negative thoughts, doubts and fears about what challenges may be awaiting around the corner to creep in.
I had a plan though and it was very simple; leave the career that left me feeling empty and create photographs like my life depended on it. I wasn’t about to go back on the promise that I’d made to myself, no matter how many times the logical part of my brain told me to ‘just wait a little bit longer’ and ‘save another £1,000 first’.
As you can imagine, I’m 75% emotion and make most of my decisions based on what they tell me. Decisions are a long time in the making but once made, they are often impulsive and there is usually no going back.
I always liked to do things my way and, from day one, I had a desire to pursue a life of self-employment. I’d basically created this entire life in my head, wrote some notes out on paper and visualised and walked the path that was going to get me to where I wanted to be. I was going to be a bodybuilder, sip mango and chia smoothies and spoon avocados out of their shells in as many different countries as possible, all while teaching others how to transform their own bodies and mindset to help them to become better versions of themselves.
It’s safe to say that I now know better than to allow my thoughts to run too far into the future as you just don’t know what surprises life might be hiding around the corner. Especially if you allow curiosity to lead you.
The camera hadn’t even found its’ way into my hands when I was drawing up my three year plan to become a personal trainer. Back in 2018, I was actually half way through my studies when my own curiosity led me to pick up my sisters Nikon D5200 and take it with me to Pistyll Rhaeadr, the place where I guess you could say that this whole journey really started. I got home after an afternoon of photographing, loaded all of the photos onto my computer and couldn’t work out, for the life of me, why the photos were either completely black, white and/ or blurry.
I have to know ‘why’ to most things in life and so I asked Google the simple question; ‘why are my photographs blurry?’ And right there, it began. One rabbit hole led straight into a network of other rabbit holes. One week passed without studying, followed by a whole month. I just could not stop going outside and putting what I’d learnt into practice. I would go outside, take photos, come home, edit, review, watch the likes of Nigel Danson and Thomas Heaton on YouTube and then spend the week pretending to work while I sat and asked Google questions and studied photographs on the Internet, ready to repeat the whole process again.
Before I knew it, I had to make a phone call to extend the deadline for my personal training course. They could have granted me an extra couple of lifetimes to complete it, I don’t think anything would have changed. My love of photography blossomed with every week that passed and stole what little love I had left for my job and for studying the anatomy of the human body.
It was much more fun to study trees and the landscape, as well as my place within it all.
Photography opened my eyes to the person that I really was; the emotional and introspective human that I had sacrificed by trying to please the world and impress certain people in my life. It reconnected me to my inner child; a reserved boy who spent hours tangled up in his own imagination, buried himself under mountains of books and craved solitude, yet wished to be heard.
One of the books that, even twelve months ago, I could never have foreseen being in my collection this year is the Collins Tree Guide by Owen Johnson and David More.
A lock down here in Wales early in the year led me to make regular visits to Powis Castle and I embarked on a project to photograph some of the wonderful trees and areas of woodland that are around the grounds.
This followed a conversation that I had with my Nan who had encouraged me to connect with my imagination during my photography trips. I wrote about the project in an article for the Welsh Country Magazine, accompanied by the photographs, some of which are here:
Almost overnight, my love of woodland photography was born. The complex nature of finding a composition among the chaos is what drew me. It reminds me somewhat of the chaos that resides in my own life and trying to find the meaning that is somewhere within it, particularly the chaos that I faced in the many different lives that I lived around the country as a child. I faced many unique challenges, and grew up around many changing faces, never knowing how long they might be present in my life and all forcing me to become a different version of myself. Inside of this, I have discovered a complete contrast in the woodlands that I’ve visited this year; the characters in each one of these remaining somewhat consistent and allowing me to be myself upon every visit.
I felt a strong desire to identify these trees that I spent time with and photographed during the winter woodland project and so I resorted to the Collins guide in between shoots to increase my knowledge of some of the things that I found beautiful outdoors in nature. Scot’s pine, Douglas fir, sycamore, ash, silver birch, beech and rowan are just a few of the species that I’ve learnt to identify during a year of woodland photography. I’ve also learnt how spot to the differences between sessile & English oaks.
I still admit to knowing nothing in the grand scheme of things. I guess the real beauty of studying nature and photography is that I never will, but I know so much more today than I knew at this point last year and that is enough of a reason for me to carry on in this pursuit.
For me, it is all a process of progression and self-discovery and every trip into the Great British woodland provides the perfect opportunity to accurately place some of the small pieces into the gaps of my never ending puzzle.
There was a time, probably around eighteen months ago, where I would question just what on earth some of the UK’s woodland photographers were thinking when searching for compositions. I just could not understand what their feelings were and what exactly they were looking for and there was no way that I could find any meaningful compositions back then.
I loved walking through the woods as a child but with a camera in my hand, they did nothing but confuse me and caused my mind to wander as I tried to force a photograph. Here was a genre of photography that I never would have envisioned myself taking to and I had very little interest in pursuing it or building a body of work solely about trees and the UK’s varying woodland.
Since then, I regularly practice the Japanese art of shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) and I’ve learnt how to quieten my mind through meditation practices and deep breathing work which I believe is responsible for my improved ability to find and photograph meaningful compositions. Once again, I guess you just never know what to expect in life, here I am with a portfolio of work that contains a tree or two in 75% of the photographs inside and I just cannot bring myself to stop visiting woodlands.
There is no doubt in my mind that this year has brought me back in line with myself, spiritually speaking. I have a deeper understanding of who I am now and I’ve learnt to embrace both good days and bad. These somewhat reflect in my photography, too. I’ve noticed a clear theme of moods developing in my images over the past twelve months as I pour more of myself into my art.
I’ve been able to connect with my own guiding voice and silence the noise in the world that surrounds me. This same voice is the one that leads me into the beautiful and fascinating woodland in search of solitude and perhaps even some level of protection against the outside world; a world, or rather a population, that seems to be focused on making noise and, increasingly more recently, engaging in conflict.
At one point in my journey, I craved the heights of a mountain top to gather my thoughts and find solitude but now it’s within the woodlands, a land of mighty oaks, twisting silver birch and elegant beech trees that provide the silence that I seek to allow this voice to speak. The trees are great listeners, and I’m learning a lot from them. Every day, my own ability to listen improves and I think this is what has allowed me to write this blog. There is no way that I’d have allowed myself to be this vulnerable once upon a time. I wrote recently on Twitter that I was feeling a little frustrated with social media not giving me what I want from this art. Posting photographs online often leaves me with a rather empty feeling. ‘Is that all my work is good for?’ I often ask myself. This is all just a part of my process for striving towards something more. It’s who I am; proud of how far I’ve come but never entirely satisfied. I guess that we are all greedy in our own way. Maybe I can take a lesson from the famous Lao Tzu quote;
‘Nature does not hurry and yet everything is accomplished’.
I think, upon reflection, that writing this blog shows that I am moving in the right direction and my use of social media platforms is just one of the tools that is moving me towards what it is that I seek.
This isn’t the first time that I have spoken about the woodlands providing me with feelings of safety and comfort. This has become evident as some of these feelings wane now that the trees have lost their leaves and the woodlands are somewhat exposed. Maybe there are some lessons to be learnt from trees and the way in which they reveal their true character and soul during the winter months. Perhaps this is a process that us humans must also go through from time to time as we strip back our layers and strive to show the world exactly who we are. The Japanese say we have three faces and only one of these do we show to the world.
A year that uncovered so much for me as an artist has also been one of the toughest of my life and I think that this has been reflected in some of my images. There was a time when I believed that my photographs were no real reflection of my feelings. Maybe that was true when I travelled to some of Wales’ most popular locations and took the obvious and easy photographs that required no thought. This year has most definitely changed that and I feel like the body of work that I’ve produced, especially within Wales’ beautiful woodlands, demonstrates my ability to think differently, packs an emotional punch and gives the viewer a glimpse into my mind.
I see joy, happiness and hope in some, sadness and emptiness in others and perhaps elements of longing in many of them, although I’m still not quite sure what I’m longing for. Belonging, maybe? Purpose and meaning? I plan to dig deeper and write a lot more about some of these feelings in the future as my work, and I, continue to evolve. I’m still coming to terms with some of these feelings that I’ve encountered since picking up a camera. The journey of self-discovery over the past few years has been an intense ride and I think I owe it to myself to be a little bit more ‘Lao Tzu’ and allow the evolution process to develop in the same way that nature would; patiently and without the exertion of too much pressure or extreme force.
The transition into the life of a landscape photographer went a lot more smoothly in my head. It turns out that you can’t just pull the plug on your main source of income and expect the stars to align and money to fly into your bank account. Building a business is hard. Building your first business, in the world of art, from nothing, in the middle of a global pandemic is a different challenge altogether.
I’ve had to stand and face the man in the glass every day this year, knowing that everything falls back on me now. There is no place to hide when things aren’t going in the direction that I’d planned. I do have high hopes for the next year and I can see light at the end of a long tunnel. There is a feature in the Outdoor Photography magazine to come in January which will get the year off to a great start. I have also decided that it is finally the right time to launch a small number of photography workshops. These will run alongside some more of my one to one or one to two lessons. I had a couple of fantastic mornings with clients last year and look forward to passing on some more of my knowledge in 2022. I’ve also added a number of new limited edition pieces to my fine art collection and hope to see more of these on walls around the world over the year to come.
It is my intention to write some more next year too, to offer more depth and meaning to the work that I create. I hope that this article has offered some insights into my thoughts and allowed you to understand somewhat, why I create. It’s a complex topic and one for which there is no definitive answer but please feel free to leave me some comments if some of this made sense to you, or you can write me an email and of course, you can always connect with me on my social media platforms.
Over the last twelve months, I have learnt not to get too far ahead of myself when it comes to making plans. Instead, I choose to remain open to any opportunities that life might throw at me and allow the wind to carry me in whichever way it wishes. But, like the trees that I study, I remain very much rooted in my own morals and beliefs.
Writing this is all a part of my process of remembering who I am and where I came from and not allowing myself to be distracted by the world and what it believes is best for me. Though I sometimes choose to look back to see how far I have come, I have been working hard on existing very much in the moment, choosing to keep one eye on the next days’ weather forecast before making too many commitments. Whatever I do commit to moving forwards, I just know that my camera wont be too far away from me. It’s going to play a huge part in whichever direction I choose to run in the future and there is no doubt in my mind that trees are going to be nearby to guide me.
Thank you very much for reading. I wish you the very best for the year ahead and look forward, with great anticipation, to what beauty might be awaiting just around the next corner.
Brad
