The

Stage is set.

Lights are low.

Curtains closed.

Whether we spend a lot of our time in airports, driving on busy motorways or simply walking the dog - we’re all on a journey.

A journey that impacts the way we feel about life, relationships, work and creativity.

So often we crave environments and stimuli that will help re-focus that journey.

Journeys Reimagined is the concept and website that I’ve been working on to allow us to do just that.

Living in the mountains can sometimes sound idyllic (for those of us that don’t live there year round!) but a remote rural lifestyle isn’t for everyone.

What I wanted to try to portray through photos, was the magnitude and permanence of the mountains compared to the, often, temporary and fragile nature of human settlement and presence.

If it’s one thing the Netherlands, where I live, doesn't have is mountains! Hardly any upland in fact save for the extreme south on the Belgian border.

That said, it does have wide open spaces. Polders and wetlands abound. So here are two photos I took in January during the few days the sun was actually allowed break through the clouds.

Ebb and Flow

Up and Down

Wax and Wane

Summer and Winter

There are many idioms to describe seasons in our lives.

Mountains have taken (up) a large part of my life, particularly when guiding and leading groups in high mountain environments was my job. Even though this is now in the past, just being in, and breathing mountain air brings out the positive in me!

The main point of this blog article, is to consider the question of quantity. Vermeer painted ~ 35, 36 paintings. Van Gogh on the other hand produced over 2000 artworks. Renoir 4000.

Taco Dibbits, the General Director of the Rijksmuseum, commenting on Vermeer's paintings, said “Their impact is unforgettable. In a world making constant demands upon us, the calm and intimacy of his work brings time to a standstill".

So we don’t need to produce work en-masse to garner attention.

Or do we?

In this episode 3 of PhotoStory, Des Clark talks with Kentucky born and raised, photographer, visual creator and businessman, Justin Thomas.

Justin describes his journey from developing rolls of film in his university darkroom to the camera world quickly becoming digital and leaving cash-poor students like him, side-lined essentially because of the cost of investing in fast-changing digital equipment. However when he moved into working in real-estate, he had both income to buy and an opportunity to develop, his photographic skills as a real-estate photographer.

Think of your hero. The person you aspire to be like. They may be alive or dead but to be favourably compared with them, you feel all sorts of positive emotions. If you see yourself as a great leader maybe Gandhi, Mandela or the New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. Or you’re a helper, a humanitarian. Then possibly Mother Teresa or Oskar Schindler.

The other day I was given a list of people supposedly with the same character traits as me. Interesting! Clint Eastwood. I like his acting – but am I like him? Fidel Castro. I definitely don’t smoke big cigars. Winston Churchill. Another cigar man. Saddam Hussein and Donald Trump. Ok, I really must be looking at the wrong list.

Well it seems not. Or at least not according to the result of the Enneagram personality test I had just undertaken. For those of you familiar with the Enneagram model, my primary Enneagram is Type 8 – the challenger. Apart from being like Clint Eastwood and Donald Trump, at their best, Type 8’s are empowering, generous, gentle, and inspiring. Unfortunately they can also be defiant, confrontational, and cynical. The good news is overall they are usually resourceful, independent, and pragmatic.

What has all this to do with a photography centred podcast and being creative? This is Episode 2 of PhotoStory, I’m Des Clark and thanks for joining me.

Of all the famous quotes that have come from Hollywood films, surely that of Forrest Gump’s mother is one of the most well-known. “Life was like a box of chocolates – you never know what you gonna get.” The quote, coming from the first scene in the film with the same name as that of the main character played by Tom Hanks, is memorable for the way it combines life’s experiences in eating chocolates with how all our lives play out in the real world. Even though many chocolate boxes have a guide card showing what each chocolate in the box contains and tastes like, we’ve all just taken a chocolate without reading the guide card. Either we’ve struck lucky and made the right choice or we’re disappointed that we’ve got a hard toffee centre when really we were looking for that raspberry panna cotta. What has all this to do with a photography centred podcast and being creative? This is Episode 1 of PhotoStory, I’m Des Clark and thanks for joining me.

Essentially, split toning is adding at least 2 colours to a (traditionally) black and white photograph. One to the shadows area and another colour to the highlights area. Usually the shadows get a cooler colour than the highlights area, which usually get a warmer colour.

Unlike single toning or e.g. sepia, the added interest of working with split toning is that, as there are always at least two colors added, contrast is accentuated as well as giving a focal point or a symbolic meaning to the image.

Seasons - or in Bob Dylan’s words, “The Times” - are changing quickly now. Or at least, I feel it. After a long, hot, dry summer in Europe where river levels fell to record lows, green grass became an illusion - unless you played golf, and glaciers in Switzerland were covered by white tarpaulins to stem them from melting into thin air, I’m now writing this wearing a body warmer and hearing the rain outside my window.

When it comes to defining words such as "success" and "failure" - what do these mean in the context of mountaineering? Reaching the summit may seem the obvious "success" definition - but what about coming back down alive regardless of whether the summit was reached? Surely that could be a success, as dying on the mountain, would, in most people's eyes, be seen as a tragic failure…

There’s a lot of scientific research papers written on the chemical structure, shape and rock origin of the stones used on traditional Italian Alpine roofs. I have to say I only realised that when I searched for photographs that others had taken of the roofs.

After a number of false starts, I’ve decided to bring PhotoStory.photos into the fold if you like. No longer out there fending for itself, it now auto-forwards any visitors to this blog page. It also provides me with a reason to create a first blog post on this recently revamped website. Why all the changes…?