Landscape Photography & Creativity - Learning to do what you love

[Music] hi everybody welcome to express photography and the vision and light series today is a really special one because i've got the hairiest person we've ever had on the channel joining us today uh mr len metcalf joining us from australia in new south wales how you doing lin i'm really well and thank you very much for that i i absolutely love my long hair and and uh i always wanted to be to be young you know even when i was sorry i said that wrong i always wanted to be old when i was a young man and now that i've got lots of gray hair uh i've actually realized that this and i love it i love being old and gray and long-haired well i i like being old and grey but apart from that we that's where our similarity ends unfortunately i'm getting shine off the top of my head i nearly wore out ah yes yeah i i notice you often wear a head in your in your videos but this reason checking them out for this reason so you're you're you and i you and i know each other somewhat well uh as we were talking before we're we're in the the stage of the blossoming friendship i think where we're kind of we've got a lot in common and we like the way each other thinks and we share a lot of common um themes with our approach to creativity and life of course so um it's been a real it's been a kind of a long wait to kind of get you on vision and light to introduce me to like to rather introduce you to my audience and what we want to talk about today is i think we'll give a very short potted history of who you are and what you do but the main thing we want to talk about today is len's journal um which i'm particularly interested because i believe i'm in the next issue oh you are indeed basically you've just worked out why you're here oh that's right i forgot that well uh isn't it lovely when you meet people and you just connect with them and uh it's so lovely to meet you and and we've only had a couple of conversations but they've been long and intense and very very connecting so one day we're going to get together and really chew the fat in person and i really can't wait to do that because i can feel the connection between us and it's beautiful nice nice it's uh yeah it it likewise i when we first started talking in the summer um i really felt i'd i'd met a kindred spirit you know just someone who lives life right to the full all the time um and i think that's admirable these days because photography work can become so daunting particularly through the last 20 months that we've been through with i mean this new south wales has been locked down for like a decade well it felt like a day way too long and we've only just um emerged like it's only been a few weeks or maybe a month or so it doesn't seem very long that we've just emerged from until omnicron arrives and then you'll be back in lockdown again ah well i i don't think so but i'm fingers crossed i'm right on that one so how did you before we start talking about the journal how did you get through lockdown i mean how did you get how you know because you're working off a lot of your works hand on you run a lot of workshops in australia uh you know you do a lot of face-to-face stuff i mean how was that for you i was uh incredibly lucky uh that i'd started setting up an online photography school about six months before the virus to read its head and i was lucky enough to launch in our first few weeks of lockdown right so i had something to focus on and uh teaching kept me sane and that the first six months or nine months of that i was teaching three days a week and are absolutely loving it and feeling connected with people in and their creativity it just totally totally lifts me and motivates me to keep going and it's such a such a lucky thing to have that as a career i'm different to many photographers in that i don't really make a living out of selling photographs and that doesn't seem to to suit me as a person i i tried commercial that that didn't work i had a gallery and i couldn't handle being a shopkeeper and um when i actually pulled my life together um by bringing my teaching expertise and i've been a teacher since i was a teenager with and brought it together with photography and also another career in outdoor guiding and training educators is one of my specialties when i bought all that together uh suddenly i found myself at home and uh in the right place you know when you find that spot where everything comes together and and everything starts working and my school blossomed when i actually bought these things together and i'm a trained art teacher and it was really the first time alistair that i sat down and taught creativity and actually got to teach art earlier on i taught all these other sorts of things and do you know what the magic thing is not only do i get this huge beautiful boost out of working with other people's creativity and helping them blossom into uh creative artists uh i also get artistic freedom from that process and i can make whatever i like instead of pampering um to an audience which is what a commercial photographer has to do or someone that really has a living out of selling prints for sure i personally struggle maintaining my individuality in that in particular environment i you know i get sucked into trying to please people and uh teaching is a great way of doing that that that gives me my artistic freedom that's hugely insightful because so much of what you just said in that sentence is the best for anyone who's watching this that little summary of what creativity does for us and what that creative freedom does for us is that's the meaning of life i think as far as i'm concerned because making photographs that pander to an external audience or for popularity or for a specific market is a blinker it's a tunnel that we go down and it's so easy to get sucked into that tunnel where you you you lose who you are you never f or you never find who you are which is even worse i think that's the scariest thing and if the pandemic has taught us anything is that we're all mortal but we're only immortal in this moment you know we're we're immortal for this period of time that we can be everything that we can be and then obviously we lose that opportunity and it must be terrible to look back in our lives and never have having found that creative person inside so i totally resonate if we were to follow this path of um pandering to an audience and and actually only like chasing likes and uh uh positive feedback from um uh the masses uh i really believe that that breeds mediocrity and when we scroll quickly through an insta feed uh that's what we're confronted with aren't we uh over and over that the um the popular isn't where the really fantastic creative interesting inspiring artists are is it it's a it's a mediocre feed uh when we actually allow algorithms and popularity uh to win the contest yeah for sure for sure i think that is a beautiful opportunity to segue into len's journal which is because it's a curated uh well i'll tell you what i'll let you tell me what it is because yeah you you can probably do that far better than i can ah there we go hold up a copy and you can hardly see it and uh we've we've got three out so far and the word curated is very very important as is the word creativity and it's a curated magazine limited edition we only print as many as a pre-sold before we go to the printer and we do that for economic reasons and uh for collectibility reasons i i hope one day that issue one is a worth a lot of money and increases in value but uh the curation uh is about finding art that is inspiring uh for us as uh people in the photography medium that artwork that stands out uh that is incredibly interesting and uh different and we don't stick to any particular genre uh as the curator and the editor i follow my heart and my my interest in what drags me to particular people's work and it's particular photos and once i start in the conversation with people do you know i'm always looking for a meaningful body of work that is incredibly inspiring rather than that lucky one-off or something that stands alone i'm really interested in uh multiples and uh how they all talk to each other whether it becomes a story or a a collection or a series i just really love how photographs talk to each other and make each other stronger and more beautiful when they come out in a in a series and it of course it's only one little glimpse into someone's work but a a very very powerful glimpse and when you're sitting to read it there's actually not very many words to read but reading the photographs and enjoying looking at them you can wander through and just spend time with that uh incredibly beautiful series and so the it's it's quarterly isn't it it is quarterly yes right so when did issue one start when when did you start the the journal oh we got that out in um may uh this year so we've we've had three this year uh it was something that we planned uh i was very lucky enough to um to find an assistant to start working with me and very high on the on the list was uh publishing my photographs and somewhere in this journey and you know it's the third uh irritation and i can't even say the right word it's the third attempt i'm a bit dyslexic so you've got to forgive me in those um getting out some of those hard words it's my third attempt at publishing the journal and the other ones i got drafts done of my work and i wasn't ever happy with actually what was coming out and maybe i thought it was a a little bit too self-righteous or something and suddenly i was like well what happens when i make it more encompassing of other people's work and and what sort of work would i would i love to show and as soon as i made that little switch in my mind it all started to come together very very quickly and uh now it's turned into something incredibly beautiful and we spent quite a long time on getting the the look and the feel so that the photographs come first in in that thing yeah i mean the the copies i've had to look through it certainly that the photos are very much front and center and obviously with a printed medium versus an online medium there's that tactility and that sense of being in the same space as the photograph and it's a very different thing from looking at an ipad or looking at images on the computer screen you know that it's a bold thing for you to do i mean you live in new south wales and you're shipping these things all over the world i mean it's a it's a it's a monumental task to just print publish distribute every quarter so it's obviously i mean it seems like it's a cross between labor of love and a commercial enterprise it's definitely a labor of love and we just get it across the line and um that's not a financial winner yet but one day i hope it is but let's just go back one little step and about having a photograph printed on paper i'm a little bit old school and i remember a photography teacher said to me uh his name is gord nundy he said uh it's not a photograph until you print it it's a it's a negative it's a it's a transparency now this is old school isn't it before the digital revolution and a photograph was something that you held in your hands printed on paper otherwise it was a slide or was a magazine and i love that notion and i know that's changed and when i hold up my phone to you i say that's a photograph but magic happens when you print doesn't it yeah and the photographs change they change form they become something else they become permanent and part of a a journal is sitting and holding the work in your hands in your favorite chair away from that pesky computer screen and i love that i collect photography books uh and i i love immersing myself in other people's work because i learn by looking at it it's such a beautiful experience sitting with other people's work teaches me about who i am and the sort of work that i like to make that was my next question is what do you learn because i think this is the difference between looking at a photograph briefly versus looking at a photograph for a prolonged period of time because once we once we transcend that very instantaneous like don't like don't understand understand what is it oh that's what it is once we go through that dialogue which is pretty pretty quick in most circumstances the time we spend immersed in other photographs it becomes about personal perspective and opinion and inner realizations and epiphanies and i share that with you i mean and christine and i are avid photo book collectors i mean probably a couple of hundred or more in the house i mean at least 200 and we do the same stick on a nice piece of vinyl on the turntable you know grab a book sit on the sofa talk about it you know looking at images and talking about it and talking about her perspective and my perspective and it is a wonderful thing to do it's and and i agree with you and i think it's a little bit sad that digital has has done so many amazing things for photography you know we we've we've expanded our palette of expression i think which is allowing us to expand our emotional literacy which is something i talk an awful lot about um on through my work but we've lost something we've lost that tactility we've lost that long-term engaging relationship with with photography is that something that's front and center of your teaching is that is that importance of being on a timeline being you know standing on the shoulders of giants appreciating that we have a responsibility to our art form it is all of that stuff that that you think about and promote yourself ah definitely not no no definitely um firstly uh conversations uh sitting there with your partner talking about why a photograph moves you personally that's incredibly powerful and i learn i learned so much from this process of teaching others about how a photograph works and and someone will go oh this is making me feel a bit queasy or i really love what's going on over there and by having that conversation your mind just goes bang and explodes out with a deeper understanding of the how a picture works and of course a picture works differently for every viewer doesn't it and i think that's an incredibly beautiful thing so conversations uh are at the heart of my um photography teaching and i think when we converse about photographs online we lack depth in that meaningful discussion about what a photograph is doing and how often do we really sit with a photograph for a long period of time i know um uh ralph gibson in his workshops he always says you know sit with one photo for 20 minutes right like really yeah 20 minutes to sit with one photo and really really look at it and when you do that in a conversation with other people you discover so much about what's going on and this is such an educational experience of studying artists studying all of the visual mediums because photography whether we like it or not is linked in with all of the other visual mediums and really it's linked in with poetry and music as well but you know that's um we don't need to go there at this point but uh yesterday i went to an art exhibition and and i spent hours uh looking at matisse's on the wall and uh studying and and looking at uh the foreground and the distance and the flattening of the image plane and then this morning i'm looking at one of some of my students photographs and i'm having the same conversation with them that was in the artwork and so i think that they're incredibly tied together and as we're we're creating art we do have a responsibility to to link it back to all of the art that's come before us and to honor it in a beautiful way in a in a respectful way and to push the boundaries of where it could go yeah 100 no you we did mention poetry and music and of course you know everyone knows that have you got a guitar behind you there just a couple i've got very very very very understanding wife [Laughter] uh lucky man aren't you yeah yeah i'm a very very lucky man and i i love them muchly um but i was just thinking when you were talking because you know we're both older gentlemen um and we remember buying all our music on vinyl you know the 12-inch records with gatefold sleeves or triple gatehold sleeves and bands like yes and all of the progressive rock bands like genesis and pink floyd and so forth and talking about spending 20 minutes with a photograph we used to spend 20 minutes with one side of a piece of vinyl and we would look at the artwork we would read the liner notes we would read the lyrics as the music was playing it was it was what i'm thinking is it was such much more of an immersive experience than streaming music is i mean i stream music constantly while i'm working but i'm not immersed in the music it's creating an ambience which might be subliminally or subconsciously affecting my work so i do create a kind of creative mind space you know through the music that i'm listening to which will filter through into my work but it's not the same as immersing yourself in that artist's intention and metaphor and meaning and i think do you think that this is just another thing that we have an opportunity to just think not everything that happened in the 60s and 70s was crap you know is is the you know it's not all about iphones and and tablets and you know sneakers with air in them you know it's about there's things that we've lost there's there's things that we've lost connection with and maybe it's maybe that is the renaissance that you seem to be part of and it's certainly something that i'm advocating that if there are fundamental values in immersing ourself in either somebody else's art or the creation of our own art and i think you know that that renaissance seems to be very much in in your psyche i think that's why we got on so well is that we just have this approach to creativity this it's it goes beyond the photograph and it becomes a a life-changing experience it's like the acid on you know it's it's but it's that it's that powerful at all you know it's like the impact that hallucinogenics would have on a person when they were 18 19 20 a photograph and the and the creative process can can create those epiphanies it changes how you see it changes how you feel oh definitely and uh i've had them at the creation stage i've been so high off my face from the experience of taking a photograph that i was walking along tripping over afterwards and i couldn't take another photograph for an hour after an experience of taking one photograph now what is that and of course our bodies are flushed with beautiful chemicals and just natural ones through our body and it's a stronger high than anything else we could ever do and it's such a beautiful experience to be totally immersed and off with the fairies with your own work and every time i look at that particular photograph i'm i'm immediately whisked back there and i can never judge that photographer fairly because i it triggers such strong emotional energy for me and i'm whisked back to that place but i can also have that same experience not to the same extent but with other people's work where it's a heavenly or in the matisse exhibition i was in yesterday there was a cathedral in one of the rooms and and he'd he'd actually like a mark rothko there'd been an absolute cathedral built around an artist's work and so you go in there you sit down you slow down and you allow your mind to wander in that beautiful space and to be taken over i it's very very much a part of the the creative process and you know it's no different to wanting to learn to meditate or going for long walks we're bombarded continually over and over with this modern world and art creativity is one of those moments to step back either as a viewer and exploring it or as a creator um it's my sanity it's my therapist as well if i'm really honest about it yeah yeah very much my sanity um i knew we were going to have a good chat i've been looking forward to this for months and i had a question on the tip of my brain there and i just need to just make sure it drags back so i'm going to pause just to make sure it comes back to me right i came back really quick um if we have infinity at our fingertips because that's what we have the creative process is infinite we can do anything we can go in any direction we can blend light and dark and shade and tone and texture and detail and atmosphere all of these beautiful ingredients that we have at our disposal i even call lightroom the gateway to infinite possibility you know it's because that's what it is so if if we have infinity at our fingertips and we can do whatever we want why do people choose in in a great part to box themselves in and limit themselves with definitions uh and other parameters that are just basically closing themselves into so what i guess i'm really getting at here is why would why would people not choose infinity is it because it's too intimidating and secondly um is that need to label a societal thing that people should be trying to shed and the the definition like your personal style you know having a personal style um so that's three questions so the floor yeah you've asked three questions there and uh we should write them down to make sure we get through them all but um uh infinity yeah it's too big isn't it so um and narrowing ourselves down and i i i artistically choke myself or restrict myself on purpose to make the creative process easier and to keep a control of it and i personally have figured out where i like to do that and so i i know i love to shoot square i love to use a a nifty 50 lens i i love to work in monochrome and i know which subjects get me excited uh trees people um flowers uh abstract art so i use those limiters to to help knock infinity down to be a little bit easier right and you maybe as a songwriter might know this when you're writing a song and you have infinity it's really hard but as soon as you limit it down to some constraints like can you write me a song about something you did in the last 24 hours suddenly it becomes so much easier so i think that limiting ourselves becomes a a fairly accessible way to deal with infinity um now what was the other questions um one was style but there was one in between it was the the well personal style was the last one and then in between there was this sort of concept that do we box ourselves in and define ourselves because of external pressure uh well uh i think we're such a social being that we love to form clubs and we love to hang out in social groups and uh you know we we dress the same uh we uh like the same music and uh you know we're talking about a a an era uh past but we would actually identify our tribe with our music and our dress yeah and with it came a language and so i think humans are uh again to deal with infinity and to bring the numbers down to a much more manageable group and uh some say you know you can only handle a community of about a thousand people and i don't even know where i got that number from but i've heard that a a small group that we can actually deal with so by boxing ourselves in we probably do that to help identify with like-minded people so that we can feel comfortable and and supported in that and of course when we start talking about uh restrictions and uh putting ourselves in with that group it takes a brave person to step outside it doesn't it uh to be that creative person that breaks the rules and doesn't do the things that the the rest of the group say they should be done and or how they should be done or or how it should look like and we've seen that through the history of photography and also throughout humanity's history as well haven't we so much so so i think that that's a little bit of a natural thing and as artists we have to be very very careful of it and um choose where we should sit in it that's the reason why i call myself an artist i don't want to be seen to be in the photography camp i'd rather be seen as someone that's uh uh experimenting and taking risks and uh making things that are really beautiful uh and interesting and stimulating so what i'm trying to get to the cut to the chase here really i guess is that there there's a tendency for us to to herd because of comfort and and identity and that feeling of fitting in and i guess we we consider that we are safer within a within a tribe a small tribe and that that's an evolutionary thing you know we've been doing that for tens of thousands of years but i would hazard a guess that everyone who ends up in len's journal is someone who's not part of a herd so the the this is the this is the kind of thing i'm i'm getting at is that the irony is that these days where so many hundreds of millions of people around the world are creating and sharing their work online we've got to this point where the homogeny is no longer attractive generally to to people who have seen a lot of photographs you know and it's the people who are standing out from that crowd who are the outliers the ones who are getting picked off by the wolves uh in the fringes of the villages um because they don't have a safe place to be it's they're the people who are actually the ones who we should be nurturing you know this is the this is the the the beauty of the gods you know is the who who who do we choose to notice in the creative world um because if we look back through history the number of people most people can name as outstanding artists is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the number of people who've painted sculpted made music drawn photographed so we're only remembering a very very tiny tiny percentage of all of these creatives over the over the centuries um and i would say that most of them were ultimately mavericks you know they were they were they were outsiders really most of them but a lot of them were curated by uh art collectors and galleries and so um you know i was i was standing in the um uh is it the met over in new york there looking at artworks that i'd studied in the textbook of art history at school now it's really clear that the person that wrote that textbook worked for that museum and actually promoted their collection and held that up as the most important art history that we should be looking at and yet when we go back and look at um there's so many hidden people there that didn't know the right person or isn't in the right collection whose work is absolutely astounding and i find that part of history incredibly um interesting and also frustrating but finding those ones that are outside the popular that actually are expressing themselves in in beautiful ways that's what i'm looking for it's exactly what i'm looking for and you're right uh that's the herd i'd like to be with the ones that are doing things differently and uh willing to take creative risks i just love that concept of len joining this herd of people that just don't want to be there it's really funny [Laughter] so what it is it's a really wonderful visual image of of just like going to it's like going to a convention of ultimately creatively expressive people and everyone's on a corner of their own when i was a kid my the key word for me was eccentricity i wanted to be the eccentric one and uh it was about i i have a drive to be on the outside to be different and uh to make work for myself and you asked about style as well and right um it's a question i i get asked so often and i think a search for style is a absolute crazy thing i think style is uh is the way we describe other people's work and particularly when um talking about our herds and grouping together as an art historian we use styles to group um periods and like-minded works together and sometimes they form together with an artist's manifesto and say this is what we are but often it's just historically well we'll just put them in that box over there and uh humans again we're hardwired to uh sort for similarity and sort for difference and similarity is one of those things that we can we can put things together and i think a much better question for people to ask themselves is uh what's my voice uh what is innately me and so when i take a photograph i don't think about my style and uh maybe i can just describe it only because i've had to have that conversation with so many people over the years as a teacher that i have any idea about what it is what's really important to me is what excites me about my own work that i want to keep making more of it and i don't worry about uh whether it has a style or not i just worry about making work that is exciting to me and one of the things that i do when i'm collect creating a collection i actually go for something i call look and actually use a look to tie a group of photographs together to help make that meaningful series actually sit now i'm an artist uh think of me alistair as someone that wants to have an exhibition on a wall and when you go in and the photographs all talk to each other and they make each other stronger and more beautiful um because we're not distracted by um the odd one out right picking those ones out that's when artworks really really sing so um i think looks often get mistaken for styles as well right um like i have a look um i love sepia and square that's really quite simple and i love my 50 millimeter lens but what actually happens inside there and what the subject is um that's actually more about what style and uh voice is isn't it it's about what what excites me who am i as a person right i tell people if you really want to know who i am look at my art more closely and you'll get the clearest biography of who i really am as a person one of the things that you and i share is that we're both artists and we're both educators you know and that's that's a it's a kind of a it's a it's it's not a huge club of people you know it's it's a a manageable number of people who would call themselves both artistic and educators um there's the old adage if you can't do teach you know that that's that's the old expression back in the day uh whereas if you can't teach teach teachers they say and i've done that as well yeah there you go that's the the the wholly triumvirate um now part of the education process for us or part of our process as educators is this huge amount of self-analysis because you have to you have to justify explain understand uh it's the theory practice reflection uh part of education you know we understand the why the how and the what um so obviously you know you and i dissect our own work and other people's work to to the most minute details because we have to articulate all of this stuff through our teaching for for for our students or for people who are wanting to to develop their own artistic voice their own creativity their own lives their own personal expression and articulation how much of that process do you think is necessary versus being too much you know to that that because when i'm creating i don't think you know when i'm out in the field just creating i'm not going through this rationalization process or this dissection of what i'm doing or why i'm doing it or why i'm reacting to things or what it is in the landscape that's resonating with me and it's metaphor and meaning and how i feel none of that's in my mind at all so i know personally i advocate people to think less i call it mindlessness in the landscape as opposed to mindfulness in the landscape so how much thought and analysis do you think is healthy versus too much where people end up just procrastinating and confusing themselves or not spending enough time just being creative by over analyzing well by um working quickly and without that thinking you're accessing your intuition aren't you and uh intuition is actually uh accessing uh all of our memories instantly without thinking and actually applying them uh in practice now i only realized that recently because i i thought it was a bit more mystical to be honest what intuition was i you know someone speaking to me and that my higher self's taking over but from a scientific psychological perspective it's uh much more simple than that it's a we practice and we practice and we practice and when we work really really quickly we're calling on all of that and pulling it out without thought and so we need mileage behind us to be that way and i think many people when they turn to us as educators uh they're not at that stage in their career or in that not career is the wrong word but they're in their practice of development uh to to have that intuition they're still in that very very much that thinking process of of the making and i'm exactly like you um when it's going really well um there's no thought there's very little um of that an analytical thought i'm so focused in on what i'm doing that the whole rest of the world stops and and shuts me out so i find the more i analyze and look the more inspired i become and uh i get so so excited by that but i think it's a very much a learning process that having those discussions and being immersed in it actually makes your work better when you're out producing it and you're understanding and you're becoming astutely aware of all those things that make an artwork work beautifully for you because uh when you're studying other people's work you're not figuring out how to make great art you're figuring out what works for you personally because uh what works for you alistair is going to be different to me as to your partner and the things that excite me would be different to the things that excite you and when you look at other people's work you're noticing different things as well and really you're sorting out your taste and your what is attracting you to various artworks in that process i think the the most healthy way to do that uh isn't a little bit of a tribe and as a teacher that's what i create right is a safe space for people to come together and explore their creativity it needs to be safe enough that they can take uh emotional creative risks uh to experiment and see how it goes and then you've had this too you do something and you first look at it and go ah that's not what i was trying to do it's no good and yet you show someone else and they go wow i so love what you've done there and those words just lift you up and you go oh okay well maybe i should look that a bit better and maybe i should make some more and see where else it takes me right i think uh creating a very special place to to be creative in is our job as a facilitator as a as a leader in education yeah and that's what i do i'm so lucky that i've spent my whole career in education so i'm an education specialist i have two degrees just in education and facilitating that safe space uh that's what i do yeah and that's uh i know that's what you do too and uh creating it that's why we're holding it but isn't that wonderful now that you know we're sat here at the back end of 2021 we've just been through a pandemic where our our entire livelihoods were put at risk because what we used to do to make a living disappeared yet we'll both come through it by reinventing ourselves and and just expanding out on the education through the online medium and through our courses and our our individual forums and communities you know i think that's a huge accolade you know to to to basically but we're we're not competitive about it you know we're we're basically exhibit we we we inhabit the same marketplace yeah i'm i'm so happy to just have you on the show here and you know if any of people who are following me come and jump on to your school that's brilliant you know because you're someone who's just full of inspiration and great ideas and decades of insights and amazing living you know before we finish off here today i think it's really important to just focus on that point a little bit is that there's such a change in the contemporary scene that so many of us are so welcoming and embracing and nurturing of our what used to be our competitors you know people who use oh my god i don't want to talk to that guy or showcase that guy because he's going to nick all my customers and things like that but you know you and i have mutual friends and tim and charlotte perkins parking rather on landscape you know the magazine that they produce the articles that they showcase the artists that they're showcasing all the time is it true that when you visited them a couple of years ago you walked around their house and they're so wrong i definitely did i love those two so much they're i'm such dear friends and i miss them terribly and uh uh lamented not being able it's been so long since i've spent time with them and uh i can't wait to see them again but yes i'm a sarong wearer um my mother when i used to go as a teenager out shopping she'd make me walk um 10 steps in front of her so that she wasn't embarrassed by me i have worn a sarong uh in in the past but to be fair i was living in thailand at the time so it was oh well can i imagine that when i get over there i'm going to buy a kilt that's for sure and uh uh i love wearing them they're quite a a comfortable garment and uh i agree again it's about being an outlier it's uh outside the norm and i love that side i wear my kill i i i wear it to go out to the shops and stuff i really enjoy wearing a kilt it's uh and it's it's a lot warmer than a lot of people think you know it's a it's a lot of cloth and it's a warm thing i wouldn't wear a sarong out there today it's about minus four and horizontal sleet and it's really disgusting it's not so wrong weather i i should embrace my um my scottish heritage and uh and and take that upper yeah my name's actually leonard murray metcalf and i'm a uh i'm actually a murray ah right but my family um my grandparents come from uh newcastle and time there all right which is where the metcalfes come from nearly nearly in scotland when we get into yeah but anyway they're great great great grandparents for um scottish all right that's a great thing that's a great thing the scots have got everywhere it's it's uh we're for a small country we've we've diversified quite a lot listen len you know i i get the feeling that you and i could just talk endlessly and and i think we need to schedule in another one of these where we can talk more about creativity it might be kind of nice to do a live event you know we can just have a live q and a you know get get people on on live and we can ask answer some questions and discuss topics that people want to discuss i think that would be a really cool thing to do so i'll try and make that happen in the new year sometime i think that would be a really great great thing to do i'd say love to that'd be fantastic yeah but listen you're you're you're one of my most incredibly inspiring people that i know and just every time i go onto your website or looking at the journal you've just got this massive wealth of knowledge that you share so freely and willingly um and when you invited me to be part of the journal it was such an honor as well because everyone who's been in it so far is just like you said photography that we should be examining for it's out of the boxness i suppose um so yeah yeah for inspiration uh and for our absolute enjoyment well it's been a pleasure talking to you len i know it must be getting on for ten o'clock and or eight o'clock at night in new south wales now yeah so it's the end of the day i've had a quite a large day and i've actually spent it with another photographer who runs a photography school in sydney here and um we were sharing ideas and talking about art today as well and he goes when you're one of the few people i can actually talk art to and i have the relevance for photography in there so i really love uh what we've started here and i really look forward to sharing that conversation and i even look forward to catching up in person sometime in the future as well and i'm so thankful that uh for your positive response to be in in len's journal and i can't wait for that issue to come out it'll it'll be out uh early january so people need to be subscribed before um january 9th to get a one of your um issues uh to be in that first subscription for that particular issue um and uh i really look forward to extending this conversation with you further and uh to your listeners as well great thank you very much i will let you know when this is going to go live and uh yeah thank you very much so for now thanks so much len metcalf and i'll put all the links cheers guys [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 2,569

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, Landscape photography, how to, tutorials, composition, educate, expressive photography, barriers, vision, experience, tutorial, lesson, be better, happy, motivation, inspiration, inspire, Luminosity, Processing, Understanding light, Light, landscape, emotion, personal development, contrast, Transitions, Adobe, creativity, abstraction, local, dodge and burn, masterclass, Kase Filters, Wolverine, Magnetic, K9, Grads, Polariser, Len Metcalf, Len's Journal

Id: DTVSpc8Bkdc

Length: 60min 36sec (3636 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021