Ten Things I Learned in Scotland

June is a lovely month in Maine. It is the final days of spring and summer is just around the corner. I know this because this morning the fog rolled in. When the fog rolls in from the harbor, summer is not far away.

To paraphrase Charles Dickens, it has been the best of springs and the worst of springs. Professionally it has been a good first half of the year; personally it has been tough. I won't bore you with the personal details. Just be aware that if you have emailed me or called me and I didn't get right back to you, it was because of the chaos running my life. It was all I could do to keep on top of the basic. I did run a platinum workshop in February, and a few people have expressed interest in the Mammoth Camera Workshop in August. That workshop is a "go" and there is space for one or two more participants. The View Camera Workshop in July has been cancelled. I am going to use that month to put my Scotland book together.

In April I had a major show, Form & Structure, open in my hometown, Decatur, Alabama, at the new Carnegie Arts Center. Over 60 prints were exhibited including some of the newest work from Scotland.  The conversion of the old library into a modern museum space made a wonderful venue for my prints. Laura Phillips and her staff did a great job with my show and have put together an outstanding schedule for up coming events. So, if you live in the north Alabama area keep an eye on the Carnegie Arts Center.

May was filled with my "annual" trip to Scotland.  It was a great month. I did a little teaching, a lot of photographing and a wee sampling of various drams. I spent time with old friends and hopefully made a few new ones. The first few days were spent photographing a few abbeys in the borders area and making platinum prints in my friend's, Donald Stewart, darkroom. The second week was filled with a workshop at Inversnaid Photography Center. What a great place to do a workshop. The hospitality is wonderful and the facilities are easy to work within. Andre, Lin and Ian make everyone welcome and the atmosphere gets you ready to work hard. We spent the week making negatives for platinum printing and making quite a few platinum/ palladium prints. (I guess they should be called palladium prints because we use the NA2 process.) I didn't make many images myself but I did use the class and staff as editors. I'd brought along small scans of my Scotland images for the new book and had each person edit and sequence them. The feedback was helpful and not too painful!

The third week my friend, Richard Barnett, arrived at the Glasgow airport. Richard and I spent the next ten days careening around Scotland making photographs. We drove to Orkney, then back to Speyside, and finally to Oban and Kilmartin. We covered a lot of area and I hope I got some of the missing images for the book. After pouring Richard back on his return flight to Charlotte, I headed back to Donald and Janet Stewart's home. He and I spent the last week photographing in the Dumfries and Galloway area of Scotland. The weather was wonderful and the landscape was different from the other areas of Scotland where I had worked before. We chased the legend of St Ninian, worked in several abbeys and found a delightful distillery that actually allowed us open access to make all the photographs we wanted (very unusual for a distillery).

Obviously, I love working in Scotland. It is familiar enough to be comfortable and different enough to be exciting. It is large enough to be widely varied and small enough to be completely accessible. Every time I travel to Scotland I learn something new.

A few of the Lessons I have learned (I think):

I had the privilege of watching the last lesson unfold at the Glasgow Cathedral. Donald and his godson, Laurie Pratt-Hunter, were working together with Donald's 5x7. Laurie would have the vision and Donald would help him get the camera placed and adjusted so that his idea could become a reality on film. Together they made some very strong images. Over the years I have watched this relationship between mentor and student strengthen the capabilities of both people involved. I have learned much from those who mentored me and often been delighted watching the light bulbs go off for my own students. This has gotten me to thinking about the following idea?

Ireland and Italy have been the destination for many photographers in the past decade. I believe that Scotland has the potential to fill this roll for the next several years. Already major workshops are planning trips to Scotland. I have spoken with some about using my experience to lead a workshop to Scotland next year but they are a step ahead of me. They are already at work on it with other teachers. I don't want to get into the traditional workshop business. There are several great workshops organizations already doing a fine job.

What I want to do is this: I want to make images, sell prints, and mentor photographers. I have spent 14 weeks traveling around Scotland in the past 24 months. I have photographed from the standing Stones of Stennes on Orkney to the Isle of Whithorn in southwestern Scotland, from the border abbeys and the Neuk of Fife in the east to the Calanais Stones on the western Isles of Lewis and Harris. So how do I put this experience together?

I have an idea for a most unusual workshop, "a voyage of discovery", if you will. Here is my idea for a workshop. Let me know if you find the idea interesting and might be willing to participate in the fall of 2005.

I would meet a group of 4 to 8 photographers in Scotland for a 10-day trip. We would begin and end either in Edinburgh or Glasgow. We would rent cars, two or three people to a car and head off. We would have a loose "schedule" and a series of B&B's lined up but there would be enough flexibility in the schedule for optional excursions. A sample schedule might be, after arriving and gathering cars and luggage, we head to Inverness. It's about a 4-hour drive north from either Glasgow or Edinburgh. Work in the Inverness area for a couple of days and allow our minds to catch up with our bodies. Then we would head out to Ullapool and catch the ferry to Lewis and Harris to photograph the Calanais stones, the beaches of Harris, and St. Clements at Rhodel.  We could return to the mainland via the Isle of Skye and the Uig ferry. A short drive south would take us to Oban. From there we could either head to Kilmartin or out to Mull and Iona. After a couple of days there we could head back to the airport to head home. Perhaps if Inversnaid has room in their schedule we could stop by there to process a little film and relax before getting on planes to return home.

I have not begun to figure out costs Your expenses would be my costs plus $40 to $80 per night for B&B, $400 for a rental car for ten days, gas at $8 per gallon, other meals, membership to Historic Scotland (for access to their sites), airfare over and back, and whatever you choose to spend on other necessities, and a wee dram per day.

So I put his crazy idea out into the ether world of the Internet. If you are interested in this idea, give me a call or drop me an email. It is a low tech, no pabulum adventure.  I don't want to set up a new workshop to compete with those already in existence. I want to introduce Scotland to photographers. What would you get on this workshop? - An adventure, some new images, perhaps a love of a new place, new friends, and my mentorship at places where I enjoy making photographs. So let me know if you have any interest in this "voyage of discovery" idea.

I hope you have a great summer.
Tillman