The Most Important Image I've Ever Taken - Landscape Photography and Mental Wellbeing
If you follow our YouTube channel you will know that 2019 was a quiet year for Hannah and myself in terms of photography. In February I graduated from my PhD and this was closely followed by a move to Oxfordshire as I started a new position as a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Oxford. Starting a new job in a new location will always be a stressful and busy time, and particularly in my line of work it can often be hard to make time for interests away from the lab, especially when starting a new research project. As a result, our channel content suffered and posts became sporadic, but more importantly, I found myself starting to slip into a bit of a mental fog. For me, photography is an outlet that has become essential for my mental wellbeing, and that is what I wanted to discuss in this first blog entry, which I hope will become a regular feature on our website.
To address this topic, I wanted to share with you an image that was my first ‘serious’ attempt at landscape photography, as I feel that the story behind this image really demonstrates why photography has become such an important part of my life. I had dabbled with photography before this, using an old Nikon F90 35mm film camera that my uncle, a professional photographer, kindly gave to me during my teens, and later when a good friend of mine lent me their FujiFilm FinePix S2 Pro DSLR, a camera that was top of the range in 2002. But it wasn’t until 2017 when Hannah decided to take up wildlife photography that I really caught the bug. It was this image, taken in the early hours before dawn by the edge of the Kyle of Durness in north west Scotland, that started it all.
The Kyle of Durness before dawn - my first attempt at landscape photography
On its own, this image is unremarkable and actually very poorly executed. It was the first image I took, so I make no apologies for its technical issues, although I am pleased to see that I was at least trying to implement some of the classic rules of composition with the horizon on the top third of the image and the Kyle creating a lead-in line. However, despite the image’s shortfalls, the story behind this image perhaps makes it one of the most important images I have ever taken.
For me, photography has become so much more than just a hobby since I started it in February 2017. At that time, I was half way through my PhD at the University of Bristol, and I was going through a particularly challenging period in my life. I was struggling on the edge of depression, and it was hard for me to see a way out. I won’t go into the specific details, suffice to say that combinations of issues had been building up over the previous year that resulted in a breaking point in February of that year. As a result, Hannah and I decided to take an impromptu trip to my old home near Durness, a place that has always helped to set me back on track again when my mind has started to drift into dark places.
Hannah had recently taken up wildlife photography as a pastime, mainly because I was apparently spending too much money on my home recording studio (music being another major passion of mine) and she wanted to take up an ‘expensive’ hobby for herself! Unfortunately for her, the plan backfired as in my search for photography-based videos on YouTube I came across a certain Mr Thomas Heaton and I was completely hooked on the idea of landscape photography. I bought myself a cheap set of second-hand Cokin filters and decided I would commandeer Hannah’s camera and give landscape photography a go.
There are certain moments in life that stick in the memory as turning points. These moments may seem unremarkable at the time, but in hindsight they mark points at which the course of your life took a lurch and you found yourself setting off along a new path in a different direction. These ‘sliding doors’ moments may be where a small choice that you make, or a particular experience, has a fundamental implication for the rest of your life. Your brain stores these moments as particularly vivid memories, and you can recall every small aspect of the moment. I have had several of these moments during my lifetime. Without meaning to sound too dramatic, these moments have often been associated with periods where I’ve struggled with my mental wellbeing and been brought back from the brink. In my case, this has usually been as a result of experiencing a deep, fundamental connection with the natural world.
The area around Durness has provided several of these moments for me. I lived in Durness, which lies at the extreme north west point of the British Isles near Cape Wrath until I was 14 and it will always hold the most special significance for me. This area has provided a few of those ‘tipping’ moments in my life. The first was when I was 15 and struggling through my teenage years, the next was when I was 25, a struggling musician wondering where my career was going to go next. The most recent moment was in 2017 when I found myself sitting by the Kyle of Durness in the cold chill of a March morning, an hour before dawn watching the glowing red LED that signified that Hannah’s second-hand Canon 5D Mark II was ticking its way patiently through a 20-minute-long exposure. The resulting photo was not very good (it turns out that a 20-minute-long exposure with the moon in shot doesn’t work, and this is why the image has been cropped to a pano!). But something happened to me during those 20 minutes.
I had been as low as I had ever been just days before, but as I sat there in the dark, listening to the oystercatchers beginning their pre-dawn search for food along the shoreline and the sound of the sea crashing on the distant rocks at the mouth of the Kyle, I realised that being in that place, at that moment, waiting for the camera shutter to close again so I could see the image I’ve just taken (which of course in my mind at the time was going to be the most amazing, jaw dropping landscape image anyone had ever taken) was exactly what my soul had always wanted to be doing. I realised, as I have realised at many of those key moments in my life, that no matter how heavy the pressures of life become, those mountains, that shoreline, and (hopefully) those oystercatchers, will still be there, doing what they do, long after I’m gone and forgotten about.
This image encapsulates for me what photography is all about. It marks the point where I fell in love with landscape photography. Personally, I’m genuinely not that bothered about the number of ‘likes’ I receive on social media, the number of ‘subs’ on YouTube, and I’m definitely not bothered too much about the technicalities of photography, or the gear (although it is sometimes nice to have things to aspire to!). This is a bit of a cliché, and I’ve been criticised for saying it before in my videos, but for me it isn’t even about the photography itself. The photography is just an excuse to be outside an hour before dawn, on top of a mountain, beside a lake, in a wood or on a coastline, in that stillness in time where the pressures of day-to-day modern life are irrelevant and forgotten about and all that matters is that you’re experiencing the ‘real’ world. If I’m lucky enough to come back with an image that I’m happy with, that is the icing on the cake. I know many photographers will disagree, but to be quite honest, sometimes the image for me really is the least important thing to take away from those moments.
Back to 2019
If anyone had come to me during that point when I was 25 and having the second of my Durness ‘moments’ and said, “Sam, in less than ten years you will be married to a wonderful and beautiful wife who shares your passions, will have a PhD, and will be beginning a research career at the University of Oxford,” I genuinely would have laughed at them. I am lucky and privileged to have found myself where I am today. But the first few months in any job can be hard, and it is often difficult to get the work-life balance correct during the initial weeks and months of starting a new position. This is certainly the case in science where the demands of starting a new research project and learning new techniques in a new environment requires a large investment of time. Over the past 9 months I can’t help but feel that, as much as I enjoy my work, the shift in work life balance has come at a cost that has been too high for me and certainly too high for Hannah as well. Throughout my PhD, I managed to maintain a balance between work and my interests outside of work. However, since April I have at times failed in that task and it has been hard for both of us. That is part of what starting this blog is all about for me, and why I need to think back to that time when I was taking this first image and remind myself of why I do photography. Photography for me is not just a pastime. It is not just a hobby. I need to be having my photography moments in order to stay on top of life and not sink back into the holes that have so frequently tried to engulf me in the past. I have come close this past year to losing it again, and the best solution I can think of is to grab my camera and get back out there…
Post-note:
I feel that it is important for me to state here that everyone has specific needs for their mental wellbeing, and what works for one person may not work for another. In my case the great outdoors that has helped me in times of need. However, this is not the case for everyone, and I must stress that the most important thing for anyone suffering with depression, anxiety, or any other mental illness, is that you talk to someone about how you are feeling and obtain medical help. I should stress here that I myself have never been diagnosed with a mental health illness, and I do not want anyone to come away from reading this article thinking I am advocating outdoor pursuits as a ‘cure’ for such illnesses. The outdoors can aid mental wellbeing, but mental illnesses are distinct from this and they do require medical intervention. I wanted to share my story however, as I believe that it is important to discuss these issues openly and help remove some of the stigma that surrounds them.
I also wanted to highlight the work that my friend and fellow YouTuber David Dixon does to highlight the importance of photography for mental wellbeing. Please go and visit his website (https://www.daviddixon.photography). David is also currently running each day in January to raise money for the charity Mind (https://www.mind.org.uk). Please consider donating to this amazing cause here:
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/red-january-2020-e5cda6aa-5111-4df5-8f68-caacdd8fc08c