Blog — Matt McGarr Photography

When I started writing this entry, it started as a simple retelling of a visit to a local safari park. It wasn't particularly interesting, if I'm honest. As I was writing it, I started wondering if it was the story of the photographs that weren't interesting. I had gone to the safari park as a day out with Pamela, with a secondary objective being to test out a 300mm f/4 prime lens that I had picked up last year and not really tried out yet. Photography wasn't really a big consideration as captive animal photography isn't really all that exciting, unless maybe you're telling a story about captive animals. I was just testing out a lens and seeing if I could get a few cool photos at the same time. We didn't get attacked by any animals so there wasn't a whole load of interest there for anyone reading about it.

I got thinking back to some of the other projects I'd done, including the previous blog entry, "11%". I had been extolling the virtues of taking photographs that mean something to you as a person. Photographs that expand your own understanding of things. I remember saying, when getting my grades back from college, that the project about my Dad had possibly ruined all other types of photography. When you've spent weeks sifting through all your belongings and family photographs and then visited locations all connected with your Dad who died 6 years prior, photos of the flowers in your garden tend to feel a bit less interesting.

No offence intended to those who photograph flowers in their garden.

I kinda feel that photographs of animals in the zoo are a bit like photos of the flowers in your garden. They can look pretty but ultimately are rather shallow. Now I like that photo of the chimpanzee. I'm happy with how it turned out and I don't think I'm boasting when I say that it's an aesthetically pleasing photo. But there's not much more to it than that. It's a snapshot. It's not a snapshot like your friends on Facebook taking photos of burgers or fat seagulls with their phones on a day out. It's a snapshot taken by a trained photographer. But it's a snapshot nonetheless. I didn't trek through a jungle to take it. It's not an animal that has to fight for its daily meals or that's in imminent danger of being killed by poachers. I hopped in a little boat while a nice man took us down a stretch of water to the bit where they keep the chimpanzees. I was lucky enough to be sitting on a bit of the boat where the safety grate wasn't in my line of sight for that chimpanzee. I'm not really trying to say anything with this photograph. So I think when you look at it, there's not much to think about beyond "that's nice".

Take this example:

Compare this photograph to the chimpanzee up there. If you were decorating your house and for some unknown reason had to choose between only these two photos, which would you pick? It'd be the chimp, right? It's a beautiful animal, with nice lighting that is framed and edited well. I think it'd look great as a large print on a wall. Ask what it means however and there's not a lot to say. The story behind it is that it's a chimpanzee in a zoo. There are lots of them around the world.

Now look at the image of that text message from my Dad. It's not exactly a looker. Not something that I'd have on the walls of my house if I'm trying to brighten it up a little. Certainly not something that someone else would have on their walls either. It's a photograph, almost specifically tailored to me. My Dad, my message, my phone. None of that has the universal appeal that a good looking animal has. The composition and lighting are quite utilitarian. I'm focusing on the word "Dad" to draw attention to that and using a macro lens to get in close. It's a photo of a text message. Any attempt to 'pretty it up' would undermine what the photograph is about.

But let's look at the meaning of this photograph. My Dad died in 2010. 6 years later, I still have a text message from him on a phone that I kept for the sole reason that there's a text from my Dad on it. You can tell that it's an older phone and one that's gathering dust so it's been kept specifically. It's normal to keep photographs or other belongings but a text message is different. They are usually disposable. But this is an interaction between him and me. One of the last that I have evidence of. I can't do that anymore. As I look at that message (and I have another one in that phone) it's like he's there talking to me. It's a memento, more personal than most other photographs or belongings. Family photos are a shared thing. This is mine.

It's not something I'd ever shared before I photographed it. It's a very personal thing that I made public. When you expose something that you've kept secret, you expose your vulnerability. I think that the hope is that when you look at the photograph, you don't just look at the light/angle/focus etc and think about the person taking the photograph and what the photograph means to them. What it says about them. When you look at the two photographs above, what do you learn about me?

The chimpanzee photo is an example of what I call "wall art". Looks good on the wall of the house, or cafe. Feels immediately pleasant to look at but is forgotten a few moments later. The second photo (I hope) is a photograph that says something about me. Maybe if you were looking at that photograph on your social media feed you wouldn't find it eye catching enough and skip past it but I think that if you were looking at that whole collection of photos, by the time you reach that photograph in the set you're invested enough to look closer and see the story being told. And hopefully makes people think or relate to it. Everyone messages everyone these days. You might never think that that text message to your friend or family member might be the last you ever send to them.

Now I'm not suggesting that this is some profound statement that makes people re-examine their relationship with family and technology. But there's more going on than with that nice photo of an ape.

But to turn all this on it's head, here's why I think it's important to take "wall art" photos as well as ones that expose a vulnerability in yourself:

It's enjoyable.

Thinking back to the project on my Dad. It was therapeutic, cathartic, empowering, upsetting and stressful. And much more, to be honest. You can't do that to yourself every time you pick up your camera. Sometimes you need to take photos for the enjoyment of taking photos without the burden of trying to change the world around you. And that's what this set was. It was fun. Pamela and I both enjoyed imagining what it'd be like to go on an actual safari and laughed as I squirmed about in the car trying to angle myself for a better shot (that was eventually abandoned and all the shots here were taken outwith the car).

I'm as guilty as anyone of looking at photographs of tourist attractions, models, captive animals, flowers etc and thinking, "who cares? We've seen this a million times". Then I'll find a project that interests me and I'll think that all is good in the world. Until there's only so much of that I can ingest as well. I recently bought "Moments" by Hal Buell, a book of Pulitzer prize winning photographs throughout the years. There is, as you'd imagine, some stunning and moving work in there. But there's no way you could read through it all in one sitting. Or at least I couldn't. I had to take breaks to recover.

It's like that taking photographs too. Over the last few months, I've been involved in a couple of relatively big projects. The first was a behind the scenes look at an amateur dramatic production. I photographed them from rehearsals right through to show night and in the end I had over 3000 photos to edit. The write up and photos will be appearing on the site soon. The other was the house move. Both of these were involved and heavy going projects for their own reasons. I enjoyed them both but I couldn't really jump into something else like that again so quickly. Well, I could have if I had needed to but I chose not to .

What I did choose was to spend a bit of time taking photos without worrying about the impact that they'd have on my career or, in the case of the house photos, whether I'd miss something only to never see it again. So in the last 2 weeks, as well as these animal photos, I've photographed a day-trip on a steam train and did a photoshoot with a friend with modelling ambitions. Relaxing, stress free photography that I enjoyed doing and got some cool photos at the end of it. I can't complain.

It could be argued that the discussion here is more "snapshots vs photographs" or even "what is art?". Admittedly, I could have found more appropriate examples of photographs from my library but these were recent and I like sharing and discussing recent photographs.

But even if I'd picked visually driven studio photographs and statement driven photographs to compare, I think the point would still stand. Visually striking photographs with no underlying statement offer short term entertainment that doesn't stay with you. Meaningful photographs can have an impact on you regardless of the lighting, composition or other technical details.

As a viewer of photographs, I think I get bored easily with superficially beautiful photographs. Even the good ones can only hold my attention for so long and rarely do I find myself thinking about them at any point after I've moved on. There needs to be a story for that.

As a taker of photographs, I have fewer hang ups. I'm happy to switch between the two approaches as I feel like it. Though that's not always been the case. When I left college, it took me a long time before I was happy just taking photographs for the sake of it. I had convinced myself that every photo had to be deeply personal and had no interest in doing anything resembling 'snapshot photography'. It was months afterwards (when we went to Munich) that I found myself snapping away with no story to the photographs. I think that's the benefit of taking photographs for yourself and not worrying about what others will think of them. You enjoy taking them, you enjoy sharing them. If other people like them as well, it's a bonus but not the goal.

So looking back at the photos from the safari park, I don't think they're going to change the world. Or even my portfolio. But that doesn't matter. I'm guessing that most photographers wouldn't be too impressed by my ability to photograph animals as they sit a few feet in front of me and that doesn't matter either. What does matter is that I had fun taking them and might have another photo to stick upon the kitchen wall. So what really matters is if Pamela likes them as she's the one who decided on the decor haha!

Sometimes I want to be immerse myself into something and put my heart and soul into it and sometimes I want to leave my heart and soul where they are and just enjoy photographing. Knowing when to choose one and just knowing that you can prioritise one over the other without it feeling wrong, is a blessing. Ultimately, I think that more personal photographs are more fulfilling for both the photographer and the viewer. Paul: Memories of My Father affected me personally and the way I understand photography in ways that I couldn't have imagined prior to starting it. I don't think that kind of thing would ever be possible shooting pretty models or animals in a zoo. But that doesn't mean that everything you do has to be part of an over arcing commentary on the world or laying your soul bare for everyone to see (often that happens even when you aren't trying, to be honest). Sometimes you just want to enjoy yourself and it's worth remembering that that's okay too.

This one might be a bit of a departure from my other blog entries. More of a travel report about photography than navel gazing. Though I can rarely help myself so I'm sure I'll fit it in somewhere as well as meandering off point.

Travelling in Scotland is pretty expensive. I like travelling in Scotland and often look for places for us to go. But Pamela often points out that a week in Turkey or Greece works out at about the same price as a long weekend in Scotland and the weather is more reliable in the Med. To say the least.

But I like Scotland*. While it's an ongoing personal shame that I've seen so little of it, it does mean that I get the chance to discover it. According to the internet, Scotland has over 790 islands. If the quick calculation in my head is correct, I've been to 6 of them. Including one when I was in primary school. So there's some scope for improvement. But mostly there's plenty of places to go that will be new to me.

*It should be noted that I also like to travel abroad and have done so extensively. I don't want to give anyone the impression that I'm a homebody!

When we last visited Luing in September, we made an effort to go a bit further afield than on previous trips, which took us to Mull. However in September, the ferries to Luing swap to the winter timetable which imposed restrictions on what we could do. To cut that story short, there were only foot passenger tickets for the Mull ferry left by the time we bought them so we had to get a bus into Tobermory once we arrived onto the island. The bus was hot & damp and due to me facing the wrong direction on small, windy roads I got terribly travel sick and staggered off the bus 45 minutes later an interesting shade of green. We had just two hours before getting the bus back and 20 minutes of that precious time was spent with me slumped on a bench, breathing heavily, looking not unlike a woman in labour. Beard and bald head aside. If I wasn't so sick I would have laughed at the idea that I had spent an hour on a boat and didn't feel remotely queasy until I got onto dry land and into a bus.

The result was that I took a handful of touristy photographs while we wandered (slowly, I remained delicate until the next day) about the famous village. I've touched on the benefits of returning to re-photograph things in previous entries and I think the photographs I took there illustrate that. Luing is only 50 or so miles away from Tobermory as the crow flies. They share a corner of the world. Yet the time spent on Luing has allowed me a familiarity that I don't have with Tobermory. The photographs were 'touristy' because I was a tourist. They were taken through the eyes of someone seeing the place for the first time. That subject is for another blog post, though.

When we headed back, I made sure to get on the bus nice and early to open some windows and get a forward facing seat. I had no issues at all on that journey.

None of this really has much to do with the story I started off telling though so I'll get back to that. I did warn of meanderings.

The relevance to this story is that Boat of Garten would also be new to me and that I would be able to spend more time there than circumstances had allowed in Tobermory. It was only going to be three days but that was a long time, relative to that last trip. The extra time would hopefully allow me to get a feel for the place and get better photos than I had managed previously. It was of course a holiday and not a photography expedition so I couldn't dedicate too much time to taking photos but I'd be able to do things as we went along. And if nothing else, I'd be able to scout out some potential locations for another time.

To skip ahead and engage in some navel gazing; It was the fact that it was a holiday and not a photography expedition that really stuck in my mind during the drive home. The balance between photographing and holidaying is one that needs to be struck and that balance rarely means a 50/50 split. That Pamela and I were there together (about a month after we had become engaged) meant that getting up at 2am to find a good spot for a sunrise wasn't really feasible as we usually had an activity planned for the mornings of the days we were there. So getting beauty shots of the Cairngorms in the wee early hours of the morning was off the table. It's something that frustrates from time to time (not just on this trip). Not being able to focus on my photography when I'm somewhere new. Somewhere ripe for exploration and documentation. Please don't think this means that I don't enjoy spending time with Pamela on our holidays. Of course I do. But sometimes I wish I was able to dedicate more time to photography orientated trips. Often I'll happen upon a scene or area and think that it's the kind of place that I want to photograph but I'll also know that it would need an hour or two of investment to find the best shots. Since I'm not quite annoying enough to ask Pamela to wait patiently for a couple of hours while I do my thing, I'll usually take a few snapshots and move on. Maybe one day I'll be rich and famous and will be able to afford to disappear for a week to do nothing but photograph but for the time being, photography will have to make do with not being top of the 'importance list'.

That was a long winded way of saying I want to go on a long photography trip but don't have the money to do that and have holidays as well.

We booked a hotel through 5pm.com. It's one of those voucher websites. We've used them before and got pretty decent deals at times. We chose Boat of Garten because it was in an area we'd only driven through before. The Cairngorms National Park.

Photograph from our first trip through the park in 2014

A quick look into Boat of Garten suggested it was a small place, with a couple of hotels, a well regarded restaurant and a post office. There wasn't much else until I saw buried in a 'local attractions' page, something about an historical railway nearby. That sounded like the kind of thing I could entertain myself with. Further research informed me that it was literally next door to the hotel that was on offer. So we booked a two night stay at the The Boat Hotel.

We were going at the start of March which meant that a lot of the attractions in the area would be closed as it's considered winter. So while the north of Scotland is littered with castles and houses (big houses, that is), very few, if any would be available to visit. Options were limited. This is the trade off with getting a cheaper stay in a hotel, of course. If we'd gone up a month later, we'd have plenty of things to choose from but would have paid more for the stay. As it was, there's still plenty to see and do besides castles and other museums.

Boat of Garten is a few hours up the A9 from Falkirk so having left quite early, we were there in plenty of time. I enquired at the desk if the station next door was accessible at this time of year. I was told that while the trains weren't running, I could go onto the platforms if I wanted. I figured we had time to do stuff first and I would come back around sunrise. We dumped our bags in the room and headed off for a drive further north. I had discovered that Fort George was still open at this time of year and given its location on the Moray Firth, we might see some dolphins. According to Google maps, it was a 40 minute drive away which I was fine with. This is where this story gets exciting: We arrived too late to make going into the fort worth it. We didn't see any dolphins. I didn't take any photos. Edge of the seat stuff.

The fort itself is a post gunpowder design so it's low lying and mostly buried under mounds of grass to avoid leaving castle walls exposed to cannon fire. To go back to the point I raised earlier; if I had been there myself and had gone in for a few hours, I'm sure I would have come out with a load of interesting photos, despite the fort's intentionally awkward layout. But I was there with Pamela after several hours of driving so decided that just enjoying ourselves was more important. There isn't really much more of interest to this part of the story, to be honest. We wandered about the fort and the water before heading back to the hotel.

Once we were back, I grabbed the camera and made my way across to the station.

I'm a big fan of the industrial aesthetic so I was loving the rusted rivets. I had mistimed things slightly so the sun was just disappearing behind the hotel as I entered the site. So while it was plenty bright, I had no direct light to work with.

I have to say that I was slightly concerned about trains. There hardly seems to be a week go by without hearing about someone being hit by a train having been under the false impression that they'd hear it approaching. This station was only really used at weekends but that's not to say that something might pass through. I'm not daft enough to wander onto the main tracks though, so I was happy that I was safe. In the sidings where I was, most of the carriages are half buried in sand/earth anyway so they weren't going anywhere.

I was in my element here. I'm not sure how many other people would share my enthusiasm for rusting railway equipment but being up north in the crisp air, just wandering about at my own pace with no one to slow me down or rush me among all this cool old stuff was just bliss. Alone with my thoughts in a pleasant environment. It's hard to ask for more when you're a simple man like I am.

After an hour, the sun disappeared and my light with it. I noticed some people started arriving in cars that apparently lived in converted carriages or caravans on the site. Not wanting to disturb them (or be eaten by a gang of cannibals that live in converted train carriages - It could happen!), I headed back across the bridge and back to the hotel. We had dinner booked for that night. The village's well regarded restaurant was Anderson's. It would be closed the next night so if we wanted to go, we'd need to on the first night as we'd be home on the third day.

I took no photos in Anderson's but I'm happy to say that it was lovely. One thing that's quite common when you get out of Scotland's central belt is that places have relatively limited menus. Here was no different. Clearly the meat of the night was sheep so the burger/Pie/Stew etc were all lamb or mutton. While that might put people off, I think it simplifies things and means that you'll probably get a different dinner the next time you go in. Assuming they don't just buy lamb and mutton every night, of course.

Things of note: Despite being a Monday night in March, the restaurant was pretty busy so if you're going in a busier season, I'd definitely book. They brought homemade breads out the table as a taster. They were lovely. And the sticky toffee pudding was sublime.

Afterwards we retired to our bed as we had a pretty big day ahead.

We'd be travelling to Loch Ness to go on a boat tour with Jacobite Cruises. A few years ago we'd visited the southern end of Loch Ness at Fort Augustas and done a boat trip there too. A completely uninteresting fact about me: I will go on boat trips whenever I can. Loch Ness is long enough that an hour long boat trip (half hour out, half our back again) doesn't really get you that far along. So although we'd done a tour before from the bottom upwards, we'd never even reached the halfway point. This time round we'd be going in the opposite direction. Sort of. We wouldn't be leaving from the northern tip of the loch but would travel about a quarter of the way down the west side to get a boat to head a bit further down to Castle Urquhart, where we would disembark for an hour. It would be a trip that took a few hours and I figured we wouldn't be looking for things to do afterwards.

I don't have a smartphone. It's because I need something more robust and battery friendly in case something happens to me when I'm out photographing somewhere remote. So, much to the amusement of most of the people that lay eyes on it, I have a phone that looks like it's 18 years old. One of the offshoots to this was that on our trip to Munich, I had a bit of a nightmare getting access to my emails. I couldn't sign in from the hotel's computer while in Germany as the email server security assumed I was hacking in from afar and withheld access. Not fun when you're trying to get a hold of boarding passes. So recently I bough a tablet. It would stay signed in and give me access to all the stuff I needed access to and would act as a handy, electronic port folio that I could show potential clients quickly. This trip gave me a bit of practice booking tickets and finding places on maps. Every day's a school day!

Looking at the map (on my shiny new tablet), I could see that the cruise departure point was going to be a bit of a pain to get to as it was on the other side of the loch to where we were staying. We'd need to drive up to Inverness, through Inverness and then down to the ferry. The route was simple enough but I had no idea what traffic is like in Inverness at 9am. It might be fine or it might be insufferable. The plan was just to leave as early as we could to play it safe. As it was there were roadworks that we got caught up in so our timing was pretty good in the end.

We got the usual safety briefing and we were on our way. Incidentally the safety briefing was given my members of the crew wearing short sleeved shirts. Clearly they were most used to this climate that everyone else on board because it wasn't a warm day. You can see the snow on that mountaintop, but what you can't see was the wind. It was biting and relentless. Pamela didn't bother setting foot outside the heated cabin the entire time and even I had to give up after a while. Hats off to the crew, even if I do think they were just showing off.

Now, I mentioned earlier that I go on boat trips whenever I can. The result of that is that I'm well used to them and tend to not pay too much attention to the information given, as I'm likely to forget it shortly afterwards anyway. So I don't know how long the loch is or how deep (it's deep though, I know that) but there was a TV that gave live info as we motored along, which was quite cool.

On the theme of not paying attention, I apparently used the ladies toilet on the boat. I argued (to Pamela that is, I wasn't being harassed by anyone) that the signage wasn't very clear and I felt a bit vindicated by the fact that two other guys also used the same toilet on the trip.

We arrived at Castle Urquhart and disembarked. The guy from earlier had put a jumper on. There was a tour guide waiting but we declined to join. Pamela's health means we have to go at our own pace so we just headed off in another direction and did our own thing.

Castle Urquhart is in a sorry state these days. Sadly, so many of Scotland's castles are similar. This one was destroyed to prevent the Jacobites from being able to use it as a base. Seems a whole load of castles didn't fair very well once explosives and cannons became commonly used weapons of war.

This one is so badly damaged that the historians/archeologists don't really seem to know how the castle was laid our before in was blown up. The information boards around the site are quite open about the guesswork involved in trying to piece together how everything worked back in the day. I think the fact that interested me the most was that soon after it was destroyed, villagers came in and stole whatever they could, including wooden beams from the roofs. These days it's one of the country's most visited historical sites and the idea of stealing things from it would trigger outrage from the many people who want to preserve our history. But back then they didn't have toothpaste or antibiotics so you did what you needed to to get by. It wasn't like the castle was needing the stuff any more. I ain't gonna judge 'em.

It wasn't long before we were back in the boat and heading back to the jetty. I stayed inside this time and didn't use the ladies toilet.

Once back on dry land, Pamela went to the cafe at the hotel and I went back to the jetty to get some photos of some things that had caught my eye. The light at the time was horrible so I had to really fight it to get something worth shooting. In the end I used the poor light to get some abstract using the harbour's walls to get some shapes.

It's not really the kind of thing I do anymore and I won't be displaying it at any galleries any time soon but it was nice to try something a bit different. I've spoken before about how a style develops and how that can improve your work but it's always nice to try something else.

And that was everything for the photographs, really. We headed back to Aviemore for some lunch at the Mountain Cafe. Lovely food, though you'll probably have to stand in a queue to get in. We had dinner in our hotel that night and went to bed. Sadly the next day, the weather was awful so we called it a day and came home. I took the scenic route to at least have some more time away but it was a scenic route seen through wet glass.

The rain eased off a bit as we passed through Killin so we stopped for a bit to stretch our legs and have a look in the old water mill which now functions as a sort of charity shop. Surprisingly and irritatingly, a classmate from college visited the same place a few days after we did and found a home film developing kit for £5. It may have been handed in after we had visited but chances are I just didn't notice it. How I cursed her name as she laughed at my misfortune.

The only other thing of note about our trip to Killin was the level of water in the falls. If you've never seen them before, this photo won't mean much to you but if you come in the summer, you can sit on the rocks on the left and have a picnic. The day we were there, you could barely see the rocks at all. I hadn't seen it like that before.

See that tree growing out of that rock middle right of the photo? In the summer, everything to the left of that is usually dry and safe to walk out onto. It's quite the different scene.

So that's my little report done.

I came away from this trip thinking that if I wanted to get some more photography done, we'd probably need to go away for longer. We stayed 2 nights at the hotel which gave us about 3 days away, including travelling time. While we had done similar trips away in the past, the last one was three years ago and more recent trips had been 5-7 days long. On a 3 day trip, your time is quite precious, I think, which is one of the reasons I didn't want to focus too much on disappearing off to photograph things. I only really did that at the train station when Pamela was having a sleep.

So in the end I found myself leaving my camera in the bag (I kept the bag with me, though) and just enjoyed the break from everything. I would have liked to get a bit of landscape photography done while there was still snow on the mountains but I had a nice trip and got a handful of cool photos from a cool train station so I can't be too upset with how things turned out.

It's maybe time to look at some photography focused trips, rather than trying to shoehorn it into a holiday. I'm forever extolling the virtues of spending as much time as possible with a subject/area to learn what you can about it and see how it reacts to changes in weather and light. That kind of investment really isn't something that can be done on a 3 day trip away. Hence the reason none of the photos featured here are port folio quality. Your best work needs time and effort. So it makes sense to try make that time and put in that effort when you can. Just remember that you have to take holidays in between.