Scotland Through A Lens: Andrew Burns

I have been taking photographs for over 40 years. My mum and dad bought me and Olympus OM10 for my sixteenth birthday. It was one of the first cameras to offer an automatic aperture priority mode and I still take most of my photos in this mode. I started a photographic club at school and we had a dark room where I developed film and print my own black and white photos. I loved all the different films you could get and the results that could be achieved with different paper and film types. I remember the excitement when Ilford bought out a 3200 ASA film that could shoot in very low light. I went to Venice that year and used reels of it shooting moody Venetian night scenes. Now with a click in Instagram you get all these different effects and digital allows you to shoot in incredibly low light. When I take photos on my phone I use Hipstamatic an app that allows you to instantly pick different films and lenses, how things have changes since my first OM10. I do think that having a grounding in the analogue world has set me in good stead.

When I left school I did an arts foundation course at The Central School of Art and Design in London. After my foundation course I did a year long photography course, also at Central. I then did a three year Graphic Design Degree Course at St. Martins School of Art and Design. In 1989 my first job was at a new digital design studio in London called De-Code Design. After a short time there I worked as a designer at the Observer newspaper where I was responsible for the first photo montage on the front of a UK newspaper after the 1995 Oklahoma bombing in America. This was quite a controversial move by the editor Andrew Jaspan. Today of course the authenticity of images is front and centre of the debate about AI and fake news. I use photoshop to bring the best out in my images but I will never alter a scene by adding sky, removing or adding objects. I always crop in camera with a zoom lens and compose the image through the view finder. 

In 1999 I took the opportunity to go to Sydney to redesign the Sydney Morning Herald for the 2000 Summer Olympics. From there I moved into magazines and became Creative Director at Australian Consolidated Press, ACP, in Sydney. There I redesigned House & Garden Magazine, the Qantas In flight Magazine and Australian Geographic amongst others. Over my time working as a designer I worked with some incredible photographers and learned so much from them. The beautiful photography in something like the Australian Geographic is my bench mark. Another invaluable skill I learned from my time in publishing was in the area of post production. Making sure a photographers work is faithfully reproduced in print is vital.

In 2016 I returned to the UK to help my mum and dad. Caring for elderly parents can be quite difficult and by way of a tonic I picked up a camera again and also started painting. The light in Scotland can be wonderful and the landscapes awe inspiring. Taking photographs gives you the opportunity to explore and find the best locations. I’m not a hill walker and most of my images are taken no more than a couple of miles from where I park my car. Sometimes the best views are from the side of the road. You don’t have to travel very far from the beaten track to feel quite remote in the highlands, and one of my greatest joys is just standing on one place and waiting for the light to do its magic.

If you wait nature comes alive around you. When you walk through a landscape you’re often concentrating on your next step with you head down, but when you just stop and look more carefully at the shape of a tree or how the clouds are casting shadows, compositions that you don’t immediate see reveal themselves. I often spend hours in one location trying get a sense of it and trying to capture it. You can be standing in a beautiful location but just pointing the camera at a stunning view is often not enough, waiting for the light the hit the right spot, a wave to break or cloud to move, can make the difference between a good shot and a great shot. When the image is printed I want to viewer to feel that they can get a sense of the place I visited.

The other thing apart for the light in Scotland is the weather and lots of it. In Sydney you could have weeks of clear blue sky’s in Scotland it can be three seasons in one day. I often say that I’m a sky photographer not just a landscape photographer. Unlike a landscape clouds move, one minute arranging them selves in pleasing manner the next the composition has gone. I will rarely venture out on a sunny day rather waiting for storm clouds to gather.

As well as the landscape photography I paint and make ceramics. I also make things from shells, stones and feathers that I then photograph. I have a little gallery at Kilncroft, Grange Road, Dornoch where I show my work. I enjoy seeing how people react to my work when they visit the gallery. There are abstract images from my foraging creations, porcelain bowls, and paintings as well as my landscape photography.

 

Kilncroft Gallery: Grange Road. Dornoch. Open 10.00am – 7.00pm

Gallery Web site: kilncroftgallery.co.uk

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