The Stillness Between
This series of black and white images explores the way nature and self become layered through time, memory and perception. Created using a 1963 Yashica LM Mat on 120mm film, the work follows a slow journey through Scottish landscapes including Faskally Forest, Corrie Fee and Ben Aan. These are places where stillness gathers and where attention becomes a way of understanding the land.
Some of the thinking behind this project is shaped by the ideas of Alan Watts, the philosopher and speaker known for translating Eastern ways of understanding into accessible reflections on the nature of reality. Watts reminds us that all sensory experience arrives in pulses, and that it is the quiet space between these pulses that reveals what is constant, what connects, what belongs to nature itself. In this sense the pause is as important as the movement. The silence between waves is where the world gathers itself.
The photographs are therefore not only images of landscape but also studies of presence. They are an attempt to listen to the forest, the water, the shifting patterns of light that pass through a place. Each frame becomes a small record of attention, a way of noticing how we do not enter the world from outside but rise from it, as Watts suggested. We are nature looking at nature.
Working slowly with medium format film allowed each image to accumulate moments rather than capture a single instant. The occasional double exposures create layers of time pressing together, echoing the natural rhythm of wave and pause, rise and rest. This process mirrors the way memory forms: not as one clear event, but as overlapping traces.
In this way stillness becomes something active rather than empty. The stillness between waves, breaths, thoughts and images is where connection is felt most strongly. It is where the difference between observer and landscape begins to soften, and where the boundaries between self and world become less certain.
The Stillness Between invites the viewer to consider what remains when clarity slips away, and how we might recognise ourselves not as separate from the natural world but as expressions of it. It is a meditation on vibration, silence and the continual movement between what appears and what endures.
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Written alongside the photographic series of the same name, this story reflects on solitude, perception, and the quiet dialogue between nature and self.
He left before dawn. The path was narrow, lined with trees that leaned close, their branches tracing the fog. His breath came out in clouds. The sound of his boots on the wet ground was the only rhythm he knew that morning.
He walked until the light began to form, faint and grey. The mist hung low, and the world was reduced to a few yards of path and moving shapes. A stream ran beside him for a while, its water soft against the stones. He watched it and thought of how time slipped the same way, leaving no mark except sound.
When he reached the loch, he stopped. The water was still, holding the sky like a secret. Across the surface, a bird landed and began to move. The wanderer sat on a flat rock and looked at the hills beyond. They were half visible, like a memory almost forgotten.
He took out his camera but did not lift it. The moment felt too thin to trap in glass. He remembered how he once believed photographs stopped time. Now he knew they were about listening, staying long enough for the silence to speak.
The longer he sat, the more he felt the quiet. The smell of wet pine. Frost lifting from the grass. The faint echo of his own heart. He thought of the years that had passed without noticing such things, the cities, the rooms without windows. They had all felt full once, but now seemed hollow, like shells left by the tide.
By noon, the fog had lifted. The loch shone pale under a clearing sky. He began to walk again, following the curve of the path through the trees. When he looked back, the loch was gone. Only a glint of light through the branches remained, a shimmer that might have been water or memory. He stood for a moment, then turned and walked on. The world had not changed, but he had learned, for now, to move at its pace.
