The compulsion to record it in the first place might be difficult to tie down – perhaps it is best summed up by Joao Silva and Greg Marinovich in their book The Bang Bang Club, in saying: The camera becomes an excuse to explore a curiosity in the world.    That compulsion will surely take you into uncharted territory.  While it should never have been unobvious, making a good job of it is very committing.  If taking a picture is easy, getting yourself into the place of recording something insightful is a skill that needs to be honed, and the risks, al-be-it minimised through experience, can not be avoided completely.  I  learned a lot about this in South Sudan which will surely stand me in better stead should I decide to push out any further.  Even if I don’t, which I doubt, South Sudan will have burned itself onto my mind indelibly as a once in a lifetime experience on the flip side, a time when I learned a lot about the world.

Pictures to follow…

It’s a simple idea which saves a lot of time.  You could even say it’s revolutionising the way people get information on the internet – checking websites and forums endlessly just in case they’ve got any new info on them should be a thing of the past.   But it remains a little surprising to me how few people are making use of it, and I wonder if it might be more readily adopted if it had a nice simple name.  It is, after all, a nice simple idea.

Photo by John Carroll @ John Carroll photography

This last weekend we opened up a project on one of Scotland’s remote bothies.   As a regular visitor to bothies, it’s always on the back of my mind how a contribution can be made to keep the bothy culture alive and functioning for the future.

This particular building, perched spectacularly on the edge of a loch in one of Scotland’s most fantastic landscapes, has been in need of face-lift for some time having been abused by a very small number of the travellers passing through –  a handful of people who decided to leave rubbish rather than carry it out.  So a small team of us set out to tidy the space for anyone that might want to stay.  The plot thickened however – as we tidied an [almost] blank canvas appeared where the rubbish had been.

In case you feel you might have anything to contribute to a creative outpost in Scotland’s Bothy Culture get in touch through High-8.

Sales and Marketing are two words that send shivers down the spine of most creatives, be they painters, musicians, photographers, writers, film makers or whatever.  I think it’s fair to say that most creatives like the idea that the world will come to them – for a band that might be the hope that one day they’ll be ‘discovered’ and catapulted into a parallel universe of fame and fortune.  Indeed it does happen, if there’s an established market out there for what you do then someone might just pick you up and slot you into that gap like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.  But the more creative you are, the chances of there being an established network or scene to hang your jacket on becomes less and less.  That’s the nature of creativity – if there were lots of other people doing it then it wouldn’t be creative.   So when you make a bold move towards doing something that no-one else in your town, country or even the world is doing, that’s when you need to carve out your own market and form your own scene: that’s when you need good marketing.  Alternatively you could of course get a regular job or chop off your ear and spend the rest of your days in an asylum, just like Van Gough, but it might be better to try something else out first.

I can speak from experience, I’ve been party  for more than my fair share of bad marketing.  In fact I think I could say that I can now see simple mistakes being made by people all around me – exactly the same people that consider marketing and sales to be some kind of sect of the dark side.  When I played in a band we often failed to mention what we were called when we were on stage – so people might go home thinking ‘my god, what a great band!  But what were they called?’.  A this was was just the tip of the ice berg.  On so many levels marketing is just about good communication – it could be called communication with your market, or, in this particular context, communication with people that might like your music.  The lovely thing is that it’s a creative process too – you’re probably just conjuring up ways of reaching out to people that like the same things that you do.

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