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I received the following unsolicited email a couple of days ago from a Mr Boyd Williams,

“As a Welshman who spent over 10 years living and working for French companies in Paris, I discovered that Wales was quite unknown to most of the French so, with the aid of a ‘revolving gallery’ of your postcards …… displayed on my desk, I tried to sell Cymru Fach to the Parisians! After hearing endless ‘C’est magnifique!’ and ‘Oh – c’est beau, c’est ou ca?’ and other complimentary remarks as colleagues passed by my desk, I know for a fact that some of them have visited Wales! 
So,’Visit Wales’  – or whatever it is that the Welsh Government is calling their in-house version of the Wales Tourist Board nowadays – could really do with employing someone like you! Keep  snapping away, please!

My reply was as follows-

“Many thanks for your email. It arrived while I was on a rather gruelling trip around Pembrokeshire selling postcards so was very timely! It is very nice to know that one’s efforts are appreciated.

The truth is that I worked freelance for the Wales Tourist Board for a number of years but found that their attitude to photographers had become quite unacceptable. In particular they operated a “copyright grab” which meant that photographers had to sign over their copyright or they would not be employed. This manner of operation was adopted by the entire WAG when WTB were absorbed into it about ten years ago, despite the efforts of photographers to persuade them otherwise. I have not worked for them since on a matter of principle.

This has been a serious loss of potential income to me, but also a loss to the tourist industry in Wales, as you so kindly implied!”

As widely seen elsewhere in government thinking, WAG seems to believe that professional photography is one of the very few business sectors whose interests can be safely ignored.

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It has been such a dismal summer so far that it made a change to almost get it right for once. Llyn Cregennen, near Dolgellau, is one of my favourite photographic locations. This lake, belonging to the National Trust, has an adjacent car-park and is therefore ideal for a dawn session with the camera. The other morning I woke naturally before the alarm went off at 4.35 am, so I had time for a fairly leisurely cup of tea before the first signs of sunrise became visible. It was an almost perfect morning; not a breath of wind and a variety of clouds at different levels. Scattered higher level clouds were moving across the sky from the north and it was these that reddened first; as the sun rose the most intense colour transferred to lower level clouds before that too faded. Interestingly some lower cloud over Cader Idris a few miles to the east actually lowered on to the summit as the morning progressed, forming a pink, then white, cap. Some time after sunrise a party of 12 choughs called as they left their overnight roost on the peak overlooking the lake and flew southwards.

Sorry to repeat myself but it has been SUCH a crap spring/summer that my technique has got a little bit rusty. What I should have done was to take two sets of exposures – one for the sky and the reflection, the other for the land surface, processed each separately and then combined them in software. But at the time I didn’t think of that. Well, it was early! So I had to process individual images quite hard in Lightroom to get the results I was after, and if you look too closely at them the quality is not quite all that it could be.

It was my first experience of using Lightroom 4 on difficult images and I couldn’t really see the value of having both “whites” and “highlights” sliders. I also processed a couple of images in LR3 and it seemed to me that the “recovery” slider did just as good a job! I also noticed that the new “blacks” slider was a lot more subtle than the old one. It also seemed to have less effect on the (apparent) colour saturation of the image. There is definitely quite a learning curve associated with Lightroom 4, and I’m still fairly low down on it. Time will tell how much of an improvement the new version actually is.

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You will probably know that I’ve been publishing postcards since 1987…… well, last winter I had an inquiry from a Ms. Ceri Price who is doing a Doctorate on “The Postcard” at the School of Geographical Sciences, Bristol University. She seemed a pleasant enough person, and I’m always pleased when someone shows an interest in my work, so I helped her out to the best of my ability. The following, however, is her own summary of her doctoral thesis-

….. I use the scenic picture postcard, that ephemeral yet enduring, disposable yet often preserved, widely circulating, material memento, as a vehicle to posit the existence of a Third Place, neither here nor there, comprising the un-place of the postcard image and the third time and space of the postcard practices.

I see this Third Place as the centre of a network anchoring human and non human actants in a fluid assemblage of relationships, and the postcard as an agent in unquestioned unreflective tourist practices. A programme of creative and experimental fieldwork projects will enable an engagement with the materialities and non materialities of the postcard, through which I shall link iconographic and performative approaches to create and examine the multi layered relational ontology of this new space. In doing so, I shall address issues of the making of place, the gifting of experience and the embodiment of the self within a non material entity.

She said she would send me a copy of her results, but I doubt if I would understand them.