April 2026

This journal records the detail of my mastering photographic art through 10,000 hours of deliberate practice

Hours 10,663 to 10,734

(May 2026)

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30^th April 2026

Hour 10,734

(1h) reprocessing/ creating “Green Magenta Abstract Square II”, above, to show more detail that goes against the flow in the ICM areas

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29^th April 2026

Hours 10,730 to 10,733

(½h) updating this journal – comments from my underwhelming showing at the recent DPI finals

(½h) preparing prints for coffee club and Colour group today

(1h) Coffee Club

(2h) Colour Group

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28^th April 2026

Hours 10,728 to 10,729

(2h) Stoke Poges Photographic Club – Set Subject PDI finals

Image	…..	Comment
		Paterns in Nature: “Acer Leaf” Still life with slightly harsh lighting in some areas, but nothing too serious – didn’t make the cut
		Funny Humorous: “Visiting Elk” Interesting shot in front of a very pink door reasonable photo but not particularly funny – didn’t make the cut

One of the judge’s mantras was: “Simplicity is good”

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27^th April 2026

Hours 10,724 to 10,727

(½h) creating and preparing prints for Wednesday’s Colour group meeting – two portal image. One Alpine Scene the other the Magenta Green Abstract Square that was created on the 13^th April using the LAB colour space. The problem with this is that when converted back to an RGB for printing, much of the detail was lost. So needed some recreation

(1h) reviewing images with Jeremy Schrire

(½h) creating, the revised, “Abstract IV Mk II” above which has the insert resized and some of the strokes & drop shadows adjusted

(2h) Amersham Photographic Society PDI Final

Image	…..	Comment
		“Into the Blue” Recognised the Magritte influence; thought the light on the floor from the door was too bright and dominating – didn’t make the cut
		“Stripes” a good idea worth pursuing but didn’t make the cut

Judge, who was a commercial photographer, consistently looked for technical errors in images or the appropriateness of the brightest spot in the image was

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26^th April 2026

Hours 10,721 to 10,723

(1h) updating this journal with notes from yesterday

(2h) creating the shoe shadow data points and analysis below from the image shot, on the 24^th, in bright sunlight

Trying to recreate the above with the help of the data gathered, but without any success

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25^th April 2026

Hours 10,718 to 10,720

(1h) creating a draft “Spring 2026” post

(1h) researching Alexandre Kojève and his reading of Hegel’s “Master-Slave Dialectic”:

• Self-consciousness arises through a struggle for recognition in which one consciousness becomes master and the other slave; yet the master’s independence is hollow, while the slave, through labour and transformation of the world, achieves a deeper, mediated self-consciousness

When combined with Marx, Kojève asserts that recognition is only possible in a society without hierarchy

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24^th April 2026

Hours 10,716 to 10,717

(½h) shooting images to help me study and more accurately recreate shadows

(1½h) Research and YouTube: Todd McGowan “Introduction to Jacques Lacan” how Lacan philosophised psychoanalysis

• Lacan made his work intentionally difficult to read as he felt that Freud’s easy clarity made it too easy to misunderstand
• Lacan and Freud never met; L sent F his thesis on paranoid psychosis which F never met; L made no effort to meet F as he was passing through France escaping the Nazis, even though he knew Marie Bonapart who was helping his escape
• Felt that Freud’s work was being distorted by too much emphasis on the Ego and normalising this particularly with the American Society of Psychoanalysts publication of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
• Alexandre Kojève (nephew of Wassily Kandinsky) influenced L with a combination of Hegel (the master–slave dialectic: self-consciousness arises through the struggle for recognition), Heidegger (human existence is defined by: lack, nothingness and awareness of death) and Marx (desire grounded in society, history and material processes)) with a theory of desire:
  • “what makes us human is a form of desire that seeks recognition from another consciousness, not just satisfaction of needs”
  • “Human desire is not desire for things, but desire for recognition by another.”
  • Ultimately: Human desire = desire for recognition, structured by lack, played out through social and historical relations
• Kojève turns Hegel into a theory of social desire; Lacan turns that into a theory of unconscious desire
• Lacan’s Registers:
  • The “symbolic” (rules, laws, societal beliefs, etc) define one’s position from which the world is perceived
  • The “imaginary” is what one sees
  • The “real” is that which is beyond our reach/ influence
• The concept of The Real parallels Kantian philosophy: Kant’s unknowable reality becomes, in Lacan, the traumatic kernel that resists symbolisation and disrupts experience and manifests in Slips of the tongue, Anxiety, Repetition, and Trauma

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23^rd April 2026

Hour 10,715

(½h) updating this journal

(½h) Lacan book

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22^nd April 2026

Hours 10,713 to 10,71

(½h) updating this journal

(1h) Amersham Coffee club

(½h) YouTube: Art History Explained:

• “The Life and Art of Paul Cézanne“
• “The Life and Art of Wassily Kandinsky“

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21^st April 2026

Hours 10,709 to 10,712

(1½h) Shooting the self-portrait after Man Ray, above

(½h) processing, including combining the two images and solarizing the self-portrait

(2h) Stoke Poges Photographic Club – Print Competition, Set Subject: “Action/ Sports”, my entries below:

Image	…..	Comment
		Set Subject “Above the Rapids” Held Back -19
		Open “Apatani Woman at Home” Held Back – 19 Great environmental portrait, shot from a good angle, but the frame above the fire which intrudes into the top left of the picture is slightly distracting
		Open “Assamese Woman Fishing” Held Back – 20 Super simple image, very high quality image and print

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20^th April 2026

Hours 10,706 to 10,708

(1½h) Seventh Art’s “Constable and Turner” exhibition on screen, documentary which has considerably increased my knowledge and appreciation of these artists:

• Constable’s most famous “The Hay Wain” was exhibited at the 1824 Paris Salon, in the Louvre where it was awarded a Gold Medal and was influential on French paining
• “Constable’s snow”, flecks of white paint added to the surface to suggest highlights, anticipates the flickering surfaces of Monet and other impressionists

(1½h) Amersham Photographic Society – presentation by Barry Webb: “The Unseen World of Slime Mould”

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19^th April 2026

Hour 10,705

(1h) updating this journal, not least adding notes about yesterday’s “Lacan” book

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18^th April 2026

Hour 10,704

(1h) listening to 4 hours of “Lacan” by Lionel Bailly. This book was chosen because Jacques Lacan was:

• a significant influence amongst the French Surrealists
• one of the first French intellectual celebrities
• frequently quoted by Mark Fisher in “Capitalist Realism” and other works for his acknowledgment of the role of society in one’s psychological development
• the analyst the treated Dora Maar following her split with Picasso

Key developments:

• use of mathematics, in particular topology, to explain concepts such as:
  • the Möbius Strip, representing Freud’s concept of the conscious on one side and unconscious on the other
  • the Borromean Rings linking the Imaginary (images, ego, identification), Symbolic (language, law, social structure) and Real (that which cannot be symbolised or fully represented) – knotted together but if one link breaks, the other two elements are also separated from each other
• used the concepts of linguistics, particularly the structuralist ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure to explain the structure of the unconscious:
  • language is a system of differences, not fixed meanings, such at a word is most closely defined by it difference from other words than it is by any direct association to the real world signified object. Such is true with ideas
  • words and symbols shape thought, not the other way round

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17^th April 2026

Hours 10,702 to 10,703

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16^th April 2026

Hours 10,696 to 10,701

(1h) watching the PIXimperfect “The COMPLETE Guide to Smart Objects in Photoshop” to learn about using multiple copies of a smart object to enable the same base element to appear multiple times in a document in ways that are then manipulated. Then easily swap the base element to create a similar image in the same style as the first, e.g.,

• “Sand Panel II”, above
• “Seascape Panel I”, below

(1h) creating panels using this technique including those above and below – different base element, which is the central image, otherwise, exactly the same

(½h) YouTube: Martin Addison “Making Panels in Lightroom Part 1“

(½h) using the above technique to create “Portrait Panel I” below

(2h) Amersham PiC Group meeting

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15^th April 2026

Hours 10,693 to 10,695

(1h) Amersham Coffee club

(2h) editing and preparing prints and PDIs for next week’s “Action” competition at the Stoke Poges Photographic Club, including “Above the Rapids” above for the set subject and “Apatani Woman at Home” for the open section – both images were cleaned up for competition

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14^th April 2026

Hours 10,691 to 10,692

(2h) Creating a “100 Years of Surrealism and an RPS Fellowship Panel” presentation:

• without the 10,000 hours bit
• More detail and individual graphics in the Cast of Characters slide

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13^th April 2026

Hours 10,688 to 10,690

(2h) Amersham Photographic Society – Print Competition; no skin in the game

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12^th April 2026

Hours 10,686 to 10,687

(1h) creating “Agadir Cutout Seascape” above which was processed in the LAB Colour such that the colours in the cutout have the A Channel inverted; yellows to blues and vice versa. Interesting, but unconvinced that it works aesthetically

(½h) YouTube from the Theosophical Society of America: “Kandinsky, Spiritual Insight, and Abstract Art with Dan Noga“

• Theosophy is the synthesis of religion/ spirituality, science, philosophy and art
• it’s precursor was alchemy
• turning lead into gold is a metaphor for spiritual growth

(½h) updating this journal

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11^th April 2026

Hours 10,684 to 10,685

(2h) processing a final short list of 15 images from the recent Apatani trip, preparing and ordering prints to be discussed on Wednesday, along with some of the revised landscapes below

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10^th April 2026

Hours 10,682 to 10,683

New Alpine Portal above with the insert colourised in an exact complement the sky

“Horizontal Alpine Portal” adjusted to be more extreme as suggest by yesterday’s Mono group

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9^th April 2026

Hours 10,679 to 10,681

(1h) processing for printing and mounting 3 Alpine Abstracts for this evening’s Mono Group meeting

(1½h) at the Mono Group meeting; comments on my images below:

Image	…..	Comment
		“Alpine Portal” Needs to be more obvious as a portal to an alternative space – maybe one part in colour
		“Horizontal Alpine Portal” Most preferred, largely due to the contrast between the insert and the rest of the image
		“Trapezoidal Alpine Portal” The group’s least favourite

(½h) updating this journal, particularly with regard to the comments above

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8^th April 2026

Hour 10,678

(1h) Amersham Coffee club. Much discussion, inter alia, about Theosophy and how both Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint were both followers with their paintings often considered to be visual representations of spiritual ideas

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7^th April 2026

Hour 10,677

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6^th April 2026

Hour 10,676

(h) YouTube:

• “Dame Tracey Emin on My Bed, A Second Life and cancer | Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg”
  • “If I were to make My Bed now it would be ridiculously tidy with 1600 thread count sheets.”
• “Why you don’t really exist | Sam Harris, Roger Penrose, Sophie Scott” is “self” defined as a stream of memories?

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5^th April 2026

Hour 10,675

(½h) updating this journal

(½h) YouTube: “Ruthie’s Table – Dame Tracey Emin: her new blockbuster exhibition A Second Life“

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4^th April 2026

Hour 10,674

(1h) 2025 Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, having moved from the Natural History Museum in London to “The Base” in Greenham, Buckinghamshire

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3^rd April 2026

Hours 10,670 to 10,673

(1h) processing the Tracey Emin photos shot on Tuesday and inserting in this journal

(2h) editing and processing some of the Apatani images, including:

• “Apatani Woman Fishing”, above
• “Shaman Portrait”, below

(1h) updating this journal, mainly with links to the Apatani images

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2^nd April 2026

Hours 10,666 to 10,669

(1h) processing images from the recent Apatani trip and updating this journal

(1h) creating “Apatani Face Off” below

(2h) Amersham Beyond meeting

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1^st April 2026

Hours 10,663 to 10,665

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(March 2026)