Colin Prior: Window on a Wild World
“I visited East Greenland last year. It’s completely deserted. There’s nothing apart from glaciers in the distance. You’re surrounded by huge icebergs and in among them, Humpback Whales, feeding. It was about 10.30 at night, so there were beautiful pink and purple colours from the falling sun, and the sea was like glass. It was one of those very rare moments”.
Welcome to the world of landscape photographer, Colin Prior. Over the past 25 years, he has explored the world’s wildest places, chasing his fascination with landscape, nature and indigenous culture. His award-winning images include some of Scotland’s wildest and most remote mountain landscapes, from Glen Coe and Torridon to the Cuillin Ridge on the Isle of Skye. His passion for natural beauty has taken him to some of the most remote places on the planet.
Born in Glasgow in 1958, Prior quickly developed a deep love of Scotland’s wild landscape. After several years as an underwater photographer, he won the “Best Beginner” Award at the Camera Beneath the Waves festival in 1981. This gave him the confidence to climb out of the ocean and photograph on land as a full-time career.
Nature has this frequency, and once you can tune into it, it can change every aspect of your life.
He looks for images that somehow help show a connection with the environment. He explains: “That connection with a wild place results in powerful imagery. You’ve got to connect. Nature has this frequency, and once you can tune into it, it can change every aspect of your life”.
There’s an environmental message to Prior’s work. “I think we are very lucky at this time because we can travel relatively cheaply to these wild places, and there is still wildlife to see. In the course of time, environmental change will have a negative effect on wildlife and those ecosystems”, he explains.
Self-taught, Prior had to struggle to develop his skills. He added a new tool to his arsenal just six months ago — a MacBook Pro running Apple’s Aperture software.
“Aperture really changed things for me”, he explains. “I think that since that first big bang of digital imaging, technology has somehow dulled the intimacy of photography, but Aperture has unlocked it and put the image right back in front of the photographer”.
Prior points to the ease and speed with which he can view and edit images he’s working on in Aperture, noting that other applications, including Photoshop, don’t provide the ease of access and editing he enjoys now. “It makes the whole process of editing so much easier”, he says. “It’s a comprehensive post production tool for photographers who want to work in RAW format”.
Because he travels extensively, being able to effectively edit images on his MacBook Pro is a great boon to how he works. “I’m normally extremely busy — there’s never enough time”, he states, “but when you travel, you often have time on your hands at the airport or in a hotel room”. Apple’s portable solutions “transform dead travel time into productive creative time”, he explains. Prior adds that being able to carry around a complete digital image processing lab helps him stay within increasingly stringent air travel weight restrictions, a must for a global traveller.
“The technology has made me far more productive in any wild environment, and saves me time and money”, he adds.
Prior uses Boot Camp to run Windows on his Intel-based Mac so that he can employ the Windows-only stitching software he chooses to create his panoramas. “I can work in the Windows environment and pass the results across to Mac OS X to do what I want to do in Aperture”, he explains.
