I’ve had Adrian’s new book in my hand for about a week and it has been a real treat to spend time with this. As with everything Adrian touches, the technical quality is very high

As I’m currently putting together another book, let me get some geeky stuff off my chest first.

This is a card covered book with a dust jacket. Printing is 4 colour offset on Phoenix XMotion paper. In other words, very high quality. The paper doesn’t shine, but projects the colours and details forward.

The format is 34.4cm by 24cm. The images are all landscape format. This format allows a very large print size as all images are presented as a double-page spread. So, you get large images, which this kind of material needs, but with a page fold.

The images were shot on a mix of 5×4 lf, mf, and a leica m9.

The subject matter itself is very close to my heart, having done something similar in BW. I’ve always wanted to revisit this in colour, but never had cameras with enough resolution to do it. In BW you can use line and form to control the compositions, but in colour, you lose that, and become swamped in the uniformity of the tonal palette. You therefore need the  extra resolution to allow the details to come forward.

The images were taken in Scotland, Lituania and Spain.

The sequencing works really well. Combinations of images show spots of colour standing out from the brown background, shallow dof show the lines in the chaos,

out of focus phasing separates the tangled planes.

All this interrupted by isolated compositions, shadows super-imposed on linear structures.

The sequencing of content shows a similar control of emotional swings. Chaos, isolation, well-being, fear are all mapped by seasonal and compositional changes.

Recommended.