Considering Art Podcast – John Balsdon, photographing earth’s wonders from the air

Introduction to John Ballston

0:00Hello, Bob Chawndy here, with another Considering Art podcast, in which I talk to an artist about their work and something of their life. John Ballston's aerial photographs capture some of the most remote and visually stunning

0:30terrain the world offers. The extraordinary shapes and patterns of river deltas, salt flats, rocky outcrops and all manner of natural topography is remarkable when you see it from the air. The logistics and sheer physicality of aerial photography is quite a challenge, but challenge has become second nature to John. Wearing his adventurer's hat, he and his team have just completed the 20,000km Cape to Cape Road Challenge from the north of Norway to the tip of South

1:01Africa in a record time of 28 days and 13 hours. John was a partner in three leading law firms before changing career to satisfy his long-held passion for photography. He's been telling me all about it from his London home.

Cape to Cape Road Challenge

1:17John, welcome to the podcast. Now you've done 20,000km in 28 days. That's a pretty impressive feat. Congratulations. Thank you very much, Bob. It's very good to be here. But yes, it didn't feel very impressive at the time. I was so relieved to get it over and done with. And it was 28 days and I think it was eight hours. Right. Okay. Well, give us your top highlights of the trip. Top highlights of the trip, starting in the North Cap. That was amazing because the North

1:49Cap is incredibly cold. It was minus 28 a couple of days before. And we went up there to start and it was a beautiful blue day. And we'd had this lovely powdery snow the night before. And so it was absolutely crisp, beautiful. And all I could think about was what an amazing place to start. And then what an amazing series of experiences we would have to go through it. So it was visually stunning. And of course, full of energy. So that was one of the highlights.

2:20Guinea, going through Guinea. Guinea was the toughest of all the roads. It took us 12 hours to do 225 kilometres. If you can imagine how tough that is. I can imagine that, John, because I did a similar trip some years ago and we travelled 90 miles in Mali and we couldn't get out of second gear because of potholes. Yeah. Well, ours were potholes and I would describe it as moguls. So I had underfloor bash

2:51plates and they were getting, you could hear them being scraped up as we were going up this one particularly vertiginous hill. But it was so beautiful because the colour of, there's so much iron all there that the Chinese and others are going in. And the colour of the roads is like this vivid orangey red, but all around these beautiful lush green rainforests. And you knew when you were going through these villages that you were one of the first people to have ever

3:24done it because the look of a wonder on their face, that was a real highlight. And then there were other places which weren't quite so highlights, but stick vividly in my memory of crossing into the Democratic Republic of Congo on a barge and being stuck for nearly 24 hours. That was pretty bad. crossing from Nigeria into Cameroon where we had to be escorted by the army because that's a red zone. That was a little bit sketchy. Lubango in Angola driving in late at night after having

4:01driven for nearly 24 hours and being confronted by a bunch of motorcyclists surrounding a police officer who pulled out a pistol and started shooting in the air. That was a bit sketchy. So I mean, there are lots of beautiful places to see. The Western Sahara, which you will know when you did yours, I find a haunting, remote, glorious, wild place, which I really want to go back to. So there's, I mean, almost endless memories of this journey.

4:35There's a lovely feeling, isn't there, when you find donkeys giving way to camels. Yeah. I mean, you have this absolute juxtaposition between ancient world and suddenly you've got these modern vehicles or animals and they're all sort of crisscrossing. I remember going into a total garage and there was a, there was a donkey pulling a cart that pulled in because the owner wanted a packet of crisps. Yeah. You mentioned the frustration of having to go on a barge and

Border Crossings and Travel

5:09waiting for ages. Did you find going through borders a real pain? Borders were my biggest, our biggest problem. On average, I think it's three hours to leave a country, three hours to get into a country. This is even when you're using fixers. So, and then of course the borders shut at six or seven o'clock at night, which when you're up against a world record is a big problem. So yes, borders were without doubt what changed our entire ethos in terms of, we had set out saying, well, we will not drive

5:43at night because it's quite dangerous to drive at night in Central Africa in particular. But by the time we got to Nigeria, we worked out, if you factor in the borders, we'd probably only be able to drive eight hours a day. Well, you just can't, can't do what you want to do unless you drive at night, assuming you're through a border and you're into a country. So. Especially it's an issue if you're racing against time, your heart sinks when you see a huge queue of lorries all trying to go through a border and having all their stuff on board checked and that sort of

6:13thing. Or when they go through the scammers. I mean, there are some wonderfully black jokes about black humour around that. What's this? If I'm asked for one more photocopy, I'm going to laminate myself. I like that one. Or another one, which is progressive good if measured geologically. So, you know, it just, it just.

Thirst for Adventure

6:35John, where did you get your thirst for adventure? I think probably because I was born in Singapore and my mother had me at 18. Can you imagine that going out to Singapore in 1965? And then I went to university and I didn't stop travelling from that point on. I just didn't see any point in not seeing the world. And so I hitchhiked across Europe. I lived in America, 22 years old. I went to India for three and a half months and it's never really stopped. Even my career was around working in different countries. So yeah, you worked for three large

7:10law firms, didn't you? And you spent a decade in Moscow. That must have been quite an experience. Yeah. Moscow was the go-go years. It's probably the best time to go to Moscow between 1996 and 2006. And I lived in Moscow itself, but I travelled around a lot on business. Russia historically opens its doors and then slams them shut. And at the moment we're in that period where they're slinging it shut. But I was there when the doors were flung wide open and I got to visit everywhere from St. Petersburg

7:43to Sakhalin to Siberia, which was an extraordinary privilege. I'm in the process of writing a book about it called Two Drinks and Go Home, Moscow Memoirs, because it was just such an extraordinary place to be. But then I came back to London and I think I've worked in 54 countries. I've travelled on business to 40. So I've had a really very lucky life in terms of travel.

Photography Career

8:13And has photography always been a passion and did you use it all the time when you were travelling all these countries? Photography has always been a passion. My mum was a photographer. She used to do wedding things and then encouraged me. And then I went to a school in Gosport down in Hampshire. And although the school itself was a comprehensive school, it had a dark room, which can you imagine that? It had a dark room. So by the age of 13, I found myself a camera and I

8:45was developing my own film and I was printing my own photographs. And it just held with me from then until I really became quite, you know, my career as being a lawyer. Once I became a partner in big law, that became a little bit more difficult. But then I picked my camera back up again about 15 years ago and I haven't stopped. Was it difficult giving up your successful career?

9:12Well, I'd been a partner for 25 years. I'd been in big law for 34 years. It was a wonderful time. And I did some really interesting things and I met some amazing people and went to great places. But I just figured to myself enough was enough. You needed to give yourself another crack at doing something else. So no, I didn't miss giving it up because I felt that I'd done it for long enough. Right. Your website's called Always Look Twice. What's the philosophy behind that name?

9:43The philosophy behind Always Look Twice is that I do aerial photography and it tends to be quite abstract. And I love the idea that in this rather instant world, that these types of images, which you can't really work out the scale of them, you can't work out if they're 100 metres across, they're 10 centimetres across sometimes. So you've really got to keep looking for them, looking at them. And often you'll find something which will give you a sense of scale

10:14that will make you understand just how big or how small they are, what height you're at. And that's the Always Look Twice is to try and make people engage in a piece of art so that it makes them, it's not appreciated, it's just become more of an experience. Instagram is instant by definition. My work, which is very carefully thought through, is intended to engage people and make them, it's like reading a book, you know, it's the

10:46same thing, which is understanding different layers. That's what you talk about, multiple layers, don't you? What are they? The first thing is scale, which I've just described. The second is I try very hard, my pictures are tack sharp, so that there's also a degree of texture to them. There's also a degree of where am I and how did this work? So, you know, Botswana fish is a perfect example of that, which I know we'll perhaps go on to later, but that's looking over the Okavango Delta and you look

11:19down and suddenly you see a shape that's like fish, which is actually the sand from the underneath the Delta itself. And there's a little dot that looks like the eye of the fish and actually the eye of the fish is a baby hippo. Wow. So, so that sort of thing, which is, I want people to engage with it. And this is beautiful reeds going from left to right because of the rivers going through the Delta and that these reeds are red in color as well. So always you keep looking. And then when you look again, you'll find that actually hippo's parents are to the right in another pool and hippo's uncle is right

11:55at the bottom. So that texture and layers is what makes it interesting for me. Is it very physically demanding taking aerial shots? It is in helicopters. I mean, I normally go with the doors wide open so that can either be very hot, very cold. The camera I use is a phase one IQ four and I use one of the 40 to 80 or the 75 to 150 lenses. They're very heavy. So the whole thing probably weighs in the region of four kilos and

12:28you've got to be able to control that with one hand while you're focusing in on it. And then the second element is, of course, you're making sure that you are balanced because you don't want to fall out. And then you're talking to the pilot to tell him, look, we need to come around, we need to do this and then angling it so you don't get the skid underneath it in the picture. So it's a very physical experience, which is part of why I love it so much, because when you're up there, the only thing you can focus on is that, you know, your mortgage, your bills, concerns about the

13:02Ukraine, any of those things are just at that point is please stay alive, don't fall out the helicopter and try and get the image that you want. So yeah, very physical. In terms of getting the image you want, do you choose your location based on the terrain? Yes, I do. I will use Google Earth Pro. And I will, I'm just doing this now, I'm just about to go to Namibia. And I will really hone in where I think the shapes and the patterns are going to be.

13:33Because you have to go through a logistical process, which is, can I get a helicopter there? If I get a helicopter there, can the helicopter stay there? What's the range? So you have to get the old fashioned compass out and get it to scale and then work out how close you can get it, whether or not you need fuel dump. And then you work out where you think the images are. And then you have to talk to the pilots to see whether or not the image on Google Earth, Google Pro is the same. So Namibia at the moment has had very heavy rainfall. So it won't look the same as it does

14:06normally. So yes, I choose it entirely on location. I've seen the work of another aerial photographer called Ed Patinsky. Are you aware of him? And are you influenced by others? I'm very, I mean, I like Ed enormous. I was speaking to Ed only two days ago. So yes, I really like what Ed does. Ed is, of course, enormously successful. But his focus is more on the damage we're doing to the planet. Yeah. Or the shapes and patterns that you get out of mines or oil or steel, whatever it might

14:41be. But his brilliance is what has inspired me to get up in the air and look for shapes and patterns of my own. So yeah, I know Ed very well. And I also look at artists. So Kandinsky, I've got one in there that you may know. Modern art is nothing new. And that is a picture in Iceland. And that looks like, to a degree, it has shades of his type of work. So yes, I look for artwork. And I also look for inspiration from someone like Ed, because

15:13how couldn't you be inspired by Ed? He's fabulous. Do you do much post-production, John? Enhanging colours or anything like that? Very little. I have a couple of basic rules, which are, one is that I don't crop.

15:30So, because I want whoever sees my work to understand that's what I saw. And I don't enhance very much. Now, of course, you have to enhance a little bit. When I'm up there, I'm I have to take photos to avoid blur at a 2000th of a second. The sharpest f-stop that these lenses work at is 11. And I can't really go above ISO 640. So I don't use golden now, because it'd just be too dark. But I will have to bring up sometimes the exposure and bring out, because it's got 15

16:03stops of dynamic range, I will bring some of those colours up. But in large measure, what you see is what I produce. And I'm now getting to the point where I'm putting GoPros on the top of the phase one, so that there is provenance. So that when you see it, you know, you know, it's not being enhanced by AI, because the video shots, which are on the camera, because they're in the hot shoe, will demonstrate that's what I saw. So yeah, a little bit, of course, everyone does it a little bit. You can't, you can't just say it's gonna be a perfect shot. Yeah, well, you probably edit out

16:39the bit of the helicopter that you didn't mean to put in the shot. Well, again, because I don't crop, if the helicopter's in there, it's out. Yeah, yeah. So, you know. Anyway, your pictures capture, as you said, these extraordinary patterns that nature offers up, the colours, the textures. They often resemble, as you say, abstract artworks. So let's take a few examples. So let's take Australia, for example. You did a picture that you call the Tree of Life, which, well, it's an

17:10extraordinary pattern of river inlets that resemble a tree. And it's against a white salt background. I guess it's salt. And there are pink, there are pinks, greens and reds. What's the story behind that? Right there. This is an image of a river near a town called Karumba, which is up in Cape York, which if you think of Australia as like a, like this, and there's a little finger that goes up towards Papua New Guinea. And this is at the bottom of that finger on the west hand side. So I had to go there and hire a helicopter to go out there. But these salt planes are incredibly

17:49flat. You cannot get even remotely close to them because your cars would just sink into the salt.

17:56But they have these very vivid colours. And I saw this on Google Earth. And when I hired the helicopter, this is quite a long way from Karumba. It's just almost as far as you could fly with a helicopter without getting additional fuel to stop. So I only had about five minutes out there to take this image. It's very high. So we're probably at about 5000 feet, possibly higher. If you look at the bottom, you see all that at the beginning of the green. Each of those little dots is a mangrove

18:30tree. And the inlets themselves go in, I believe, what you're going to see here is three to five kilometres. It's at least a kilometre wide. And yet, because the salt itself at the top, it's almost like a Turner painting, where you've got those colours where they sort of merge into each other, then they're whiter and then they become darker. And the reason why the dark is at the top is because during the rains, Australia gets very, very wet. And so the wet from the rains plus the salt creates this

19:01white, purpley look. And the colours from the rivers are all, and that is, believe it or not, that is the only photo that I've ever shown that has had no post-production. That was as taken. And what looked like leaves from this height, when you go down there, are they actually trees? They're trees. Yeah. They're trees. Ironic, really, isn't it? Yeah, it is. And so I call it tree of life because it's indicative and it's just something

19:36more primal. But then when you really start to focus in on it, it's got all these shapes and patterns in the salt itself as well. And that red colour, I still don't quite understand what it is. I've never got to the bottom of it. I don't believe it's a shark having attacked something rather large, but it's a very vivid red colour and it must be an algae. Yeah. Of some sort, I think. Another image you did called Embedded Plat, which was also an Australian in the outback,

20:08it's an abstract form that looks like a twisted rubber plat against a kind of frosty background. What exactly was it? These are mudflats up in the Northern Territories and I'm probably at about 200 metres. And what happens is as the water flows in and out through those streams, the sands begin to clump together and they create an image almost like plated hair. And the water actually coming in is coming

20:39off the land, which is where you get the brown colours. So underneath it, that sand would be, the sand would be typical coloured sand, but it's being coloured by the water coming off the land itself, off the agricultural land. And sometimes rock has extraordinary colours too, doesn't it? There's one you did beehives in Northern Territory, the islands of rocks. They look from the height like plasticine, don't they? They do look like plasticine. This is the Pernalulu National Park. It's about the size of New York

21:11City. It's a completely natural phenomenon. It's very sacred to the local indigenous people. And although it looks very small, if you look at those dots of green, each of those is a tree. So each of those is very tall. And the bands that you're seeing are all created by this unique microbiome. I'm not quite sure what you'd call them, but it's a form of bacteria that integrates

21:41with the rock. And then the shapes are created by water and rain. And you can actually see it like if you go further up, you can see it's like a production line where it's being pushed towards the land and then it's eroded down. But you can see where the lines are being created and the colours are being created. But that, as I say, the sense of scale is very hard unless you go in and you will start to see that each of those little, they're not just a bush, they're quite a big bush. So again, in this one, I'm probably 300, 400 metres above them. But I love the orange colours.

22:18Yeah, yeah. In Kenya, you did a picture that you call Factory in the Sky. This is a combination of nature and industry. You've blended the sky's reflection into the picture. You've been interested in industrial landscapes before, haven't you? Yeah, I do. I mean, I like industrial. I like that strange intermixture between the way that industry will work with nature. A lot of the places I go are so remote, there's not much industry

22:49around. But I really like this. This is technically one of the hardest photos I've ever taken. Because to get this, I was, it was quite late at night, maybe four o'clock in the afternoon. And I was coming round in an arc from right to left. And it was over a lake that isn't that far outside of Nairobi. And the lake is absolutely dead still. But with that amount of light, it was so difficult to capture this. I can't tell you without blur. I had three or four other photos. And I was playing

23:20and I kept on going round and round. But this is actually a salt factory. That's what it is. It's just pumping it in to then get it out. But it's also, you have the darks at the bottom leading to the lights at the top. And it does look like you're in the sky. So but it's that rawness or roughness that you have of industrial that I particularly like. But it's hard to find them in very remote places. But when you do it, I think it's quite rewarding.

Aerial Photography Examples

23:46Another one you did in Kenya, you've entitled Nature's Paintbrush for obvious reasons. Tell us about that. That is flamingos over one of the hottest places on the planet. It's over a bay where the water itself is so alkaline that it will burn predators' feet. So what happens is the flamingos go there to breed. And it's very brackish water. So there's a lot of crustaceans in there on which the flamingos can feed. It was the first day I'd ever used my phase one. This is the day that inspired me to

24:22take this up properly. It hastened my exit from Big Law. It is the image from which all other images have come. Because I went up there with a helicopter with my wife. We both agree it's the best day of our married lives. And we got to see imagery that we never thought we'd see. There were no people for maybe 50, 60 kilometers. Extraordinary. And yet you have these huge thousands of flamingos suddenly fly and go across this incredible waterway all together. This is the inspiration. This is where

24:58all of the high resolution photographic images have come from. Iceland is another very picturesque country that you've taken photos in. It's a land of volcanoes and waterfalls. And you've done a series of riverbeds that really do look like abstract art. There's one in particular serpentine, which has a sort of blue claw, like a snake skin against a blue and orange background of sediment. Yes. I mean, I love going to Iceland. I mean, lots of people like Iceland because they say it's a

25:29photographer's paradise. The thing is, Iceland, because it's the newest, as I understand it, island in the world, and you've got all that volcanic activity, you get a lot of the minerals are flowing down from the glaciers. And they clump together and they've got quite vivid colors. And also the mud itself has that volcanic feel to it, which is the purple in the right. But for some reason or other, you also get this interplay of white water that comes down from the glaciers and then mixes with these blue colors. And I think the orange comes again from the volcanic

26:06activity. But when I was talking about always look twice, yes, it does look like, I mean, it's almost like scales of an animal or like a goldfish or something like that. But if you look very carefully in the middle, you can see that there are footprints of what must have been birds that walk across this because this is only probably a metre deep. It's very near a place called Vic, which is where you've seen all the volcanoes going off recently in the last couple of years. And so it's a very shallow

26:41part of the river that's flowing. The ocean is very close. And you get the water shapes create this. As you say, it is a very abstract piece of art. And I'm probably no more than 100 metres up when I'm taking that maximum. Right. Another one in that series called River Silhouette. You've done a couple of that. There's beautiful soft pastel colours. Yeah. Again, this was just a little bit upstream

27:13of where I took Serpentine. So I was following, I went from the sea and I followed the river up and the colours of the orange that you saw in Serpentine is still here. But this is when I'm talking about the texture, in particular, the river Silhouette that looks like a face. You see the nose. What I particularly like here, again, is those pastel colours, but also you can start to see the texture I was talking about. So the water, if you look on the right hand side, you can really see the ripples

27:44from the river, which are flowing down into the sea. And you do get this. I don't think they get it anywhere else is the white colour of the water. Because this is all just flowing over a riverbed or round rocks or, yeah. And it's an incredibly image dense place if you go there with a helicopter. The big challenge is that Iceland has such variable weather. Getting up there is actually quite difficult. You sit and wait in Reykjavik until there's a weather window where you can get

28:16out. So you can just sit there all day waiting. Because when you were on your Cape to Cape trip, you obviously didn't have any means of aerial photography. So what did you do in its place? Well, we do have drones. We did have drones. Oh, right. And we did use them. But to be honest, Cape to Cape became, because of the time pressures, became more of an opportunity to take what I would

28:47call street photography, mainly. But we're making it into a film. And I'm going back to Namibia to go and take shots out of my favourite country in terms of imagery in Africa, which is Namibia. Will you use aerial photography there? Yes. I was speaking to the pilot yesterday. So we're going to get up to the Skeleton Coast and Damara land to go and use a helicopter and we think a plane to go much higher to try and get those images, which I will share with you when they come back. But Cape to Cape, by the time we,

29:24I think we did 4,000 kilometres in the last two and a half days. It was a sprint towards the end. Not much chance to take photos, unfortunately. That's a problem with your quest to try and break a record, isn't it? I mean, that's kind of hindered your art in a way, didn't it? It hindered my art in terms of taking it then, but it's inspired my art to go back to a number of those places and make sure that I get the images. And it's also informed me of the challenges

29:59I will face in places like the Western Sahara, which is very heavily policed. Guinea, which there will be no helicopters.

30:10Nigeria has beautiful places to go to, but there's a lot of security concerns, as does Cameroon and the DRC, which is the size of Western Europe, that you would need to be super prepared to get out there. So it's inspired me as much as it stopped an art project, except for Namibia, but it's created a whole series of others. That's the way I look at it. John, thanks so much for talking about your work. It's been lovely listening to you and you do lead a fantastically interesting life.

30:43Well, we're all, as I say to my wife, I'm in the fourth quarter. I need to crack on. And I'm very lucky to be able to do it. But it's been charming talking to you as well, Bob. OK, thanks a lot. Thank you so much for the time. Cheers, Al. Cheers. John Borsden and the stunning images we talked about there, you can find on the Considering Arch website. Thanks for listening. Join me, Bob Chawndy, again next week. Bye for now.

31:08Bye for now.