After relocating to the small rural town of Haltwhistle I turned my lens away from the man made landscape. I was drawn to life in the countryside because it offered a slower pace of life. This change of pace inspired me to make a switch back to shooting film and I started to ventured out with Grandads old camera. Due to the cameras broken light meter I decided to start calculating my exposers by eye and this allowed me to pause and made me more aware of the world around me. I would walk the local footpaths and often hiked away from them across the marsh and in to the woods. My previous work had revealed that my photography captures my surrounding while also revealing the influence of my state of my mind. I wanted to lean further in to this theory and I explored this connection by immersing my self in landscape. I did this by taking dips in the rivers and lakes. Over time this connection started to reveal that while there is beauty in nature there is an also allot of destruction. Nature was not the constant fixture of bliss I had always thought it was. As the seasons changed I experienced the death and rebirth of the undergrowth and animals that live within it. It became more frequent that I found chaos reflecting of the surface of the prints I was beginning to amass. This lack of order meant my work had acted like a mirror again and it was reflecting what was going on in my life. I came to this place with my daughter and I became a father a little boy not long after I arrived. However my marriage to their mother proceeded to fall apart and the fragility of nature around me reflected this. My Grandads camera was  immersed with me into the landscape both metaphorically and then literally when it took a dip in to a waterfall. I bought the same camera and lens second hand and tried to carry on with the project. In the end something did not feel right about this and the Image making part of the process was done. When I started selecting the final images I was drawn to photographs which embraced the imperfections which had happened thanks to the old mechanical camera and/or my misuse of it. This sees a focus on blurry images which showed that I had missed focus. There is also examples of problems with winding on film which has created double exposers. I started accepting light leeks as being worthy parts of the photo. Problems like lens flare were also considered to add something to the feel of the project. I used to see errors like these as the box between me and the world getting in the way. In this project these mistakes became a part of a the collaboration and the camera was aloud to inject its own personality on the images. To further embrace the imperfections found within the photographs I decided to scan the lab prints with the beat up scanner at the library to further degrade the images. I have then arranged the photographs in to diptychs that share themes with one another while also maintaining differences. This exploring how we try to fit together with another person during a relationship. These differences are hard to see but over time these flaws are revealed and sometimes show two people are no longer able to trade. AS I EXCHANGE CARBON DIOXIDE FOR OXYGEN and I become one with the landscape it’s clear that nature could not heal me and was unable to fix all my problems in my life.