Category Archives: Ideas

Commentary, Ideas

Photographing Icons – Or Not

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Yesterday I shared elsewhere a photograph that someone had posted featuring a line-up of scores of photographers, arrayed tripod-to-tripod, ready to photograph one of those iconic views that we all know so well. I suspect that we have all been to such places and either found the experience of seeing and photographing them to be powerful… or we might have been repulsed by the crowds of people all apparently trying to “capture” the same thing, among them perhaps a number of folks who might be trying to almost literally recreate versions of the scene that they had seen elsewhere.

The point of the share (seen here and here) was not complimentary. My reaction to the photograph was to wonder, even more than usual, why people would want to make photographs that way. I phrased it as, more or less, “yet another reason to avoid photographing icons.”

However, a person wrote to me after I posted and pointed out, with a bit of anger and with some justification I think, that complaining about and putting down those who want to photograph a beautiful place might seem a bit pretentious and self-righteous.

She has a point.

While there is something a bit troubling about seeing dozens of people lined up to make the very same photograph, some of us might be a bit too quick to jump to overly negative conclusions. Perhaps there is a way to cast this as a positive lesson, rather than ridicule. So let me engage in a bit of reflection and honesty. Continue reading Photographing Icons – Or Not →

Ideas, Locations, Stories

I Feel Fall Coming

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It happens every year at about this time, close to the middle of August. Even though I have learned to expect it, I’m still happily surprised when it occurs. There is inevitably a day when I am outside and I sense something different in the world and I know (really know, not just know by looking at the calendar) that the seasonal trajectory is now beginning to leave summer behind and head inevitably toward autumn.

This is not a bad thing, by the way. I happen to love autumn.

Dry Creek at Fletcher Lake - A dry creek surrounded by golden autumn meadow grasses and illuminated by early morning light winds through a clump of small trees near Fletcher Lake, Yosemite National Park, California.
A dry creek surrounded by golden autumn meadow grasses and illuminated by early morning light winds through a clump of small trees near Fletcher Lake, Yosemite National Park, California.

It often happens for me in the Sierra. I usually spend weeks there between June and October – the time of year when camping and backpacking are possible. The beginning of the season is marked by tremendous changes. Snow melts, rivers rise, meadows flood, plants emerge, flowers bloom, campgrounds open, trails clear, tourists arrive, plans are made and executed and many things are new, or at least new once again. Then on that August day, something changes. I cannot put my finger precisely on the nature of the change, but it is unmistakable and it often stops me momentarily in my tracks when it happens. For some reason I often associate it with the way the air seems to move and with the way it carries sound – I may notice something different in the sound of the breeze or the way it amplifies the sound of a cascade across a valley. There is something about the light that I think of as a kind of soft quality and a feeling that the color of the light might be a bit cooler. At about the same time I often notice certain other more concrete indications for the first time, too, such as the way that more of the corn lily plants start to become brown or even yellow and that grasses are less and less green and more and more brown.

I was not in the Sierra when it happened this year. This year, the past few months have not been a time for a lot of travel to places like the Sierra. I have only been to the Sierra on a single multi-day visit, and that was over a month ago. (Don’t worry – I will be going back soon!) So this year it happened at home, on a morning earlier this week – my birthday, actually – when I walked into our yard in the morning to take a look at the vegetable garden, and I notice that vague but unmistakable quality of light, quietness of the breeze, and softness of the atmosphere.

The calendar may say summer, and for more than a month to come, but I’m ready for autumn.

© Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

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Commentary, Ideas

A Photograph Exposed: Photography and Luck

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(“A Photograph Exposed” is a series exploring some of my photographs in greater detail.)

I have never been shy about admitting the role that luck plays in producing effective photographs, especially photographs of the natural world. Vision and knowledge and experience and planning and all the rest are important, but we kid ourselves if we imagine that we are in control of our subjects to any great degree. The topic came up in a recent discussion, so I thought I’d share an edited version of my response here.

I can tell you with certainty that luck plays at least some role in many, if not the majority, of my landscape photographs. It is not the only thing, and preparation of all sorts is critical, but in the end almost every photograph depends on conditions and circumstances that are largely beyond my control. I’ve written quite often at my blog about the sudden unanticipated appearance of magical light or atmosphere, snap decisions to be here instead of there, showing up in a place to find the key element that I could not have predicted, and random decisions that led (or not!) to special photographs.

The following photograph is one of my favorite illustrations, though I could use scores of others to make the same point.

Fisherman, Winter Surf - Big Sur fisherman casts into the roiling winter Pacific Ocean surf.
Fisherman, Winter Surf

(To make the story even wilder, I ended up with three images of this scene, and I still have a hard time selecting a favorite.)

So, how did this photograph come about? It sure looks like it must have taken some planning to get that individual fisherman posed in front of the stupendous winter surf, right? Or else some serious Photoshop trickery ? No, on both counts.

One morning I decided to photograph at Point Lobos along the Central California coast – a bit less than an hour and a half from where I live. Why Point Lobos on that day? It is hard to say for sure since even though I knew that high surf was possible, I could have gone to many other coastal locations to find it. It is a place I photograph often, but so are at least a score of other locations within the same radius of my home. So, for no clear reason that I can articulate, other than it is one of the places I like to shoot, I headed that direction.

I got there  too early, and the park was still closed. I pulled up to the entrance, joining the short line of cars waiting for the gate to open, and figured I’d wait. As I sat there, I realized that I might as well drive around and see what else I could find while waiting. So I started the car, made a u-turn, and returned to highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway. Should I go left (north) or right (south)? No idea. Oh, what the heck, I guess I’ll go south. (Less traffic to worry about when turning right onto the highway…) Continue reading A Photograph Exposed: Photography and Luck →

Commentary, Ideas

Put Down That Camera!

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An article that I saw this evening at the SFGate website (“Arm’s length: Does filming hold reality at bay?“) got me thinking again about the strange ways that the ubiquitous camera has affected our relationship to the world around us. From the article:

We can film anything today, from anywhere, by simply extending our arm and aiming a device at the subject of interest. Then, almost as quickly, we can beam those images to the world. But is this progress? Are we starting to experience things through miniature screens rather than actually living them by being there? We are taking pictures, but we are distancing ourselves even further from the things we are taking pictures of?

The article opens by describing a group of people waiting for the passage of the peloton in the Olympic bicycle road race who, as soon as the cyclists appeared, raised cameras and rather than experiencing the actual event of the race, looked at in on the LCD panels of the cameras held in front of them, hoping, I presume, to get around to actually seeing race later on their computer screens.

I saw a similar scene unfold – actually I saw a lot of them unfold – recently on a summer afternoon in San Francisco. I had wandered over to the Palace of Fine Arts to, yes, make some photographs of the architecture, the surrounding grounds, and perhaps the people who were there on this sunny day. The Palace is an imposing, classical edifice left over from a worlds fair many decades ago, and it features giant fluted columns and a central structure with a very large and very tall dome. I could write an entire post about the sorts of things that people were doing there related to photography, but I’ll just mention one. When I photograph such a place I actually spend a lot more time just walking around and looking than I do making photographs. I might walk and look for ten or fifteen minutes, spot something, make a few photographs, and then go back to looking. As I walked along the pathway around the lake that sits in front of the Palace, I noticed people feeding the geese and other birds that congregate there. A large group of “kids” (perhaps high school age?) who appeared to be on a group visit from another country came by just as a small group of geese swam past. They rushed to the edge of the water to, I thought, get a closer look, sit on the low wall next to the water, and watch the birds. I was wrong. Every single one of them pulled out his/her cell phone or point and shoot camera and pointed it at the birds and made what could only have been the world’s most banal photographs of birds in water. I don’t recall a single one of them watching and experiencing the actual birds rather than recording the event for, well, for what exactly? “We went to San Francisco. There were some birds in the water.”

I often see a related form of photographic dysfunction when I’m making nature or landscape photographs. I might have found a beautiful spot, looked at it and studied in long enough to find a composition, and set up my camera to wait for the light or clouds or for the wind to stop. Or I might not yet have found a shot, instead just looking and walking around the scene, taking in its visual nature, thinking about color and light and wind and texture and form, waiting to see a photograph. If I am anywhere near a road, almost invariably one or more cars will pull up, windows will be rolled down, cameras poked through windows, windows rolled up, and away goes the car. Sometimes they don’t even slow down to make the photograph, driving by at the speed limit with cameras pointed out the window!

I cannot deny that there is some value in using a camera to simply record proof that you were there, and I’ll admit that I enjoy seeing old family photographs of people in these places. But the reflexive action of photographing everything at the cost of experiencing nothing seems sad and a bit perverse to me. If this thing being photographed is so special that it is worth traveling great distances to see it, isn’t it also worth slowing down long enough to experience it and take it in through all of your senses?  Isn’t it better to experience five things deeply than to skim the forgettable surface of 100 things without pausing?

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.