Category Archives: Ideas

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.

Ethics, Ideas

Talent, Tools, or Time?

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This is another in a series of posts lifted from something I posted in a photography forum elsewhere. For some reason there has recently been a larger than usual number of discussions about the relative importance of “gear” versus other things when it comes to making good photography. I certainly do not think that equipment is unimportant, but I think that people often focus more on this aspect of photography than necessary, often at the expense of some other things that really have far more potential.

In any case, here is a lightly edited version of what I posted. (Do keep in mind that forum posts do not necessarily represent fully edited and carefully considered work – they are more like a sort of written conversation.) I’ll start with an italicized excerpt of the message to which I was responding. My comment follows that.

All the talent and the world and all the equipment in the world isn’t going to overcome a lack of time to practice… 

Absolutely true. This has always been clear to me from my background in music where a thing called practice was the most important tool for becoming very good and maintaining that state. And it was also very, very clear that no amount of “hardware” (e.g. – “better instrument”) was going to replace that or even make more than the tiniest, insignificant difference without that fundamental thing that results from practice. Continue reading Talent, Tools, or Time? →

Commentary, Equipment, Ideas, Technique

Thoughts About ‘Backup Cameras’

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Recently I read a post in a photography forum in which a poster asked for advice concerning selection of a back-up camera body. If you do a lot of photography, eventually you will have gear fail on you. The last time this happened to me, my EOS 5D developed a shutter problem with no prior warning. In the middle of a night photography shoot the camera simply stopped working. I had no backup camera at that point, so my shoot was over – after driving nearly two hours to the location and making two exposures I packed up and drove two hours back home. If you shoot in remote locations, as I often do, or if you find yourself in other situations in which being unable to shoot isn’t an option, you need a backup camera strategy. (You might also want to consider how you would deal with a lens failure, too, though there are more ways to work around that possibility if you usually carry more than one lens.)

Rather than re-writing the whole thing, what follows is the text of my reply to that forum poster – with just a few contextual edits here and there. Note that I refer to Canon products, since that is what I use, but that equivalents from other manufacturers could replace those I mention.
(The original poster’s message/question is not included here, but he was essentially musing about whether to use an existing camera as a “backup” body, buy a second copy of one of his current cameras, or use some other strategy.)

I wrote, more or less…

This gets at what I regard as the primary question here: “What is the role of the back-up camera in the [your] shooting?”

The term “backup camera” can mean different things to different people. Continue reading Thoughts About ‘Backup Cameras’ →