It is no secret that I’m pretty serious about my landscape photography. I spend a lot of time going to interesting places, searching out subjects, and making photographs. In fact, this activity is undoubtedly the single biggest influence on the nature of my outdoor experiences.
Midday summer sky reflected in a subalpine tarn, Yosemite National Park
I embrace this effect and regard it as highly positive. I’m convinced that photography deepens my appreciation and understanding of these places and subjects. Like every photographer I know who shares my passion for these subjects, entering the natural world to make photographs focuses my perceptions in powerful ways. I slow down. I stop. I look. I ponder. I wonder. I indulge my curiosity and I see things that I would otherwise miss. I’m intensely aware of light, color, atmosphere, form, and subject.
My article, “Photography and Luck” appears in this month’s edition of Extraordinary Vision Magazine, available for iOS and Android platforms for free. This is a great photography publication that features images and writing by a wide range of photographers.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
How many of us have considered the ways in which popular social media services — which admittedly are hugely appealing in many ways — are doing an effective job of killing the world wide web and undoing the early promise that it offered of direct and open access, along with visibility proportionate to quality, and critical disintermediation?
A few years back there was this astonishing, exciting, powerful, accessible thing called the world wide web, on which virtually anyone could share their story, their creative work, their business — and we saw the beginnings of the great disintermediation as boundaries were broken and the middlemen who had stood between content producers and consumers began to disappear. This was a world filled with promise. Those who produced valuable and interesting content (as differentiated from those who simply channeled it) could connect directly with a world of people who found that content compelling, and those looking for content could easily find it and follow it. Word got around, and it did so fairly directly, with little or no intermediation by those who had controlled traditional media.
Social media applications are seductive things, especially during their start-up phase, when the typical approach has involved giving away (or at least appearing to give away) a great deal of access by means of what seem like very open platforms. In fact, many who jumped onto these platforms early on did manage to leverage their initial power to their advantage. However, virtually without exception, these applications have morphed in directions that do not enable our own control over what we see and who we connect to, but which instead take control out of our hands and begin to determine for us what we will see, most often based on generating advertising revenue — a old model that takes us back to (to coin a term) nondisintermediation.Continue reading Social Media and the Death of the Web (Morning Musings 9/27/14)→
With partially ironic intent, I’m going to begin this Morning Musings post with two quotations. I snagged from the web by doing a quick search on “quotations about quotations” and, in line with common web practice, I simply present them for what they appear to be — I have not checked to validate the sources. Hey, it’s the internet! ;-)
“In the garden of literature, the highest and the most charismatic flowers are always the quotations.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan
“He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions
I’ve thought about this quite a bit, largely in the context of the (increasingly?) common practice of attaching quotations to photographs. I think that there are things about this practice that seem useful and beneficial, but there are also some aspects that seem a bit problematic, at least to me, and I’d like to briefly explore this in an entirely incomplete way.
I can call up a few relevant quotations pretty quickly when necessary. Some of you may have seen me post a favorite John Muir quote as a way of acknowledging that I’m heading of into the mountains: The mountains are calling and I must go.Continue reading Quotations and Photographs (Morning Musings 9/21/14)→
