Category Archives: Morning Musings

Morning Musings

My Place. Your Place. Their Place (Morning Musings 11/7/14)

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Rock Art
Rock Art

Rock Art. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

My place is California, and within California are special locations that I have visited over a lifetime — such as “my Sierra.” Many years ago these places were new to me, and at one time the Sierra Nevada was a place of my imagination, known mostly by reading about it and looking at photographs of the highest portions of the range. Today, decades later, I do not claim to know everything about the range — that would be an impossibility! — but when I go to the Sierra most of the experiences have more of a feeling of renewing a long acquaintance than of discovering something new. The rhythms of the place are familiar, as are the details — the sounds of creeks and wind and boots on the dry trails, that light, the plants, the way that forests alternate with granite and meadows, the timberline meadows, the rugged peaks, and much more. I like to say that I have come to know particular trees and rocks.

I recently spent some time in the American Southwest with friends who know that place as well as I know mine. Visiting this area is a very different experience for me — in some ways it reminds me of when I “discovered” the Sierra so many years ago and everything was new. I see the sandstone, the canyons and arches, the pinyon pine and juniper as new and novel. There is so much to see… and so much to miss! Traveling down one small canyon with my friends I felt that I was engaged with this landscape, but soon realized that I was not seeing half of what they have learned to see. I walked down washes and saw gravel, while they saw the abundant evidence of people who had lived there long before we visited and who had left behind bits of stone tools and pottery and rock art and even their homes. Watching my friends navigate their home range made me conscious of how I know mine… and of how much I have to learn about theirs.

At one point, one of them directed us away from our main route and up a side canyon. He asked us to be sure to walk on rocks rather than sand so that we would leave no tracks — this was not a place to encourage too many others to visit. Soon we found out why. At the base of one sandstone cliff there was rock art, with its enigmatic forms and patterns. Bits of worked stone were all around in the dirt, if you knew what to look for. We found a beautiful red arrowhead, marveled at it for a moment, and then put it back. Nearby, on the other side of the canyon, was a high place where these earlier people had lived, and where we found the evidence of their presence. Before long we walked on and rejoined the main route and went about our photographic business, separating from one another as we worked different subjects.

I was alone when my turn-around time arrived late in the afternoon, and I began to walk back toward our starting point. When I came to the side canyon once again I took a quick trip back up there alone and pondered this site by myself in the early evening quiet. I thought about what it must have been like to live a life in such a place. I imagined that on an evening like this one the voices of children might have echoed across the canyon, and perhaps there might have been smells of food being prepared. And I thought about how these people must have known this place in ways that are barely comprehensible to those of us who come here today for a few days and then leave.

Morning Musings are somewhat irregular posts in which I write about whatever is on my mind at the moment. Connections to photography may be tenuous at times!

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.
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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.

Equipment, Morning Musings

About Tripods (Morning Musings 11/4/14)

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Friends photographing in Utah's red rock landscape
Friends photographing in Utah’s red rock landscape

Morning Musings are back! Today I have a few general thoughts about tripods — not aimed at those who are already confirmed tripod users, but rather at those who find it hard to bother using them.

To start, let’s admit that one does not always need a tripod. For certain types of photography in which quick response is required and in which being too obviously a photographer can interfere with photographs, it is usually better to not use one. There are exceptions to every rule, but you are unlikely to want to use one for most street photography, for personal and family photography at home and on vacations, for certain kinds of portrait work, casual travel photography, and so on.

Let’s also agree that using a tripod is a burden, especially at first when one hasn’t accepted the extra trouble and when you haven’t yet developed instincts that make tripod use a lot more automatic before long. I’ll readily admit to being less than thrilled on about the 50th time that I must remove my tripod from the car, extend and lock the legs, level the thing, attach the camera, and only then make a photograph… after which I have to reverse the process: remove the camera, collapse the tripod legs, stow the thing once again. The slightly put-upon feeling diminishes as you get used to it, but it perhaps never goes away entirely. (The good news here is that the process of setting up and using the tripod does eventually become much quicker and much more automatic than it first seems.)

So, why use it then? There are more reasons than you might imagine.

Stability is an obvious advantage of the tripod. While you can, with care and practice, often hold a camera quite steadily and produce very sharp images when shooting handheld, you simply cannot eliminate all of the blur that comes when you hold the camera in your hands. And if you do happen to have very steady hands, you still will make mistakes that produce blur — working a bit too fast you may introduce a bit of camera vibration in some shots and you will reduce the number of successful results. A good tripod used correctly can virtually eliminate all camera motion and vibration in most cases. This is especially important when doing some kinds of photography that intrinsically require longer shutter speeds. This obviously includes night photography. Low light, low ISO, long lenses, and small apertures often require landscape photographers to use rather long shutter speeds. Continue reading About Tripods (Morning Musings 11/4/14) →

Morning Musings

Incremental Progress (Morning Musings 10/16/14)

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Two Rocks, Morning, Racetrack Playa - Black and white photograph of two "moving rocks" on the Racetrack Playa at Death Valley National Park. Morning light with unusual clouds, and the Grandstand in the distance.
Black and white photograph of two “moving rocks” on the Racetrack Playa at Death Valley National Park. Morning light with unusual clouds, and the Grandstand in the distance.

As always, photographic technology continues to advance. That is not news, or at least it shouldn’t be. This has been the case for the entire 175 year (or so) history of the medium, as the methods of recording light and reproducing images have evolved in beneficial ways. It also shouldn’t be news that the most recent changes have involved the adaption of digital technologies to photography — the capture, storage, processing, sharing, and printing of photographs.

This progress is a good thing and, aside from some who prefer to work with old processes, eventually the value of the new technologies becomes clear to most photographers and we accept and adapt to the new and find it advantageous. Almost everyone welcomes the steady pace of refinement and improvement in the technology of photography. However, it seems to me that some imagine that this progress is happens at rates that are simply not possible.

It is common, when some new technology comes out, to hear some folks say that it makes the older gear irrelevant or that it “blows it out of the water,” and that the improvements are of a tremendous magnitude and will change your photography in radical ways. Eventually this is arguably true, but the time frame over which truly radical change happens is much longer than a few years. In reality, most individual “upgrade” changes are incremental. While they are good and valuable, they do not “change photography as we know it” or improve results in radical ways.

Think about it this way. How many times have we heard the next incremental change described in hyperbolic terms like those in the previous paragraph? If the changes really warranted the use of these radical descriptions every year or so, over a period of a few years (much less over a period of decades!) imagine how astonishingly photographs and photography would have changed. But that hasn’t happened. The changes take quite a while to add up to something earth-shaking. Even the change to digital photography — which I would argue is very significant — has taken place over a time frame of decades.

Progress is real, and progress is good. But, when viewed from a longer perspective, it doesn’t happen as fast as we sometimes imagine.

Morning Musings are somewhat irregular posts in which I write about whatever is on my mind at the moment. Connections to photography may be tenuous at times!

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

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.

Morning Musings

No One Else Sees What You See (Morning Musings 10/15/14)

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Museum Atrium
Museum Atrium

I’m going to try to keep this post somewhat brief, and touch on two aspects effects of this reality. There is, no doubt, much more to say about both ideas, but not in a “morning musings” post! So I’ll keep it to one paragraph per idea this time.

I believe that photographs are not so much about the things in front of the camera as they are about how the photographer sees the world. Whatever the subject might be, there is only one of it. Yet there are as many ways of seeing that one subject as there are people — perhaps even more. At first we all are certain that the subject of a photograph is that thing at which we point the camera, but the more photographs we see — our own and those of other photographers — the more we understand that the important thing is how and what the photographer sees, and how that way of seeing is shared photographically. In your own photography, this can and should eventually lead you beyond trying to emulate or compete with other photographers, and toward finding your own true and honest way of seeing.

Related to the idea that photographs embody your way of seeing is a secondary issue that affects the difference between how we see our work and how others see it. I sometimes am surprised that a photograph I believe in provokes little response from viewers, while one that I might think is fine-but-not-great will evoke a strong response.  One explanation may be that no one else can ever see a photograph in the same way that the photographer sees it. I don’t write this to suggest that viewers are coming up short when they look at photographs. The point is actually more about a mystery that the photographer often has to deal with. We often “know” our photographs in ways that are inaccessible to others. We recall the experience of making the photograph, what we had in mind when we made it, how the subject might connect to us in a personal way. We understand what we wanted the photograph to be and to do, and we are aware of things that we might have chosen to do differently in retrospect But viewers know none of this and, for the most part, can never fully know it. One of the outcomes of this reality is that we, as photographers, are frequently not the best judges of our own work. For everyone in the world but the photographer, the photographs have to say what they say on a visual basis — whatever meaning and associations they may have must come from that visual object.

Morning Musings are somewhat irregular posts in which I write about whatever is on my mind at the moment. Connections to photography may be tenuous at times!

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

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.