Category Archives: Thinking Aloud

Commentary, Ideas, Thinking Aloud

When Inspiration Takes a Vacation

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It happens to (almost) everyone. The pendulum sometimes swings towards enthusiasm, inspiration, and creative work that almost seems to flow all by itself. But pendulums swing both directions, and one of the prices we pay for doing creative work is having to cope with the inevitable dry periods when enthusiasm, inspiration, and creativity are nowhere to be found, periods when you can find yourself questioning your talent and abilities. (I think that one characteristic of “mature” artists is that they understand this cycle and are less likely to be undone by it – both because they are familiar with its existence and because they have learned ways to deal with it.)

I don’t claim to be the definitive expert on this issue, but I have some experience with it in both photography and music. There is much more to be said about this than I have space for here, but I thought I’d share a reply I wrote in a forum where a poster posed the following: Continue reading When Inspiration Takes a Vacation →

Commentary, Ideas, Thinking Aloud, Tongue in Cheek

Telling Stories About Our Photographs

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I am as guilty as (OK, more guilty than) anyone else when it comes to writing a lot of words about my photographs! This is ironic in a way, since I believe that, for the most part, successful photographs should be able to say whatever they have to say without a lot of verbal explanation or justification. (There are clearly exceptions to this “rule,” and this is not to say that there isn’t a lot to talk about in photographs.) But some people seem to enjoy the descriptions, so I offer a bit of back story about every photograph, and I love to discuss the photos with folks who share my interest.

Recently I read a post about a fine landscape photograph that someone had produced – the photograph was one of those that is good enough to make me think about how I might create such an image. As I write this now, I have forgotten whose post it was and precisely which photograph it was about. But something that struck me about this post was the tremendously compelling and somewhat scary story that the photographer told about getting the photo. It included things like standing for days in tremendously difficult and seemingly dangerous weather conditions, traveling miles and miles across difficult terrain to find precisely the image that he/she had previsualized, and the tremendous good fortune of finding this perfect image after days and days of enduring challenges that normal people would not or perhaps could not endure.

Some such stories may be true. (Though more often I suspect that they are considerably embellished, but what’s wrong with a bit of fun fiction now and then? :-) But sometimes I wonder if the effect of the photograph would be the same without the spine-tingling story-telling? And I wonder to what extent some viewers tend to look at (or not) photographs that are not accompanied by such compelling and daring tales? What is the balance between viewers being intrigued by the apparently adventure-filled lives lived by photographers and viewers reacting to the intrinsic quality of the photographs themselves?

With this in mind, I offer two descriptions of events associated with the creation of photographs. Think about how the stories affect your perception of the images – for better or worse. ;-)

Story #1

It was a tough morning in the arid desert valley. The oppressive early season heat had arrived and it was over 90 degrees shortly after sunrise. Raging wind threatened a dust storm, and I had been suffering in the heat and dust and dryness for many days. However, this remote location being a place of remarkable extremes, the surrounding mountain peaks were topped by several inches of recent snowfall, rendering many areas inaccessible to anyone unprepared for serious alpine travel. So I faced a choice — endure another day in the sun-blasted furnace of the valley or attempt to struggle up into the alpine zones of the towering mountains and make a photograph. Continue reading Telling Stories About Our Photographs →

Commentary, Ideas, Thinking Aloud

How Do We Really Shoot?

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This is probably going to be a sort of “thinking out loud” post, so forgive me if I’m sharing some half-formulated thoughts. I may even have to take back some of what I write afterwards! It is complicated. (Slightly revised on 8/14/11)

This afternoon I was reading an article about a photographer who produces some excellent and compelling work that I like quite a bit. The photographer’s identity is not important in the context of what I’ll write, since the person’s story only served to remind me of many similar stories I have read elsewhere regarding quite a few other photographers. Aside from the commentary on this person’s wonderful photographs, there were two other threads I noticed in the article – and I recognized both of them from a lot of other writing by and about photographers that I’ve seen, specifically about landscape/nature photographers.

First, I noticed that there was almost as much discussion about the circumstances in which the photographer works as there was about the photography itself – and the circumstances seemed quite dramatic. (It seems curious to me that photographers are often more interested in writing about and readers more interested in these circumstances than in the actual photographs, but that is something for another post…) There were stories of working in freezing cold with the risk of frostbite, of traveling to wild and seemingly dangerous places, and of encountering scary and threatening circumstances, working alone, coupled with an impression that the photographer was unable to resist the call to “risk it all” for “the shot.” It all sounds quite dramatic and even dangerous! That, however, is going to be a subject for a future post.

The second thing that caught my attention was a claim that the photographer had imagined a specific shot and then had gone to a certain place and spent a week waiting for that shot. The photograph that was the result of these efforts is, indeed, a very wonderful photograph and one that I find quite compelling. But from my own experience in photographing similar subjects in similar places and circumstances, the claim of seeing the image before arriving and then waiting for exactly the imagined image to appear didn’t quite add up, especially given the ephemeral nature of the effects and conditions that make the image in question so powerful.

It is this second issue that I’m interested in exploring a bit right now – the question of whether we simply capture the image we saw in our mind’s eye before arriving on the scene, or perhaps do something a lot more complex and, I think, much more intuitive and instantaneous. Do we arrive on the scene and wait for the thing we imagined to happen, or do we arrive on the scene and find a way to photograph what we find there? Or, what is the balance between this opposite poles? Continue reading How Do We Really Shoot? →

Morning Musings, Thinking Aloud

Backpacking Photography, Or Not

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I have been on two Sierra Nevada backpack trips during the past month… with very different photographic results. The first trip was a six-day visit to the Ediza Lake/Thousand Island Lake area near Mammoth, California. I came back from this trip with a bunch of photographs that I think are very successful – both from the pack trip itself and from a pre-trip visit to Mono Lake. I just returned yesterday from the second trip, a week-long adventure in the highest portion of the southern Sierra Nevada during which we crossed three spectacular 12,000’+ passes – but I didn’t have nearly the photographic success on this trip.

What could explain the difference between the outcomes of the two trips? Probably quite a few things – here’s a short list:

  • The nature of the trips – On the first trip we stayed in the same place for as long as three days at a time, providing lots of time to learn the area a bit more thoroughly. On the second trip we moved every day, and some of the days were quite rough. On day three of the trip we travelled cross-country (e.g. – no trail) across a class two 12,600′ pass. The best early morning hours were often spent getting up and onto the trail, and we were tired enough in the evenings that crawling into the sleeping bag was a more attractive proposition than doing photography.
  • The weather – On the first trip the clouds built up every day, leading to afternoon thunderstorms on more than half of them. In fact, on several days the clouds had already appeared by dawn. On the second trip we experienced a full week of nearly “perfect” (in the backpacking sense) weather with hardly a cloud to be seen. While the second trip’s weather was arguably better for backpacking, it was not nearly as interesting for photography.
  • The terrain and conditions – The timing of the first trip was fortuitous; we hit the peak of this summer’s meager Sierra greenery and flowers east of the Minarets. Two weeks later, much of the spectacular country we traveled though on the second trip was extremely dry and brown. In addition, while traveling over high passes is indeed a spectacular thing, I find them difficult to shoot during the middle of the day, the time when we tended to make our crossings.
  • The company – My companions on the first trip were my photographer brother and his family. It was easy (unavoidable, actually! :-) to include photography as an integral part of the trip. My companions on the second trip were the talusdancers, a group of friends who backpack the Sierra together every summer. The main focus of the latter trip was travel through the mountains, not photography.
  • Imponderables – Sometimes everything looks like a potential photograph… and sometimes it doesn’t – you either are thinking photographically or you aren’t For whatever reasons, sometimes the mind and the eye seem fully engaged in seeking out photographic images – and at other times it just isn’t happening. It wasn’t happening nearly as often on the second trip as on the first.

All of this is a reflection on the fact that I probably came back from the recent trip with no more than a half dozen – if that – photographs that really “do it” for me. On one level this is a bit disappointing. However, I’ve learned that not every trip produces a ton of great images, and that even the trips that aren’t immediately successful may lead to something more successful in the future.

Besides, it was a great pack trip!

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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