Notes from the Landscape

Walking in the upper reaches of Yosemite Valley, rock hopping on slippery granite, my feet, whom I’ve always trusted, gave way and I slammed my face into the rock, snapping all my upper front teeth in half. I had no cut lips or gums and my nose was untouched, which can only mean...I must have been smiling on the way down.

Nature has never been scary to me. It’s only ever sparked intense curiosity. It’s why I chose landscape photography, or maybe poetically why landscape photography chose me. It offers that chance to observe, not for scientific understanding, although I like that too, but for artistic realization.

5:23AM, Note to self: I feel more comfortable looking through a viewfinder than just standing and looking. By adding a frame, I turn it from an observation to an interpretation.

Lost time. It should be called found time. Those moments when time doesn’t seem to exist and you’re lost to the flow state of your endeavor.

There’s a moment when you’re by yourself in the mountains, really by yourself, when you feel an honesty about your place in it. Not the cliché thought of smallness in a larger universe, but a more personal feeling of belonging.

I don’t think gifts are bestowed, I think they’re discovered, I think they’re crafted.

10:13AM, BDE (basic daylight exposure). Under blue sky, if the sun is 20 degrees above the horizon, one over the ISO of your film at aperture F/16 will yield an appropriately exposed negative. BDE should be called boring daylight exposure, as in “I’m not shooting it’s BDE,” or “I just bailed ‘cause it’s BDE…” This is how I’ve used the term for years. This magnificent storm blew out and turned BDE, blarch. We want the storms.

Why did Thoreau build a cabin on the outskirts of town? Because he recognized in his fellow citizens an apathy toward experiencing life. It was never about solitude, it was about living simply and closer to nature.

I was in the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles and on one wall was a folded piece of blank paper pinned to the wall. There’s a lot of crap in the arts; too much cleverness and not enough honesty.

Art is not a commodity, it does not adhere to the same principles that drive normal economics. What is the value of an object? Does value lie in its scarcity, its perceived value, in the reputation of the artist or all of this…I scream at the moon, but she does not care.

Digitization of photography promotes the expectation of perfection when the printed image is analog and imperfections are part of its journey

2:47PM, mountains. Clouds moving toward me. Hold cupped hands up and count, need a minimum of thirty seconds to get the cloud movement I need. Put a red 25 and polarizer to darken the sky, add a 10-stop ND to drop the exposure to 2 minutes, 5 minutes with reciprocity, that’s good it’ll add a nature N+1 without needing to adjust development. 50mm lens should do it. Frame up foreground, decent sky, position clouds to move right into and overhead. Lockdown shutter, turn timer on. Wait. It’s not always poetry out here.

A good friend once commented that I need to feel pain in order to see the beauty of nature. I sat with this for a while. I don’t know if it’s a requirement, but there’s rich clarity when your body has broken through and the pain of it is replaced with a rhythmic grace. Maybe part of me likes to experience what it means when the comforts of life are stripped away.

I was walking in the backcountry and I stopped by a small snow fed stream to drink and soak my feet. I pulled off my shoes and when I put my feet in the water my right leg seized up in such pain. The muscles refused to work properly and I couldn’t lift my leg out of the cold water. I had to just sit there and accept it, with a few choice words yelled to the wind. I really should remember to eat more bananas.

Fantasy and imagination, they seem so similar. Imagination is the ability of the mind to be creative and resourceful. It is the seeds of possibility. Fantasy is the absence of reality, it bares no thorns. It is a perfect sequence of events that yield no negative outcome. It is the idealized want, with no pain or work to achieve. It requires nothing of you. Fantasy and imagination are indeed not the same at all.

I am haunted by light. I chase it, follow it, capture it, but eventually it fades to the West and I am left standing with camera and tripod. This is the found time.

Windless and empty this mountain place, shall I return home? I think not. I’ve gone walkabout, an intoxicating freedom.