Ramblings

It starts by spending entirely too much for a camera. I have owned a lot of cameras, some of pretty decent quality, taking pictures that are relegated to dusty albums and drawers and hard drives. Finally, digital photography comes of age with good SLR cameras, and the decision comes to how much is enough and how much is too much? When you buy the best, it only hurts once. Suddenly, there is a level of versatility and quality that transforms taking pictures to making photograps, transforms snapshots to art, and the relationship with the camera and in turn to the world I see becomes entirely more considerate. And before I have finished paying off the camera I paid entirely too much for, I have bought another lens that cost as much as the camera, and then another camera, that exceeds the reach of the first, and another lens, because there just is no reason to not have the best tool for the job, and you will never know how far the job, the experience of capture, will go until you have the tools to reach that far and that deep.

Having said that, I still fall in the ranks of the avid amateur, so it is with a certain amount of presumption that I now strive to offer my work within a commercial context. It is like walking out onto a frozen lake, not being sure if the ice beneath my feet has the integrity to hold me up, or if I will crash and find out that in fact I'm all wet. So far, I have been very gratified by the support and interest I have received in this tentative endeavor.

As a photographer (amateur or otherwise) I find myself looking at the world through different eyes, similar to a view finder. I have always been one to appreciate a landscape, and a lot of my photography is panorama work. I imagine many of us see the world in a large context that goes by rather quickly. As a photographer I find myself looking to find the small framed aspect of a scene or landscape that might otherwise get quickly overlooked within the "big picture" and capture that space in time in order to focus on frames in the world that might ring a note of recognition of aspects of the world we move in.

Ansel Adams rightly said:  "A good photograph is knowing where to stand." I strive to find a unique perspective of familiar scenes that bring a quality to photos that transcend the usual snapshots that many of us take. A mentor of mine told me long ago: never take a picture from a standing position. Always kneel and look up, or get a little elevation on your subject and shoot down. We all see the world from a standing position, and changing one's elevation in relation to the subject (or the ground) lends an easy level of interest to photos. I also try to search out locations that allow me to take a picture of what may be a familiar scene from an angle or location that isn't immediately familiar. Location location location. Space. That, and timing is everything. My best photos are ones that capture a unique light, usually the alpenglow of sunrise or sunset, that brings out the depth of colors in a scene, and accentuates the shapes and depths of space.

And lastly (for now), of course it takes taking a bazillion pictures to come up with the handful that are worthy of your attention. I humbly thank my friends for the kind words they have offered the few successes I have been able to harvest from the chaff that accumulates on my hard drives.

"Photography's greatest talent, and its biggest responsibility, is to prove that beauty and wholeness are worth preserving." -Tom Ang, The Tao of Photography

The world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness. The craft of the photographer is to recognize its best works and moments, to anticipate them, to clarify them, and to make them permanent. -John Szarkowski, paraphrased from The Photographer's Eye