On the Road

Earlier this year I co-led a photo tour in the Palouse region of Washington state. I’d never been there before, but reputation alone indicated an awesome photographic destination offering vistas of rolling hills and farmland, plus all the textures, colors, and plays of light and shadow you could wish for.

This may be strange to hear from a travel photographer, but I can make a case that location isn’t everything—light is. And I’d build my argument on the fact that the right light brings out the best in any location.

I know someone who calls these photographs my Alfred Hitchcock Project. You know, The Birds through a Rear Window. Nice touch, but the truth is the Master of Suspense was not in my thoughts when I began to shoot.

Camera technology these days is amazing; it’s practically magic. The problem, though, to my way of thinking and photographing, is that the magic offers a very wide and deep comfort zone—you might call it a zone of automatic decisions, and it’s probably best not to spend a lot of time there, certainly not if you want to create individualistic images.

I learned photography in the film days, and when the huge change to digital came along, I changed not only my gear but the way I see. I used to have to see in terms of very specific criteria of what would work within the ISO range of my film and what the film could record in terms of light and shadow. Low ISOs meant I couldn’t get enough depth of field, or a tripod was needed, or I had to light something because there wasn’t enough information in pictures that had incredible shadow detail. High ISOs often meant an unacceptable level of grain and bad color rendition. As a result I passed up a lot of situations that got my attention but were beyond the capability of my film to capture.

Chuck Berry was right. “It goes to show you never can tell,” he wrote, and sang, and that phrase is as appropriate a way to begin this column as any I can think of. I certainly never can tell which photo will please the client, fulfill the assignment, or sell well through my stock agencies; in other words, which one will succeed in the marketplace.

I’ve seen my share, and I expect you have too, of people who basically spray the area hoping to get a keeper. I’ve also seen photographers who wait…wait…and wait some more to catch that decisive moment. I’m neither of those types. I think of what I do as mindful shooting: I know what I want the photo to look like; I preconceive and previsualize the moment; I control the situation as much as I can to get that moment; and I’m prepared to work with what I’m given and what I can’t control in order to get a good result.