| Breaking Clouds, Big Sur
I don’t know about you, but I love to talk photography; with friends, with family or with complete strangers, exchanging views and information, both technical and aesthetic makes the hours fly by. Because of my enjoyment to gab about this subject I’m in many local and national photography organizations where a number of members are outdoor photographers; and more precisely, landscape photographers. While the conversation now more than ever crosses into the digital realm, and why not, I’m disturbed by what I’m starting to hearing more-and-more. While discussing how Photoshop is a God-send for fixing all those troubled negatives of the past; you know, the one’s with the large black spot that likes to hang out with bright clean snow; or the image you could never get quite right because you couldn’t hold enough dodging tools? Someone always mentions their “sky folder”. The folder on their hard drive that is filled with skies of all different types, ready to be inserted into another image when they were to lazy to wait for the right conditions; and this is not just hobbyist or advanced amateurs saying this, but professionals as well.
In my opinion outdoor photography is one of the most difficult to execute successfully, this from a working portrait and wedding guy too. You can’t tell a tree to move over a few feet or ask the wind to stop tickling the grass. What makes fine landscape photography art is the moment; Henri Cartier-Bresson coined the phrase the “decisive moment” when describing his work on the streets of the world, and the term also perfectly describes the artfulness in a beautiful landscape. Fore it is only at that moment, that 1/2 of a second where the soft glow of sunset kisses the coastal grasses where land and ocean meet; on that day when the storm breaks and the bleak dead sky makes way for large beautiful clouds to fill the horizon and you were there, after hours of hiking or days of hoping or years of waiting, to open the shutter and let your lens take in the scene. Having a folder full of big fluffy cloud filled skies, warm sunsets or dramatic sunrises cheats the process of fine landscape photography. You are no longer creating art out of only what’s given to you by mother nature, using your skills and vision to create something beautiful out of a scene others don’t give a second thought. Instead you’re settling, settling for a mediocre scene that you’ll later take back into Photoshop and create something that isn’t really nature or landscape photography. Instead the pieced together image is a collage, and if it’s labeled as such that’s perfectly acceptable and wonderful. However, in this day of digital photography, camera phones and digital darkrooms it is almost assumed that any image with a dynamic sky or bright colors wasn’t made possible by the photographer’s unique vision or mastery of photographic techniques; but instead created in Photoshop, which immediately erases the magic of the moment. As someone who, like many of you, has been asked “is it real” or “how many images is that” it is very discouraging; and I believe ultimately harmful to photography as a whole. When people stop seeing a beautiful moment for what it really is photography starts to lose its impact, both in the fine art realm and in the conservationist efforts many beautiful outdoor photographs help to illustrate. You see, fine landscape photography is more than just going outside somewhere and taking a few pictures. It's about finding the perfect somewhere, and being there at the perfect time when all the elements fall into place; when you can say "it was worth it to make this trip for the fifth time" and you can finally turn your lens on that perfect moment and click. The accompanying image was made while driving down highway 1 along California's central coast. Thick storm clouds covered the sky the entire day and didn't make for much of a sunset at my original location. I'd packed up my gear and was ending my day photographically when I saw a break in the clouds while driving back to my hotel. I quickly pulled over, grabbed my camera and ran up a nearby hill to get to some high ground. After composing the scene a few different ways I found this to be the most successful. When I look back on this image I think about the race to capture the image and the satisfaction of knowing I captured the beauty that was placed before me at that instant, something that I think would have been lost if I'd had opened my sky folder. |
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