Don’t Move: A Photographic Exercise

On our final morning on the Jago, as we waited for the weather to clear off the mountains, I took the opportunity to spend a bit of time making photos. It was a nice morning for photography, cloud shadows rolled past, and scud clung here and there to the mountainsides. I wandered around for a few minutes, but eventually stopped, just watching the landscape change as the light shifted across the tundra. It was a good moment, so I took advantage of it.

I gave myself an assignment: I wouldn’t move for 30 minutes.

Sometimes photography is a distraction. There is the tendency for the camera to substitute for experience. I’ve caught myself falling into that trap more than once. To escape, I usually just put my camera down and appreciate the moment without the distraction of photography. Personal experience is more important than some mediocre images. Why mediocre? Because if we aren’t in the moment, using the camera in lieu of being mentally present, our images will inevitably be inferior. We have to be there to be there.

Which brings me back to my exercise that morning on the Jago. Just as the camera can be a distraction, too, it can be a tool for better seeing a place. I spent much of that half hour simply looking. Occasionally I’d see a composition: a cloud shadow, a flower against the gray backdrop of the swirling river, the sun slipping through the scud atop a nearby peak, and I’d raise my camera and make an image.

Are these my best images? No. But in those thirty minutes, I saw the place well, and that, I won’t forget.

The images here were all made from exactly the same location using a Canon 100-400 at various zoom lengths.

If you join me on one of my photo workshops, we’ll use this exercise each morning to get us in the moment. There are still a few slots available for my Arctic Images workshop at Agiak Lake in Gates of the Arctic National Park in mid-August and at my Photographic Landscape of the Wrangells workshop for the Wrangell Mountains Center in early September. Come join me!

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