Flowing Photography

“You know you’ve got it, if it makes you feel good.” -Janis Joplin

While I doubt that Janis had photography in mind when she wrote the lyrics to her classic “Piece of my Heart”, I think it’s actually a great way to know when you are in the zone. 

Most photographers will know what I’m talking about here. It’s a place where the situation, compositions, and light all come together. Fingers find the right camera settings without effort or conscious thought and with each click of the shutter, you just know you’ve got something good.

Moments like that are, sadly, rare for most of us. Though I suppose that rarity makes them more special when they do occur.

Psychologists refer to this mental state as “flow”. It’s popular in sports psychology as well as art. And there are entire books on the subject of achieving and maintaining flow as way toward better…well better anything really. It’ a fascinating subject, and I strongly recommend the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I read it first several years ago when I was training for an Ironman Triathlon and was struggling with my running. I’m not sure helped me find my “flow” any more often than I did before, but at least I came away with a better understanding of what was happening in my brain, on those rare occasions when I felt weightless, one foot in front of the other, mile after mile. Just like in photography, those runs were my best.

Anyway, I was talking about photography. When I look back at my favorite photos over the past year, just about all of them were made during moments of flow. Some sessions were hours long, some were just moments, but each was lengthy enough that the image came together effortlessly. I just knew exactly what I wanted and how to create it.

Here are a few examples of image from the past year:

This first one was from almost a year ago during an amazing aurora display. I had been making some pretty good images when I decided to move to a different location. As I scurried between locations, I looked up to check the lights as I passed beneath these spruces. When I looked up and saw the coronal aurora, I knew it was time to stop. I pulled out the legs of the tripod and moved a few feet to my right where the lights were framed nicely by the surrounding trees. I made an image. Nice, but the trees were dark, another exposure and I painted the trees with my headlamp beam. Boom. Done. 2 minutes and I’d made one my best images of the aurora.

This next one was in April when I was guiding aboard and expedition ship off the west coast of South America. I was walking with a small group of clients on the beach of Isla Lobos de la Tierra watching flocks of Blue-footed Boobies fly by and the Peuvian Pelicans perched in clusters along the beach. I looked down toward the water where the chop was slapping against some stones with the morning sun just reaching through the clouds. I scurried down and made two photos. This was the second. 

On two occasions during my final trip of the year for Arctic Wild (www.arcticwild.com). I found myself in a state of flow. The first was the second night. After dinner we hiked as a group to the top of a small knob above camp that provided views up a down the river. At first, the light didn’t seem that great for photography, it was kind of overcast with just the barest sense of sun. But as time passed, the landscape shifted to this strange glow that lit up the autumn tundra as though from within. Dark clouds provided a sense of storm light and the images made themselves.

This final shot was just a day or two later of the one above. I was hiking with a couple of my clients up a tributary creek to the Kongakut. We’d gotten snow the night before, and the morning felt twice as bright. We’d been working our way over little side channels of the creek through an enormous patch of willows, still yellow with autumn leaves despite the new snow. We were stepping over a little stream of water above a pond when I noticed this moose antler fully submerged in the glass-clear water. A story was unfolding in that scene, and I knew just how to tell it. I made a few images before stepping away from the scene and was getting ready to move on, but the sense that I hadn’t completed the shot came back for me. Rather than hike on, I jumped back across the creek, and clinging to a willow, leaned out over the water where I could frame this image. With the click of this image, the sense of flow disappeared and I moved on. 

In landscape photography, unlike the few experiences I’ve had with flow as an athlete, the periods are often short, lasting for enough time to make the right image.

Flow, when it happens, is a cool thing, and it takes makes the art of photography, that much more compelling. Maybe Janis Joplin was a photographer.

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