Moon over Yavapai Point Sunrise ~ Winter 2010
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Learning to see in a photographic sense means that one has acquired skills that lead directly to what Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment. One must learn to gaze patiently at the whole of what one chooses to photograph. One must also learn to reduce one’s gaze into a frame, a ratio of width to height, that results in a pleasing composition. One must also further reduce ones frame into a precise moment of action, that moment within the continuum of moments to capture an image on film or, to be more precise, to a digital file. Finally, one must learn to seamlessly apply one’s gaze to the equipment one chooses to use but this is the least important part of the process.
To gaze is to engage with one’s setting, to concentrate on the whole of one’s surroundings in a way that appears to block all interference, all distractions from one’s act of looking. The gaze is akin to a meditation in which one empties one’s mind in order to reach a deeper understanding of that which is. To gaze is to gain a certain patience, waiting for conditions to merge into a moment of precision when everything is just so. To gaze is to see beyond merely looking, to hone an awareness of everything in order to select that which is to be photographed.
While gazing, one learns to frame in a photographic sense, to look through a ratio of width to height, as a part of the selection process for making photographs. The frame one chooses as a means to reduce the whole into a potential photographic image is dependent upon the equipment one is using at any given time. If one is using a 4×5 or 8×10 view camera the frame ratio is 2 to 2.5. If, as I now do, one is using a digital 35mm camera the common ratio is 2 to 3. Framing requires a specific knowledge of one’s equipment but is independent of the viewfinder in the sense that one does not look through the viewfinder until one has already made a selection of something to photograph. Framing narrows one’s gaze as a first step in making a photograph.
Once one makes a framing selection the time for action begins. Depending upon how one shoots, one must set up one’s camera. When shooting landscapes I continue to use a tripod as if I were shooting with a large format camera. This allows me to be precise in my framing selection as I finally look through the viewfinder to compose the image. It is at this stage that one’s vision merges with one’s technical knowledge in order to select the appropriate ratios between ISO (film speed), shutter speed and lens speed in order to capture the image one sees. Here the combination between vision and craft allow one to capture an image that is always already gone, one never to be seen again and never having been seen prior, the unique decisive moment of exposure.
The image in this post is an example of the application of the gaze to the whole of one’s surroundings. I was photographing at Yavapai Point in the Grand Canyon at sunrise on a very cold Winter morning in January. I set up in an out of the usual beaten path in order to not be disturbed by the small crowd gathering around at this lookout. I captured a number of images from the moment of the break of the sun over the horizon behind me to when the shadows began to shorten. I packed up and was on my way back to my car when I turned a corner and there it was, the full moon around 30 degrees above the horizon above the canyon wall. I stopped, set up the tripod, adjusted the camera and released the shutter. The light was still quite warm, the time being around 8:30 AM. As I was setting up many of the people that came to watch the sunrise over the canyon were walking back to the parking lot. I heard one person say, “I wonder what he is shooting?” I suspect this remark was made to someone other than me. I thought, this is the difference between gazing and merely looking.
The Moon over Yavapai Point Sunrise ~ Winter 2010 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
