I arrived at Mather Point around thirty minutes prior to the precise moment the sun crept above the horizon. In the twilight of the early dawn the sky changed from a cold blue-gray to a warm yellow-orange. Lighting the canyon was the reflected light from the full moon. Looking into the canyon as the light changed and shadows moved, I waited. Hovering around 5 degrees Fahrenheit on the rim this particular morning and in spite of the many layers of clothing I put on, I couldn’t help but think about the cold that surrounded me, enveloped me as I waited for a precise moment to begin to photograph.
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The dualism, the split personality of the photographer, the one working alone, in fractions of seconds, exposing that which one believes to be compelling at the very instant of capture, something intimate, personal even private yet doing so in order to share that which one’s own vision noted so clearly with the world is the very essence of what inspires one to photograph in the first place. Making the private public is part of the the experience that motivates one to spend countless hours looking at landscapes in order to capture a mere fraction of a second, an exposure that freezes what would always already vanish never to be seen again.
Sunrise at Mather Point ~ Spring 2010 The camera is the instrument that brings the inner passion and the outward event into harmony with one another, this linking, or, rather, this coincidence, is successfully brought about, then we find one of the things that no image-making medium can accomplish to the same degree. Edward [...] Hanging just above the trees that protect a gift shop near Desert View by the Grand Canyon the nearly full moon sparkled in the sky. I stopped for a second, set up my tripod, framed the image and snapped off three bracketed exposures that would later be combined into an HDR image. Choosing the HDR technique guaranteed that I would capture a full tonal range, providing detail in the shadows of the trees and the craters of the moon. The image, now captured, sat for a while before I decided to look at it in black and white. A bit of blue tone brings out the blacks without impacting on the whites and here is the finished image. There are places on this earth that I never tire of, whether I am merely looking or actively photographing. The Grand Canyon is one of those places. The richness of colors layered upon colors, the play of light and shadow across the rocks, gorges, buttes and formations is forever changing, challenging one to see differently in each passing moment. Like most photographers, I prefer the light from sunrise to around mid-morning or from mid-afternoon to sunset…the hours when shadows lengthen and the colors are most vibrant. Photography, any visual art for that matter, but photography in particular is about learning to see. Everyone looks but not everyone sees. What is the difference? Looking is indiscriminate in the sense that looking takes in everything without attending to anything in particular. Seeing is the learned practice of attending, of paying close attention to not only what is present in its origins but, and this is most important, attending to what the photographic image will look like when finished. Seeing involves both the here and now and the ability to project to the finished product. Making photographs is, to a large extent, a visual compromise between the origins and the print. Technique will only take one so far; an internalization of the craft contributes to the ability to record what is there in the landscape, what presents itself for capture. Craft alone, however, makes for boring images. Wedded to one’s craft is the ability to see, to gaze with purpose at that which is right in front of one’s nose, so as to allow one to re-present that which one sees, something that goes well beyond the mere presence of something to be photographed. When I first began seriously making images I shot everything I could find in my viewfinder. A roll of PlusX lasted but minutes; I knew when I was finished because I had no more film. The simple truth was I had no vision, no means of seeing beyond the surface where everything looked interesting indiscriminately. Every once in a while I might find an image I really liked but they were few and far between. Those early years were important because I spent time looking, both in general and specifically through the viewfinder of my camera. I began to discriminate, to frame images more carefully, ignoring some potential images and concentrating on others. Still I was only looking in the broadest sense of the word. 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. I have been making photographs since I was 13 years old, some 53 years ago, when I discovered magic in the darkroom as images appeared as negatives on film and positives on photographic paper right before my eyes. I have used everything from a Brownie Hawkeye fixed lens snapshot camera to an 8 x 10 view camera in my image making journey. I switched to digital image making about 5 years ago when it became clear that there was nothing I could do in a darkroom that I couldn’t do in my newly discovered Lightroom, in fact, digital image making offered me additional technique that was superior to wet process, not in the final outcome but in the ease of achieving that outcome. Digital imagery has also made color more available as an art form in photography. |
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