PRACTICE AND WORK

AN EDITORIAL ASSIGNMENT LED TO PERSONAL EXPRESSION

When Ansel Adams gave lectures late in his life, he made a point of letting his audience know that he had worked for sixty years as a commercial photographer. Although famed for his art, he accepted assignments and projects that helped pay the bills and allowed him to travel around the country while pursuing personal image making along the way.

For example, during a break on a project for Kodak in the Southwest, he made his famous photographs of aspens in New Mexico. During World War II, while he worked on a documentary project on the Japanese internment camp of Manzanar near Lone Pine, California, Adams photographed two icons of landscape photography—Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California and Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California. Adams was out in the field long and often, whether photographing for a job or making art for himself.

Nothing can improve your photography more than practice and hard work. Practice is the process of becoming ready to make a great image. Those past experiments and failures, those mental calculations for exposure, setting up your tripod quickly before the light changes, knowing how to refine a composition for the best image design—all have a cumulative value. There are no shortcuts for the experience that allows you to be instinctive. After many years of work, decision-making can become intuitive and your own vision has a chance to surface. Intuition, not technology or gadgetry, is the key to vision.

Back in 1995, my wife and I traveled to Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada to work on my book The Color of Nature. The assignment was to photograph turquoise glacial lakes and glacial crevasses and caves to show ice-filtered, blue light from inside. I was told about an ice cave that I hoped would show the glowing blue I had seen in other photographs, but when I walked inside the cave, the light did not seem very blue. I photographed for about an hour around the opening where I could see some light passing through. Finally I figured that if blue light was there, I must have it on film by now.

Then I shifted gears. While I had been working on the “color of nature” job at hand, I noticed some more interesting forms farther into the cave. The striped patterns of frozen debris and scalloped walls showed great potential. I worked for another hour at the edge of available light, making exposures in the four- to eight-minute range. I played with the composition, seeing how the lines of striation moved through the frame. I adjusted the proportion of cave floor to ice, alternated between vertical and horizontal framing, and changed my camera position for different perspectives. Finally satisfied, I hiked back to my van.

That first hour or so spent “working” was like a sketching process. I had time to absorb the mood of the place. All the while, the ice dripped on me and my gear. My consolation was that it was drier inside the cave than outside in the pouring rain. The technical concerns facing me, the extreme depth of field (I could easily touch the ice ceiling above my head) and long exposure times, were similar to problems I had “practiced” when photographing many other situations before—for example, in the slot canyons of the Southwest. Like I had learned in slot canyons and other low-light situations, I compensated for the film’s “reciprocity failure.” The effect requires longer exposures for the film to be exposed properly, so I double my spot meter’s given exposure. By adjusting my 4x5 camera’s movements to conform to the cave ceiling, I could use a more moderate aperture of f/32 so that my exposure times weren’t too long. At f/64, the exposures would have been nearly half an hour. These solutions were second nature after many years of practice.

My blue ice images were not so blue, and so were not used in the book. The great thickness of the ice at that location did not allow enough light to pass through for the blue effect. When I focused on the area of the cave that excited me, the results were much better. The ice cave photograph shown here has appeared as a limited-edition print in gallery exhibits and in a book of my best images, Landscapes of the Spirit, and variations on this composition have been published in several magazine articles. In any case, I wouldn’t have found the cave had it not been for my work. Sometimes the “work” and “art” images are the same image. With my ice cave images, only the “art” image worked. Sometimes neither works. The one thing I do know is that practice works.

Cloud Reflections and Mt. Moran at the Oxbow Bend on the Snake River | Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming | 1990