LAST LIGHT

REVISITING THE KEY THEMES IN YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY

I was driving home at sunset as the last light of 2018 faded into darkness when I noticed some intense colors in the sky. I stopped to photograph at an open area of grassland with a clear view of the landscape and clouds. Using the magic of intentional camera motion (ICM), I moved my camera back and forth horizontally, blending the land and sky into a painterly abstraction of the scene before me. I relish the uncertainty of this process, where no capture looks the same and each one is hard to predict. In near darkness, I made seventy-three images in six minutes, experimenting with various shutter speeds and the speed of my camera motion. The exposure times ranged from .5 to 2.5 seconds.

As 2018 ended and I reviewed my photographs from the past year, I noticed that I had not made any new “Impressions” photographs. So, on that last day of the year, it seemed the right time to push myself to add new work to my “Impressions” portfolio. Well, those results got me revved up for another session in the same area a few days later. This time I worked on a day with ominous clouds and beams of light striking the foothill grasslands, also shown here.

Grasslands at Twilight | Madera County, California | 2018

Progress happens one step at a time—one idea leads to another, and down the road we travel. The pathway toward elevating one’s photography is to continually add depth to those primary themes that inspire us. Creative tangents are critical to that growth, but sometimes can be too random. Most of us can benefit from a more focused approach. My recent images shown here will add valuable breadth to my “Impressions” series. For your own creative resolutions, target your key themes to build their depth and quality level, and plan shooting sessions with those targets in mind, and I bet you’ll see exciting improvements in your photography.

Valley Oak and Fog | Ahwahnee, California | 2010