“Great photos aren’t taken, they’re made”
I’ve seen the title of this post, a quote from Ansel Adams, come up a few times when reading about modern photography and it generally holds negative connotations as people assume it refers to excessive post processing and “photoshopping” to change the results in the image. This is not what Ansel was referring to. He was referring to the difference in the eye of someone who is, or hopes to be, a Photographer and an individual who is simply taking a snapshot. Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. - Matt Hardy For the most part, I’d safely define the vast majority of individuals who own cameras as amateur Photo Journalists, in that they wish to journal the events and moments they experience so they use a camera to effectively do this. A turning point happens when you stop trying to catalog events as they happen and wish to create an artistic representation of what you are seeing. When you start to become an Artistic Photographer. When you stop merely taking a photograph of a scene and start making the photograph before you close the shutter. Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like - David Alan Harvey For me this has been a gradual process. I largely started out wanting to journal my experiences as they happened. Comparing my folders of digital images now I’m not really taking more images today than I was a few years ago but what I’m photographing has changed immensely. Going back a few years I can see that I would take photos as I moved, usually at eye height and directly at what I was looking at. I’d usually take one photo per view and move on. Now, I’m taking a similar number of photos but the content has been vastly reduced. I’m taking many pictures of a single moment, from different angles and heights, with different apertures, ISO’s and shutter speeds. The gap in time between my photos is no longer documented as I’m not concerned with simply journaling my experience but rather creating my own personal artistic representation of the experience. The difference between “Taking” and “Making” a photo you’d print and hang on your wall is subtle but the results can vary immensely. Making a photo could be as simple as dropping to one knee and using a different aperture rather than taking the photo from a standing height and using the auto setting on the camera. I don’t imagine that I’m an amazing photographer myself, but I make photos that I personally...
Mt. Baker, N. Ridge: Anatomy of an Attempt
“At one point or another we’ve all cited percentages or experience levels and shrugged away risk. Given reasons for why it can’t happen to us, why it won’t happen…” I lay awake, semi in and out of my sleeping bag. It’s hot. I’m trying to sleep as I know I need to be awake and alert again in a few short hours. I want so bad for the temperature to drop, so that I can sleep, so that the snow underneath my tent and for miles around me will firm up. But there’s no wind, no sound, just dry, dead air and the dying light of the day. I’m listening to a podcast called “The Dirtbag Diaries” on my mp3 player. This episode is called “Anatomy of an Accident”. In it the author details a near fatal accident he had high in the mountains in a steep icy gully, he examines the simple mistakes he made during that trip early on that had a domino effect eventually leading to his accident. “Geez, this is the last thing I need to be listening to right now!” I say to myself. I hear a serac calve off Colfax in the distance, the impact shatters the silence across the entire mountain. It’s not the first serac we’ve seen or heard fall this day. “Maybe this is exactly what I should be listening to right now…” I let this episode finish and then try to get some sleep. It’s fitful, it never seems to get dark outside, the temperature is always uncomfortably hot and before I know it, it’s 2am and time to get up and ready. I give Dean and Adrien a wake up call. Spring is already up. Everyone moves in silence, boiling water, eating whatever calories we can paw at in the dull light, getting our harnesses on, prusiks dressed and checked, clipping all our gak where ever it will fit. We split into two rope teams of two and head out into the eerie glow of the near full moon to cross the Coleman Glacier. Only minutes have passed and we’re already jumping the first of a plethora of unavoidable crevasses, ice axes at the ready to arrest any sudden snow bridge collapses. I think to myself “I didn’t even need that coffee this morning, this is enough of a wake up”. At times it feels like tiptoeing past sleeping giants. Huge pillars of broken ice the size of houses, yawning crevasses the depths of which my 100 lumen headlamp can’t even attempt to see to the bottom of. As I inch across one of a few 3 foot wide...
