Coming Soon…

Last week, I received an e-mail from my friend and fellow photographer Tom Robbins, which included a suggestion for a future blog topic:  seeing in the field.  It’s a subject that is simultaneously rich with opportunity and fraught with peril.  The opportunity part of the equation is obvious; once you get past the technical part of the puzzle, seeing is really what photography is all about.  But the potential pitfalls of the subject are equally evident; how do you go about detailing, via the written word, a cognitively sprawling process that is not only endemic, inherently subjective (to at least a significant degree), deeply personal and visual?  It’s a knotty problem.

Red Jack Lake, Hiawatha National Forest, Michigan

So, in response to his suggestion, I did what any self-respecting blogger would do when faced with a similar conundrum:  I co-opted Tom and asked him to collaborate with me on what I hope will be a numerically unspecified series of installments on the topic of “seeing in the field,” in real time.  The entire enterprise remains very much a work in progress–and it may never be anything more than that; we’ll have to see.  But hopefully we’ll touch upon such issues as recognizing a worthwhile scene; identifying appealing elements and themes; similarities and differences that arise between the advanced “visualization” of a scene and simply stumbling across something unexpected but worthwhile; fine-tuning composition; and probably a number of other subjects that haven’t even come to mind yet.

Sunflowers, Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, Arizona

Hopefully readers will find all of this of some value.  When I was in the process of really getting serious about landscape photography, about 15 years ago, I spent a lot of time thinking about these very topics (or this broader, holistic subject), and read a number of books on the subject of making landscape images.  Virtually all of the sources I consulted engaged in a kind of subtle, nuanced interplay between addressing the matter in a tangible, concrete manner and in a more ethereal, intangible way.  It was as though there was a kind of intellectual minuet that was being danced.

The Heart of the Matter, Zion Plateau, Zion National Park, Utah

It remains to be seen how the subject will be treated here, but part of the reason that I wanted to engage Tom in the process was to lessen–if not eliminate–the concern I had that if I dealt with the subject entirely on my own I might end up doing nothing more than giving readers a look at an entirely subjective, non-transferable view.  Doing so would, surely, do more harm than good to anyone attempting to practically apply thoughts and procedures lacking in any ability to be extended.  By including the thinking of another photographer–one whose interests and approach intersect but don’t entirely overlap my own–I thought a baby step toward consensus on something that might resemble the earliest steps on a 1000-mile journey might be vaguely identifiable.

Sunrise, Bear Rocks Preserve, Dolly Sods Wilderness, Monongahla National Forest, West Virginia

In any event, this prologue is intended to simply provide fair warning of at least part of what’s in store on this blog in the relatively near future.  We hope you find it useful in both a practical and creatively stimulating sense.

Swift Creek Overlook black & white, Red River Gorge, Daniel Boone National Forest, Kentucky

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