The dark side of landscape photography

I started photography to share the beautiful things I see when I'm out in nature. The focus was initially on being in nature, and the camera just happened to come along.

Over time, the desire to make good images became a bigger and bigger priority. It took many years, but trips began to be centered around photography. Evenings playing around with sliders in Camera Raw became days of careful painting selective adjustments in Photoshop. A scene that was once filled with the joy of exploration and being out in the wilderness became not good enough to win any awards or get re-posted by any feature accounts on Instagram, and therefore not worth witnessing.

This is all, of course, a terrible way to approach being in nature, but this can happen in the pursuit of landscape photography. It's what happened to me, anyway.

One thing I wanted to do before leaving Seattle for a while was to go to an island with my girlfriend. I love the islands in the Puget Sound and I really enjoy sharing the experience of being in nature with people I care about. This is a big contrast to what I had been doing for the past few months — mostly solo trips into the mountains.

The islands don't offer the same kinds of impressive compositions that the mountains do, but they offer a unique environment that I really enjoy. There's something really meditative about sitting by the water, looking over the Sound, and seeing the mountains from a distance rather than up close. And when we were on a walk around Fort Casey on Whidbey Island, I realized how much I missed just being on a pleasant walk. Not hunting for a composition or chasing the light. Not hiking for hours or days on end to reach some remote location just for the sake of getting an image.

I had left my camera bag in the car as we walked around. And, unintentionally, I noticed how the light was hitting a certain tree. The unique shape certain trees had. The beautiful colors and fresh air of early Fall. Just observing nature and slowly taking in the scene. These things are actually essential to capturing how a place feels in an image, but they are only possible if you slow down and forget about photography for a moment.

We then headed to Fort Ebey nearby, found a nice, high viewpoint overlooking the entire area, and shared a growler of beer from the local brewery as we watched the sunset. No photos. Just enjoying the view.

This is what initially got me into photography, and unfortunately, the harder I work to try to create world class images, the less I get to enjoy the simple act of being in nature. With my standards for what makes a good image being as high as they now are, most locations and conditions just don't offer what I seek. So, if the goal is to create images, I will be disappointed most of the time.

This is why I think it's critical that the primary goal always remains to enjoy being in nature.

I did take one photo that evening — with my cell phone, from where we sat and looked at the sunset. It’s a terrible photo, but it is also a nice memory, and that’s worth more than any award-winning image.