April 12, 2014


What I love about photography is the evolution of an image.  You start out one way thinking this is the best angle, best composition and then your mind begins to see other possibilities.  You delve deeper into the subject and then begin to add the necessary elements to make an even better image than you started with.  I have been guilty sometimes of throwing the kitchen sink into my photos but eventually I spare down the clutter and focus on the true subject I wanted to make.  It is just a matter of seeing deeper into your subject and then exploring the varying light, composition and props that make the image purposeful.

I could have photographed the Calla Lily the usual way by taking an image of the whole flower.  But where is the fun in doing that?  I like to create an image that can lead a viewer to experience maybe a deeper connection to the subject.

Here I am photographing a firm root in the ground but yet we are free and fluid to explore and spread our wings to see our true nature.

April 5, 2014 


Sometimes creating a good photograph is just putting your subject in the right light.  I like to use natural light when ever possible. During the spring and summer months the sun light coming in our west facing bedroom window is a wonderful softbox. We have a white cloth blind that softens the direct sun and illuminates most subjects with this beautiful even and diffused light. Sometimes in order to have alittle more contrast in my photograph I will put a dark reflector opposite the window light to give my subject a more Rembrandt look. When shooting indoors with soft diffused light you might have to use a tripod to steady the camera to get depth of field.

                     

March 30, 2014

Photography is a run and gun exploitation of the now. Shoot without thinking, capture the moment no matter what it is, be first on your block to post and reap the benefits of more followers.  This throw yourself at others and at the world is narcissistic.  We shoot to see if something sticks to the pop culture posting board and then you hope it will go viral and you will make a fortune and life will be good.

Photography should be purposeful, illuminating your subject in a way that expresses in visual content an inner landscape, that gives the viewer an insight into your inner being.  Photography is an expression that adds to the conversation concerning the lives we lead.  It does not degrade life by careless subject matter that exposes the raw sloth of the human condition for more clicks on a media site.  We all know that life is moving fast. To be distracted by these redundant copycat images (that are so profuse now in the market place) it is hard to sift through the clutter to find an original expression, a unique vision of someone's true life.

Not everything can make a good photograph.  The substance of an image is character.  An image gives us a glimpse of what is first unknown, but now revealed.  Someone's inner world brought forth to connect with the viewer on a deeper level.

Real life is growing and maturing and delving deeper into your experiences. Finding some harmony between your inner and outer world. We seem to live in a shallow life of distractions without purpose. Posting the minutia of your daily routines and hoping for approval. Nowadays, if you were to give life a purpose, it is to try and capitalize on your seconds of trite expressions to others. Never seeking a deeper meaning that is waiting to be discovered.  Never wanting to seek a different expression that has substance.  Now the shallow expression is king.

We might think we are expressing an image with substance, but really what is the purpose and the effect of this image being posted on a social media sight?  Is it to express your deep connection to the subject and your wish that others share your underlying feelings? Sometimes, yes.  But more often we are hoping for a few likes or maybe a comment or two that expresses empathy for your photo record.  And if you don't get any responses, are you then sad that your image was discarded and never fully appreciated? Do you feel lonely and sad that no one understands you or likes your life?

Social media is advertising pure and simple. You become shrills for those moments in your life you were never meant to share and you react to the response like ad agents doing the sales history books.  "This worked so let me post more of the same...  And if I get more looks and likes then I can show ads on my site and make pennies on the dollar"...doing the same old tired thing. Your happiness depends on the reaction to your post and not the intent of the post.  Or maybe the reaction to your image post whether good or bad is your intent.  In order feel alive we need a response any response to our existence.  If you post something sad you might get a reaction of empathy.  If you post a happy image you will get a happy response. We think this is a connection but it is just a click on someone elses web site without background information to fully understand the purpose of the image. We connect now on a shallow playing field, where redundant automated responses are welcome to verify our lives as useful and meaningful.

But this doesn't get to who you are and what is your drive and goals in life. We all want to be seen and heard, that is life's necessity.  Without others, we would go mad with the sounds of our own inner mosaic, as Minor White expressed it, "The sound of one hand clapping."

As we lose our status through economic loss, we are tempted through needy desires to be visible to this physical world in some capacity.  Social Media is waiting to accept your information greedily, and exploit your images and words for its own profit.  We give ourselves away and then wonder why we continually feel, in some hidden corner of our brain, that we are being used.

This ordinary life we try and lead now, was a revolution from the abstract concepts of good and bad dictated to us through religion and men of power in the earlier centuries (1600's to the 1800's).
A transition from top down management to the people becoming aware of their purpose and their dignity internally. While braking away from the remote ideals of authority that give us glimpses of a perfection that we can never fully grasp or understand, therefore, we could never really live up to.  We now know that we have a dignity and a responsibility to live a life, and create a better world for all in the here and now.  Through marriage, raising children, morals and ethics we find purpose in our lives and work hard to find our calling.

But now a new master has risen and it is working overtime to exploit the resources and energy of the masses for profit....

Erick Kahler, the philosopher said "This thoroughly collectivized capitalism is not likely to rescue our world from peril of becoming a total collective; it is, on the contrary, training the people for it.  Capitalism has ceased to help us to human ends.  No longer does the adventure of personal success carry a general, pioneer meaning.  It has become a purely singular, private striving for material advantages, money, objects, status and influence.  The degeneration of the American drama is pathetically pictured in Scott Fitzgerald's, Great Gatsby and in Arthur Miller's, Death of a Salesman."

What we see on social media sights is this sanctity of life reduced to images of absurdity, which were never meant to be exposed to the world. When we see them we react to the craziness and laugh at the absurdity of this world.  We disconnect from our own purpose in life and are diverted from our own personal expressions that are waiting to be unearthed. We have been lead astray from the creation of our own life's powerful message.

This flippant disregard for the sanctity of the ordinary life is continually undermined by the overexposure of content that is nonsensical, and as we see more and more of this absurdity in everyday life broadcasted on the web, life itself loses its value.

We seem to love distractions, especially in this hyper economic depression. We are overwhelmed by meaningless tidbits of knowledge that we share almost on remote control as conversations become redundant news clips and our lives get further and further away from us.

Social media discord misinforms us, makes our lives less real, more agitated without taking action to control our own lives. No longer do we hear our voices talking to each other with inflection and feeling.

All this useless counter productive information keeps us insulated from our real world.  We are the new gods witnessing the human misery and madness from above.  Looking down at our hand held device instead of looking at someones face and into their eyes.

March 15, 2014


I recently took photos at a Vietnamese Temple.   The Temple was built in honor of the great Ksitigarbho Bodhisattva for his vows of compassion.  This was a perfect example of getting to a place and being overwhelmed with the subject.  Everywhere there was a bombardment of color, statues and incense burning. There was so much to see and be part of that I had to take a step back and decide how I wanted to approach my subjects. I knew immediately that I couldn't interfere with the people who were coming to worship at the shrines and pray for their loved ones.

First off, my tripod was put back in the car.  Then I put 3 lenses (24mm, 50mm and my 105 macro lens) into a smaller shoulder bag.  This way I was more light footed and could go with the flow as more and more worshippers arrived.

In these situations if you are sensitive to others and respect their space you still can get in close to your intended subjects without imposing a barrier between you and the people coming to show their devotion to the colorful shrines.  However, one time I did get caught up shooting one shrine and didn't hear the quiet voice behind me asking me to move.  I apologized and she smiled and moved toward the shrine to pray.

It is a good idea to look for natural barriers that you can stand by and shoot your subject from. This way you become part of the scene and you don't have to worry about people running into you while you compose and try and make a photo.  Also, because I was hand holding my camera, I set my ISO a little higher and used a shutter speed around 250-320 of a second.  This gave me good depth of field and I still could stop motion if necessary.

When you are shooting in crowds it is a delicate dance to capture the subject you have been hunting and not make your presence an annoyance to the other people who are there to enjoy themselves as much as you want to make pictures.  You must anticipate movement around your intended target and move quickly to get closer and take your photograph and then move away again.  Have your exposure and shutter speed set and the lens that works with your intended vision.  As you move away you can regroup and take another look at your intended subject and then decide if there might be another, better angle to shoot from.  Also, maybe changing the lens this time will work better with your subject and off you go again and again if necessary as you explore your subject, experimenting with composition, lens and perspective.

Over all it was a wonderful experience and next year I hope to get there when the Monks allow visitors into the temple at night.  I have heard it is even more spectacular than the daytime beauty when the colorful lights are on.

March 8, 2014

Erich Kahler wrote in his book, The Tower and the Abyss, of the fragmented knowledge we are gaining and without syntheses of this knowledge we are unable to make a meaningful whole of our purpose in life. He says, "we have lost all control over the state of our learning, all orientation in the vast wilderness of factuality and, since there exists no whole any longer in which to determine anybody's or anythings position and the role in this world, our hugely expanded knowledge ends up in suggesting that, apart from practical purposes, everything is meaningless".

No one studies photography anymore, now they just shoot pictures, millions of pictures, billions of pictures exposed on the worldwide web each week. Ever more burdening our minds with fragments of other peoples lives and useless information.  Some of these images are funny and positive and these milliseconds of info puts us in a good mood in a day of redundant work and dreary silence. But more and more human nature takes over and these images are cruel and embarrassing to the one being photographed.  We laugh openly at the stupidity of others and once again feel good about ourselves that we are superior to those fools.  We are dumbing down our sensibilities to others as we move further and further into a realm of instant reactions to stimulus without concern or thought for the people in the photos.  We are walling off ourselves from others and are treating the outer world as a play thing and for our entertainment to satisfy our need to be and feel better than another.

Photography is the perfect vehicle to identify the fragmentation of our lives.  A photograph captures a moment in time.  Yanks it from the time sequence and fatally creates a separation from the flow of visual continuity.  The picture now is a flat two dimensional surface that is removed from its timeline and now can be viewed as an abstraction from the real world we live in and thus has no purpose but to delight the senses and enslave the viewer for more and more gratification from the ever increasing visuals that are evolving humans into fragmented voracious voyeurs.

We must gain control of this ever widening gap between living a life and viewing a life.  When we create images we must have a deeper purpose and an intent to inform and enlighten each another to our inner universe.  Pictures of happy faces are an abstract concept under the guise of a meaningful purpose.  These are ads for ones life as you wish you could live it.  But if we were to delve deeper into the person in the photo then we would begin to see the complexity of their life and a more meaningful, deeper understanding of that smile.  

March 2, 2014


I was driving along some back streets in Seattle and spotted this guy working on his red mustang.  The sun was rising and I had a choice to make, go to my intended subject I wanted to shoot or stay and make pictures of the mechanic.  I liked the feel of the image and what made up my mind was his orange work clothes.

February 22, 2014


Years ago we traveled along the West Coast of the United States in a motorhome. We did travel east a bit as we planned interesting subjects I wanted to shoot and subjects my photo agencies wanted me to shoot as well.  We would usually stay a minimum of a week in each place, but sometimes depending upon weather and subjects we could stay much longer. As a photographer, this allowed me time to absorb the terrain of the city and countryside and find those unusual subjects that are both personal and fun to photograph.
One of the places we visited was Palm Springs. One day, I was scouting areas east of Palm Springs and ended up on Dillon road. The road started out normal but as you traveled along you would come to these up and down hills along the highway and if you pushed the speed up a bit your stomach would begin to float as if you were rising up on a small plane. You really couldn't go too fast because as you came to the top of one the hills you never knew if a car was down in the dip.  Immediately I knew my daughter, who was around two years old at the time, would love this road.  So I went and got the family and we went on a roller coaster ride in the deserts of Palm Springs.

Another fun spot was the dinosaur park off Interstate 10, northwest of Palm Springs. 

February 16, 2013



Human identity is changing rapidly in this no holds barred social media frenzy of content and more content.  We are losing touch with the sacredness of the ordinary life our ancestors revealed through hard work and human sentiment.  

By being quick to judge, interpret, and take photographs, we are limiting our ability to learn and understand a photographers purpose in creating an internal image and our connection to that purpose.

Expressing emotions is both physical and verbal.  When we see a person crying we react and think, oh, what has happened.  This physical representation is just a moment in time and we assume certain things have happened to this person and that is why the tears.  But what is really going on down underneath this persons physical presence? When that same person begins to laugh, we think those tears were not tears of pain but tears of happiness. We missed a moment before the tear event that would have given us this clue.

In still photography the image is yanked out of its time sequence and we the viewer can become disoriented wondering what the meaning  of the photograph we are looking at is.

We need to relate more personally to the image in order to see the clues the photographer is giving us.  What symbols is the image creator using to connect the photograph with the viewer on a more intimate level.

When you look at an image, do you ever truly see the photographers real motives, his emotions, the why an image was taken in the first place?  With scenic images, we know that the photographer saw a beautiful setting and decided to take a picture of it.  But why did the photographer choose a certain composition over another?  Why did this particular scenic image succeed and that other one fail?

When a photograph grabs us emotionally, we become attached somehow to the image creators impression of a scene.  The image holds our interest and we can sit and contemplate the information given.  But we still don't know all that is going on in that photograph.  We start by exploring the surface meaning of the photograph (color, perspective, composition etc..). This is not a fast paced sprint but a meandering over the two dimensional surface of the image, studying the subject looking for details that at first we were missing.

If the photographer connects with us on a deeper level through his photograph, then we are able to get a better gestalt of the images purpose and find a meaning for ourselves that might not be exactly what the image creator expressed, but allowed us to connect to the image on a deeper, more personal level. 

This inner world under the surface of things is what I believe makes a great photo come alive.  It is hard to dig deeper into a scene pulling out details that represent an inner expression, if it was shot casually.  Casual photographs are okay, they give us a moment in time, a fashion statement easily forgotten.  But what we are looking for, hungry for, is a true depth that creates a conversation between the creator of the image and its viewer ie: can you see me truly, see my image as a reflection of my inner world and perhaps represent a part of you as well.

I think that photographers that wrestle with this inner expression and outer detail are battling the good fight for better images and an evolving in themselves to make better more personal images with a broader appeal.

Composition/Technique alone can not bring life into a subject that has no relationship with the photographer creating the image.  Without a relationship of some kind with the scene you only have a shallow two dimensional record of a reality that is just surface reflections only, without depth and the ability to connect with your viewer.

Technique can only go so far in allowing us to express ourselves photographically.  Composition is important but so are the details that become symbols of our inner fears, doubts, happiness. etc...that the photographer can add to his scene that make or break the image.

February 16, 2014

A few years ago we had a family of moles  digging in our back yard.  Each morning new mounds would rise.  These moles were in worm heaven and were very content crisscrossing my yard with their tunnel waste making traps for unsuspecting worms that fell into the narrow passages.  Just for a humorous image I stuck an American flag at the top of one such mole hill.  I was surrendering my territory to them and giving up the battle.

February 10, 2014


Bill Brandt, photographer, wrote: "Composition is very important, but I believe it is largely a matter of instinct. There are text-book rules on the subject, but they are likely only to result in stereotyped pictures.  They hamper any one's native imagination".

There are no easy formulas that guarantee the creation of good imagery.  Experimentation gives you choices.  Do I like that result or not?  If not, why not?  What draws you to certain subjects and not others?  Am I getting myself in a rut shooting the same subjects over and over again?  All these questions help you determine your creative direction and pushes you to break out of your limited shooting environment.

When you first come upon a subject that hits you with interest, stop, slow down and take in the entire scene.  Don't wander off helter-skelter,  shooting everything just so you might hit on an acceptable image. Take your time, take a deep breath and explore the subject that attracted you.  Go below the surface reality that is present, don't succumb to its calling. Find your inner patience to allow the subject to reveal itself on a deeper level.

Use your intuition as you begin to explore and exhaust those first moments of inner excitement.  Once your mind begins to slow down and is calm, that is the time to really study your subject and begin looking for those angles and perspectives that will lead you to a deeper, more personal exposure rather than those run and gun images that have become standard operating procedure on social media.

When I come upon a subject that interests me, I usually begin with an environmental image first.  This calms my mind and gives me a visual layout of the landscape.  I always feel better once I have begun the exploration process and have taken that first image,  it becomes a "good to go" moment for me.  I then begin to zero in on my true subject as my intuition rises above the outer chatter.  I move closer and closer to the subject I wanted to shoot (both literally and figuratively) and begin to connect with what drew me to this subject in the first place.  I can reverse this as well. I can get closer to the initial perception and then feeling something isn't working, move back and explore the subject from further away.  Maybe the subject needed a bigger environment to contrast with.

Photography gives you a license to experiment and enjoy the full process from initial interest in a subject to your final exposure that captures your inner sight.

January 25, 2014

Fear can motivate or cripple you.  What we fear most of the time is criticism of ourselves. Giving something freely to the external world and then having that something made fun of or destroyed by analysis is detrimental to growth and craftsmanship.  We must, in order to succeed in any field of study we love, look at ourselves and our feelings toward the world.  Through this examination we find out which feelings have been conditioned in us through the years.  Which thoughts and ideas now control us and make us fearful to expand our lives, our horizons and move past what others think we should be and what they think we should do.

Seamus Heaney wrote concerning how he found his poetic voice, "I was in love with words themselves, but had no sense of a poem as a whole structure and no experience of how the successful achievement of a poem could be a stepping-stone in your life."  Heaney goes on to say, "that his first poems were trial pieces, little inept designs in imitation of the masters fluent interlacing patterns, heavy handed clues to the whole craft."

When you first start in photography we learn through experimentation.  We see great photos and we try and imitate them because we want to know how those images were made. Through this process of trial and error we forge past our own stunted growth and other people's preconceptions of our work. We must keep learning and evolving in our chosen field of photography and not allow others to dictate to us how and what we should photograph.

Technique is the math that creates formulas you can trust and explore without feeling desperate.  It gives you confidence that you are in control and not allowing your subject to hide and escape your grasp. 

We learn our craft initially by doing it. We should always be looking for subjects that appeals to some deeper level and brings out an emotional response in us.  We imitate the imagery we see.  If we only see our friends face book snap shots, more likely than not, we will produce subjects in a similar vein and we won't stir the waters, the undercurrents of our inner life that is waiting to be explored.

By shooting as much as possible, you sharpen your photographic eye for those moments that just seem to manifest themselves within seconds before your camera. Your reflexes are tuned in and ready for anything.  Your camera controls are known and your exposure appropriate for the light. This helps you make those quick decisions on timing your exposure to create special imagery. Sports photographers have this deep instinctive ability to be in the right place at the right time along the sidelines.  War photographers have the ability to discover in chaos those moments that surge through the violence that seem to tell the whole story in a single moment. What gives them the edge is doing it. 

Intuition is fined tuned by action.  Getting out there each day and seeing the world with fresh eyes. Creating images with purpose and meaning. 

When we study the history of photography, we find early masters of the craft struggling to find an art form worthy of expression.  Battle lines were drawn between photographers that believed in the pure image without any manipulation whatsoever and the so called artificial images that were created using other techniques that were more appropriate in drawing or painting.  Nowadays, we have a battle between the over saturated image (social media) market place exposing to the world people's mundane outer lives vs the photographers that want to step back from this explosion of imagery and reconnect with the reason they got into photography in the first place; taking meaningful images that can affect the viewer on a deeper level than the evening police blotter.  It seems in today's media frenzy just being seen is the final truth that makes are lives meaningful.

We are missing the mystery of the underlying reality in which our memories and experiences combine to create the ground work for expressing deep feelings through composition, subject, perspective, etc..

December 24, 2013

How do we discover the world outside of ourselves?   How do we make this outer reality known to us and have a reasonable assurance that others share the same outer world we think is there? The environment we are raised in dictates alot of our inner behavior toward this shared reality we inhabit. We are bottle fed patterns of behavior;  a smile is pleasant,  a raised voice scares us and hooks us to a bad feeling,  we learn to hold our parents hand for safety.  We accept this physical world as fact not fiction.  As we gain more knowledge and experience, we begin to shift our perceptions more inward and toward our reactions to things outside of ourselves.

These inner reactions relate to an outside force that is stagnating our creativity.  We begin the long journey of self discovery and how we can imprint on the outside world our perceptions, our feelings and how this can change others behavior toward us,  ultimately how we can connect with others through our own experiences manifested through art..

Through time, we become quick to size up situations and we gain intuition to skip alot of once necessary clues in order to make judgements, which could mean the difference between life and death or just a bruised heart.

In everyday life, this can be a good thing, but I don't think it is necessarily good when you are creating imagery with meaning.  The mechanical aspects of photography are getting easier by the day, but the the intent in your subject selection and your final image is still complicated, frustrating, and necessary.  We must think before we press the shutter.

What drives you to photograph?  If you allow your negative patterns (conditioned responses to outer stimulus) to inhibit your ability to react, if you internalize this negativity, you could look at a scene and think it could be better and then move on. What you have accomplished is to ignore the present subject and miss an opportunity to make something from it.  Obviously, their are times you just don't feel it and have lost interest and are tired of the struggle to create, but other times by pushing yourself just alittle more, trusting your intuition, you can discover a deeper  reaction to your subject that was really there, but remained hidden until you pushed through your own inner barriers.

We have all felt the evil eye of negative comments about us, our appearance, our friends we keep, choices we make. The same is true when you show someone an image you created.  This image says something about you whether you realize it or not.  A negative comment can sting and create future barriers to your creative will.  You must fight through the negative and grow from each personal image you take and begin to understand why you have become attracted to certain subject matter and not others.  By exploring your inner world, you will find that once you overcome your trepidation to exhibit your work you can get to a better place of confidence.  With positive feedback from trusted voices, we grow in our ability to act and not over think each programed feeling toward the outer world. We have all taken a picture of something that we felt was a great subject and had great meaning to us as we viewed it through the view finder.  But, when we see the final image, we look at it again and wonder, "what was I thinking?".  The subject is too vague and too cerebral to have any purpose.  But so what? By making that exposure you felt something. You moved outside your restrictions and were able to find some kind of purpose for taking that image. That is a good thing, a first step toward image knowledge. The next subject will be looked at a little differently with more knowledge and experience.

The first image I remember shooting was a glove laying in the middle of a country road.  The thing that drew me to this subject was its isolation and the feeling of abandonment that was present.  I pulled off to the side of the road and went back to take the image.  When I got close to the glove I noticed that the middle finger on the glove was raised, the glove was telling me to F... off.  I smiled and knew photography was going to fun.

December 24, 2013



I hope everyone has a Great Holiday Season! And a Happy New Year!

December 22, 2013

Love of what you do creates momentum and a willingness to spend more time and effort working harder to be the best in your chosen field.  This motivation to be better at something is your calling in life. This calling challenges you to improve your skills and raise your standards as you mature in your chosen profession.

Photography does this for me.  I just can't help myself,  I must make images.  When I am shooting, I feel complete.  I am in tune with my environment and I am experiencing my subject on a personal level.

There is a freedom, a letting go of your past influences, being present in the now and creating images that can be a real high. Searching for a subject can bring a nervous energy, this increases your heart rate and brings with it an anticipation of something special, as you zero in on your composition.  You begin to lose those petty distractions, those mundane rituals of life that chain us to the details that mean nothing but redundant images of dull commonality.  We see the subject in a true sense when we experience our inner world externalized in front of us.

When you are ready to make your photograph, stop and think whether you have looked at your subject on a deeper level, more conceptually.  This pause can gain you better insight into your subject that could make a big difference in the quality of the final image, rather than just the literal composition you might have started with.  For instance, you might see an image forming that is a metaphor for your feelings. This new composition could connect to a wider audience. Subject is found, ideas are earned and willed into existence and a deeper meaning is gained by your image creation.

I have never taken a perfect image. I always see something in the final image that I could improve upon. This is good, because it makes me focus harder and see deeper into why I chose this composition over another.  Why did I choose this lens under this light?  Why didn't I wait just a few minutes longer as the light got better to show my subject?  All these reflections will prepare me next time to be aware and present to take advantage of my past mistakes and show my new subject in a better composition that will give my intent a more expressive image.

With every image you create, you will get better at spotting important details in the scene that might have been missed before. These opportunities could enhance the final image with a stronger purpose.  Through trial and error you will become a more perceptive photographer, your compositions will show similarities that begin to define you and your unique creative tendencies. 

What is your definition of success in photography?   I suppose success in photography could mean just making a few pennies on your images every month, or it could mean mucho bucks, working with a big production studio, pumping out typical imagery researched as marketable and sellable.  However, success for me is enjoying the moment and being present and focusing on my subject and working for an image I can be proud of even if no one will ever see my photograph. I am happy creating and being passionate about my image creations.

December 7, 2013

From birth we are trained to see the world in certain ways.  This conditioning is called socialization and it makes our lives easier when society is all on the same page.  This usually works well through the first years of schooling and then an individual begins to see different ways to accomplish and solve problems that others have missed or ignored.

Obviously this conditioning applies to photography.  We all know about the Kodak instamatic camera that claimed you could get perfect pics as long as you shot the subject a certain way... their way.  Usually this meant the sun had to be coming from behind you, over your shoulder and the person had to squint into the plastic lens.

Freeman Patterson said that a major barrier to seeing is labeling.  And Monet, the painter said,"That in order to see, we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at".  We infer from the label of a thing its essence and we then think we know this subject perfectly.

In todays fast pace and overwhelming bombardment of information, it is no wonder people have shut down and lost interest in going deeper into their inner sight.  If we were to react to everything we wouldn't be able to do anything.  So we condense our experience into a quick tweet and an ignorance of substance waiting to be discovered.

If we can open up and truly reflect on our conditioning which imposes a narrow band of consciousness in our lives we can begin to open up to our own feeling and ideas we want to express photographically.

It is rare that one finds a true voice, a true calling in the beginning of his/her career. You must work at it constantly and through trial and error, likes and dislikes, you will grow as a person and as a photographer and slowly but surely you will find a unique way to photograph your subjects through  light and composition that begins to feel right, begins to say this is who I am.  And this will lead you to the realization that you are not  going to shoot and shoot frivolous pics that have no depth or meaning beyond your nose.  Why add to the glut of the usual suspects, why not create an image with purpose and bring a new vision that can stand out from the billions of images being taken on a daily basis.

As we learn and mature in our new sight awareness we find ourselves attracted to new subjects. We begin to look for light that creates the impetus for us to the show the subject our way, an expression of self rather that a imitation of others struggles and experiences.  

Your mind having been trained to organize reality a certain way always wants to impose old patterns of seeing on your subject.  This old model is a combination of your conditioning to see imagery a certain way and to look for the casual easy redundant image over the more personal ones. We all have pressures in our lives and we sometimes try and do too much, which leads to shoddy exposures of film.  We feel the pressure to hurry up and move on to the next subject so we can conclude the image taking process and to feel somewhat satisfied that we took some pictures.  We are all guilty of this and there have been times when I have taken images knowing that I didn't put all my energy and inner sight into the exposures.

Preconceiving an image before you even get there limits your ability to find your real subject. You must let yourself open up to the subject once you are there. You absorb the environment you are in, becoming aware of light and its effects on the subject present in front of you and allowing the light and composition to move you in a new direction which connects you with your subject.  Only then do you make an image.  The preconception of your image is not imprinted on you before arriving to your destination but is there once you have explored your subject fully and found the self awareness between what the subject is in your eyes only.   

I am not saying you go to an environment completely blind and ignore the qualities of that place that make it unique and photographable.  I always do my research and have a want list in mind before I get to a destination. But once there I try and open up to the surrounding possibilities and begin to look deeper into my own reactions to the landscape.

As you grow as a photographer, you will gain valuable travel experience and craftsmanship.  You will become more aware of lighting, composition, lenses, and the freedom to bring all that together to make a great image.  You will be open to serendipity and chance encounters, looking for unusual compositions that were brought about by knowledge of camera and your high intuitive nature now resisting the casual approach of past conditioning.