...the ultimate gift of photography...

“I publish more articles in a year than most people publish in a lifetime!”  These were the words of my Paleontology professor.  Soon after, he disappeared for a while, and class was taught by one of the TA’s.  Not what I had paid for, but I would get the credits nonetheless.  Besides, it was actually a nice change of pace.  When our prof returned he told us that he had had a nervous breakdown.  I flashed back to geology field camp, when at each break he would take a wet-wipe bath before sitting down to one of his many nalgenes filled with instant coffee.  What a wreck!  He would stutter and stumble, and his heart fluttered like a hummingbird’s from dawn til dusk.  He was validated however, because he was published.

Fast forward to last autumn.  At the studio, bottle of vino, day is winding down.  The last student there is fretting over a way to sell some of his pictures.  He wants to make a little money, to buy more gear, to make more pictures to sell, to buy more gear.  “Understandable” I say, “But you’ve come a long way already.  Are you willing to put in the time and dollars to get your images out there?  Is that what you really want?”  The great power of photography is so much more than that.  Photography enriches our life.  It can change lives, alter opinions, make us cry or smile or laugh.

“Try this on for size,” I said.  “You’ve got a job that pays good money.  You’ve got a great house and live in a great place here at Mt. Rainier.  You’ve got benefits.  By all measures you are doing quite well.  Your previous success is what brought you to this stage in your photographic journey.”  “Imagine that you forget about selling a picture, and put that energy into only making pictures.  When the pictures are made, you give them away.  You focus on this mountain, and learn it like a lover, paying attention to it’s every mood, good and bad weather, season to season.  Your pictures become the only evidence of a heartfelt relationship that will form with the mountain.  You keep giving and giving and then in 20 years ask yourself this question.  “Did this enrich my life?  Did it enrich the lives of others?”  I’ll bet you my studio and all the equipment in it that it will have.

Looking for outside validation of your inner journey has no end.  You can “publish more pictures in a year than most people publish in a lifetime,” and in order to find worth the next year you’ll need to do it all over again and again.  As cliche as it sounds, it’s the journey that makes it worth while.  And by making and sharing, however it may be, you will enrich your life and the lives of all those around you.  That to me is the ultimate end result, and the ultimate gift of photography.