...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.

Creativity and Adventure

How often do we put Creativity and Adventure in the same sentence?  Not often, but for me they are one in the same.  Surviving adventures requires imagining creative solutions on the fly.  Producing great images while dealing with variable lighting and subjects, weather and creative obstacles requires the ability to imagine creative solutions on the fly.  As a photographer the tools are technical.  Mechanical and electrical devices, and the physics of light.  Dealing with dynamic snow, ice and weather the tools are also technical.  Mechanical ascenders, electrical GPS and the laws of gravity and atmosphere.  In the end both require the creativity to bring it all together and proceed to the end.

FEAR, often enters into both endeavors.  Obviously one of the above scenarios is a little more deadly than the other, but in both, fear can stop you from achieving your goal.  On a mountain fear is your friend.  It is the part of you that realizes the objective hazards that always linger, and doesn’t foolishly deny their existence.  This enables you to deal with hazards prudently and carry on as safely as possible.  Amazingly for some these types of fears are easier to deal with than the deep dark inner fears that limit our creativity.  Fears that many of us don’t even know we have, much less understand.  The walls that we build to protect ourselves from our fears can be just as treacherous to your life as a weak snow bridge over a giant crevasse.  For is leaving in fear living at all?
When time weakens the grips of fear, what is left behind?  Your truth, the truth.

As my endeavors begin to come to fruition truth is the only constant.  Strangely, my experiences, be they on a mountain, behind a camera, renovating a historic property, or trying to be a good husband and father, all hold the same lesson for my life.  It is the realization of this unifying truth that makes my evolution as an adventurer and creator possible.

Adam