MAKE AN EFFORT!
IT’S MINUS FIVE OUTSIDE, it’s pitch black and your alarm has just gone off. Every fibre of your body wants to stay snuggled up in your warm bed… but the potential of a stunning sunrise awaits. You struggle to get dressed, struggle to get your gear to the car and struggle with scraping the frost off the windscreen. You drive in grumpy silence to the location – questioning your sanity and the curse of landscape photography – and are amazed that it’s even colder when you get to your location. There’s a potentially ankle-braking scramble to the location where the camera is set up with much cursing and grumbling. Then you wait… in the cold… in the dark… all alone, dreaming of coffee and maybe even bacon and eggs. Grrr! (Oh, and brrr!) And you wait. A calm descends. The horizon starts to brighten. Birds begin to sing. That funny little wind that always seems to just precede the dawn blows gentle across your face. The blackness starts to ebb away. Trees and rocks reveal themselves. The dark blue band on the horizon turns to a paler blue. Then to purple. Then red and then orange. The clouds follow the sequence, gradually picking up more colour. The scene is transformed. Then it happens… shafts of bright light shoot out to kiss the lowest clouds and moments later a shimmering crescent appears on the horizon and quickly – always surprisingly so – forms into a brilliant disc. Everything is immediately bathed in warm, enveloping light… and the landscape comes alive. You’re torn between drinking it all in and tucking up behind the viewfinder to do what you came for… and keeping up technically with the rapidly changing light levels.
Sunrise. Is there a more exhilarating time for photography? I don’t think so. The start of a new day is symbolically exciting by itself, but the roughly 30-minute periods either side of sunrise present so much variety and so much potential for stunning images. The air is clear. It’s quiet, apart from nature waking up. There’s unlikely to be anybody else around (well, in most cases). And you’re going to feel immensely satisfied – not to mention virtuous – when you get those images onto the computer and view them for the first time. And, let me say, there is no greater satisfaction if you’ve made the effort – and been duly rewarded – when fellow photographers have chosen to stay in bed, dismissing any potential for great photography after a cursory glance out of the window. It’s a sweet, sweet feeling to flick the first image onto the screen in all its orangey-reddy-sunrisey glory and say “Told yers it’d be good!” That coffee has never tasted better… nor, for that matter, the bacon and eggs.
Effort in photography is not always rewarded… but the risk of missing an opportunity is always greater. It’s always worth making the effort. Walking a bit further. Staying a bit longer. Braving the weather. Being patient. Going back for another look, because you just know there’s something there. Waiting for the light. Forever waiting for the light. But this is what photography is all about. Photos graphos – drawing with light.
It’s also about using the camera as your primary creative tool. Using all its technical capabilities firstly to deal with whatever conditions are encountered and secondly to achieve your creative visions… your artistic response to your subject. The camera (and, of course, I include the lens here) is a unique instrument; understanding what it can achieve both technically and creatively is a unique skill. It’s what makes photography – real photography – so special. And the key ingredient is effort – not just being there physically (so you actually have something to photograph), but exploring everything the camera has to offer in the pursuit of the images you want to create. Yes, today’s automatic control systems are truly sophisticated, but they can’t think for you and they don’t know what you’ve got in mind… which is exactly why there are manual overrides. Good camera work requires effort too, but it’s equally rewarding when you get it right.
On location. In camera. It’s the real thing.