Snowmass Mountain and Capitol Peak from Buckskin Pass, Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, Colorado
Introduction
I think of landscape photography as the pursuit of visual “peak experiences.” I’m borrowing a term here from humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who studied human potential—the heights to which humans can aspire, not the depths to which they can sink. According to Maslow, peak experiences can give “a sense of the sacred, glimpsed in and through the particular instance of the momentary, the secular, the worldly.” Whoa! That sounds awfully pretentious. But when I think back on the most beautiful scenes I’ve ever witnessed, I understand what Maslow was talking about. Visual peak experiences are moments of extraordinary natural beauty, often ephemeral, that I seek to capture in such a way that a viewer of the photograph can share my sense of wonder and joy. Granted, my photographs rarely, if ever, achieve such lofty heights. Perhaps they never truly will. But for me it is the pursuit of visual peak experiences, and the arduous, ecstatic struggle to capture them on my camera’s sensor, that makes landscape photography endlessly fascinating.
For me, these marvelous moments occur most often in wild places, particularly in the mountains. Even after 45 years, I still remember a peak experience that occurred during a camping trip with my parents in the desert mountains of southern California. I was 12 then, yearning for independence and hungry for child-size adventure. Alone, I walked away from our campsite to a saddle in a ridge overlooking a vast desert valley and the mountain ranges beyond. It was a journey that an adult would have measured in mundane yards and minutes; I measured it in emotional light-years. For a timeless interlude I meditated on the ridge, soaking in the silence and the unfathomable sweep of land. I remember feeling utterly isolated in a desolate world, and yet I recall no desire to flee back down the path to camp. Something about the sheer unrepentant emptiness of the land compelled my awestruck attention and has demanded my return to the mountains again and again.
Candlestick Tower and Soda Springs Basin from Murphy Hogback at sunset, Island in the Sky district, Canyonlands National Park, Utah
F. W. Bourdillon, a British mountaineer who tried to climb Everest nearly a century ago, captured my feelings when he explained the secret motivation of mountain lovers as “a feeling so deep and so pure and so personal as to be almost sacred—too intimate for ordinary mention.” Mountains, he went on to say, “... move us in some way which nothing else does ... and we feel that a world that can give such rapture must be a good world, a life capable of such feeling must be worth the living.”
In my early teen years I hiked the valleys and scrambled up the easy peaks in California’s Sierra Nevada. Then, at 15, I took up technical rock climbing. When I moved to Boulder, Colorado, to go to college in 1975, I added ice climbing to my quiver of mountain skills and began tackling difficult routes on peaks from Alaska to Argentina. In my mid-30s, after 20 years of intense mountaineering, my interest in climbing high peaks began to wane, while my interest in photographing them blossomed. Landscape photography, I found, could be just as much of an adventure as mountaineering. True, the challenges were different, but the pulse-pounding excitement and the need to perform gracefully under pressure were still there. At one time I had struggled out of bed at 1 a.m. to climb a long, demanding route on a high peak before the afternoon thunderstorms struck; now I rose at the same ungodly hour to race the rising sun to a photogenic vantage point.
I quickly learned one of the fundamental paradoxes of landscape photography: the potential reward is always greatest when the odds against you are the longest. The most spectacular light often occurs when the rising or setting sun finds a tiny gap between dense clouds and the horizon. When that happens, you may have only seconds to compose the shot and capture the image. In many cases, such an opportunity will not occur again for weeks, or even months. One vicious hailstorm can flatten all the wildflowers in an entire valley. Miss a shot of fall foliage, and you may have to wait an entire year for another chance. The fall color display is always transitory; the leaves reach their peak of color just as the stems become so brittle that the slightest breeze sends them spinning to the ground. The most magical winter wonderland can endure to enchant photographers only briefly; all too soon, the sun and wind will erase all traces of the snow from the trees, and the world will become ordinary once more.
When I first became a full-time landscape photographer in 1993, the only way to share these marvelous moments was to capture them on film. In the film era, people assumed that an image was a representation of the real world unless proven otherwise. Today, in the digital era, peoples’ perception of photographs has changed: many people assume a digital image has been modified unless proven otherwise. Given my reverence and respect for wild land, it probably goes without saying that I believe authenticity matters in landscape photography. For example, I had just one opportunity to photograph Comet Hale-Bopp, the brightest comet of the 20th century, setting over the Saber in Rocky Mountain National Park. I could have photographed the Saber on any moonlit night, then added Comet Hale-Bopp with a little digital magic in Photoshop, but what would have been the point? Even Hollywood knows that the truth has power, so it claims, whenever possible, that its latest movie is based on a true story. And while I could easily have fooled nearly all my viewers with a fake comet setting over the Saber, I would have been selling a lie.
Longs Peak and Chasm Lake at sunrise, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
Uncompahgre Peak and the valley of the East Fork of the Cimarron River from Mt. Jackson, Uncompahgre Wilderness, Colorado
Some people argue that images can never truly capture the real world, so any claim to authenticity is absurd. I readily acknowledge that there are significant differences between viewing the real world and viewing a photograph of it. Indeed, those differences are a major part of what this book is about. However, I believe it’s possible to draw a line between an image that reflects reality in some fundamental way and one that doesn’t. I want to be able to tell someone viewing my work, “What you see in my prints is what I saw through the lens.” I want the viewers of my work to exclaim, “Wow! What a magnificent world we live in!” not to think, “Wow, that guy really knows Photoshop.”
From Peak Experience to Well-Crafted Image
To be a good landscape photographer, you need the heart of a hopeless romantic. But you also need the brain of a scientist and engineer. Creating an evocative landscape photograph requires both an emotional connection to the scene and an understanding of the science and craft of creating compelling images. My approach to learning landscape photography can be summed up in 10 words: master the science and craft, and the art will follow.
Understanding key scientific concepts from fields as diverse as geography, optics, vision, and psychology can help landscape photographers create captivating images. Mastering the science of landscape photography includes knowledge of atmospheric optics, the science of how sunlight interacts with our atmosphere. Atmospheric optics explains why the sky is often blue, sunsets are sometimes red, and why tall mountains rising abruptly above the plains can receive beautiful light. The ability to predict the appearance of spectacular light helps photographers be in the right place at the right time. Understanding the science of light also permits the knowledgeable photographer to predict where rainbows will appear and why polarizers sometimes enhance reflections and sometimes remove them.
The science also includes an understanding of how the complexities of human vision affect the way we see the world and the way we view art. For example, the brightest highlight in which our eyes can see detail is about 10,000 times brighter than the darkest shadow in which we can see detail. A photographic print can exhibit a range of light intensities of about 50 to 1, as opposed to the 10,000 to 1 we can see with our eyes. One of the fundamental problems for a landscape photographer is finding the best way to compress the very broad range of tones we see in the real world into the much narrower range of tones we can reproduce in a print. This book tackles this problem from many angles, starting with calculating exposure in the field and concluding with a variety of techniques in the digital darkroom. These techniques include the “Rembrandt Solution,” a technique pioneered by the 17th-century master painter that is still relevant in the digital age. Used properly, the Rembrandt Solution can create the illusion of greater dynamic range in a print than what actually exists.
For a landscape photographer, the meaning of craft goes well beyond an understanding of photographic basics like aperture and shutter speed, focus point, and depth of field (the zone of sharpness from near to far). It includes the ability to locate promising subjects using topographic maps and computerized mapping tools. These computer programs help photographers visualize how light will play across the landscape and enable them to answer questions such as, “What is the best day in 2016 to photograph the full moon rising through Utah’s world-famous Delicate Arch at sunset?”
260-degree panorama at sunrise in January from the summit of 14,265-foot Quandary Peak, Tenmile Range, near Breckenridge, Colorado. The band of blue sky between the horizon and the band of pink sky is the twilight wedge.
Making images that capture your visual peak experiences and evoke emotion when you view them later is a satisfying achievement. To be truly successful as an artist, however, your images must speak to a wider audience. An understanding of the psychology of how we view art can strengthen your work. I’ll discuss the distinction between images that are merely different and those that are genuinely creative. I’ll also describe the critical importance of relevance, as demonstrated by research conducted with my images by advertising researcher Bruce Hall. As Robert Solso, author of Cognition and The Visual Arts put it, “An artist does not create art any more than a physicist creates physics.” What he meant is that physicists don’t invent the laws of physics; they try to uncover the laws that describe the seemingly chaotic phenomena they observe. Similarly, successful images aren’t generated randomly; they must fit like a key in the lock on the viewer’s emotions—triggering memories, evoking anticipation, and helping viewers imagine the feelings they would have experienced if they had been standing next to the photographer when the image was captured.
The full moon rising through Delicate Arch just before sunset, Arches National Park, Utah
Before you can set out on your own personal vision quest, you need a working knowledge of your camera gear. In this book, I’ll assume you’re already familiar with the basic operation of your camera, such as how to set the aperture and shutter speed to get what your in-camera meter considers to be the right exposure. You should be familiar with the various exposure modes your camera probably offers, such as program, aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual. You should know how to use exposure compensation to vary the exposure the sensor receives, and you should have a working knowledge of your camera’s metering modes, which in modern cameras usually include center-weighted and multi-segment (called evaluative, matrix, or multi-pattern, depending on the manufacturer). Mid-level and better cameras often include spot metering as an additional metering mode; I’ll discuss spot metering in detail in later chapters. I’ll assume you know how to download images from your memory card and make basic adjustments to color and density with image-editing programs. A thorough reading of your instruction manual, plus a quick jaunt through a good basic volume on photography, should give you all the background you need to successfully use the information in this book.
I firmly believe that you do not need to be born an artist to create great photographs. In my view, landscape photography is largely a craft that can be mastered with practice. Noted black-and-white photographer John Sexton once said, “The only difference between me and my students is that I have made more mistakes than they have.” There’s a lot of truth in that statement. I shoot most of my images deep in the wilderness, but the lessons I’ve learned, and teach in this book, are equally applicable whether you’re shooting sunset from the balcony of your home or shooting sunrise from the summit of a 14,000-foot peak. I hope that mastering the content of this book will give you the skills and knowledge you need to distill your own peak experiences into powerful images of the natural world.
Sunrise light on the upper tier of Columbine Falls, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado