Just go and see what happens.

I have probably talked about this before on Picture of the Week, perhaps a few times, but it’s a message that I need to be reminded of from time to time.  My good friend Steve and I were discussing this a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve thought about it a lot since then.  When we first start out in photography – perhaps any new pursuit – everything is new, and there’s no picture not worth taking.  For landscape photography, that translates to getting up and going out, no matter the forecast or time of year.  You go just because you enjoy going.  As you progress with photography, however, you begin to recognize conditions that make for good photos, and so you start to become more selective.  Particularly as the weather apps have gotten better and better, I, at least, have found myself skipping mornings when the conditions don’t look great because that translates to a high probability of no good pictures resulting from the outing.

Now, part of that is just progressing as a photographer.  You know what works and what doesn’t.  From my own personal experience though, it also kills – at least some of – the wonder of the outing.  It’s one thing if all the apps show there is supposed to be a great sunrise and then it doesn’t pan out, that certainly happens.  But it’s another thing if you just skip the outing altogether because the apps said the conditions don’t look favorable, or even worse (in my opinion), not as favorable as they could look.  Wayne Gretzky is famously quoted as saying, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”, and I think that really applies to photography.  It’s obvious, but if you’re not there, you won’t get anything.

Another angle here is that as you progress in photography, you can often find shots even when conditions aren’t great – or are downright bad.  As my friend Bill Lea reminds me often, let the light dictate what you shoot, rather than going out with an agenda.  As I said at the beginning – just go out and see what happens.

All this certainly applies to this week’s Picture of the Week.  The forecast was terrible, and I knew that going into it.  I almost let myself be lazy because of it, but instead I got up to go see what I could find, and honestly, I had a blast doing it.  I don’t have a lot of shots like this, because I rarely go looking for these conditions.  The blue morning was SUPER moody though, particularly as the rain was moving in to the right of the scene.  Despite being quite warm out, the scene feels very cold, rather than being warm and inviting like so many of my other pictures, and I love that!

More next week!

–Dan Thompson