QUICK NOTE: I will be joining Nic Stover's Speaker Series on Wednesday, April 3 at 4:00 pm PT to teach a new class on photographing abstract subjects in nature (like those shown in this post). After my presentation, I will be doing a processing demonstration, too. If you cannot attend the live session, Nic will be sending out a full recording to anyone who registers. You can learn more here. I hope to see you there!
Review of February + March
Well, I missed my monthly update for February and lost all momentum with my weekly blog posts. The reasons: ephemeral conditions in Death Valley, finishing the second edition of our significantly expanded and fully revised Beyond the Grand Landscape ebook, getting a nasty cold, and saying yes to social time in the desert whenever an invitation popped up.
If you are new to our blog, you might not know that we have an RV and that RV allows us to sometimes go on longer trips and those longer trips are often to Death Valley National Park. Death Valley is a lovely place to go in the winter for three main reasons: we love the landscape, the weather is mild, and many photographer friends and colleagues pass through the park for workshops or personal photography time. With our Starlink internet service, we are both able to work from the campground.
As I mentioned in my January update, we arrived in Death Valley a few weeks into the month and we planned to stay in the general area through mid-March—a longer trip than usual so we could work on our Death Valley book project. And that plan: it is the topic of this monthly review.
Swaths of color expand across the floor of Death Valley National Park.
(Photographic) Happiness = Reality - Expectations
This happiness “equation” seems to be popping up all over the place and as I listened to yet another podcast where the hosts discussed its utility in designing a happier life, I decided it would be helpful to apply to nature photography for this blog post, as well. These three words, paired as they are in the title above, essentially cover the same topic as many pages of our new Beyond the Grand Landscape ebook. In addition to photographing the landscape, finishing this ebook was one of my main priorities for our time in Death Valley. When revising and expanding the ebook, I wanted to add more about the photographic process, especially in terms of how our mindset can so heavily influence our experiences in the natural world.
As I was writing and revising these sections in the ebook, I was living a different photographic reality. This experience was a helpful test to double-check the usefulness of the advice I am sharing with others. As I discuss in the ebook and many of my classes, I find the experience of being in nature and my photographic results to be best when I go outside with few expectations. Instead, I try to have an open mind and be receptive to serendipitous connections as they occur. Unless I have previously found a composition and am returning with the hope of photographing it under certain conditions, I almost always leave the car with no plan (or nothing more than a basic hiking route in mind, for example).
This Death Valley trip was different because we are slowly working on finishing the photography for a book about the park. Before we left home, I went through my existing Lightroom catalog of Death Valley photos and made a list of the subjects I would like to revisit in hopes of expanding an existing portfolio or trying to create better photos than I had taken in the past. I also studied the park map along with my long-running list of places we want to visit. I collected all of these ideas into a master list of subjects and locations I thought I could reasonably photograph in eight weeks. With the book project looming, I arrived in the park with a mind full of ideas and an actual checklist to guide me.
An abstract rendition of saltmarsh aster, cattails, and a spring-fed pond in Death Valley National Park.
The Checklist = Expectations and Lots of Preconceived Ideas
The previous paragraph represents the “expectations” part of the “happiness = reality - expectations” equation. I know the park well and had a good sense of how much photography I could get done in the time we had, based on prior experience. But what about reality? Ha! Reality…
The first reality check was the ebook project I had lingering and wanted to finish so I could mentally move on. A few weeks into the trip, Ron headed off to Los Angeles for a work obligation and I spent a week in the trailer with a nasty cold. That cold involved coughing and that cough lingered for weeks. It was the type of cough that took physical activity, like the backpacking trips we had in mind, off the table. More reality.
And then the weather… Two types of wind come to Death Valley in the winter. The nice type of wind helps frills of sand gracefully curl off the edges of the sand dunes and tosses just enough dust into the air to add some dreamy atmosphere to the landscape. The other kind of wind is the relentless wind that throws so much dust into the air that the massive mountains in the park can just disappear from view—the kind of wind that makes it hard to stand, impossible to steady a camera, and unhealthy for outside activities. This winter and early spring in Death Valley brought many days of the bad wind.
And it also rained for five days, including a flood that closed the highway through the park, flooded our campsite with mud and debris, and eliminated—just like last year—some of the further afield spots we hoped (planned) to visit. Something I did not expect for 2024: water dripping through the roof of our trailer because the rains were so heavy…in Death Valley. One of the things on my checklist: macro photography of tiny salt formations. With all this rain, all of my normal spots for this type of photography were flooded, with few tiny formations to be found.
Add in some other big logistical complications related to the National Park Service’s decision to suddenly start enforcing the camping limits that have historically been veeeery loose and our trip was very different compared to what I expected/hoped for/planned to do during our time in the park. We didn’t spend a single night in the backcountry during this trip and aside from some hikes to new-to-us canyons, we mostly revisited familiar places. And that macro salt pattern portfolio I had envisioned in my mind: I have one—one—photo from this trip to add to that body of work.
Contrast this experience with our trip to Alaska last autumn. Our plan: pick up our RV rental in Anchorage and drive around a route that our neighbors who previously lived there helped us sketch out. With very little advance research, we would go with the flow and stop when we felt like it. The weather was miserable for almost the entire trip and the photography was challenging but we had a great time. In that case, the reality - expectations equation came out in an entirely different way: We had zero expectations so it would be easy for reality to exceed them, and thus we loved the trip and the experience. That is probably too simplistic of an assessment but had we had a bunch of photo locations and compositions in mind in advance, we would have found nothing but pouring rain and dreary weather hanging over most of those ideas. Without a firm plan or a lot of preconceived ideas, we were more open to being happy with and excited about the things we unexpectedly discovered along the way.
Delicate salt formations float on the surface of the ephemeral Lake Manly in Death Valley National Park.
Only Loose Plans, No Checklists
When we left Death Valley to head for home, a sense of failure lingered for me (not disappointment, but failure), mostly because that very unfinished checklist was on my mind. Because this list existed in the first place and then I added expectations around it, I was having a hard time accurately assessing the actual experience of the trip.
The actual experience looked like this: I saw Death Valley filled with a cloud inversion from Dante’s View! All that rain brought a lot of flowers and interesting plants (not the type of SUPERBLOOM that is good for Instagram selfies but a pretty bloom that has been amazing for desert lovers). In March, before the weather started getting warmer, some normally brown hillsides in the southern part of the park were covered with so many rock daisy plants that they looked green from a distance. The rain also created lovely ripples, mud, and other abstract patterns across the park. And all that damn wind… On a few days, the dust over the sand dunes was so thick that it looked like rolling fog. And the ephemeral Lake Manly! I’ll have more—photographically—to say about Lake Manly later but can say here that a massive lake in the middle of Death Valley was incredible.
Despite being sick and having the ebook project lingering over me, I can easily say it was a very good trip in terms of photography and connecting with our friends and colleagues. The expectations and my checklist still cloud that assessment because I made almost no progress on the ideas I had in mind when I arrived, even though the actual photos and experiences are likely as good or better than what the checklist would have produced.
The point: A (very) loose framework is fine but having too much of a plan makes it harder to end up with happiness when calculating the reality - expectations equation for any given experience, especially when the unpredictability of nature is involved. I personally tested the advice I was putting into my ebook in real time and it stands up to the scrutiny of direct experience, I think. An essential part of developing as a photographer is getting to the point where you feel confident enough in your skills and creative abilities to know that you will be able to create photos that meet your goals on a pretty regular basis—not always but most of the time.
This is another aspect of why I so rarely follow a firm plan. I trust that I can show up to a place, create photos that mean something to me, and convey my connections with the landscape through those photos. In the case of this Death Valley trip, I wish I had just stuck with the practice of knowing that things would mostly work if I just simply flowed with the landscape and the conditions. For the future: only loose plans and no checklists.
I know that some people feel like they need a plan when traveling for photography, so this is, of course, not advice that will work for everyone. If this is the case for you, I encourage you to try de-coupling the need to plan with expectations for photography as much as possible. I also encourage you to try trusting yourself more, as you might find that with more flexibility and openness to serendipity, your photography and experiences will significantly improve.
Layers of sedimentary rock crumble into a pile of shards in Death Valley National Park.
THIS MONTH’S RECOMMENDATIONS
Article 📖 The World’s Second Most Endangered Pupfish is in Trouble: This article from Sierra Magazine is a good overview of a few issues facing the pupfish at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, which is on the eastern edge of Death Valley National Park.
Art Exhibit 🎨 James Prosek and the Texas Prairie: Some of Eliot Porter’s archives are held by the Amon Carter Museum. While reading some of Porter paper’s on the museum’s website, I came across this artist and his exhibit on the Texas prairie. I just love the botanical drawings that are included in the collection.
Speaking of Eliot Porter 📷 Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes book is available as a free download through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you enjoy photographing small scenes, you might find it interesting to view this book to learn more about the roots of the “intimate landscape” genre.
Reflecting on February 📓 I very much enjoyed this new ebook featuring black and white photography from James Rodewald. In the ebook, James shares photos from three “Creative Februaries” of daily photography with his iPhone. (The photos in the ebook look just like any other photos from his portfolios in terms of quality—both technical and creative.)
Nature Visions Magazine 📗 This is the quarterly magazine published by the Nature Photographers Network. I am working my way through the fourth edition and am really enjoying the articles. If you enjoy reading about photography, I highly recommend this subscription.
More Photo-Related Recommendations 📸 Subscribe to our newsletter! I share a list just like this but entirely focused on nature photography in each issue of our newsletter.