We Were Wanderers - North Cascades
Added 2018-12-26 04:36:12 +0000 UTC
I've started traveling more often with a single image in mind. Spending months on the road with Nicole and improvising when we arrived on location for years was incredible, but when I started teaching in Iceland and on the Olympic Peninsula I was given an unexpected gift: the challenge of answering questions on why.
"Why do I like this spot? Why do I like this light? What am I looking for? How do I direct a pose? What if you tried this? Why am I taking these photos?" And with all of those questions I started to understand my own work better.
Teaching has given me clarity to see a location and envision a photo in a way that I didn't really have before. Where sometimes I would feel stress on arrival now I can take a breath, answer the same questions as I ask myself, and get my photo out of the way.
Then I experiment, sometimes its just trying a couple other angles before Nicole is too cold to continue, sometimes its grabbing some food and coming back later to try something completely different (we did this in Joshua Tree images I will be sharing soon).
The snow caves of North Cascades are one of the most dangerous places we have been to create. There are only a few weeks of the year that its even a little bit safe to be in this part of the mountains, and in order to create this image as safely as possible I put myself in the most danger by entering the cave, while Nicole stood just a few feet from the entrance. Ice caves are always insanely risky to enter. Just a month later this entire cave was nearly non-existent collapsed by melting and avalanches.
I hope you all are having a safe and warm holiday.
