10/08/2024
Half Dome
Yosemite National Park
If you get up at 5:30am every morning and hit the trails before sunrise then you get images like this one. "Waiting for the moment" is old school driven by the technology of 8x10 view cameras and glass negatives. Today with the advent of digital imaging technologies I am able to aggressively seek out and capture moments which to be truly successful demands that one actually strives to live in the moment one is hoping to capture. I see folks all the time having set up their camera in the "perfect" spot waiting all morning taking various shots as they wait-same photo, different time. My approach is to choose several ideal locations in the same area then just make the rounds snapping pictures as the scene develops. Static positions yield the same composition at different times while my tactic yields a number of different shots at different times. If you want to become good at photography then you need to take a lot of pictures, you need to experiment, you need to try new techniques. In the pursuit of photographic excellence, we need to stand on the shoulders of pioneers like Ansel Adams, adapt with developing technologies and raise the bar as far as possible as we hunt for the "perfect" image.
