Road Trip: Confessions of a Bad Landscape Photographer

At some point, as an artist, how you see the world meets how you choose to show that vision to others and you come to the realization, “this is what I do”. It’s not that you will never stretch yourself beyond that, but you find a style and a way of working. I am a photographer of the antics of musicians, of the new and exotic. I am a street photographer and a photographer of people. Lately, I have turned to abstract images that reflect a sense of being which can’t be tied to a single dimension of emotion or tidy words. My nature is two inches away as I hunch over my camera to photograph an insect wing. Although my interests are expansive, this is mostly where I dance as an artist. And a while back, I came to the realization…

I am not a landscape photographer.

That is, and continues to be, a hard blow. I have a big enough ego to want to believe I can make totally fantastic images no matter what I aim my camera at. And ego doesn’t make it so. But more than that, I love the natural world. I am continually wowed, amazed, and gobsmacked by how infinitely beautiful and mind blowing the earth can be; how lucky I have been to move through forest and desert and beach and starry sky. I want to be able to show that to others. Unfortunately, like getting all shy and tongue-tied around the guy you like, in that world, I usually find myself unable to capture the image I want in any meaningful sense. Instead of my camera being a natural extension of myself, it is a balky, defective machine that refuses to do what I ask of it.

Part of the problem is the knowledge that there simply is no camera or camera trick that will capture what it is to stand in the middle of an aspen forest and listen to the sound the trees make; to translate the wind at sunrise in the middle of the desert or to capture a somersault in surf, the perfect quiet of snowfall, of the flutter of the thunderstorm in your gut. For me, that technology simply doesn’t exist, not with video, not with lytro, not with all the megapixels in the world.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t press the shutter anyway.

Early this month, I took a road trip through a part of the country that I’ve wanted to revisit for a long time, driving through Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado. Here is my own imperfect collection of images taken on the journey.