The Photograph I Didn't Take…

This past July, I took a landscape photography workshop with Steven & Kristen from Expressions Gallery in Chatham. I’ve been photographing people for more than a decade, but standing on Nauset Beach with a tripod and the ocean in front of me felt surprisingly new….There were filters and exposures and tiny technical decisions that I don’t normally have to consciously think about anymore. When I’m photographing people, so much of that has become instinctive. I know my camera. I know my light. I know what I’m looking for.

So when we went back to the Cape over Labor Day weekend, I packed everything.

Camera. Tripod. Lenses. Filters.

I had visualized me going back to Nauset and making something beautiful on my own….Except this time there wasn’t other incredible photographers standing beside me to help me as the light quickly changed…. It was just me, Justin and the kids on a family weekend at the Cape.

We were already running late. I couldn’t get the tripod legs open. I had the wrong lens on. I forgot to put the filter over my lens. The kids were running around doing their thing while I was trying to get everything set up before the light disappeared.

And while I was looking down at my camera trying to figure out what I needed to change, this was happening.

sunset shoot at Nauset Beach, Cape Cod, MA

Justin took this picture with his iphone… Look at that sky!!!!!

I was standing right there, with all of my camera equipment, watching one of the most beautiful sunsets of the summer unfold, and I didn’t make a single photograph I wanted to keep.

At first, I was so annoyed with myself. But once I got past that, I realized something. Landscape photography isn’t simply pointing the same camera at something else. I’m now studying a different photographic discipline.

After years of photographing people, so much of what I do has become muscle memory. I understand light. I understand composition. I know when something feels right before I can necessarily explain why. None of that disappears when I turn my camera toward the ocean.

But the technical language changes. The equipment changes. The way I approach exposure changes. The filters, the lenses, the preparation, even the pace of making the photograph are different. And there’s something strangely exciting about discovering how much more there is to learn inside a medium I’ve already spent years practicing.

That night reminded me that seeing the photograph and knowing exactly how to execute it are two different things. I could see what I wanted to make. I just wasn’t technically prepared to make it before the light disappeared. That’s frustrating….But it’s also the work.

The photographs that eventually become finished pieces don’t come from simply showing up somewhere beautiful with a camera. They come from learning how to translate what I see into a photograph & an emotion all at once.

mother & daughter nauset beach, cape cod, ma

And somewhere in the middle of all of this was Elle.

The other kids were perfectly happy playing on the beach, but Elle wanted to know everything I was doing. What I was looking at. What I was changing. Why I was doing it. She stood beside me watching the camera, then the ocean, then the camera again. Which I loved, because Elle is an artist too. She is always drawing something, making something, noticing something. And the funny thing was that I was trying to explain something to her while I was still figuring parts of it out myself.

Looking at these photographs afterward, I realized how much I love that she gets to see this part. Not just the finished photograph hanging on a wall.

The looking.

The experimenting.

The technical problem solving.

The returning to the same place because you know there’s something there you haven’t quite captured yet.

I think there’s something important in that.You can spend years becoming good at what you do and still remain curious about how much further you can take it. I’ve practiced photography for more than a decade, and I’m fascinated that the medium can still ask me to stretch.

Maybe that’s part of having a creative practice in the first place. You never really arrive at the point where there’s nothing left to discover.

So no, I didn’t get the photograph that night…. But next time I’ll know my setup before I get to the beach. I’ll know which lens I want. I’ll have the filter on. I’ll get there earlier. Eventually, those things will become instinctive too. And I’ll spend less time looking down at my camera and more time doing the thing that brought me there in the first place.

Looking.