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Our western culture places a premium on achieving ever greater measures of success which, paradoxically, can intimidate us from taking the first, crucial steps towards a goal — fear of failure can often prevent forward progress. 

I came across an interesting interview in the NY TIMES with Jan Filochowski, chief executive of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, one of the world’s top children’s hospitals, where he talks about the importance of constructively dealing with failure, as opposed to trying to avoid it:

Q. We have to make mistakes to become better managers?

A. I’m a huge believer in the 80/20 rule. As long as you get more things right than you get wrong, that’s O.K. And if you wait until you get everything right, you’ll never do anything. You’ll be perfect, but indecisive, and you will fail big-time. That’s one of the things I learned. It’s about achieving not just the O.K. but the good enough. If you focus on the good enough, you get better and better. If you wait to get from the good to the great, I don’t think you’ll ever get to the good.

Many landscape photographers attempt to emulate the results of images already seen, perhaps with slight variations.  We all do this, which is why it's so difficult to bring anything new to the table, especially when visiting an iconic and much photographed area – the Grand Canyon, for example.

If one has the time, however, and is able to get the cliches out of the way, it is possible to transcend the scene that everyone has seen and realize one's own vision.  That's not to say it's easy, since the objective becomes very amorphous: wander around searching for something you don't know you are looking for.

The only upside is that the process then becomes one of discovery — more exciting than documentation:

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!”

                                                                                                                      – Søren Kierkegaard

 

Another excerpt from an interview with photographer Jeff Jacobsen in the April 13 issue of Photo District News (PDN):

You defended beauty in photographs earlier  [in the interview].  Are you suggesting that contemporary photography tends to eschew beauty?

I think often it does.  Sometimes beauty has a negative connotation in the photography world, certainly in the photojournalism world, it often is.  And that complexity of form is given this high degree of value.  And sometimes [complex form] really is magnificent.  But sometimes a very simple form – some Andre Kertesz photographs are so formally beautiful but they're very simple.

When it's really, really working in photography, there is a creative relationship between form and content.

 

Marcelo Gleiser, writing on an NPR blog about laughter and health, observes that:

Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation, develops the argument that humor and creativity have a lot in common: in a good joke, there is a rupture of the logic, a point where the narrative departs from its natural flow and takes a sharp turn to the unexpected. That's when we laugh. You can't control it, it just happens. If you retrace your steps and explain the joke to someone who didn't get it, it isn't funny anymore.

I think that may be the reason many of us find contemporary works of art less than satisfying: we feel intuitively that if the work needs to be explained, the essence is lost — perhaps it was never there to begin with.

I came across the following quote by composer Jean Sibelius from a 1919 interview and thought the sentiment could apply equally well to any non-verbal creative endeavor: dance, painting, photography…etc.:

If I could express the same thing with words as with music, I would, of course, use a verbal expression.  Music is something autonomous and much richer.  Music begins where the possibilities of language end.  That is why I write music.

Many of the images I capture when I venture out I could not have planned. Even when I do have a certain type of image in mind – think dramatic landscape – it's more likely that I'll return with something I had not envisioned.

If I am receptive to the environment I am passing through, I may be lucky enough to "see" a unique pattern or scene that gently impinges on my consciousness until I respond by framing it in the camera's viewfinder.

Out skiing this past season I paused to catch my breath and this delicate spray of branches just off the trail caught my attention, one of an infinite number of equally captivating vignettes….

 

I don't recall where I encountered this pithy observation, but it echoes an earlier post suggesting that less is more:

"definition of a good photograph: one that is like the definition of a good dream in the sense that pieces have been arranged unconsciously and provide enough form and point of reference for the viewer to find meaning, but enough is left undefined to allow for the viewer's own history, ideas and dreams to find a place."

When I am teaching workshops, I emphasize the importance of the frame, and of using the edges and corners that appear in the viewfinder to help compose the final image.

I've been out skiing a few mornings a week and have been alternating between cameras — carrying either my panoramic camera or a standard format digital camera — which present very different viewfinders in which to compose an image.

Going back and forth between the cameras as I've been doing really brings home how much the viewfinder, and the discipline it imposes, affects the images I come back with.

Curiously, I find the exaggerated horizontal view of the panorama format easier to work with.  Rather than finding the more restricted frame a challenge, it actually allows me to distill the scene more easily into what is important.

It's this challenging process of identifying and then isolating a particular portion of the world — distilling the scene's fundamental essence — that is at the heart of creative landscape photography.

When winter snows blanket a landscape they not only hide detail but, conversely, reveal much that is otherwise invisible when snow is not present.

Henry David Thoreau noted this with respect to the comings and goings of the animals in Walden woods, commenting on the network of tracks criss-crossing the landscape around his cabin.

However it's also true of stationary elements that, without the benefit of a snowy backdrop, would go mostly unnoticed.  I've made a number of images of the dried plants and grasses that remain above the snowy landscape.

These austere elements, framed just so, can yield delicate and surprisingly beautiful patterns against that pristine white backdrop.

 

Out of the bosom of the Air,

Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,

Over the woodlands brown and bare,

Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

Silent, and soft, and slow

Descends the snow.

                    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow