In this episode, I’ll chat about how important it is to go back to revisit resources you thought you had already learned. Photography, like any craft, is a game of both constant change, but also reflection of where we came from. By revisiting old things, we see them with the light of knowledge that we gained since the first time.
New this week: I finally recorded video and you can view the “enhanced podcast” on YouTube here. https://youtu.be/Kdiv1XP2KPo
Though, this particular episode isn’t super filled with extras.
Transcript
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to another episode of The Tie Dyed Wanderer In Focus.
It is my weekly photography-related podcast.
Although, yeah, I kind of skipped a couple weeks.
You know, the goal was around Thanksgiving.
I decided I was gonna take that week off.
And then I just got busy, and that’s what happens when you have ADHD, is you kind of then stop doing things if you’re not in a consistent rhythm.
So I’m still not quite in the habit of doing this on a regular basis yet.
But the good news is this episode is actually gonna be a really, to me, a really special episode.
So, you know, a couple of the themes.
Well, first, let’s get a couple of things out of the way.
Working on redesigning my website, to really kind of try and bring my Tie Dyed Wanderer personality, which is my adventure, my storm chasing, and all that, together with where I’m trying to go from a professional standpoint, which is more the commercial editorial side.
I really think there is a way for me to combine those two.
And that’s what I’m working on right now.
I forgot to mute things.
Oops, let’s do that right now.
Sorry about that.
So, working on that project right now, the number two really big, huge news is I wrote a book.
It’s a really short book.
It’s a photobook, of course.
One of the places that’s been really special to me since I first visited it in 2021 is Badlands National Park.
Something really resonates with me there, and I decided, hey, I’ve got enough images now that can kind of tell stories.
I’m going to put some of those stories, albeit very short, into a very short book.
It’s less than 30 pages.
The feedback I’ve gotten from the few people I’ve sent out to kind of review it for me has been very positive.
It is available on iTunes Bookstore or Apple Books, however you want to say it now.
They like to change their names, so I don’t know.
And it’s also available on Amazon for the Kindle.
Currently only available in ebook format, which is fine at the moment.
I’m looking for ways to get it published on very small, on-demand runs for actual physical copy of the book, but that’s going to be a little ways down the road.
I have to change the layout and do a few things for it first before we get to that point.
So if you’re interested, it’s $4.
It’s less than a cup of coffee at most places.
Definitely less than a latte at pretty much any place.
And if you enjoy photography, the name of the book is Textures of the Badlands, a black and white photographic journey through the Badlands National Park.
And that’s exactly what it is.
All the images are black and white images, which tend to work really well for that particular part, park.
Man, I cannot talk worth a darn today.
That’s what happens when you don’t do podcasts for a little while, when you’re supposed to be doing them weekly.
Anyways, so I look forward to it.
Hopefully, you decide to go out and purchase the book.
It would really help me going forward to be able to continue doing adventures and continue making really cool photography of some of these beautiful places that are out there.
But I am also hopefully, not hopefully, I’m going to start posting more regularly on my blog to get some more information out there for you that way.
And of course, this podcast, you can find on iTunes, you can find it on Amazon, you can find it on Spotify, or you can just go to tiedyedwanderer.com or shawnrunbladephoto.com and click on the podcast link over in the corner.
And of course, there’s links to go everywhere there.
That’s where you can also find the transcript of this, as long as it translates for me.
One of the episodes, it did not grab the transcript for whatever reason.
So I apologize, it’s not there.
You can also find a little bit more information.
And I’m actually recording this video of this.
I’m going to try and start actually posting on YouTube as well to kind of start doing my enhanced podcast that I talked about on the very first episode.
At any rate, let’s get to today’s subject.
Early on, I mean, there’s only three episodes.
So I guess this is still early on.
But in one of the previous episodes, well, actually a lot of them, the common theme has been the photography really is about capturing and sharing emotion.
This episode is related to that but not directly about that.
So when I first started in photography, when I first picked up cameras and started looking at other photographers, my goal as a photographer was to learn the technical side of things.
I wanted to know how to operate the camera.
I wanted to know how to create images that were technically acceptable images.
You know, they were sharp.
The exposure was good.
They were potentially somewhat photographically interesting from a technical standpoint.
You know, I mentioned it many times that the entire reason I got into photography was because of storm chasing, and that’s completely true.
You know, I started storm chasing in the early to mid-90s and wanted to learn how to take pictures of lightning.
And that’s where my love of photography started.
Early on, a lot of the photographers that I came across, you know, obviously Ansel Adams, and you know, at the time, I was kind of getting into the Photoshop space.
So, you know, photographers like Moose Peterson, who is a beautiful wildlife photographer, as well as an aviation photographer.
You know, I followed him because of the Kelby Media Group.
You know, there’s just so many of them.
Ooh, Richard Burnaby is another amazing, amazing wildlife photographer.
I hope one day I can even remotely have a chance to be able to capture scenes similar to his.
Because obviously, not his scenes, that’s not the goal of photography, but having some of those opportunities like he did.
One of the other photographers, though, that I came across was a photographer by the name of Galen Rowell.
Not only is he a wonderful landscape photographer, he was a very skilled climber, and more importantly, an environmentalist, a conservationist.
Very big on speaking about protecting our natural resources so people in the future can enjoy them.
Part of the thing that drew me early on to his photography was his use of color, how he was able to control the color, his ability to control dynamic range within the photo.
And early on, everybody kept screaming, flash is too difficult, and you should always do natural light photography and all that, or existing light.
And I kind of enjoy flash photography, and a lot of, not a lot, but one of the things I noticed in some of Galen’s work was he’s not afraid to use fill flash on landscapes.
You know, it’s another way to help control the dynamic range in that image.
He actually, if I’m not mistaken, he was one of the initial people that helped develop some of the graduated neutral density filters.
Obviously, he’s not the only one.
They’ve been around for a long time, but he used them extensively in a lot of his landscapes, which you kind of have to if you really want to control the exposure because landscapes can get out of hand really fast, which is why high dynamic range or HDR photography came into existence.
But I picked up one of his books early on.
This book, it’s Galen Rowell’s Inner Game of Outdoor Photography.
Flip through it.
You know, when I first got into photography, went through it, his images are beautiful.
And I spent a lot of my time looking at how he created the images.
My mind was entirely focused on how did he get that shot?
And what eluded me then?
And honestly, his eluded me up until probably 2021, when I went out to Yellowstone for the first time.
That rekindled my love of photography, but it also, something in my brain clicked, and I’ve always known it, and I’ve talked about it in the past when I was teaching photography classes, that the goal of photography is to tell a story.
But in order to tell a story, you have to be able to learn how to see the scene.
You have to understand that you’re driving that picture.
Yeah, the image is in front of you, but you, as the photographer, have to figure out how to translate what you’re seeing and feeling in your mind with what’s in front of you.
And over the years, since I got into photography in the 90s, through 2021, we’ll just call it that, my entire purpose behind photography was learning just how to make the camera do what I want and capture what I see.
And yeah, you learn early on that part of photography is figuring out how to not just capture what you see, but capture what you see.
And that didn’t really click with me right away.
Now that I’m rereading this book, which this book was originally published in 2022.
No, 2002, which actually sadly made it Galen’s last book before he unfortunately passed away in an aircraft crash in 2003, a year later.
I realized that as I was reading this book, and it kind of made me sad, knowing that these are basically his last words in the world of photography.
But also, now that I’m going through this book and re-reading it with the knowledge that I have today, with the experience that I’ve gained over the past 20 years, it’s a completely different book.
The words in the book have not changed since its initial publication, right?
It’s still the same book.
It’s still the same pictures in the book.
The book itself hasn’t changed.
I’ve changed, though.
I have learned more.
I have gained more insight.
And now that I’m rereading this book, passages hit completely differently.
The words mean a completely new thing to me, which is really, really powerful, especially if you’re willing to accept that.
You know, if you just go, oh, I must not have read that page.
No, I remember reading the book.
Just the meaning of the words, the message in this book is new to me.
It’s literally like I am reading a completely new book that I’ve never picked up before.
And that’s a great thing, because that means that I have learned that photography is absolutely more than clicking the picture and getting a technically well-exposed image.
And again, like I said, I’ve known that.
I understand that, logically thinking that that’s what photography’s all about.
But it hits different now.
It’s a completely new thing for me.
Not new thing for me, but a new meaning here in my heart, right?
One of the paragraphs in the book, in one of the first chapters is, cameras capable of making great photographs have become commonplace today, but photographers have not.
While technical innovations have made photography ever easier in recent decades, the art of producing images that other people will care about has become even more formidable.
The apparent paradox is due to the rising expectations in the culture where we are surrounded by a growing number of sophisticated images every day of our lives.
And that paragraph, wow.
Just look at social media today.
We are flooded with beautiful images.
They’re technically well created.
The lighting is absolutely gorgeous.
They’re great scenes.
But also a lot of them you just look at it and go, okay, that’s a pretty picture.
It’s beautiful.
There’s nothing behind it.
I’m guilty of that too.
I have created some images that everybody’s like, oh, that’s absolutely amazing.
But when I talk to photographers that are in the industry, and I’ve gotten this feedback before when I’ve emailed some of them, they’re like, yeah, your work’s good.
Your technique is good.
You’re solid.
You have a great understanding of the craft.
It just doesn’t hit.
And that, you know, obviously, that hurts, but I also understand, since I’ve been working on re-evaluating myself, re-evaluating my photography, that, yeah, that’s right.
Because I didn’t take the time to understand why I was photographing the scene.
I didn’t take the time to really evaluate, really think about why I’m creating that image, why it’s important to me.
So, you know, I’ve been over the past few weeks, if you follow me on Blue Sky, which by the way, follow me over on Blue Sky.
I love, that is a great platform.
I miss Twitter, and this is the biggest, the closest thing to it.
But if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve been seeing me post a lot of images recently that are old pictures that I took in that 2021 trip.
And the reason for that is purely because I am looking back on work that I’ve done as a photographer with a different mind’s eye.
I’m looking at it with new insight as to why I was taking those images to start with.
And I’ll be honest, a lot of the images, you know, just today, I posted another image from Yellowstone.
I’ve been playing a lot more in black and white recently, just because I never have, so I’ve been kind of challenging myself.
But a lot of those images, I would have never thought twice, you know, going through initially, when I took them.
But now, I’m going back and going, hey, you know something, that image actually has some impact.
I just have to see it a little bit differently.
I have to think about how I’m going to edit that image a little bit differently.
So it is a really good practice to, number one, and I’ve talked about this a few times before, go back to your old images.
Go back to look at things, at your previous work, because you’re going to see things in a different light today than you did yesterday because you have different knowledge.
And that’s wonderful.
But also, don’t be afraid to go back and reread books and articles and look at photographers’ works that you haven’t looked at for a while, because you’ve learned.
You’ve grown as an individual, hopefully.
You’ve tried to push yourself a little bit farther.
The insight that you can gain from doing that is immense.
It really is, I guess, somewhat humbling.
I don’t know.
That’s not the right word.
I’m going to use it though.
We’re just going to go with it.
To know that you can change so much.
2021, when I went out to Yellowstone and the Badlands and Devil’s Tower, that was my first time out west.
And that trip, and then the subsequent revisits back to the Badlands for projects that I’m kind of working on, honestly have really changed my life.
They have given me a completely new insight on why I do photography and what’s important to me from a photographic standpoint.
I know now more than ever, and especially now reading this book, it hits me square in the chest, that my goal, I want to tell stories with my images.
I want to share my feelings and my emotions with others.
I want to do that more strongly than I’ve ever felt before.
And that’s a good thing, especially in a medium like this, where making good images is so much more than just being able to click the button and getting a well-exposed image.
Is that important?
Yeah, it’s important.
But it’s really not the most important thing.
I think a photograph that has a solid meaning behind it, that has a strong emotional connection, that can overcome some really, really challenging technical, I’ll go as far as saying technical fails, blurry image or grainy image, or poorly exposed image.
As long as it’s within the realm of still being able to see and still being able to understand what’s going on in the frame, a very strongly composed image that really pushes that emotion, I think can overcome a lot of those deficits.
So that’s my message for this week is rethink, go out and revisit things that you thought you already knew.
Go out and look at things you’ve already looked at.
Because as we grow, our insights change, and those same things that we think we’re so far past, have completely new meaning today.
Thanks for listening.
Anyways, I hope you’re finding these interesting and helpful.
Again, this podcast is really more about the hows and whys of photography, or more really about the whys and understanding the photographic mentality more so than the technical side.
Don’t worry, we will actually get into some of the technical stuff as we go forward.
So again, thanks for listening.
My name is Shawn.
I am The Tie Dyed Wanderer, and this is what, episode number four of The Tie Dyed Wanderer In Focus.
Thanks.