The Journey Into Art

(This is the full text submitted for publication on several photography websites.)

Introduction

I am a technical professional who wanted to become an artist in his middle years. I confess that I had no previous art training except for making papier-mâché boxes in high school!

I learned that the Internet could not teach me what I needed, except perhaps how to take an average travel photo...

“Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.

How hard it is to tell what it was like,

this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn
(the thought of it brings back all my old fears),

a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer...

“Look to your right... It is the path back home. If you choose, you can take it. It is safe, easy, and comfortable. You do not have to work out or fight or do anything else you do not want to...

“If one says ‘red’ – the name of color – and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds...

If you are willing to do something that might not work, you’re closer to being
an artist.
-Seth Godin

As many know, I spend most of my days practicing medicine, so my thoughts and opinions are those of a middle-aged person coming into photography as an art form...

It has been more than a year from the last one in this series, so I thought I would carry on with a review of one from my most recent project "Walls in Motion".

This project will be the first exhibit after the COVID restrictions ease, probably late next summer or fall...

Hovenweep Pueblo was occupied from around 1200-1300 CE. All signs of occupation were really gone by 1280 CE. The site has not been fully excavated, so we only know some generalities about the area.

The architecture is similar to archeological ruins in Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico...

What in the world were they doing building something so beautiful on a rock???

They say it was for a structure to retreat to in the event of an attack. That sounds very plausible to me, given the description of the times...

A ruin should always be protected but never repaired - thus may we witness full the lingering legacies of the past.

Walter Scott

This is one of the pueblos in Hovenweep National Monument...

The third day of my time in the San Juans was not in the San Juans. It was spent in the Canyon of the Ancients. I went for the fall colors in the San Juans and to spend a day with the ancient ones.

My first stop was the Painted Hand Pueblo in Canyons of the Ancients National Monument...

It’s your road, and yours alone, others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.

- Rumi

I have always loved the path motif...

The luminous quality of the light shining through the leaves of the aspen and cottonwood cannot be expressed except in picture. On a clear day like today it is so bright, you must shield your eyes. But you don't want to, as it would diminish the radiance...

This was the first dedicated time photographing in almost a year.

This year I explored the western San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado. Despite years of living here I had spent little time in that area...

They say the secret of success is being at the right place at the right time, but since you never know when the right time is going to be, I figure the trick is to find the right place and just hang around...

After many months of distraction, I was driving out on the plains of eastern Colorado, when I came over a hill and saw a low, wide valley filled with clouds. I had never seen such a site on the plains...

The contrast in the movement of the water and rock is striking.

The water moves moment by moment.

The rock was moved by the water, but only in the distant past and now is only moved slowly by the rain and winds...

Water seems so innocuous. It seems to make us wet and uncomfortable when caught in the rain. It seems so benign when we are in the shower. We don't though think much about it when we are dry...

Creativity goes away when the most important thing in life is surviving.

As most know, my primary profession is medicine, and the past 6-8 weeks have been quite hectic, to say the least. Thankfully I have not had to fight for the survival of my life nor for others in my personal and professional circles...

I have begun to move into work that looks more closely at the land at my feet.

I have always thought that capturing the big landscape was most important...

How does one start on an artistic journey in landscape photography? I knew from the first time I invested in my first “good” digital camera; I would eventually want to express something unique in my work...

While wandering along Oak Creek, south of Sedona, I came to see an enticing site, a beautiful oak leaf in a small pool of water in the sandstone bedrock. Staring more I saw the reflection of the surrounding fall trees...

I have read a lot about creativity and even tried to write about it myself.

I have concluded that talking about and writing about creativity is like walking around a well and only describing what is in it with the simple term "water"...

I see many, many ads for tools that help you create images (and I presume prints) fast with presets or other shortcuts.

Most of my best works take 1+-5+ hours to create. The farther I go along this path, the more time it takes for me to finish a piece...

Sometimes one afternoon's and evening's experience lasts for months. So it was with this evening at Muley Point in southeastern Utah.

Everything came together to make a most remarkable several hours of capturing the breadth of a spring evening in the desert...

Virga are streaks of rain beneath a cloud, but the rain never reaches the ground. I've also heard it called dry rain. Until this plane flight I'd never seen virga from above. Not much of a cloud above the virga...

What is art to me?

This is a remarkably vital question. I have been a physician for over 34 years as of this writing.

What I carry into my art starts from the many years of observation I have practiced in medicine...

This is another from the Transformed Series where I began to depart from standard landscape photography and add a bit of happy dance to the print.

It was taken on a late spring afternoon on Muley Point in southeastern Utah and shows the wonderful combination of the land and my experience of and with it...

...when solitude, season, and sky, all come together in the right place and time, when I am in the right frame of mind. This instance was certainly not of my choosing. I was witness to a solitary moment of allure and loveliness and mindful enough to appreciate it...

Creating photographic art has never been easier.

After reflecting on the events at a recent conference I attended, I became aware again of the growing ability to process images quickly...

I cannot recommend the Fine Art Summit hosted by Alain and Natalie Briot more highly.

Each year they provide 3+ days of world-class exposure to great places to photograph, but more importantly, exposure to industry masters, who share their experience in each of their unique photographic journeys...

These words "focusing and limiting one's work allows for greater creativity" are some of the most misunderstood and disbelieved words I have ever heard. How can limiting oneself result in greater creativity? That make no sense, right? Greater freedom should result in greater creativity...

This is one from the Transformed Landscape series that is a painting-like print made without any presets or custom modifications from other photographers. It is an example of a personally processed print made from years of experience developing my own personal style of processing the images I capture into a fine art print...

It is very hard to be objective about one's work. There is too much emotion and too much of "I love this picture" in the way.

That is why it is important to do two things:

1. Ask for feedback from those who you trust to give you genuine and honest feedback...

In late 2010 I went for my first dedicated photo trip. This was the first purposeful trip I had taken with the specific goal of completing a photographic project about a specific place.

(This was a breakthru in understanding the need to go to a specific place with a specific goal, in this case a project about the Black Canyon...

This is one of my early prints, exploring the blasphemous activity of altering the form and colors of my images to express something more than the few modifications most landscape photographers change in their images...

This is another of the most liked prints from my new collection, The Transformed Landscape.

This was originally captured on a most remarkable evening looking south from Muley Point in southeastern Utah, looking onto the north side of Monument Valley...

People much more versed in the theory of art and color have spent much of their lives writing about and explaining color. I have nothing to contribute to that erudite discussion. But I can share my own movement into the understanding of color in my art...

Little did I know at the time how important projects would become in my work. It took me many years to actually figure it out.

As my friend Alain has said, "Projects are important, because they make you focus...

This is the fifth in the series of Before and After images that shows what came out of the camera and what subsequently went on paper.

This image came from a late spring sunset at Devil's Garden, outside of Torrey, Utah...

This is one of the most liked prints from my new collection, The Transformed Landscape.

This was originally captured on a most remarkable evening looking south from Muley Point in southeastern Utah, looking onto the north side of Monument Valley...

On Friday, September 13, I will be having an opening and reception for my new work, which is an original presentation of landscape photography. I previously shared these prints at the Art in the Park in Parker, Colorado, on August 24-25...

After having a pivotal experience about 6 months ago and starting to produce landscape photography in a new way, I am now convinced of the uniqueness of this direction in the world of digital photographic art...

I know this is really boring, but if you can't master your camera, you can't make good photographs. Michelangelo had to master his paints and brushes before creating his paintings and frescoes...

So I decided I would take my camera with me on my daily walks with the dog. We walked along many places in the neighborhood, and I took pictures of what caught my eye...

This is the fourth in a series of Before and After images that shows what came out of the camera and what subsequently went on paper.

This print was from a morning session south of Sedona, Arizona, shooting with a long lens...

This was a soft evening in early June at Devil's Garden outside of Torrey Utah. The forms and colors of the Garden and evening were rare and inviting.

I was tired from several days of dawn to dusk photo shoots and found the quiet meandering among these peculiar shapes on the north side of a wide draw refreshing...

This is the first a series of posts showing images that I had taken at the start of my photographic journey a number of years ago.

I am sharing these images and posts as a way of encouraging those starting out on this journey...

One of my hard things was that I came to photographic art after many years of professional training and experience in science and medicine. I had no formal art training, except for making paper mâché boxes in high school...

IF you do the following, you are following a film paradigm (while shooting with a digital camera):

1. You do nothing to the image that comes out of the camera and print without processing...

This is the third in a series of Before and After images that shows what came out of the camera and what subsequently went on paper.

This is the image as it came out of the camera and was imported into Lightroom with only the default Camera Raw settings, i...

Driving around the Escalante area in Utah, one is met often with bland flatness or that same old red you see all over the Southwest. Yet a turn in the road or view around a corner can show a dramatically changed landscape...

It should be plain that you can only capture what you see. Yet when starting out and trying to focus on something to photograph (other than everything), one must see first and then capture the image...

I have been asked by a number of people to expand on the description of my basic capture and processing workflow as described on the Artist's Process page. It is important for me to share that what I do is not remotely close to point-and-shoot photography...

This is the second in a series of Before and After images that shows what came out of the camera and what subsequently went on paper. This series was spurred by several issues. First was that people regularly ask me if the print was "manipulated...

Many have asked what was the change that I mentioned earlier about this month's print of the month. So I thought I would add this Before & After to the series a bit earlier than planned.

The initial image from Lightroom with some basic modifications...

This month's print is a creative divergence from previous prints.

I love the Southwest US for its openness, grandeur, solitude, history, and scenery. Sometimes when I am standing on an overlook, I get so enamored with the beauty and the moment that I want to jump up and down, run around in circles chasing my tail, dance, sing, and shout...

There are more and more of us on this planet. That means it is harder to find places of solitude and photos that show something new.

I have recently wandered the landscape of southeast Utah and paid particular attention to where I walked after being reminded of the delicacy of the soil...

This is the first of a series of Before and After images that shows what came out of the camera and what subsequently went on paper. This series was spurred by several issues. First was that people regularly ask me if the print was "manipulated...

I have read a fair amount about the southwest US and the ancient ones who had lived there. I have seen many pictures of ruins of their dwellings and other artifacts found. Unfortunately that is all head stuff to me...

This month's print of the month is from an early morning, watching the sun rise over the main Zion Canyon. Light glances off the distant peaks to lead the eye to the morning moment.

This is the fifth of a series of 5 posts expanding on questions people had asked me when discussing my work and artistic experiences at a recent show. They are published as part of the exploration of my creative life...

This is the fourth of a series of 5 posts expanding on questions people had asked me when discussing my work and artistic experiences at a recent show. They are published as part of the exploration of my creative life...

Time wandering alone in the wilderness often leaves me open to awe, expectancy, and hope. Moving around a new turn in the path or over the next little hill or moving 30 feet to the right or left presents a new experience and new vision...

This is the third of a series of 5 posts expanding on questions people have asked me when discussing my work and artistic experiences. They are published as part of the exploration of my creative life...

This is the second of a series of 5 posts expanding on questions people have asked me when discussing my work and artistic experiences. They are published as part of my exploration of the creative life...

This is the start of a series of 5 posts expanding on questions people have asked me when viewing and discussing my work and artistic experiences. I wrote them down and decided to write about each one in greater and more thoughtful detail...

For millennia the desert has represented a space and experience, where one left all their roles and responsibilities behind to seek solitude, direction, and respite.

Some also intentionally went to the desert to seek wisdom, purpose, and enlightenment...

An evening storm is coming into the Maze District. I had been here for 4 days before this night, exploring one of the most remote areas in the lower 48 states.

Getting here involves miles of high clearance, 4-wheel drive roads that have not been maintained since they were built in the 1950's...

The slot canyons of Arizona and Utah hold a particularly important place in my art and in my understanding of human experience.

My first exposure to them was during my first photography workshop with Alain and Natalie Briot in the spring of 2010, and little did I know the impact it would hold...

The current Antelope Canyon milieu is completely different from when I came here in 2010. (I will post more specifics when I talk about slot canyon I and II projects.) The Upper and Lower Canyons are so well known that there are as many as 12-15+ truckloads of visitors viewing the canyon at any one time...