It all began with a realization that each sunrise was a new day and that each sunset was the end of another. Yet the real love for chasing wild light didn’t truly begin until I reached a place within my heart that realized we only have a limited number of sunrises and sunsets to experience on this earth and how many of those do you take for granted? We hurriedly go running about our business, easily taking small and large things for granted. Our life quest begins in an authentic enough way, we are born, dream as children with childlike ambitions about how or what life should look like, then we get jobs a mortgage and children of our own. It’s not all doom and gloom, After all these are incredible blessings if we are fortunate enough to find all of these things happening to us! However, for a vast majority, we get caught up in our agenda versus honoring each day and remembering that this journey is not forever, so don’t plan so far down the line that life today is but a simple day where we forget the reason why we do what we’re doing to begin with.
Photography began for me as a result of being with very artistic parents. My parents were always traveling and very rarely was it that we weren’t taking photographs of something. I remember scenes of my Father painting on the beach along a remote stretch of the Exumas back in the early 80’s as I swam in the turquoise waters just offshore. For my family, this was not an uncommon sight, it was rather uncommon to find us anywhere traditional actually, for we were always outdoors somewhere.
Fast forward to the present, I can clearly recall why I am so keenly connected to those times of profound creative memory. I think back to the moments where I began my journey and what made me feel so incredibly connected to the light in such a way that I wanted to change the way I lived my life forever! Light has a way of interpreting itself as emotion. The context of chasing wild light is a way of describing my journey of categorizing the ways in which I am able to capture each moment and how it made me feel. To elaborate a bit further on light and its many feelings, deep murky dark is mysterious and maybe even scary to some; while light and bright is generally very happy, lighthearted and easy going. Every shade and tone of light in between has its own depth of emotion and conveyance of feeling. For every mood, there is a corresponding shade or tone of light! Mix this with color temperatures and now you have a clear pathway to feel certain ways through an image, evoking every manner of possible context we could ever imagine on earth just by the landscapes surrounding us.
I could just as much say that I am chasing emotions as I am chasing light, for everything we see, we feel. I desire to capture the mood of a place with a certain light based upon how the context of that landscape speaks to me. In this scenario, just any light will not do and that is why it may take me decades before I get the right conditions to capture a particular image. The complexity of light and the dynamic of how light plays with emotion is a delicate balance and one that truly comes out in my work. Each adjustment I make, every change in the settings of a capture will allow me to either relate or reject the moment of capture.
There are places closer to the poles of the earth where the sun stays below the horizon for much longer than let’s say countries along the equator. As such, light has an effect on its inhabitants, emotionally and even how temperatures are in relation to where light touches. I truly love the emotional pursuit within light capture. There really is so much to explore and with varying degrees of difficulty in each pursuit. Truly phenomenal Fine Art Photography always comes from the meeting of conditions with exceptional light. For instance, where peak flower blooms are at their best with no wind for perfect technical execution and a remarkable sky filled with the perfect amount of drama to illicit emotions rooted from the very foundation of your being. When moments occur such as these, I am literally and figuratively walking on a bed of clouds and I need to pinch myself when it’s all over!
I can remember one particular evening of chasing light where a huge three-day rainstorm had flooded the South Western deserts! Flash floods had been roaring through stretches of the Mojave nonstop causing all sorts of road hazards and late season snowfall. Of course, I had been watching this storms every move and knew in my gut that Death Valley would certainly be flooded. The next morning early, I headed out to validate my suspicions, upon arrival I was rewarded to a once in a decade view of a flooded bad water that took my breath away! So not only were the conditions absolutely phenomenal, the sky was about to go absolutely nuclear with not a single breath of wind to disturb the reflection over this fleeting little ephemeral lake in the middle of the desert 282 feet below sea-level! I captured image after remarkable image, the light changed and continued to become more and more dynamic as it went on. My mind was in such a trance, on several occasions I had to stop and simply take it all in! I must have shot well over twelve hundred images of that evening, of which two Fine Artworks from that evening have made it into my collection.
Remarkable light has a way of transcending our spiritual essence and if we are truly connected to that part of our psyche, we can tap into something within us that is far more primal than what we have the ability to interpret through language itself. That is what I love about a well-executed Landscape Photograph, the profound capture of epic light at just the right time to make you feel something that is rooted deep within you in a place where you feel it! When the light hits just right in a crescendo of beauty it isn’t something that we are able to describe, simply put “words do not do them justice”, they absolutely must be felt!
Feeling the light is what I believe defines Fine Art Landscape Photography! Without emotion, there is no feeling in life and likewise, where there is no feeling, there is no emotion. A world where we do not feel is a place where everything becomes meaningless and that is a dangerous place to tempt the darkness. There are those who go about their life robbed of these simple joys of emotional connection, that allow for feeling to be their ever-present source of inspiration and it is this that inspires me to share with the world; the story of emotion and how it is interconnected with the way light makes us feel!
Take for example a white room, almost a vacuum if you will. There are no corners, no lines, no walls, no beginning and no end, what if this was life? The context of this in and of itself quite literally scares the daylights out of me, not having color, sky, mountains, trees, oceans, lakes, birds or flowers… I’m not certain that life would be worth surviving if the world didn’t exist in its vivid colors, beautiful sounds, textures and light. I don’t contend to be a doctor of any sort; however, I would bet the farm that as we are social beings, complex in our design and function, that we require all of these things to mentally place ourselves in a day to day presence of peace. Anyone who says they do not need art, would be relegating themselves to a place of saying it would be okay if everything were to disappear; no birds flying in the sky singing their songs, no flowers, sunsets, beach sand to fill the space between your toes and no waves to crash upon the shoreline. You see, life is art and life without art is hardly memorable, let alone worth something that would fuel a concept such as a great future, fulfilling dreams or desires. Everything around me is a continuous flow of art and beauty, as a constant progression of the symphony that is life. All one needs to do is go somewhere that touches them in a simple way and sit. Feeling the breeze on your face, the sun warming your skin, the clouds moving by overhead as you fill your mind with whatever thoughts appear. Our creativity is greatly attached to these moments and distinctly connects us to what we see as our future within hopes and desires, further tied to that of our dreams and the destination we seek.
Chasing Wild Light to me represents all of these things in a dynamic orchestra of emotional connection. The interlaced evidence of what we all see to be real in this dimension of life which feeds and nourishes a part of ourselves which drive enthusiasm, creativity and love. Chasing Wild Light is about the pursuit of life and the dynamic shifts within our own lives each day we wake up to pursue a dream that we think is our intended goal. All while we are shooting for the end line, we cannot forget that the greatest times of our life are right here and right now. We must be vigilant to remember that life is not about the destination and that as cliché as it may sound, those whom we love and adore which come before us have warned us to take inventory on our hearts and remember to enjoy the journey that is happening within our lives right this very moment!
So, while we hurriedly go about our lives feeding our purpose and seeking out what we wish to manifest out of this experience, let us not forget the things in which make this trip on earth so significant. In my quest to connect my collectors to the earth, I will continue to seek out the deepest of emotions intertwined with my love of chasing and capturing wild light, it is what fuels me in my journey while I am here. To share with you and to show you a greater piece of what we are all a part of, something that we can all belong to in a way that propagates the most significant connection of all, the one that makes us human.
