A journey to a sought-after destination will always leave one with a sense that their photos simply did not capture the essence of the place visited. I cannot think of one single person who has been truly pleased with their photographs from a recent vacation or trip to a beautiful destination. I can vividly remember multiple occasions while watching a friend scroll through their images saying that “these photographs simply don’t do the place justice”! I mean really, how many times have you heard this from those people in your life?
Fast forward to when you get back from a trip and everyone crowds around saying “C’mon! How are these real”? I have become very used to hearing the many things that others think when they see my imagery from far away destinations and local ones alike. I decided long ago that taking a picture was something I never wanted to do and from then forward I took photographs. Enter Landscape Photography and its profound impact on my life! Now, I could never imagine not capturing the essence of a moment, going somewhere and experiencing epic light only to do the disservice of snapping a cell phone picture literally makes me cringe.
It sounds funny in one way, however, when that light occurs in that special way that it does, it’s like a magical sprinkle of fairy dust across the land! It literally and figuratively changes you from within. Being in position, full of anticipation and hopeful of what comes is a level of excitement and anxiety I cannot explain, yet every so often it connects, and everything simply comes together in ways entirely unimaginable. Landscape Photography has long been the focus of my professional exploit. I have traveled the world seeking out those moments of magic and sometimes if I am very, very fortunate, I am able to walk away with a captured memory for a lifetime!
I can remember early on when I was just a boy, we were in the Bahamas and I was seven years old. I remember freediving over these incredible living reefs, full of fire coral, sponges, soft corals, sea fans, huge groves of staghorn corals that faded off in the crystal blue with multitudes of reef fishes in every array of color one could imagine. I remember having in my possession having a 35 mm underwater camera and a single roll of film to capture whatever I wanted with! At such a young age, I was simply thrilled to see what I could get that day. I vividly remember taking photos of French angel fish hovering above a large brain coral and some vibrant flamingo tongues clinging onto a nearby sea fan. These memories were very formative and had captured my mind at a very young age.
As we sailed around the world, I can recall documenting our journey and documenting places with my photography much more that capturing the light of those moments, however it wasn’t long before documenting these places simply wasn’t enough and I began to realize just how much I was missing out on with each experience and each place we visited. Back then, Everything I shot was film and while I worked diligently to capture light in ways that evoked my emotions. I found that the balance between underexposing highlights and properly exposing shadows always had me desiring more out of my workflow and while I always walked away with work I was happy with, it wasn’t until digital technologies advanced until I was in a place where I felt that I could truly create relative to my vision.
The context of creating emotion within Landscape Photography is something that I strive to evoke more than anything else. In my opinion if it does not make you feel something, then it simply isn’t worth doing and that goes well beyond the context of Fine Art or Landscape Photography! This is about living life unapologetically and expressing yourself through the places you have seen with a vision of light.
Landscape Photography has arguably given everything to me in a professional and personal sense. I believe that it is essential for one to follow one’s path in life and in order to follow your path you must listen to yourself. Listening to ourselves can be a difficult journey in todays age, with finances and life often intervening on our dreams. One thing that I feel passionately about though is that we must listen to this calling within ourselves and that we are never able to be free unless we free ourselves!
Enter how Landscape Photography changed my life. I could argue that Landscape Photography has been a part of my life since I was a boy and it really has been, however, that journey has taken many different forms, from artistic expression, creation, photography, travel, art, inspiration to an entire wholistic view on life and how it integrates into my eternal being. All of this said, the last two decades have very significantly shaped the human man that I am today into the one whom I choose to carry into the next phase of my forever.
Castaway By Marlon Holden Fine Art
Ever since childhood, I can remember being fascinated with light and how it transformed the way I felt about a place, often very quickly. I can remember being a thousand miles from most everything sitting on the aft deck of our sailboat about 60 miles away from a small atoll in the Tuamotus named Rangiroa; the sunrise was so vibrant and wild that I am not sure I have seen another like it in my entire adult life! I sat there with my Dad on that aft deck mesmerized with him for a good ten minutes or so. That sunrise was so incredible in fact that if I mention it to him to this day, he will instantly light up and we can have a lengthy conversation about how that moment in time and life captured us in ways that can only be felt! With these words and experiences in mind, this is what I aspire to create within each and every moment in my Landscape Photography and to add a bit more context to life here, Rangiroa aptly translates in Tuamotuan to “Long Sky”! How about that for duality?!
Incredible landscapes mixed with the essence of light is literally like the elixir of life. With so many places to go and so many places to experience, I feel like our lifetimes were intentionally created as they were to get a taste of something so grand that we often say to others how it would take many lifetimes to explore the furthest reaches of the world. I often think to myself what that really means? As I become much more a thinker in this journey, I often reflect on the fact that there is just as much if not more landscape to explore within ourselves; that as much as we might try, our complexities would take us many lifetimes to explore our own wilderness within and sometimes a photograph well taken can allow for some of that fulfillment of what is known unknowns in our own lives.
As complex beings that come from the earth, we are innately tied to the matter of what we are. I believe that at our core we are drawn to the beauty of the earth because we quite literally are the earth and upon our passing will certainly go back to the earth as every generation before us has. What a profound and unequaled thought to know that our end will be met with the very dirt we walk upon. Many have asked me why I do what I do and what captivates me to create in the medium of Landscape Photography and while it is a complex question, it is also quite simple. When I am in nature, I am at peace. The only distractions around me are natural ones such as birds, the wind, weather, wildlife, just myself and the mountain so to speak. Within these moments with nature and myself come visions of profound clarity with the knowledge that I am quite literally going back to the earth and we as human beings have the ability to be so ruthless or so incredibly beautiful. As I journey further into this life here on earth, I choose to seek out the light because it is all that is beauty and righteous. As for my flesh, time is limited, and light is eternal. Our energy fades into another realm and dimension as the physical faculties of our being disintegrate back into the earth! If I am truly conscious, I can clearly see that I am a greater part of something so much larger than myself and that if I am honest with myself, when I look at the earth, I am very much so looking at myself. You see, in this life we are temporarily free to walk about in our physical form. Able to manifest our dreams and desires as free thinking beings temporarily able to make independent decisions, yet as we go back into the earth, we become one again and thus my belief that we are truly looking within ourselves, like a mirror looking back at us, we are the earth. Not to get too deep on you here that I lose context to why and what we are discussing on this topic, as Fine Art Landscape Photography, however my artwork is an aspiration to transcend what is obvious into that of philosophical journey quest.
Landscape Photography for me is much more than a picture ever will be to many and certainly greater than a photograph is in its literal form. Landscape photography is about moments in life, literally captured and translated as a story of my imagination. These emotions bridge the basis of logic and what we all seek to understand or view as real. Landscape photography for me, is a journey of life. One that we might see deeper into as a book without words and one full of moments in bliss an ensemble of visions dedicated to the earths beauty, profound moments of our own divinity and the real purpose of our essence, something greater than ourselves that within that moment we can capture with a snap of the shutter!
Gentle Within By Marlon Holden Fine Art