I have been photographing almost ceaselessly this year. Travels to Death Valley, the Utah National Parks, Washington State and Vancouver Island, California (twice) have been extraordinarily fruitful in building my portfolio, even though my office is beginning to be overrun with prints. With a trip to New Zealand upcoming next weekend, I have put my cameras down for a brief respite, which I think will serve me well. All this practice at making photographs has clearly improved my visualization of scenes, and I don’t feel that pausing for a brief respite will have any adverse effect on that. One or two images and it will all come right back. What I feel will be supercharged, however, is the desire to make fine photographs. Wanting to make a great picture is 90% of the challenge in fine art photography. As is often stated, you have to be in it to win it, and if the desire is simply not there, you will not be in it at all. So I have been concentrating more on my cycling and physical conditioning, while simply getting ready to travel. While I am not looking forward to the lengthy nature of the trip, it should be fine and the three weeks we have allocated to travel around the South Island should make for a marvelous experience. In fact, I find myself getting more and more psyched up each day that I leave my cameras in my camera bag. I’m hoping for some first-rate new images to add to my portfolio. For now, I’ll just post another of my redwood collection that turned out to be one of the best series that I have done to date.
