If it’s true -- that old folk-wisdom notion that claims that “Sometimes you bite the dog, sometimes the dog bites you,” then I have found that a similar, ain’t-it-weird? dictum influences my life as a photographer:
Sometimes you find the photograph. Sometimes the photograph finds you.
I was on a ferry the other night, crossing Puget Sound right about the time of sunset, headed to a client meeting. I had my wedding portfolio in a case in one hand, and a daypack on my back that was filled with even more work samples, a camera, and a couple of lenses. I also had a small point-and-shoot camera in my pocket. A challenging voice in the back of my brain taunted me, asking: “Hey Dude, with all these trappings of an “image-maker” on you, do you suppose you can find a picture, right here on this ferry boat, right now?”
I'm tempted to jokingly say I hate that voice, introducing as it does two very different creative possibilities: That I will find a photograph that pleases me, and thus feel the Sweet Rush of Success (good;) or I'll fail to find a worthy image and drag my sorry, caveman self home from the hunt with no art to put on the cave wall to impress the cave-wife and cave-kiddies. But the truth is that "the voice" is really one of my best teachers, encouraging me to accept whatever comes my way.
So I walked around the passenger area of the ferry on a vision quest for a picture. I looked at the patterns in the water in the wake of the ferry, and considered the color that was added by the warm, end-of-day light. I then sized-up the visual possibilities of the Olympic mountains off to the west, but the mountains were mostly hidden in clouds. Nothing really seemed to “be” a photograph...until the boat docked in Edmonds and I walked into the ferry terminal, where I happened on a window, crazily and wildly cracked.
There was an image possibility that was worthy of investigation, and I spent several minutes by that window, shooting one kind of picture, then another.
Oh, Sweet Productivity! The caveman could, with gratitude and humility, take something home from his hunt.
