It rained here yesterday. It was wet and windy all day. The weather forecast is for rain, on-and-off, the rest of the week. I think the Pacific North-wet winter monsoon season has begun.
Uggh.
Actually, I don’t really mind The Rain. The coming of wet weather tells me that the busiest part of the sometimes frantic summer/fall “wedding season” has come to an end. The Rain signals the arrival of a new season, a quieter time when I’ll have fewer professional obligations on my calendar and can take a breath. I’m looking forward to getting back to work on some personal photographic projects that I had to put aside during the summer.
After 30-plus years making my living as a photographer, I have learned that work I do for myself makes me more jazzed about work I do for others. My personal (non-income-producing) photography opens my eyes and clears my head, so that when somebody calls me and wants to pay me to shoot something, I’m ready and energized.
I’ve spent the summer making photographs of people at weddings. I’ve been looking for a fleeting expression, a gesture, a visual moment captured by the magic box, the still camera. Now, like a farmer who plants crops that match the weather and the seasons, I know that the time has come for me to plant some photographic winter wheat. In the coming months, I plan to finish the mock-up of a book I have in the works. I'll also be out shooting landscape photographs of high, wild, wilderness areas, places where there are no human beings to be found for miles.
One photographic discipline strengthens the other.
There’s a hike I do most every October to a lake on the sunny, rain-shadowed east side of the Cascades. The lake is some distance away from any maintained hiking trail, hidden in a high basin near one of my favorite peaks. The lake is surrounded by larch trees. Those trees look a bit like evergreens in the summer, but, come fall, the needles turn golden yellow. It’s an amazingly beautiful scene, the trees and the mountain, reflected in the still, blue lake. Some years when I hike up into that basin, I find that the landscape has been dusted by winter's first snow. I go there and feel very lucky to be able to visit such a perfect place.
A hike to that high country lake is a good way to mark the changing of the seasons. Up there, the days ahead seem full of possibilities.
