It’s passion that drives me. I’m always attuned to what I see when out in the field and want to understand the emotions they evoke while trying to align them into a coherent thought. Often the landscape will offer its story or theme without too much consternation on my part. Sometimes though it is very different for me.
Like a lot of things in life, it’s what you bring to the table that will dictate how you see, hear or think. The years of my photographic journey has proved over and again that I will be influenced by the way I feel at any particular time. How do I know this? I only need to look at an image I’ve made in the past and I can instantly decipher what my thought process was then.
While hand of man, or more to the point, human influence does not usually play a part in setting a composition overtly, I’m cognoscente of the fact that I have experienced a lot of human history on my journeys. I’ve discovered that the history of man on the landscape can be just as powerful as the landscape itself. Putting the two together brings the passion of yesterday, today and the future!
While watching the beautiful cross light bring the plains alive I relived a Native American story that I could hardly remember. In practice they believed that they took care of the buffalo so the buffalo took care of them. In short they were sacred!
The legend in my mind at the moment was about the loss of the buffalo when they were their sole means of livelihood. Even though they knew the extermination would lead to their own demise and how it was being carried out, they preferred to tell a story of the buffalo on mass coming onto the most beautiful of plains they had ever witnessed. As they did the mountain opened and swallowed the buffalo, never to be seen again.
