Luck has a large part to play in Landscape Photography

It was 6:00am and I was just rounding the corner of the slipper drive up through the snow to the parking lot. However, to my surprise, I was met with a larger group of people than I had anticipated. Sure it wasn’t as early as I had wanted but could there really have been people to beat me up here? As I struggled with my snowshoe's even more people began to arrive and I knew I had to hurry or it was only a matter of time before I was waiting for people to hustle out of my frame.

There wasn’t much more I could do other than get up a few hours earlier and show up well over an hour before dawn. I don’t really like doing this in a new location I am unfamiliar with. Not only is it hard to know what I am looking at in the inky blackness but it can also be dangerous if you don’t know where certain terrain features are or even trail markers. So reluctantly I carried on, trekking past a few other snowshoers and even running into another group of photographers! But I finally found a spot a few hundred yards from the other photographers that were good enough. The sun was already coming up and if I wanted to take advantage of the morning light it needed to happen now.

I framed up my shot, fiddled with my settings and made my photograph. I ended up getting a bunch of shots for social media but the actual photo, while good is definitely not something I would call portfolio worthy. And that is what I wanted to talk about today, the idea of practice and remembering that no matter how good you think you are there is always room to improve.

Every photographer goes through it. For a while, it seems like you can do no wrong, and every image is another improvement. You keep amazing yourself and seeing the results until the day that it stops working. Something might be off with your framing, maybe you just aren’t shooting at the right time of day or you could just be in a creative rut. We all go through them but it's important to remember that a lot of landscape photography is an exercise in patients.

To get that one perfect shot requires a lot of things to go right and a healthy dose of luck to produce unique conditions. It was a gamble for me to get out to this location. I had never been here before nor had I known what I was going to be hiking through. The clouds didn’t cooperate with me and I wasn’t given the sunrise I wanted. But I did get the image above and while it may not be something for my portfolio it is a symbol of sorts that I am proud of.

I got out at 6 am for sunrise snow shoe solo hike in January in Colorado. That is something I never would have thought I would be doing let alone doing by myself. It's important to remember that so much of what we do as a landscape photographer is mixed with a lot of luck. So long as we are getting out and enjoying the experience of connecting with nature we shouldn’t worry so much about the images. They will come with time and patience, after all, we have worked so long and hard to get here, we can wait just a little longer.