I’ve been doing this for nineteen years now, which is long enough to know I don’t know much, and long enough to have boxes of Mini DV tapes I’ll probably never finish converting. I was eight miles up a trail at 7,000 feet and I was kinda lost. It was too dark to hike back to the creek, so I found some trees and rocks that I hoped would keep me sheltered enough, and I set up my tent on a cliff in the Wallowas. I had food, water, and shelter, and I was smart, so I wasn’t afraid of dying. Yet.
That was September 2011. I thought that solo trip was the most stupid fulfilling thing I’d ever done. I guess I just kept going out, and the camera didn’t matter as much as I thought. The next morning I hiked down the cliff and got back on the trail.
A few weeks later, in the Tetons, I learned how much longer a night could get. A friend and I hiked Cascade Canyon to Solitude Lake, then up and over Paintbrush Divide. We reached the pass near sunset, which sounds nice except that the entire hike down the back side was in almost complete darkness, on ice switchbacks and snow drifts. She threw up a couple times during the night. Hail fell on the tent. I made beef stew in the dark and planted the bear box. We survived, and I made some images I still look at, but what I remember most is the cold, the slipping, the way the headlamp beam caught ice crystals on the trail edge. That’s the stuff that stays.
Back then I was shooting a Nikon D2H, which I would edit in Photoshop Camera Raw on a laptop at a Jackson Hole coffee shop. I didn’t have a system. I had a car with 330,000 miles on it and a sleeping bag. The camera was a tool, and it worked until the autofocus started hunting or the viewfinder blacked out. By November 2012, in a pub near Yosemite, I was researching gear online like it was a disease. Olympus EP1 for $200. Used Nikon D300 for $500. A D3 still holding at $2,500. What I really wanted, I wrote in my journal, was “a full frame professional SLR that can keep up with print size.” And metal. I wanted something made with metal.
I never got the D3. I got a Sony a7R a few years later, then spent a year cursing its autofocus and the blackout in the electronic viewfinder every time I fired the shutter. I missed shots because the camera couldn’t focus on a landscape. A landscape. Just focus wide out, just do anything, just focus, and it couldn’t do it. I sold it before the value depreciated too much and started renting lenses instead of buying them. I’d bought a wide-angle once for around $400 and sold it a year later at a loss, having used it maybe three times. Renting felt like admitting defeat, but it was cheaper defeat.
The images that worked came from standing there getting bit for twenty minutes, not from the gear. In September 2012, at Blossom Bar on the Lower Rogue, I set my tripod on the edge of a rock and framed a vertical portrait of the river at sunset. The water was reflecting brilliant blue sky and wispy white clouds, then the colors began to shift. I dropped the f-stop to f/22 and pulled the shutter speed down to three seconds. I used a graduated ND filter to hold detail in the sky. The raw capture had the bright pink-orange hues in the water, and I knew I had something I could work with later. Not because the camera was special. Because I was there, wet, mosquito-bitten, and I waited.
Two years later, on a beach south of Eureka, I rolled up my pants and stepped into a tidal pool with my tripod set low. I used a remote shutter and an ND filter and left the shutter open for two minutes. The reflection of pink clouds in the still water. The horizon line. I was cold and my feet were numb and I had sand in my pockets for a week. That’s the trade. You don’t get the image from the couch.
I developed a technique on the Oregon coast that fall that I still think about. I set up the tripod at blue hour, dropped the exposure to a few seconds, and panned the camera horizontally while the shutter was open. This panning, this sweeping, removes details and distractions on the land. What remained were gradients of color and a blend into darkness at the edges of the image. It looks like how it felt, I guess. Most of the time you end up with a horizon and a sky and you don’t really know where it is. It’s flat. You move on.
When you stay out that long, past the blue hour, you just end up there, and the stars are out, and you haven’t left yet.
In October 2011, camped in Rim Rock Valley outside Moab, I left the rain fly off the tent. It was a clear night, and I laid there watching the stars move past overhead. No telescope, no app, no camera. Just watching. That’s still some of the best night sky time I’ve had, and I didn’t take a single photo of it.
A year later, at the Rogue River Ranch, I watched the harvest moon rise above the eastern mountainside while listening to Neil Young and making Mountain House meals. The freeze-dried beef stroganoff or whatever it was. The moon was orange and enormous. In September 2012, from Hood River, I saw the moon rising over Mount Hood. Each time, I had a camera within arm’s reach, and each time I mostly just looked.
By 2020, I’d gotten more deliberate about the night sky. I drove out to a mountain peak in Eastern Oregon in August to watch the Perseids. I saw maybe fifteen or twenty good ones between midnight and 2 a.m. The Milky Way was crisp, and I could see the little filament light structures that make up its edges. When a big meteor went through, it left a plasma tube behind, a glowing ionized streak that hung there for a second before cooling back into darkness. I had binoculars and a thermos of cold coffee. I didn’t sleep much. The temperature dropped into the forties. I was wearing every layer I’d brought, and I still considered moving the truck closer so I could sit in the cab with the heater on. But I stayed in the chair. The next meteor might be the one.
That same year, a friend called me at night and told me to look outside. A stream of bright objects was moving across the sky from southwest to northeast, evenly spaced, like pick-up sticks. It was the Starlink satellites, hundreds of them, still clustered from a recent launch. For a moment we both thought we were being invaded. I learned later they’re supposed to be painted in black matte paint, like the Iridium satellites, so they don’t flare as bright. The Iridium burns used to catch the sun and shimmer for five or ten seconds, brighter than almost anything in the sky. I miss those, in a way. They were predictable. The Starlink train is just strange.
I started thinking more about the calendar, too. The autumnal equinox, the cross-quarter days. Halloween is halfway between the equinox and the winter solstice. So is Groundhog’s Day, and May Day, and Lammas on August 1. These aren’t just holidays. They’re old observations of the sun’s position, placed at the midpoints between the astronomical markers. I did a podcast about it. Not many people listened, but it helped me understand why I feel a certain way when the light shifts in October. I don’t know, it’s just something about October.
Hotels are weird. I sleep in the truck.
In Capitol Reef, in October 2011, a friend and I backpacked five miles up the Upper Muley Twist Trail. The ranger said we’d be the only backpackers out there. We camped right by an arch in the cliff side, ate grilled cheese and tomato soup, and slept. It was cool being out there. Just us.
The Lower Rogue became a recurring spot. In 2012, we car-camped at Tucker Flat, then packed light into Blossom Bar. We watched four huge hard-sided fishing boats row through the rapid. We sat in Adirondack chairs on the deck of Paradise Lodge. We hiked out to Mule Creek Canyon and found a sand patch just big enough for the tent, moved rocks for an hour to level the ground, and slept with a loaded gun in its holster near the sleeping bag because I’d seen three sets of little eyes on the rocks past camp. Spooky.
By 2020, I’d refined the logistics. I was camping solo at Cold Creek in the Willamette National Forest. I’d driven up a meandering Forest Service road, past the BLM land where you can’t camp, up about seventeen miles to where the national forest starts and you can just pull off. The road had been paved most of the way, but further up I hit a couple hundred downed trees across the road. Somebody had cut just enough to squeeze a truck through. It was like pick-up sticks. Then the snow started, packed out on the road, and I saw where a couple cars had gone in four feet, backed out, and turned around. I did the same. On the way back I passed a bridge that had washed out in a flood years ago. The old 75-foot structure was just lying on the rocks downriver. I took a couple photos of it.
I camped with the tailgate down, using a propane heater instead of a fire because of burn restrictions. I’d given up on campfires for the most part. They make your clothes smell like wet smoke and they take too long. I had a Jetboil for coffee, an Aeropress, and a cooler with half-and-half. At night I’d walk a hundred yards from the truck, kick the heater on, and sit in a chair with a notebook. The fire ring was empty. I was warm. It felt like cheating, but it worked.
Earlier that evening, before I started recording the podcast, a guy in a white Ram had cruised up the road, pulled onto the spur where I was camped, swung around, and took off. A few minutes later he came back. It’s not a park, it’s not well managed. Sometimes people aren’t well managed either. You just kind of have to be sharp on what’s going around. I also heard some young guys down by the creek junction, probably five or six of them in lifted trucks, doing donuts before sunset. Doing some donuts, yeah. But I just waited till dark, used up all the firewood I’d gathered from a brush pile down the way, and recorded with the tailgate down. The moon came up and cast light on the trees in front of me. I think I saw Venus. The fire was going low. That’s good news.
I learned to build fires the hard way, though. Feather sticks: take a dry stick, peel thin flakes with a knife, leave them attached at the top so they curl like feathers. Cotton balls and Vaseline in a Ziploc bag. Strike a flint rod or just use a lighter. I always bring a lighter. The petroleum jelly burns slowly and hot. In Wyoming once, in September, every piece of burnable wood had been collected by campers before us. We burned pine needles and pine cones. They don’t sustain a cooking fire, but they’ll get you warm enough to think.
The budget was always tight. In 2012, driving the Lost Coast, we figured we could travel for less than $100 a week. Fifty for gas, seven a day for food. It was close, but doable. We slept in the car most nights. In Moab, we found a spot on Kane Creek Road, six or seven miles up, near a pay campsite parking lot. Free. We made camp mochas with condensed milk and chocolate. When it rained, we stayed in the car through the morning. When it cleared, we hiked sandstone canyons. The car was a 1998 Toyota Camry at one point, later a truck with a canopy. You don’t need much. You need a place to sleep and a way to make coffee.
Then you drive back, plug in the cards, and try to make sense of what you brought home.
In October 2011, that meant sitting in a Jackson Hole coffee shop with a Nikon D2H and Photoshop Camera Raw. By September 2012, I had a more deliberate workflow. I’d import the raw captures into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop CS5. I’d bring the highlights up, add contrast to pull up the dynamics in the light, move the clarity slider slightly positive, add a vignette. Each slider had a purpose. The vignette wasn’t decorative. It was to hold the eye in the frame, because the coast at blue hour has a way of bleeding out into nothing if you let it.
I spent a lot of time looking at cameras I couldn’t afford. In Yosemite, in November 2012, I wrote down every model and price. The wanting was almost as consuming as the shooting. Later, I tried to solve gear problems with software. I used Hootsuite for social scheduling until the upload module stayed buggy for years and I jumped ship to Buffer. I produced Alexa flash briefings because they were mostly just filling out a form, no coding required. I rented a GoPro Fusion in 2018 and shot 200 gigabytes of 360 video over Memorial Day weekend. It took eight hours to render six minutes of footage on my laptop. The stitching software ate my graphics card alive. I don’t do much 360 work now, but I’m glad I tried it.
The podcasting started as another way to process the work. I record into a Zoom H4n, then drop the files into Logic Pro 10. I run a compressor to normalize loud and quiet moments, an EQ to pull out odd room tones, a noise gate to strip away low hums. I add a de-esser because my sibilance is aggressive. I watched hip-hop vocal production tutorials to learn how to mix spoken word. Some guy explaining compression in a way that didn’t match anything I was hearing. Sorry. But I learned.
I bought a Behringer X-Touch MIDI controller to see if I could edit Lightroom with physical knobs. It worked, sort of, but I mostly just use a mouse now. The experiment was worth it.
I’m still digging through archives. I sent off a box of Mini DV tapes from 2005-2008 to be converted to MP4. Two hours of footage came back on a thumb drive. Some of it was high school basketball games. Some of it was a wedding I recorded for someone. A lot of it was junk. But there was a clip of my friends from 2007 that I thought was gone. I also found a roll of film I’d shot through a late-90s Canon EOS body I bought for $35. I haven’t developed it yet. The local shop closed, and the mail-in service takes two weeks. I don’t know what’s on it. That’s the point, I guess.
My hard drive situation is a disaster. Four terabytes of duplicates. I ran a program called Gemini to find matching DNG files. I have JPEGs with white borders, resized for Hootsuite, sitting next to raw files I can’t find anymore. The first ten years of my photo archive are smaller than each of the following years because the cameras got hungrier. A Nikon D2H raw file was 4.2 megabytes. Now a D850 raw is 100 megabytes. I don’t shoot a D850. I shoot a Canon 5D Mark III I bought used, and a $35 film camera, and my phone. I don’t know what any of this adds up to. I know that I keep going out. The best images I’ve made came from being cold, wet, lost, or all three. And I know the studio work is where the image becomes what it felt like, but the feeling only exists because I stayed out past dark, past comfortable, past the point where it made sense to keep walking.
I have nothing to teach you. There’s nothing you can learn from me that you won’t learn better by going out and failing. But if you’re out there, eight miles up a trail, kinda lost, with a cliff on one side and dark on the other—set up the tent. Make the coffee. Wait for the light. It probably won’t do what you want. But sometimes it does. And sometimes that’s enough.