Ride The Light!
© 1998 William Neill

Like a wave, the light makes its play on the landscape. We watch, wait, gasp and hope. Will the light be film-worthy? Landscape photographers must be keen students of the weather, anticipators of that magic sunbeam. Our job is to see the light!

People have a tendency to take light for granted. After all, that is how most of us navigate through life! As photographers, I think that the best approach is to consider ourselves lifetime students of light. I don't think that I am an expert in light, nor do I feel that I ever will be. The subtleties and varieties are so great that I simply hope to learn more over time. If one assumes that he or she really knows light, then that assumption will limit one's creative potential in photography. If we always seek to learn more and to expand our knowledge and understanding, then our potential is greater.

I discovered this lesson in the early 1980s when I worked at The Ansel Adams Gallery here in Yosemite. Ansel Adams was conducting his summer workshop, and Joel Meyerowitz was one of the teachers. Meyerowitz is a master of color photography, and his book Cape Light is a classic. The nuances of light and color in his imagery are inspirational. I had the fortune of watching him photograph during his class. He pointed out shades of color in his subject that I could not perceive at first, which was shocking to me! After staring for a while, I could see what he had seen. Humbled, I vowed to begin looking closer and harder at my subjects, and to learn more.

Three years ago, I was photographing in Glacier National Park while working on two book projects. Twenty three years earlier, while working a summer job there as a college student, I had begun my life in photography when I started carrying a camera on my many backpacking trips. I had returned to the park after so many years to renew my connection to this special landscape, and to make photographs.

During my early days in Glacier, I had learned another lesson in light. One summer morning, I walked in the dark to an alpine lake with a blank canvas and oil paints. I hoped to capture sunrise on the mountains reflected in the lake, although I had little experience with painting, and none painting nature "live."

As the sunlight struck the peaks and moved downslope, I worked quickly mixing colors and depicting sky, rock, tree and water. I was nineteen, and everything was possible! I blended the shade of green I saw, but by the time I put paint to canvas, the color had changed! It was fascinating to learn that color and light could be so subtle and ever-changing. Not thinking, I simply settled on the colors that seemed to look the best, and I painted on with excitement at the spectacle! The lesson was that painting reality was difficult and interpretive, and what was more important, that light was elusive and wonderful and energizing! I began to see that the expediency and immediacy of photography was better suited to my impatient youthfulness than painting or other artistic outlets.

Back to more recent history! My return to Glacier took me to another mountain lake for sunrise. As I drove away from my campsite in the dark, I wasn't expecting much of a sunrise, as it had rained all night and the sky was still dark with clouds. However, the dawn lit up with color as I set up my view camera with a wide-angle lens. I photographed quickly, metering the light with each exposure and trying to steady the large camera in a stiff wind&emdash;difficult but energizing conditions.

The red light of the sun hit the clouds, then moved down the peaks. The colors changed cinematically as I exposed frame after frame. The result was several fine images, and my favorite is shown here. The moon came out for only one exposure! With broad landscape views such as in this image, one must still consider the essentials of good composition. It is easy to forget when we see such thrilling conditions. The light may be the strongest element that attracts the viewer, but the underpinnings of design must also be strong for the image to hold the viewer's interest for more than the initial look.

For example, the foreground trees are important for both their graphic qualities and tone. The fact that the shapes of the evergreens are clearly defined by the lighter tones of the lake, and that they are black, adds depth to the composition. The proportion of the trees to the rest of the image is small so that they don't compete with the clouds. Part of designing a photograph is deciding the relative importance of the different objects in the frame, and in this case, the different qualities of light on those objects. The clouds occupy half of the image because of the dramatic lighting conditions! The image's horizon line, in this case the lake, is placed low in the frame to emphasize the light in the sky.

I photographed the magic light as it transformed Glacier's landscape before me, not thinking about that sunrise painting session of years before, or of Mr. Meyerowitz's lesson, yet I know that I carry those early revelations with me. Now and again we all forget things we have learned. As Bill Murray portrays in the movie Groundhog Day, there are many lessons we must learn over and over again before we meet with success! Perhaps, if we are to remain students of light, our success will be that we will never finish learning our lesson, but that we keep on learning, and riding the light!