William Neill Photography

When Ansel Adams gave lectures late in his life, he made a point of letting his audience know that he had worked for 60 years as a commercial photographer. Although famed for his art, he accepted assignments and projects that helped pay the bills and allowed him to travel around the country while pursuing personal image-making along the way.

For example, during a break on a project for Kodak in the Southwest, he made his famous photographs of aspens in New Mexico. During World War II, while he worked on a documentary project on the Japanese internment camp of Manzanar near Lone Pine, California, Adams photographed two icons of landscape photography--"Winter Sunrise, The Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine", and "Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar". Adams was out in the field long and often, whether photographing a job or making art.

Nothing can improve your photography more than practice and hard work. Practice is the process of becoming ready to make a great image. Those past experiments and failures, the mental calculations for exposure, setting up your tripod quickly before the light changes, knowing how to refine a composition from many years in front of the light box and behind the camera&emdash;all have a cumulative value. There are no shortcuts for the experience that allows you to be instinctive. After many years of work, decision-making can become intuitive and your own vision has a chance to surface. Intuition, not technology or gagetry, is the key to vision.

A few years ago, I traveled to Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada to work on a book on the colors of nature. The assignment was to photograph turquoise glacial lakes, and glacial crevasses and caves to show the ice-filtered, blue light from inside. I was told about an ice cave that I hoped would show the glowing blue I had seen in other photographs, but when I walked inside the cave, the light did not seem very blue. I photographed for about an hour around the opening where I could see that some light passing through. I hoped that my eyes were correcting for the blueness, and that the film would show that color more intensely. I tried a variety of compositions in case the blue came through. Finally, I figured that, if blue light was there, I must have it on film by now.

Now I shifted gears. While I had been working on the job at hand, I noticed some more interesting forms further in the cave. The stripped patterns and scalloped walls showed great potential. I worked for another hour at the edge of available light, making exposures in the four to eight minute range. I played with the composition, seeing how the lines of striation moved through the frame. I adjusted the proportion of cave floor to ice, alternated between vertical and horizontal framing, and changed my camera position for different perspectives. Finally satisfied, I hiked back to my van.

That first hour or so spent "working" was like a sketching process. I had time to absorb the mood of the place. All the while, the ice dripped on me and my gear. My consolation was that it was drier inside the cave than outside in the rain! The technical concerns facing me, the extreme depth of field (I could easily touch the ice ceiling above my head) and long exposure times, were similar to problems I had "practiced" when photographing many other situations before, for example in the slot canyons of the Southwest. I compensated for the film's reciprocity failure at long exposures by doubling the meter's given exposure. By adjusting my 4x5 camera's movements, I could use a moderate aperture of f/32 so that my exposure times weren't too long. At f/64, the exposures would have been nearly half an hour! The solutions were second nature.

My blue ice images were not so blue, and so were not used in the book. The great thickness of the ice did not allow enough light to pass through for the blue effect. When I focused on the area of the cave that excited me, the results were much better. The ice cave photograph shown here has appeared as a limited edition print in gallery exhibits, in a book of my best images, Landscapes of the Spirit , and variations on this composition have been published in several magazine articles. In any case, I wouldn't have found the cave had it not been for my work. Sometimes the "work" and "art" images are the same image. With my ice cave images, only the "art" image worked. Sometimes neither works. The one thing I do know is that practice works.