I am an enthusiast landscape and photographer and astrophotographer. There is something very satisfying about capturing an image. When you gaze at a surreal scene in real life, you are totally embedded in the context. You feel the cold chill on your neck, wet from the 2 hour hike that you’ve just finished. The light, which until now has been a faint glow on the horizon, has just broken free from the landscape and pierced your iris. All at once you feel the heat of the morning sun, having traveled one hundred million miles to get here. It warms you like a cup of hot tea and your goosebumps retract.
Now, you might take out your phone and snap a picture at this moment to show your friends, but something’s amiss. The picture looks terrible and uninteresting. The challenge of a landscape photographer is to capture a scene using elements which are almost entirely outside of your control, and enrich it with enough context or mystery to convey the desired emotion to the viewer.
I have fallen in love with photography in the same way that I fell in love with music (I was a pretty good singer a couple of decades ago). I don’t know if other people view my work and appreciate the meaning, but I enjoy it, and since I took the picture, I know exactly what the context was.
Take this photo, for example:
Five minutes before I took this picture I was asleep. I drove out to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, USA the previous night to photograph the Milky Way galaxy. After a few hours of astrophotography, I found an east-facing overlook and parked my car at it, then I set my alarm for an hour before sunrise and when to sleep. My alarm went off and I saw the scene above out of the window of my car. A truly incredible sight to behold.
Here are some other pictures, but there are many more on my instagram feed (stevekamerman)
