Waiting for the light
On the unglamorous part of landscape photography — the two hours of nothing that make the fifteen minutes worth showing up for.
Most of what I do with a camera is wait. Not in a meditative way — usually cold, often slightly lost, checking a weather app that has already been wrong once that morning.
The ridge photograph took four hours of walking and about fifteen minutes of usable light. That ratio sounds bad until you realise the walking is not overhead. It is how you learn where to stand.
What I actually watch for
Three things, in this order:
- Separation. Layered hills only read as layers when there is haze between them. Too clear and it flattens into one shape.
- Direction. Side light at a low angle, or nothing.
- Edges. If the brightest thing in the frame is not the subject, I am in the wrong place.
Everything else — the histogram, the aperture, whether I brought the right lens — sorts itself out once those three are true.
The part nobody photographs
There is a version of this where I tell you about the gear. It would be more useful to say that I got the ridge shot on the second visit, and that the first visit produced nothing at all except knowing which way the light came over.