Match the Inside with the Outside

Landscape or Fine Art Photography is both a simple activity and a complicated process. The fundamentals are not that difficult to master. Once you figure out the exposure triangle and can get your shutter speed, your aperture, and your ISO to work together, it is a matter of creating a composition and firing off some shots. The complicated part is finding an image that fits the way you feel.

Knowing When You are Being Honest

We walk around with conflicting desires and humans have been discussing this at least since the Ancient Greeks when Plato wrote about it in his Dialogues. The world is also full of paradoxical moments. The trick to making a photograph that represents you authentically is attuning your senses to search for a moment when the outside world resonates with your inner world. 99% of the time this is not happening. We are distracted by problems and hopes, but if you want to find those moments it is possible.

Heaven in a Grain of Sand

William Blake was a British mystical poet and artist who created amazing hybrid works that were so strange they were never very popular during his time. It took European culture time to develop a sophisticated enough taste to see the beauty in strange and sometimes dark artwork. Now, that seems to be no problem for the art world to recognize. People completely missed the genius of Van Gogh during his lifetime, but Francis Bacon was esteemed as a genius, and he had some of the most unconventional habits. Hieronymus Bosch was another great artist who was so radical he had to join a secret society to find patronage. All of these artists have in common an unrelenting faithfulness to their own vision. While the art world is fully capable of curating the strange and the sublime, the socially mediated world of Instagram exerts pressures on people to show only the happy moments, to fake the funk on so many levels. That will never get you there, in my opinion. Only brutally honest feeling will ever make good art.