I am not a patient person. I don’t particularly like being still. I like doing, moving, feeling productive. And yet, if I want to make good photographs, I have had to learn how to be patient.
Observing. Still. Present.
Somehow, these things coexist inside me at the same time. I have to be restless enough to start a hike before sunrise, but still enough to wait when I get there.
For a long time, I struggled with that dichotomy. I would arrive somewhere beautiful, feel the urge to move on too quickly, or become frustrated when a moment didn’t immediately reveal itself. I thought I needed to do more in order to get what I was looking for.
One day last summer, I was hiking in the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness. I reached the summit expecting the mountain to be right in front of me. Instead, it was completely shrouded in fog.
There was a time I would have left.
But I didn’t.
I sat down and waited.
At first, nothing changed. The fog held steady, thick and unmoving. But slowly, almost without announcement, the mountain began to emerge. Not all at once, but in waves. The fog would pull back for a moment before drifting in again, revealing and concealing the mountain in turn.
I didn’t leave with what I thought I came for. Not exactly.
But I left with something better.
A different understanding of waiting. Not waiting for perfection, but simply waiting long enough to see what is already there begin to reveal itself.
It's tough to do. You spend all this time and effort getting to a place, and when it doesn't work out the way you planned, it's disappointing.
Sometimes we try so hard to create the photograph we imagined that we miss the one unfolding in front of us.
The mountain that morning was never what I expected it to be. It appeared and disappeared. It changed from moment to moment. It was gone in the perfect light and reappeared in the harsh daylight. But perhaps that was the lesson.
Photography is, at its heart, an act of observation. And observation requires patience.
Sometimes the most important thing we can do is stay a little longer and see what reveals itself.
Plus, it's never a bad day sitting at the foot of a mountain…
