With the recent snow fall, I’ve been out shooting every day.  Snow does something special with common, everyday scenes.

If I had been out with one of my photography friends, it may well have happened that I was the only one to see this.  My friend would likely be shooting something else, equally compelling to them.  What is it that causes us to make one photograph and not another?  I’ve been out shooting with several friends and it is a routine topic of conversation – we all shoot in the same area and come back with different sets of images.   John Kennerdell, writing in The Online Photographer said:

‘My experience has been that we don’t choose our best subjects. They come to us, insistent and demanding.’

Your best subjects will be different from my best subjects.  What is insistent and demanding to one of us may not be to the other.  For each of us there is a connection that forms with a subject that we choose or perhaps it chooses us and that connection can be quite insistent.  The connection to the scene above yelled at me when I was taking the dogs for a walk a few minutes earlier and wasn’t going to settle down until I came back and did what I was supposed to do.  This sort of thing is quite common in the arts.  I’ll bet you have experienced something similar to that.

I suppose we could leave it that there is a connection of some kind and not look further into the nature of that connection.  It seems to me though, that there is something deeper going on here, something I would call spiritual and my intention for creating this blog is to explore that spiritual element.  I have found that I am in good company with that interest.  Minor White, for example, says

‘No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.’

I have been a spiritual seeker for many years.  I started out in a pretty conservative Protestant church and over the years have come to a broader view of spirituality and religion.  I still go to church but the source of my spiritual thinking is as much the world as it is the Bible.  Without getting into too much detail, the following summarizes the important part of my beliefs that relate to photography:

• God is in everything, everything is in God
• Everything in the Universe is connected

So what does it mean to go out and make photographs?  For me photographing God’s creation is recording some faint trace of God.  This doesn’t make every trip out with a camera a solemn occasion.  It fact it is usually a freeing and joyous experience, sometimes tinged with a bit of humor.

Meister Eckhart, a German mystic and theologian of the late 13th and early 14th centuries, seems to be speaking directly to me when he says

‘This then, is salvation: to marvel at the beauty of created things and to marvel at the beauty of their Creator’

Pete Myers, a photographer writing on the Luminous Landscape website, seems to be echoing Meister Eckhart when he says

‘When I am out in the field photographing, I enter what for me is a ‘sacred space.’’

It would be unwise to overinterpret what Mr. Myers says.  He may disagree with the thrust of this blog post but he does go on to say that he is there to be open to the moment and be absorbed in the beauty of it.  For me, it is indeed a sacred space.  It is God’s creation and one of our joys in life is to appreciate it.

More on this later.