Views of Utah
Time does seem to fly by rather quickly at time. Looking at the calendar I see that it has been nearly 10 days since I returned from my Utah trip. Since my return I’ve not touched my cameras, save to take out the CF cards and copy a few remaining images onto the computer.
Today I had lunch with Earl Moore of Meandering Passage. I was curious about his recent trip to Alaska. He had many interesting stories to tell and, as usual, we spent a good 2 hours together talking and, in general, enjoying each other’s company.
About an hour or so into the conversation I got this idea for a post and asked Earl about his experience with it. It’s something that happens to me a lot and I just wondered if Earl was affected by it. It call it “settling”. I asked:
Earl, how was your transition from Alaska back to Salisbury?
What I meant by that was how long did it take to get back to normal after having his visual senses overloaded by all of the beauty of his Alaska trip? He said that, although he returned a while ago, today was the first day that he had touched his camera. He indicated that while he was happy to be back home, it has taken him a while to be able to ‘see’ Salisbury again.
Saturated or desensitized?
I experience the same phenomenon. It generally takes me about 10 days to settle and get used to my surroundings again. I don’t know if it is that it takes me that long to desaturate, going from photographing a couple of times per week to doing it every day, twice a day. Or, does it take that long for my mind to readjust to the subject matter? Here, green, green, green, lots of trees, streams, etc. Utah, browns and reds punctuated by the occasional bit of water, surrounded by mountains, cactus, desert sage, and all manner of lizards and desert wildlife.
Views of North Carolina
I tend to think that it is the newness of the place and a bit of sensory overload. It’s so easy to notice things when you go to a new place. Someone who has lived there for a time would probably never notice these things. It’s similar to a constant sound or touch, after a while, your mind simply tunes it out and to hear it or feel it again, you have to pay close attention to it, change the volume, or move the touch point around. I think that going to a different location allows you to hear the music or feel the sound, but when you return home, your senses are dulled and you have to ‘settle’ a bit before you can reestablish that connection.
What do you think? Does this happen to you?
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I takes me quite a while to “settle” after most intense experiences. Different people handle that trasition in a variety of ways, I’m sure, but I need some adjustment time. I wish I were going to see Snowy Canyon tomorrow. Lovely.
It does happen to me for sure. I experienced it, returning from Australia last year. It took me a couple of weeks to adjust to my normal surroundings. But I also noticed that I compared my country to what I saw in Australia. Perhaps to make sure that where I live is special too. I try to look at it from a visitor’s view.
@Anita: Snow Canyon is 4 miles long, from end to end. I’m sure that you’d absolutely love it! I could certainly go back and spend days upon days, mornings and evenings, photographing it.
@Andre: There are lots of parts of Charlotte that I’ve not explored. Maybe I should look upon it with new eyes. The eyes of a visitor. Hmmm.
Hot dang Paul, I’m experiencing that right now as well as in the past. I always wondered why it was like that for me. Perhaps I try to take a rest from being on my visual and mental “toes” as I tend to be when I’m in a different place. Is it just me or can it be mentally taxing to be on that heightened sensory state, many times looking for a photo opportunity?
On a side note regarding that last comment, I did read this article on naturephotographers.net by Richard Bernabe — It Doesn’t Take a Brain Surgeon… — and now I’m pondering the possibility of approaching things differently, letting subjects find me than constantly looking for subjects. I don’t know what any of that really means in practical terms just yet.
But back to the subject of your post. I’ve experienced that kind of feeling that you are talking about twice in the past year that I’ve visited places. Prior to that, I had never really been on a trip where I was thinking about photography beyond the usual snapshots so this feeling is still new to me.
It’s nice to hear of others who experience this too. Cheers!
Nope, doesn’t happen to me. I just need to stop thinking about whatever, and start thinking about the now and in a couple of minutes I’m there.
Good to read that this happens not only to me. I was on a mission in Sri Lanka for the last 11 days of may and that required me to do a lot of documentary photography for the project. Of course there were occasions to sneak in some pictures which I wanted for their content, their expression and their beauty. But since then I have taken out my camera only twice and without really usable results. I know this from previous missions but unfortunately this time it seems to take longer to recover from the mental overload: too much beauty but poor, sad, war- and disaster-stricken people. So I will go for a self-assignment the next weekend to a well known place and try to calm down: no people, only landscape and light.
No, it normally does not happen to me, but this may be connected to the fact that I am not a good “vacation shooter” at all. While abroad I have always some urge to document, and that frequently keeps me from letting loose. My best vacation photos are taken when I am completely indifferent to the actual place. They could have been taken at home as well (apart from there being no sea, etc), i.e. they are taken when I feel at home, regardless of where I am.
Fact is, that when you are in Paris and stand in front of the Eiffel tower, there is absolutely no need to take an image of it. You can as well turn around or take a photograph of some detail that could be part of every steel construction. I mean, it’s no crime to add the ten billionth image of the Eiffel tower, maybe it’s even the one the world has waited for, but chances are that it’s not. You may still decide to do it, and so do I frequently, but the real challenge is, to get the cliché out of your head, to see the Eiffel tower as what it is, a peculiar steel construction with a lot of interesting details and a challenging geometry, not as the icon that you have in your mind when you think of it, even if you’ve never been there.
And at home the challenge is reverse. You have to see what you know like you see what you don’t. You have to get rid of the habit of reduction. It is normal human practice and it is important for our daily functioning, that we reduce the world to what is of immediate importance to us. We don’t only do that on a conceptional level, no we also blank out visually. We don’t see what is between the things that we need to see.
Photography is much about those “betweens”, and in order to see them, I need a certain relaxed mood. Normally when I take the camera, I fall into that mood within seconds, and it’s not the ordinary, it’s the extra-ordinary that sometimes keeps me out of it.
Paul, this is an interesting topic, and I don’t think it’s all that unusual for a photographer with a passion for nature to feel that way. I experienced something very similar after I spent a week at Yosemite in March 2007. Nothing quite compared with the grandeur I witnessed there but I do think the sheer act of taking photos several hours a day for a week put me into overdrive. I just needed a break. I was exhausted. Then there were hundreds of photos to go through…
There is probably something in there about taking our familiar surroundings for granted as well. As you mention, “sometimes seeing things the locals don’t.” Our weeds are a foreigners’ flowers.