A couple of months ago, I asked whether photography can be considered a numbers game. My answer was yes – but not in the volume of photos you take. Instead, it’s how many times you go out and take photos in the first place. I experienced a great reminder of this recently.
Before I tell the story, I should say that – as a landscape photographer – it can be easy to fall into the pattern of thinking that landscape photography is a static genre. The clouds will change, and a tree may fall, but things don’t change very much fundamentally. Even if you miss a beautiful sunset, there will always be another.
But the reality is different. Landscape photography is filled with low-probability events to capture. A flash of lightning appears in the distance; an animal walks into the perfect spot in the frame; the Northern Lights reach much farther south than usual. (I hope some of you enjoyed that last one recently.) Even if some of these events will reoccur one day, the timescales involved may be too long to realistically photograph it again. Just like in street photography or wildlife photography, you may only get one bite at the apple.
These sorts of rare occurrences aren’t usually the type of thing you can plan for. But the more often that you go out and take pictures, the more often you’ll experience some of them. It’s simple math: the more you do, the more you see. I wouldn’t have been able to capture many of my favorite moments as a landscape photographer if I didn’t roll those dice and keep going out, sometimes even when I didn’t expect to get anything good.
Very recently, I experienced something that felt totally rare and unique as a landscape photographer and really hit this message home. I just returned from the beautiful country of Iceland – always one of my favorite places for landscape photography – testing a series of lenses for our next reviews. And while I spent most of the trip exploring less-traveled areas of the country, I also returned to few of my old favorite places. Chief among them was the Jokulsarlon glacier lagoon.
I’m sure that you’ve seen photos of this area before. In one direction, bright blocks of ice wash up on a black sand beach. In the other direction, a glacier looms over a massive lake dotted with icebergs. Jokulsarlon is a beautiful location for photography. But it also ranks among the most crowded and oft-photographed places in Iceland. Although I still love it both for the nature and for the photography, I don’t kid myself – at this point, it’s pretty touristy for my taste.
Given that, I only allocated one sunset there this time. But I do love Jokulsarlon at the end of the day, and you can’t go too wrong there photographically. Walking a little bit from the crowds still gives you some of the raw beauty that Iceland is known for, over-photographed though it may be.
But this day, I was in luck. After shooting at Jokulsarlon for about an hour, I was excited to see a rainbow suddenly form over the beach off to the northeast! The rainbow only lasted for a few minutes, but it was a really wonderful sight – easily enough to make me glad that I went out there for photography.
However, this moment alone wasn’t what inspired me to write this article. Of course the rainbow was an incredible sight, but thousands of people visit this beach every day. Given the erratic nature of Iceland’s weather, I’m sure that I’m hardly the first person to photograph a rainbow at Jokulsarlon.
But maybe I was the first person to photograph a rose there?
Let me elaborate. After the rainbow disappeared, and sunset began to wind down, the crowds dissipated – and I was thinking about following them. Although the light at blue hour was pretty nice, this was near the end of my trip, and I’d been camping for the previous week. Should I leave and get some sleep, or was it worth staying out for a little more photography? That was the question.
I’m always going to be glad that I chose to stick around. The photo that resulted might be my favorite from the entire trip. And it captures something that is too improbable to ever plan for: a rose made out of ice.
There’s no trickery going on here – no optical illusion or Photoshop. The ice in the foreground really was just a thin spindle supporting a larger piece of ice on top. How it stayed standing, I don’t know. But pair it with the reflection below, and it’s shaped just like a rose made of the most delicate ice. There’s even a petal off to the right.
I spent about a minute photographing this frozen flower, quickly trying different compositions, knowing that I was seeing something fleeting. Most of all, I positioned my camera so that the background behind the rose would be as bright and large as possible, helping it stand out more clearly. It was the most important subject in the photo by a mile, so of course I wanted it to shine.
After I took a few photos, inevitably, the top of the rose fell into the glacial waters. The scene was gone. If anything, I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. The improbable structure had every right to disappear before I had time to set up my photo, but somehow, it stuck around for a little bit. I was left in awe of the ephemeral beauty that I had just seen and had the chance to photograph.
Things like this aren’t possible to plan for, not at all. It doesn’t matter how good of a photographer you are. There’s no way to conjure these moments except by going out more often.
My hope with this article is simply to inspire you to go out and photograph more often. Although I’ve approached it from the perspective of a landscape photographer, what I wrote applies to any type of photography – even more so if your subjects are fast-paced and constantly changing. I’m convinced that many of the best street photos taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson or Vivian Maier exist not just because of their skill, but also because of how many times they simply went out there and took pictures. And no genre of photography is an exception.
As photographers, there are many things pulling our attention in different directions – camera equipment, settings, and even the creative side of things. But the most important part of photography is just taking photos. Go out more often, and you’ll run into the most amazing little moments to photograph. I think you’ll always be glad you made that choice.