As I write this, I'm winging my way to San Francisco to join my friend Jeff Fielding for a few days of hunting photographs. We'll spend the first day in San Francisco as Jeff shows me around the town, then Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday will be a visit to Yosemite, a place I've never been.
I know. It's the shrine of Ansel Adams and many other landscape and nature photographers, so I've got a lot of precedent in front of me, and it's probably going to be tough to come up with something remotely different. I'm sure I'll be unable to resist the shots where my tripod will rest in the same holes where hundreds of photographers have gone before, so expect to see a few of the iconic images as I interpret them.
But who knows? Maybe, like the Smokies, I'll find something I wasn't expecting and make a photograph that speaks to me… and to you too.
(I'm actually flying over Mono Lake at this very moment, home to our new arsenic-based alien overlords :-) and while I had hoped to spend a little time there too, it will have to pass on this trip. The Tioga Pass Road is closed because of snow, so it would take forever to get to the lake from Yosemite Valley and our lodgings. So, again, next time.)
I'm sure there will be plenty of place to go and to photograph while I'm here, so I plan to take my time—and my own advice—and look beyond the surface of things to try to show you, as Ansel said, "the equivalent of what I saw and felt."
Here's hoping.