It had been a long winter! Finally spring is here in the deserts of the southwest. While not a banner year, there are still abundant wildflowers to be found, the thunderstorms are blowing, the snow is melting, and the world is alive yet again.

For a number of personal reasons photography had taken a back seat to other priorities these past few weeks, still the knowledge of the glowing canyons and the mountain meadows waiting for me fills me with hope. They will be there when I'm ready and the experience will only be enhanced by absence.

A couple of months ago I assumed the role of Editor-in-Chief for Nature Photographers Online Magazine. It's a fun and rewarding position and keeps me busy reading (even more) about photography from some talented authors, both well-known and not-so-well-known (yet?).

I would like to take the opportunity to thank the editors at Rob Galbraith for kindly mentioning my site in a recent post. The attention it generated is testament to the popularity and quality of the site.

Guy Tal

Slide Show Presentation in Torrey, UT - June 16, 2007

On June 16th, I will be presenting a slide show under the auspices of the Entrada Institute's Saturday Night Event program. Admission is free and I will welcome seeing any of you there. For those who don't know the area, Torrey is located right outside Capitol Reef National Park, and close to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument. There is no shortage of beautiful scenery close by for anyone who wishes to spend a day outdoors before joining me for the presentation at the Robber's Roost Bookstore.

Questioning the "Art of Seeing"

In a term perhaps borrowed from Aldous Huxley, many have described creative Photography as "The Art of Seeing" - a concept that seems somewhat logical as both photography and seeing are about impressions created by light. Still, photography and seeing are different in many ways. A case can be made that they are not only unrelated, but in some ways may even be at complete opposites.

Consider what seeing means to you. In the waking hours your eyes are continuously open, constantly processing visual information and deriving context and meaning, not from any one impression, but from a sequence or progression of images. Every now and then you blink and lose an instance which, in the overall scheme of seeing is rarely even recorded and is completely insignificant. Photography in this sense is the exact opposite - the camera is blind most of the time and has no sense of context or time or progression. For an instance, it blinks open and captures an image - an instant that is more meaningful than all the time spent in dark disconnect from its surroundings.

To put it another way - seeing is about creating meaning from a continuous stream of visual information, where any given instance is meaningless. Photography, on the other hand, is about creating meaning from one fleeting instance, where all events preceding and following it are irrelevant.

Photography in this sense is not really an art of seeing, but rather the art of perceiving. Where seeing is passive and reactive, creating a photograph is a deliberate and proactive endeavor. Creative photographs are created not through absorbing information over time but in using available elements and light to explicitly define a meaning, perhaps even to create a new one.