Originality in Landscape Photography

Before getting into the topic of Originality in Landscape Photography, I want to do a bit of quick housekeeping. Before the housekeeping, here’s a recent photo.

Housekeeping #1: My workshops have been filling up quickly in the past few years, but I’ve also been getting a regular number of cancellations. It’s about two per workshop. If there’s a workshop you want to take, email me to get onto the waiting list. I recently had cancellations on five workshops. Three were filled from the waiting lists. These workshops had waiting lists but the people on them had already made other plans:

• Feb 23-25: Winter Along the Gunflint: 1 Space

• May 16-19: Teddy Roosevelt National Park: 2 Spaces

I’ve also opened up all my online classes for 2024. The night sky one is a third full. The Lightroom one typically fills up with students after they finish an in-person workshop. Lots of open spaces for the Lightroom class now.

• July 1, 2, 16 (three sessions): Online Night Photography Course: Open

• November  4, 6, 11, 13 (four sessions): Online Lightroom Class: Open

2025 Workshops: I’m currently planning my 2025 photo workshops. They will likely open for registration in late April. I’ll have two registration periods. The first is for alumni and Facebook Subscribers. I open a limited number of spaces to those two groups. The second registration period is when I open up all the spaces remaining for the alumni registration plus the spaces I reserved for public registration.

My workshops have always had a lot of repeat participants, and generally they have occurred with cohorts of participants that all did their first workshop at about the same time. They do more and eventually move onto other things. I feel like right now a new cohort is taking shape. It’ll be fun to see how it evolves. I really love watching participants make lasting friendships on my workshops and end up traveling together. I had two participants who randomly ran into each other in a parking lot in Africa once. It’s so much fun to hear about these things.

Housekeeping #2: I’ve been considering added a paid subscription option here on Substack, but I’m unsure if I want to do that based on the recent controversies. Enough people have pledged money that it would be worth it. But I’m considering moving my newsletter back to my website like I used to do it. I’ve gone through a few newsletter providers in the past few years because they closed and now there’s a good option for moving things back to my own website again. I may end up doing that. But that would be a project for later in the year. Regardless, I plan on moving a few of the older essays in newsletters to my website’s blog and delete them here as the year goes on.

Housekeeping #3: When I first moved to the north shore of Lake Superior, I worked as a guide at Lutsen Resort for a couple of years. I believe my last year with them was in 2009. A fire recently destroyed the historic lodge. I wrote an essay about it, and Minnesota Monthly published it. You can read it here: Essay: Lutsen Lodge Was a Nexus of Connection.

I do watercolor sketches as a hobby, and here’s one from my last visit to the Lutsen main lodge while it still stood. While I have a few photos of the lodge, I don’t have any that I really like except for one. It’s the wedding photo in the above linked essay.

Housekeeping #4: I'm given a slideshow at the Grand Marais public library on February 21 at 7pm about my bikepacking trip across northern Minnesota. I rode Minnesota’s new Border to Border Touring Route. Seating starts at 6:30pm.

Originality in Photography

Since I wrote my last newsletter Photos that Echo Photos that Others Took, I’ve been thinking about originality. This all hit me on the head when I saw a set of photos shared on Threads by multiple people.

The set of photos were iconic shots from a popular place to photograph. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with posting iconic shots. They are iconic because the original photo nailed the composition, location and lighting; and they perfectly represent an area. Then everyone flocks to the location to repeat the shot. Nowadays, it seems repetition causes a location to eventually become iconic, too (I can think of one little ugly duckling of a sea stack on Lake Superior that gets photographed all the time). There's even a board game about photographing iconic spots.

Anyway, the comment accompanying the four photos was something like, “[Location] has endless potential.”

While I haven’t been there before, I know people who have. They have said that it’s wild landscape with a lot of possibilities. So, maybe it does have “endless potential.”

If so, then posting just the iconic shots that have been shot by many others seems to ignore the potential in favor of images that have been proven in the past to be popular.

Maybe it is just my frame of mind right now and looking back at my old work digital work from back in March 2004 when I bought a Nikon D70 until my work from last year and feeling like it sort of isn’t me anymore, but even if it is my state of mind, I don’t see how you can represent a location as having “endless potential” if you’re just showing the shots that we’ve all seen before from multiple people, albeit with a slightly different editing technique.

Is this what photography has become? Endless repetition of iconic now, iconic always, and iconic only.

I shot this image of a skin-on-frame kayak parked at a stop sign during a flood event on June 26, 2004. I built this kayak and paddle. I don’t own either anymore.

Let’s stop.

Let’s stop and think about this.

Let’s stop and think about this and decide that in our photos we’re going to find those endless potentials.

We’re going to look for imaginative ways to photograph the world. We’re going to look for locations that aren’t iconic and figure out how to photograph them.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with chasing iconic shots. It’s fun. It’s instructive.

But let’s not let our photography languish there.

This little pine tree standing on a rocky shore of an inland make for a perfect night sky shot, but instead of photographing it the same way it always gets photographed I had my wife paddle under it for sunset in this shot. I found a new way to photograph it.

I have always believed that photography mashes up a lot of engaging elements, such as curiosity, creativity, math, science and imagination and also exploration, discovery and reward. If all we are doing is repeating iconic shots then we’re not being curious, imaginative and are failing at exploring.

Our rewards and discoveries will be reduced if we’re just photographing other people’s discoveries.

When I was learning photography one of my teachers told the class that we should imagine ourselves and our subject as an atom. We’re the electron and the nucleus is the subject. We should circle around the subject (physically and metaphorically), try different heights and come back in different conditions. I found when I think about my subjects that way that I get curious and imaginative.

Next time you’re out there take a moment and wonder about what interests you beside the iconic scene. Take time to explore the obscure. Get curious. Get imaginative. Go explore and make new discoveries. Be the electron.

Most of all embrace the endless potentials with originality.

The old icons are getting a little dusty.

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter that’s one part housekeeping and one part ranting. I’ll see you again in two weeks.