gdanmitchell
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Tom, it was a pleasure to run into you on my trip. (Sorry I had to run off so quickly - the light was going! ;-)
I hesitate to admit how long I've been backpacking in the Sierra Nevada. Let's just use the term "decades" to describe the time. (I've calculated that I have spent somewhere between a year and a half and two years of my life backpacking it total, and that doesn't count the car-camping and day hiking.)
I've gone through several phases in terms of the role of photography in my back-country experience. Many years ago, I was primarily interested in the back-country for its own sake - I simply wanted to be in the high country of the Sierra. I carried a camera or cameras, but back then I did not carry most of the associated gear: extra lenses, tripod, etc. I gradually became more serious about this photography back then, but it was not the primary goal. Over time I got to the point where I was carrying two bodies (Pentax ME and MX) and a small set of several prime lenses.
Then, a number of decades ago, I began to regard the camera as an impediment to experiencing wilderness. Over a period of years I diminished my camera gear on pack trip to the point that I was carrying only a small Olympus Stylus 35mm camera with no additional gear at all. At times I had to force myself to make photographs, mostly out of a sense of obligation to bring back a record of my travels. At that time - and a wonderful time it was! - the point was the wilderness and not the photography.
Then things changed again. It might have been the advent of digital cameras. I recall an inflection point on a long trip (two trips, actually) to Alaska in the late 1990s, when I carried an early 4MP non-DSLR digital camera and I began to think again as a photographer. Or it might have been a maturing of my relationship to the natural world. At a certain age the sheer physical (and spiritual) joy of traveling through high places is enough, but at a slightly later age I began to think more consciously about the places and the experience. In any case, it was probably about 15 years ago when photography again began to become the goal of the travel and not just an ancillary activity.
One can, I think, make good photographs even while focusing mainly on the travel and exploration - but it is much harder. You have to develop an ability to see quickly and a habit of forcing yourself to sometimes slow down and ponder a bit. Some subjects do seem to simply appear in front of you, and they may not require a whole lot of thought or contemplation or searching. In the same way that I can put myself in the mindset of the trail in about 30 minutes now - it might have taken a few days in the distant past - I can put myself in the photographer mode very quickly, too.
However, if you really want to know a landscape, I now think that you almost need to stop and not move, at least not in the place-to-place sense, for some time. You, or at least I, need to stay in one place for hours or days - often a length of time that I would earlier have regarded with fear, fear of boredom. I need to slowly poke around and look more closely and let the place soak in, and I need to see it in more than one way, as time of day, season, and weather reveal aspects of it that I would not see while walking through.
Of course, this turns out to be a kind of (often pleasant, but still) quite difficult work. I know it may sound bizarre to those who haven't done it, but sometimes it isn't easy to get up an hour before dawn to go out and look for more photos, and sometimes you might want to just sit around camp with friends rather than wandering off up and down searching, and from time to time the idea of eating dinner at a normal time can be very tempting! ;-)
Dan
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