For the past thirty years, I have considered myself a landscape photography enthusiast. I have cameras. I have lenses. I have tripods. I have memory cards, camera bags, filters, batteries, cleaning supplies, and enough photography equipment to give the impression that I know what I’m doing. I have also spent thirty years looking at beautiful landscapes and thinking, “That would make a great photograph.”
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.
After three decades, I’m beginning to suspect that the problem may not be the landscape. It may be me. This is not an easy thing for a photography enthusiast to admit. Thirty years is a long time to be practicing something without becoming particularly good at it. At some point, you begin to wonder whether you’re actually developing your skills or simply becoming more experienced at making the same mistakes.
I have learned a great deal about photography over the years. I understand light. I understand composition. I understand exposure. I understand depth of field. At least I understand what all those things are. Whether I consistently manage to use them correctly is another matter. But somewhere along the way, I discovered something I seem to be considerably better at. Building websites. This was unexpected.
I originally thought the website was supposed to be a place to display my photographs. Instead, I discovered that I really enjoyed building the place. I could spend hours choosing fonts, adjusting margins, changing layouts, rearranging menus, modifying galleries and deciding exactly how much empty space should exist between two photographs. I could obsess over the appearance of a website with the kind of concentration I have never been able to summon while standing in front of a magnificent mountain range. Give me a spectacular sunrise and I might take a few photographs and go home. Give me a slightly misaligned navigation menu and I will spend the entire afternoon fixing it. That should probably have been my first clue. Over time, the website became increasingly sophisticated. The photographs, unfortunately, did not.
I would take a photograph, process it, look at it and think, “That’s pretty good.” Then I would put it on the website and immediately become much more interested in the website. Maybe the photograph needed a better presentation. Perhaps a different gallery. Maybe a larger image. Maybe a smaller image. Maybe a different background. Maybe the caption should be centered. Maybe there shouldn’t be a caption. Perhaps the entire page should be redesigned.
And suddenly I was having a wonderful time. The photograph hadn’t improved. But the website looked fantastic. Eventually I had to face an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps I wasn’t really a photographer who happened to build websites. Perhaps I was a website designer who happened to own a camera. This would explain why I have spent thirty years chasing great photographs but seem to have developed a much stronger relationship with website themes. A landscape photographer sees a beautiful mountain and thinks about light, composition and timing. I see a beautiful mountain and think about how good it would look as a full-width hero image. A photographer looks at a sunset and asks whether the colors, exposure and dynamic range work. I look at it and wonder whether the homepage needs a little more white space.
At this point, I have to wonder if I chose the wrong hobby. Perhaps my real talent was sitting in front of a computer all along. The irony is that the better my websites become, the more obvious the problem becomes. The website looks professional. The navigation works. The photographs are displayed beautifully. Everything is clean and organized. And then someone actually looks at the photographs. That’s when the illusion falls apart.
The website says, “This is the work of a serious photographer.” The photographs quietly respond, “Don’t get carried away.” After thirty years, I’ve finally learned something important. Being enthusiastic about photography and being good at photography are two completely different things. Fortunately, being enthusiastic about building websites and being good at building websites might also be two completely different things. So there is still hope.
Perhaps I can continue taking photographs, continue building websites, and eventually figure out which one I’m actually good at. Although, if I’m being honest, I think I already know. After thirty years of landscape photography, I may have finally discovered my true artistic medium. It isn’t mountains. It isn’t deserts. It isn’t sunsets. It’s the space between the photographs. And apparently, I’m really good at arranging it.