One side note: Judging from site stats and a few remarks I've heard offline, a number of people seem to be having trouble with the concept of a "photoessay". What I'm doing as I write this is giving the reader a sense of the day I was having as I took these photographs. Is it occasionally self-referential? Yes, and it would have to be - I was conscious of the fact that I was out taking photos for this photoessay, in fact that was most of what I was doing on that hike, so to omit all that was self-refential from this article would be to tell much less than the full truth about my subject. In fact, I would be skewing the view shared of that trip in a manner that would wholly transform the perceived experience as seen by the reader into something which was never had, or never approximated even closely on the day in question, as I headed out on this looping path I took through the Gold Coast.

Part of the experience of shooting for this page is the experience of a little failure, especially in the beginning. Nothing abnormal about this; usually even a professional photographer takes far more shots than he uses, the very selection process itself being part of his act of creation. During this hike, this particular amateur was having a good day, far more of the shots I took ending up being used than discarded. Currently, I'm playing around with Adobe to improve the look and deepen the colors a little (we'll get to why I'd want to do that below), but even as is, most of these are decent images.

Even so, one has that initial frustration, and it is part of the experience. Somebody told me "you should always put your best shots out first, grab them with those so they'll want to keep coming for more". I disagree. I disagree, not merely because the word "always" in statements of what one should do seems inappropriately Kantian in an amateur artistic context, enough so to make me extremely uncomfortable, but because such a demand places itself unbudgingly in the way of any effort to accomplish what such an article is intended to accomplish. That initial frustration didn't just come at some random time during my efforts, and it certainly didn't come at the end. It came at the beginning, and when else could it have? What you're reading is a story about the day of somebody who had put a hobby aside for some years and came back to it, and having relearned what he had forgotten, certainly wasn't going to simply forget it again the next week.

In exchange for gutting the concept of the article in the pursuit of a rigid convention, what would we get? An article constructed to disappoint. If my best images are on the first page, then what are the images on the next six pages going to be but a comedown? The best is something that we should lead up to, whether we're professionals or (as in my case) amateurs, not something that we should start with; that would be like starting a story at its climax - the reader is left with nowhere to go, and a story is what I'm writing, a story told in part through images, albeit a very simple one.

Are those first three images my best? In terms of clear representationalism, no, though they are interesting in their own way, experiments I was playing around with as I got used to working with my F stop, some of which I intend to return to in later work. Look at the first image. If you stop thinking of the words "Elm and State" and just think of it as an abstract composition or a graphic, it's not a bad one. Something that I'm learning as I go along is how to use long exposures to turn solid objects into mist. Does doing this show the viewer exactly what I was seeing? Seeing with my eyes, no; seeing in my mind's eye, quite possibly. Let go of the idea that the camera must be nothing more than a recording device and think fot the word "painting with light", and I think that you might find this image easier to accept. Perhaps not museum quality, but interesting.

Is it an interesting failure or any interesting success? That depends on how one defines success or failure. If one defines success in terms of doing what one initially set out to do, then it is rooted in failure, but I would say that one is defining success far too narrowly and in a severely self-defeating way, one ironically guranteeing failure in all one tries. Such a view of success leaves no room for growth or learning, both of which will transform the very viewpoint one used to decide what to set out to do in the first place; learning is not something that we achieve through a pure, unbroken act of will, but something that we must struggle with an occasionally surrender to, if we are to gain anything from it at all. One's mistakes, one's little defeats, are part of that learning process, and thus those little semi-random accidents are a thing to be built upon in the course of any creative process, be it one of mathematical or scientific investigation, or artistic creation on any level, professional or amateur, if others I have heard speak of this are to be believed. Being awake enough to notice the accidents worth elaborating on is part of what one must learn to do; those who are too proud to learn this are those who, on a test, one sees scratching their heads, remembering all they were taught, but somehow not just getting the spark of inspiration needed to know how to use it. For that, you have to let go and let the process take on its own life. You have to be willing to play.

Anybody who has been to graduate school in Mathematics understands this on a gut level; if he didn't, he wouldn't have lasted through enough of his undergraduate program to get there. What I've been amused to learn is how true this seems to be in areas of creative effort so very different from Mathematics, and in the course of this first page, you'll see a little of that before, for the rest of this article, I go on to more representational photography. The question is, will those reading this page be openminded enough to accept a little innovation? If the answer is "yes", then I'd suggest that they let go of their expectation of immediate gratification as they look through this piece; this is not ad copy or a newspaper article, and immediate gratification is not supposed to be part of what I'm offering. It couldn't be, because that day I lived through began in frustration, so immediate gratification would be an implicit lie. If the answer is "no", and people aren't openminded enough to give this one a chance? I'll live. It's just a free webpage, and censoring one's own efforts worrying about the unreasonable reaction somebody might have is where a lot of stitled writing came from during the last decade. All one can do is expect the best of one's readers, and try not to obsess too much on the site stats when they don't seem to be living up to that expectation, judging from how few are continuing on to page two.

At the very least, though, I can try to not get in the way of your completion of page one, so let's move along.