Patience in Landscape Photography: Why It Changes Everything

I've been photographing the Southwest for over twenty-five years with a 4x5 large format camera, and the single most useful thing I've learned isn't about exposure or composition or film choice. It's about time. Specifically, how much of it you're willing to spend standing in one place with nothing happening yet.

The 4x5 forces slowness on you whether you want it or not. Setup takes fifteen minutes minimum. Each sheet of film loads individually. You get maybe four or five exposures on a good day in the field, which means you spend most of your time not shooting. Early on I found that frustrating. Now I think it's the whole point.

Badwater Basin, 4:30 a.m.

The image I get asked about most from Death Valley came out of a trip where I almost packed up and drove back to Las Vegas.

I arrived at Badwater Basin around four-thirty in the morning in late November. It had rained two days before, which left shallow standing water across part of the salt flats. The weather forecast said clearing skies. What I found was overcast. Flat gray-black nothing in every direction. I set up the camera anyway, partly out of stubbornness, and waited.

About forty-five minutes before sunrise the cloud layer started breaking apart over the Panamint Range to the west. The sun was nowhere near the horizon yet, still well below the mountains to the east, but the sky above me started catching pre-dawn light. Pinks first, then a saturated coral that moved into purple at the edges. This wasn't sunset-pink, it was something colder and stranger. The color lasted maybe twelve minutes total before the cloud broke up further and everything went pale.

What made the image was the water on the salt flats. The standing pools caught the sky color directly and held it — flat mirror surfaces, about three inches deep, spread across maybe two acres in front of me. The reflection was cleaner than the sky itself. I shot three sheets of film in that twelve-minute window. Two of them were underexposed because I was fumbling with cold hands. The third one worked.

I've been back to Badwater five times since. Never had that water. Never had that cloud formation. The image exists because I was already set up when things changed, which only happened because I showed up in the dark and waited.

Toroweap Point, Wasted Trip

Toroweap is sixty miles of dirt road off the highway, then a campsite at the edge of a cliff 3,000 feet above the Colorado River. No guardrails, no services, usually nobody else around. I drove out specifically to photograph sunrise and planned to camp overnight to get into position before dawn.

I woke up at three-thirty to shoot the stars before first light. Full overcast. No stars, no sky. I lay in my sleeping bag for an hour trying to figure out if the clouds would clear and decided they probably wouldn't. I got up anyway, made coffee, set up the camera at the rim by five. Still overcast. Flat gray light coming up. Nothing to photograph.

I sat there for three hours. The clouds stayed solid. Around eight-thirty I started breaking down the tripod.

Then a gap opened. Not a big gap, maybe thirty degrees wide in the cloud cover to the southeast, and it let through a single shaft of direct sunlight that hit the river below while everything else stayed in shadow. The Colorado at that spot catches the light and bounces it off the canyon walls. For about four minutes the river was brilliant white-gold and the surrounding walls were purple-gray and the contrast was something I've never seen replicated anywhere.

I had the camera half-disassembled. I got one sheet of film exposed before the gap closed. One frame from what I was certain was a wasted overnight trip.

That image has sold more prints than anything else I shot that year.

What Patience Actually Is

I don't think patience in photography is a personality trait some people have and others don't. It's more of a decision you make about how long you're willing to stay uncomfortable before calling it a failure. Most photographers leave too soon. I've done it myself. The difference, most of the time, isn't equipment or skill — it's just staying.

Monument Valley taught me most of what I know about returning to locations. My first few trips there I got fine images: the mittens at sunset, the standard compositions. They're technically good. But they're what everybody gets. It took six or seven trips over different seasons before I started finding things that surprised me — specific shadow angles in early morning, snow that changes the red rock into something almost black and white, the way an approaching thunderstorm stacks up behind East Mitten in July. Each trip added information. The images that came out of it got less predictable.

The practical version of all this: when you arrive somewhere with your camera, don't set up immediately. Walk the location first. Figure out what the light is doing and what it might do in an hour. Position yourself where you want to be when conditions change. Then wait. Most of the time nothing happens. Sometimes something does, and if you're already in place, you have a chance at it.

Film photography builds this in structurally. With four sheets of film for a whole day, you stop taking shots that might be good and start waiting for shots that are. That constraint changed how I work more than any other single thing. Read more about why scouting locations before you shoot is part of the same habit.