I was reading a blog post by a fellow photographer yesterday about knowing your subject and your art. As is often the case I started thinking and remembered an essay I posted on my website about 7 years ago after a family reunion of my wife's family in northern Nebraska. "Nebraska?" you say? Well, google up the Niobrara river, have a peek, and we'll talk photography in Nebraska. Anyway, I decided to repost the essay. Hope you enjoy. Yeah yeah, I know the image isn't from Nebraska but it is one of my favorite sunrise shots. Deal with it!

They Just Don't Get It.....

It's the kind of morning that city people can't understand. It begins when I wake in the half light that envelopes the world about 30 minutes before dawn and continues as I stand on the porch of a 100 year old farmhouse and watch the sun slide past the horizon. Maybe it's the way the steam rises off my first cup of coffee that tastes so good I could swear it's the nectar of the Gods. Perhaps it's the way the new sun glints off the spider webs in the field just beyond the mown area of lawn making them shine like a new silver coin in the sun. Personally, I believe it's the air.

The storms that moved through night before last and yesterday afternoon have scoured any impurities from the atmosphere and left behind air so pure and clean I'm sure if I take a breath I'll never be able to breathe city air again without choking. It's not quite like cold clear mountain air that sears the lungs when I take a breath and it's certainly not the filtered purity of a modern air-conditioned office where I spend most of my waking hours. No, this is something else entirely. A bit more humidity, remnants of the previous storms, but mainly it's the clarity that makes me feel this is what God had in mind when he designed mornings.

I am a photographer after all, and I spend a lot of time praying for mornings like this. When I create an image I try to convey the feelings I experienced when I saw a particular scene and it's almost impossible to make a bad photograph on this kind of day. But a photographer friend once told me the best images are often the ones in your mind, not on the film so occasionally I leave the cameras in the case and just observe the magic.

I have a lot of friends that wonder why I never travel east to photograph their parts of the country. My wife nags me a lot to visit the cities of the east: New York, Boston, Washington. I'm sure the eastern landscapes are magnificent in their own right and the cities are spectacular but they hold no allure for me. I sometimes struggle to explain why I have no desire to visit any place in the east knowing that they just don't get it.

But I'm okay with that. Really I am. You see when I experience a morning like this I realize it just doesn't matter that they don't get it. It doesn't matter that the East will never see a magical morning like this. The sun is shining on a fresh new world, the magic has begun…I get it.