Photography Tips: Follow your Heart

I wanted to go to Machu Picchu. I really did. But I knew, long before I got there that there was no way I would be able to shoot “straight” Machu Picchu photographs. No way.

You see, I knew what Machu Picchu looked like, but I surely didn’t know what it FELT like until the worn out soles of my canvas hiking boots hit the weathered surface of those all too historical stones. So I left myself open to physical and mental interpretation. Getting up before the sun, riding the bus up the twisting slopes, putting on my rain gear and then walking out from the edges of fog and suddenly I could FEEL this place. Straight color, images I’d seen hundreds of times before didn’t register with me. I FELT this place in black and white and I felt something slightly off. I realized I needed to make multiple exposures of Machu Picchu almost as if the place was moving. What struck me, as it does many people, was the idea that human beings made this place. They carved it, carried it and then assembled it. Yep, you guessed it, by hand. I was FEELING the movement in a place that is entirely stationary.

So I shot it this way. Is this a great photograph? Yes. No. Maybe. I’ll leave that to your interpretation, but all I can say for sure is that for me it MEANS something. When I look back on this image, and the others I made in this fashion, they make me FEEL like I’m standing on those stones once again. We experience something when we make pictures and our audience experiences somethin when they see our work. Embrace it.