Chasing Clouds
I left work early. Slipped out the side stairs from my 5th floor office. It was a cloud day. A stratocumulus day, even. If I were king or president or The Boss, I’d let everybody leave work early on a good stratocumulus day.
I had spent the earlier part of the day passing by the big windows of the 5th floor lobby, sometimes stopping just to watch the clouds bloom like slow cauliflower in the blue-silver summer sky. Standing with my face pressed to the glass, I watched the grand collisions, almost imperceptibly slow, of one giant cottony puff into another. The thin blue gap between them consumed by movement so slow that it could only be noticed by looking away and then back again, like at a sunset or a moonrise.
By 4:00 PM, it was all I could think about. I snuck away, free in the knowledge that nobody would miss me.
I rushed home; grabbed my camera, the drone, batteries, tripod, hat. Promised Carmen I wouldn’t be late (though she knew better). Down Highway 10 out of Little Rock toward the eastern edge of the Ouachita Mountains. I knew I needed altitude and a grand, sweeping landscape to get the most of the clouds. Flatside Pinnacle never disappoints for views like that.
As I drove west, I noticed the clouds weren’t quite as full as they’d been earlier in the day. But there were still nice heaping clumps above the hills to the south and the Arkansas River valley to the north. I’d be fine. Even if I had half the clouds from earlier in the day, it would be a great sky westward over the rolling ridges from Flatside.
The paved road to Flatside ends at Lake Sylvia. From there, it’s all washboard gravel roads through close, dense woods. I could see through the trees in a few spots at high points on the rolling road, and noticed the clouds to the west were becoming more … sparse. But not to worry, I told myself: there were still impressive banks of clouds farther off to the south.
That road, from Lake Sylvia to the trailhead at Flatside, is just under 9 miles. However, its a slow 30 minute drive through bumps and turns and washouts. I was getting anxious, struggling to recall some mantra about “the journey, not the destination” as I gripped the wheel. I raced against the fickle whims of atmospheric forces that I don’t fully understand, watching my hopes for epic shots literally evaporate before me.
When I arrived at the parking area of the trailhead, they were gone. Dissipated, save for the weak, wispy streak of an anemic cirrus cloud to the north.
But I was undeterred. I shouldered my camera pack and resolved to trek up to the peak. Flatside is still an amazing view, even under a less-than-perfect sky.
This would be the part of the story where I talk about how perseverance pays off, and about the great photos I was rewarded with because I chose to power through the hot June adversity of a cloudless afternoon for an unforgettable landscape shot. A life lesson about follow-through and persistence.
But this is not that story.
I walked about 50 yards up the trail, took a long look at the nearly empty sky, and headed back to the car. Defeated.
I sent the drone up, if for no other reason than to confirm a cloudless horizon in full 360°. Nothing.
I loaded up my gear and cranked the A/C. And I sat.
I was disappointed. This was not the first day in the past month that I’d gone out to shoot with a specific type of scene in mind, usually with dramatic clouds playing a key role in my plans, only to have things end in a letdown. In fact, this was the maiden flight of my second drone. You know: the one to replace the one I’d gotten stuck in a tree in the Ozarks a few weeks before. Yeah. That’s the kind of month it had been.
So, I sat in the car under that bright, blue, cloudless sky, and I thought. There was a lesson here. Planning a specific shot rarely ever works out the way I have it in my head. There’s always something that makes my expectation crash head-on with reality. The light above the waterfall is too harsh for the soft shadows in the hollow. The humid blur of Arkansas summer washes all the color out of distant mountains. There are too many hazy, boring, slow moving clouds to get a clear long exposure shot of the Milky Way late at night, or not enough fat fluffy clouds to make a dramatic sky on an idyllic summer’s day.
But then I remembered the lesson that I come back to over and over again: ALL of my favorite photos are of moments that I DIDN’T plan for. The most powerful, most beautiful, and most interesting shots I’ve ever taken have been the ones I’d never even imagined when I loaded up my gear and left the house. I’ve shot the sunset at Horseshoe Bend in Arizona, and I’m perfectly happy with the images I got there. But the photos that stick with me from that trip are of cotton-candy-pink clouds in a baby-blue sky over a desert road. I’ve shot at gorgeous national parks from Yellowstone and Grand Canyon to my local Hot Springs NP here in Arkansas, and my most memorable, meaningful images are not of Old Faithful or Ooh-Aah Point or even Bathhouse Row. They’re photos of foothills taken from the window of our van as we sped down the Wyoming highway. Or of a succulent in the parking lot of the botanical gardens in Phoenix. Or of two deer crossing a foggy morning road on Hot Springs Mountain.
I got lucky enough to make a full-day solo trip to explore Maroon Bells in Colorado a couple of years ago. It was high on my bucket list. The photos I got of The Bells were fine. But the photos of the aspens on the trail are some of the most personally fulfilling shots I’ve ever taken.
I could go on. The list of photos that I never meant to take is long. They’re the photos that I remember. The photos I return to over and over again. The photos that mean something.
And that’s the lessons. That’s the take-away that I come back to time and time again. That’s what I returned to as I sat there in my car below Flatside: meaning in photography comes from moments. Not from plans. Not from itineraries. Not even from perfectly metered exposures, spot-on white balance, sensors with epic dynamic range, etc.
The moment makes the memory.
The memory makes meaning.
Meaning makes the image.
