Why I Wait for Storms

The clear day is a tourist's idea of beautiful weather. For a landscape photographer it is, almost without exception, dead light. The shadows are short, the sky has no shape, and the relationship between the land and the air above it has nothing to say.

The five minutes before a storm and the five minutes after are the only weather a serious landscape photographer is really after. The hours in between are for the people inside the lodge. What you want is the moment when the cloud has not quite committed — when light is still pouring through an unclosed door in the sky — and the moment when it has just stopped raining and the world has been washed.

I have driven home from a four-day trip with no photographs because the weather refused to break, and I have stood on the same overlook for two hours waiting for one shaft of light I knew was coming. That second photograph paid for the four-day trip and four more like it.