Finding Beauty in the Ordinary

It’s about photographing things you see. It’s photographing the light and direction of the light. It’s not stamp collecting. It’s about a beautiful original photograph where you use your own initiative, your own individuality, your own instincts to come up with something. It doesn’t have to be the Hanging Gardens of f**king Babylon. It can be just about anything.

Mark Littlejohn, UK Landscape Photographer

Mark Littlejohn, one of my favorite photographers, uses light, color toning, and composition to turn ordinary photos into ethereal poems. I find his work so inspiring. The primary reason is that he doesn’t get on a plane to go to exotic locations. He goes for a walk with his dogs to the beach or in the forest. He wanders around his backyard.

Mark, who happens to live in Scotland, takes what he is given and turns it into magic. He isn’t the only photographer who takes what’s around him and finds a way to create a dreamscape out of it. Paul Sanders, former photo editor of The Times UK, doesn’t need grand vistas and exotic destinations to tell his visual stories.

I bring up these two landscape photographers because they have done what I have aspired to — find my unique visual vocabulary that I can use in my everyday photography. I am getting closer to that point where I can find my “photo” anywhere. I am excited about this prospect because it frees me from the idea of going somewhere to take photographs.

I am blessed with a wonderful backyard — San Francisco and its surrounding areas are a natural wonder, a photographer’s delight. Even the mundane is made magical by the fog, and every changing weather pattern—the sea, the hills, the steep streets, and of course, the beaches.

I need to find a way to tell the story of the city I call home visually. How do I take what’s very familiar, and mundane to my eyes and turn it into a poem? It is a challenge that I hope to pursue rigorously in the year to come.

December 4, 2023. San Francisco