Don Peters's blog

His early work as a photojournalist brought Jack Dykinga a Pulitzer Prize. That was just the beginning. He subsequently became one of the finest and most celebrated landscape photographers of our time.

In this interview, Jack discusses how he takes photographs, digital processing, the challenges of making a living at photography, conservation, and much more.

Good landscape photographs usually have an interesting subject, a good composition and good light. Of those three ingredients, the right light may be the most elusive.

How do we find it? It requires thinking, persistence, and a willingness to get up early and stay out late.

We don't need to travel to scenic places to find good subjects for photographs. I've taken many photographs that I like, within a few miles or even a few blocks of my home.

How do we find such images? It's mostly a matter of learning to look carefully at the details in what we see around us. When we've found a detail that will work as a subject, we then need to be creative in finding the right composition.

I was traveling six hundred feet down and a thousand years back, more or less. The trail from the rim of Canyon de Chelly to the White House Ruin begins with a series of steep switchbacks. On one side, there's a wall of rock. On the other side, if you're clumsy, there's a fall that's long enough to kill you. I watched my step.

A few weeks back, I was exploring a rock formation near the Little Colorado River. I found a number of petroglyphs. It occurred to me that almost all the petroglyphs and ruins I've encountered in the Southwest were near rivers or streams. The ancient desert people had compelling practical reasons for living near water. I suspect, though, that they also enjoyed simply looking at it.

I love to include water in my photographs. Judging by what I see on photography forums, I'm not alone. Water can significantly improve a photographic composition.  It's worth considering why.

Suppose you've been taking pretty good photographs with a point-and-shoot camera, but you want more. You want to get a digital single-lens-reflex camera and learn how to use it well. What's involved?

That's what I was wondering in February 2008 when I bought my DSLR. Here are some suggestions for anyone who's starting out down the same path.

Photographs have no depth. They're two-dimensional facsimiles of a three-dimensional world.

But photographers, like magicians, deal in illusion. If we understand what creates the illusion of depth in a photograph and how to enhance that illusion, we can make our images more believable.