Changing With The Times
A lot has changed in 40 years. I have endured a turbulent stock-photography marketplace and revolutionized workflow to find myself, creatively speaking, right back where I began. As a newbie photographer in the early 1970s, I simply wanted to photograph beautiful places. Today that same desire pushes me a little farther into the great outdoors.
America has changed a lot. Our culture has changed, and the population has changed; the regulations have changed. The amount of photos out there has changed. All of that has an effect on any photographer. Many places have been overphotographed, and so I tend not to visit those areas any more.
I feel the national parks have been overphotographed. I think there are still photographs there; there’s still a lot of great beauty, but there’s a certain style that’s been overused. Most of the pictures are so evident—the postcard scenics and poster-type imagery. I guess it has just kind of pushed me to the side, looking for something different.
Mt. McKinley, Alaska
If you crowd yourself with shooting the obvious, you are missing everything else. You only have so much time. If that light gets great and you just shoot the first thing that you see because it’s so obvious, you are missing the real jewels of imagery. There are always pictures that I bypass because they’re just too blatant. They are too obvious. I think if you just dig a little deeper and move in a little closer or crop something out in a different way, it comes out so much nicer. I’m always trying to push the envelope.
Independence Mine
While younger, I was simply happy to photograph beautiful landscapes wherever I could find them, the seasoned me needs a bit more of a challenge. When you’re just starting out, every vista is new and exciting. When you’ve seen it all before, you tend to look for something different. And that could be just about anything.
I’m absolutely looking for something different, trying to get the experience heightened, no doubt about that. I need new material. I need to see something I’ve never seen before. A type of tree maybe that I’ve never seen in person. Just a new place. I love going back to places and rephotographing; that’s a learning process all on its own. But boy, having new terrain to explore is really a creative starter. It really gets your creative juices flowing.
The most important thing for me these days is getting those creative juices flowing in a way that personally pleases me. It sounds simple, but there was a time when many stock photographers were beholden to their agencies. The landscape shooters learned what sold well, and like Pavlovian dogs, they knew what to shoot to make a buck.
Independence Mine State Historical Park GOLD! A magic word that time cannot tarnish; a soft metal with the strength to forge history. Gold was the magnet that drew thousands of adventurers to the last frontier. Though most Alaskans recognize that gold played an important part in Alaska's history, they normally think first of Nome, Fairbanks, or the Iditarod country. But even before a quarter-of-a-million gold seekers began their stampede into those famous areas, gold was discovered just southeast of Anchorage in 1886. From there prospectors spread into the Susitna and Matanuska river basins, testing the creeks in the nearby mountains.
There was a time when stock photography was really booming, but it definitely isn’t any more. At one time, it was quite lucrative. Your business started changing because you were starting to get a monetary reward. It was kind of a knee-jerk mentality where we started shooting more of the big scenics because this was what the publishers wanted. I started out shooting the midrange shot, the close-up and the medium-range shot. Then I transferred to the larger image—the broad view of the land. Actually, I was kind of pushed into it with a reward system that made me photograph that way. So now I’m going back to my roots. I’m trying to see with my very own eye.
I’m hoping that my judgment after this many years of photographing is true, and that I’m creating a refined image—more refined, more formal and maybe a better photograph. It’s more about the photograph as a art form now, more so than the subject matter. It’s like music: It’s a song, but it doesn’t have lyrics. It doesn’t really tell a story as much as create a feeling. That’s been my goal all along. But I think with the stock industry the way it was, we all got kind of diverted. I’m not the only one; I think lots of people just started shooting something because it was selling. Now I’m shooting certain types of pictures because I think they’re better.
Pretty soon, your camera will transmit to your office or something. We’re not going to have all this extraneous stuff. Pray to God that they figure out how to get rid of all that. You start to lose your focus with all that stuff if you take it all with you. You never can get away from the business end of it. When you’re out in the field, you really need to immerse yourself in just feelings and the visual world. I like to just get on that artistic side and stay on it and finely tune it because it takes weeks to do that when you’re out there. When you finally get back out to go shoot after you’ve been inside your home or your office, it takes a while. It’s a strange process.
Technological Changes
Aside from the creative adjustments, the last decade has obviously seen some technological changes for Clifton. Sometimes, though, the more things change, the more they stay the same. While the rest of the photographic world has rushed full-speed into an all-digital workflow, one group consistently sticks with film: the landscape photographers.
Film has had almost 200 years of evolution. That’s why I was still shooting film until 2002. It is a tried-and-true process. [Digital is] like 12 years old, really. What we had in 2002 is nothing compared to what we have now. What we have now is nothing compared to what we’re going to have. It’s going to continue to evolve and change into an extremely powerful medium.
Today, I am shooting with a Sony A-900 24-1/2mp. I am no technophobe. All my workflow is now digital, and because of that, I have been freed to change the format that he primarily shoots—from 4x5 exclusively to mostly medium format. I stopped shooting film in 2006. I still have a view camera, but I’ve switched to digital format. I have had to scan my (and my fathers)entire library, working with Photoshop, doing all that… That’s been a major amount of work.
By switching formats, you learn a lot. There’s no doubt in my mind digital is a more creative tool and with less equipment to deal with. The less equipment to get in between you and the creativity, the better.
