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My first thought is always of light.
Galen Rowell -
What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I'm not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I'm not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world.
Galen Rowell
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And most of my early pictures failed but about one in a 100 somehow looked better than what I saw.
Galen Rowell -
I'm exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator.
Galen Rowell -
My mountaineering skills are not important to my best photographs, but they do add a component to my work that is definitely a bit different than that of most photographers.
Galen Rowell -
The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.
Galen Rowell -
I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.
Galen Rowell -
I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.
Galen Rowell
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I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I've ever done. It's a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.
Galen Rowell -
One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it.
Galen Rowell -
When we tune in to an especially human way of viewing the landscape powerfully, it resonates with an audience.
Galen Rowell -
There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement.
Galen Rowell -
Wanting to take a light camera with me when I climb or do mountain runs has kept me using exclusively 35 mm.
Galen Rowell -
I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.
Galen Rowell
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The combination of pictures and words together can be really effective, and I began to realise in my career that unless I wrote my own words, then my message was diluted.
Galen Rowell -
These days, most nature photographers are deeply committed to the environmental message.
Galen Rowell -
Today, I'm very careful not to mention very specific locations when I write or give captions.
Galen Rowell -
I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.
Galen Rowell -
I think that cognitive scientists would support the view that our visual system does not directly represent what is out there in the world and that our brain constructs a lot of the imagery that we believe we are seeing.
Galen Rowell -
I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a 'record shot'. My first thought is always of light.
Galen Rowell
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A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.
Galen Rowell -
Luckily, many other people tell me how they have had a particular landscape photograph of mine in their office or bedroom for 15 years and it always speaks to them strongly whenever they see it.
Galen Rowell -
The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.
Galen Rowell -
I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra.
Galen Rowell