Alabama Hills and Missed Opportunity — Aaron Parry Photography

At 4:00 we rolled out of our cozy queen-sized beds to the chorus of iPhone alarms chiming. We packed the car with the few items we’d need for the morning: my camera gear, a change of clothes, gloves, headlamps, and a couple of turkey sandwiches, and at a crisp 4:15 the tires hit the tar as we headed for the freeway.

The drive from Mammoth to Alabama Hills is just under 2 hours, and for the entirety of the drive, the image I was trying to create bounced around in my head . I’ve seen it a thousand times, and chances are, if you use social media, you have too. The picture is of a car driving up a desert road in front of a spectacular mountain range in the background, lit by sunrise. It’s a scene from the mountains of western Asia, or at least, movies the likes of Iron Man would have us think it is. It’s actually a parcel of public land in the southern Sierras, and this is the image.

A few minutes after 6 we rolled onto the well-kept dirt way, and after rumbling another 5 or so miles, just enough for me to question the integrity of the plastic joints of the interior of my car, we arrived at the perfectly straight stretch of road I’d been hoping was the marked location on my Google Maps. It was still dark, but we could just make out the mountains surrounding us, and in the faint pre-dawn glow, the peak of Mt. Whitney stood in front of us.

While we waited for the sun to peek over the horizon and to paint the tips of the mountains with a bright orange light, I enjoyed the opportunity to capture some incredible blue hour images. There’s a quiet calm that comes before dawn, and even with the wind howling outside the confines of the cab, this morning was no different.

Finally, as 7:00 approached, Lone Pine Peak began to glow a vibrant orange-pink, and the countdown began. You see, sunrise for a photographer carries with it this strange combination of excitement and stress: excitement to capture scenes from spectacular locations at their most beautiful, but the stress of missing something in the mere 20 minute window where the colors and light are their most dramatic and vibrant.

A lightning-fast 20 minutes, and a thousand clicks of the shutter, later, the image I’d been mulling over for days was out of my head and on the memory card. The day was an absolute success. For a photographer, and any creative for that matter (entrepreneur, artist, engineer, etc.), the ability to turn a vision into a reality is a gratifying experience. It means that you’re well on your way to mastering your craft, or at the very least, it means that you have enough control over the tools to fake it until you make it.

We spent the morning exploring the beautiful landscape, kicking up dust in my 2018 pickup, and enjoying the beauty of one of California’s, and perhaps the United States’s, most breathtaking locations. The stark contrast between the desert shrubs in front of us and looming mountain range in the distance, a range which contains the highest peak in the contiguous US, is something you truly need to experience to appreciate.

Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in the contiguous US, just behind a rock feature in Alabama Hills

It was a morning well worth the early wake-up and tired travel. I couldn’t wait to get the images from the camera to computer and scroll through the RAW files to find my next masterpiece. After a quick import to Lightroom, and cursory scroll through some portion of the 1500 files. I was ecstatic.

Then I got the text: “Can you take your truck out of this one for a print?”

Prior to hitting the road for the drive back, I had sent a few images that Jack had taken on his iPhone to some friends as a way to share my excitement and enthusiasm. Shortly thereafter, I received that reply and my excitement grew. The cameras in smartphones nowadays are incredibly impressive, but I like the creativity that comes only with the ability to change the focal length, aperture, and shutter speed on a camera, not to mention the benefit of having a much higher resolution for details and cropping. So with my excitement heightened, I scrolled through the catalog of images once again to find a similar shot taken with my mirrorless camera.

And just like that, a pit started forming in my stomach, because as I reached the end of the catalog, there was not one resembling the iPhone image I had sent.

“No way,” I thought. Maybe the images hadn’t finished importing. But quickly I realized that was not the case, as all 1658 images were appearing in the folder. A filter perhaps then? Must be a filter. Perhaps I was filtering by rating? After importing images to Lightroom, I typically will take a few minutes and assign each image a rating of 0 or 1 stars. 0 means that I will not edit, and 1 means that I will. Rating the images allows me to quickly filter the entire directory down to a more manageable number of photos at which I can go back to take a second look.

But now the pangs of regret were beginning to harden. The filters were off. I was slowly coming to the realization that in my excitement and focus just a few hours earlier, I had completely missed what might have been the best scene of the day. I had “missed the forest for the trees” as the saying goes, and white the trees were beautiful, the forest was breathtaking. As I scrolled through, it was becoming more and more apparent with each pass, that in trying to realize the vision with which I had come into the day, I was too narrow-sighted to capture the beauty of the scene as a whole.

Since picking up a camera for the first time, I have constantly been striving to be a better photographer, to make my images more interesting, and to create with, and on, purpose.

Perhaps this is why my oversight hurts so much. I had plenty of images that I could retouch in photoshop that I could remove a small object (my truck) in the foreground to achieve the same clear and sweeping landscape that I was looking for, but something about it felt like cheating to me.

Could very easily remove the car from this one, but still isn’t the same

Coming into the day, I’d felt I had grown so much. I am better now than I’ve ever been at turning ordinary images into something a bit more interesting, and I should be proud of my ability to turn a vision into reality. I had a goal in mind, and without question, I was able to create the image that I wanted. But this experience knocked me down a peg. It pointed out my lack of experience, and showed me while I have come a long way, I still have much farther to go.

But such is life. We move from failure to failure, growing each time. As I move forward with photography, I know to slow down; to take in the scene, location, environment, or event for what it is, and not necessarily what I want it to be.

Sometimes you learn more from the pictures you don’t take than from the ones you do.

Photographers Remorse. Learning from the photos I DIDN’T take.