the ever-conundrum of photography.

'When are you going to take it?' asked Walter Mitty to Sean Penn's epic Life photographer character regarding a photograph of the elusive snow leopard for a moment filling Sean's old Nikon film camera's prism finder.

His reply... the answer to the ever-conundrum of photography I personally face every time the light turns from mundane to magic and I am torn whether to look through my viewfinder to compose another photograph or simply... just simply record it in the neurons of my mind.



'Sometimes I don't,' he starts out saying...



'If I like a moment - for me - personally... I don't like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it.'

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To just stay in it. In the moment. To be present. No distractions.

 That... that is the struggle.

.

The difference between being able to make a great photograph and being a great photographer is having something to say.

Courage – so be it righteous – will gain all things.

~ Ludwig van Beethoven
April, 1815, to Countess Anne Marie Erdödy

Fear – to a great extent – is born of a story we tell ourselves.

"We poked along the high trails, wandered through the grasslands, let the mountain wind blow away flat-land cares."

~ Theodore Roethke, excerpted from The Wild Cascades Forgotten Parkland

and a final reprieve.

"Everything is impermanent: thoughts, lives, mountains, stars."

~ Gary Snyder, pulled from North Cascades Crest by James Martin