Insights From Greenland

I just returned from my overseas workshop and I wanted to share a couple of quick insights from Greenland that came to me as we sailed the arctic fjords on a wooden schooner along the Eastern side of the island.

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The trip was amazing and is still a bit beyond words for me to express much of it…so many sights and sounds and experiences/emotions during the 8 days of the workshop.  As you can imagine, I have a TON of content that I need to organize, process and figure out how best to present it all.  From still images, to video and vlogs, not to mention a bucket full of amazing drone images and video.  I also returned with a big dose of Covid and have been slowly recovering from that (but that’s another story).

I have lots of practical insights from Greenland that I hope to share in future posts, or part of an upcoming e-book.  But for this post, the insights are a bit more nuanced or subtle and I wanted to share them with you, maybe you can benefit from them, or just gain some insight in to my thinking as I went through the adventure.  So, here are a few insights from Greenland…

Complete Immersion in Creativity

When you go off on a photo adventure like this, or to Antarctica, or Africa, or many other locations, it is oftentimes complete immersion in to a creative way of living for those few days.  All of your traveling companions are focused on photography like you and the majority of conversations are typically about photographic or creative topics.  With dry weather, I spent my entire days on deck watching the scenery slide by and only went below to eat or sleep.  My cameras stayed on deck the whole time and I was to grab either my wide angle or telephoto setup and shoot, whenever the inspiration struck me.

It dawned on me a couple days in to to the trip what an amazing gift this was, to have uninterrupted creative space and time for me to shoot photographs.  Of course it was somewhat governed by the schedule of the ship, but for the most part, I could roll out of my bunk and on to the deck and start shooting if I wanted, only stopping for meals or darkness.  In contrast, for more local based workshops, there is always travel between locations, connection with our email/texts, and a myriad of other things to take us out of our creative space.  Lots of task switching between the real world and the creative world.  Not so on this trip, I was able to immerse as fully and as long as I wanted each and every day of the trip.   It was gift and a blessing to be disconnected from the rest of the world, in our little cocoon onboard the ship where everything revolved around creativity.  If you can ever do an immersive trip like this, please do so and revel in the total immersion that it offers.

Shoot for the Enjoyment

My biggest insight from Greenland was internally focused and one that made me chuckle at myself a little bit.  It was about day 3 of the trip. and we had seen so much already and I had been shooting constantly the whole time.  Hundreds of massive icebergs, towering granite cliffs, polar bears, musk ox, etc etc.  I had changed out memory cards once or twice already and was amassing quite the collection of images.  Standing on deck and photographing another amazing iceberg, my brain kicked over and I thought “how many pictures of icebergs do I need?”  I knew the answer to that, (not as many as I had), but I didn’t care!   I kept shooting

I often challenge myself, and preach to my attendees, to be selective in your photographs and know why you are taking them.  For me, sometimes the challenge is how few photos I can take and still be satisfied, striving for quality over quantity.  However, standing on the deck sailing the turquoise fjords, I threw all that out the window and shot photos for the pure enjoyment of it, and the fact that I might not make it back here.  Once I let go of my preconceived notions of only shooting well thought out and composed photos,  I was freer to just enjoy the act of photography.  A day or so later I was able to put more words to it and realized that I really enjoy the act of “seeing” a potential image and the challenge and skill required to compose the shot…this is a really fun part of photography for me.  So I let myself go and just enjoyed the act of seeing and composing and taking the picture!

I may end up not doing anything with the hundreds of images of icebergs, though there are quite a few that I really like and will find a way to use them.  At that moment on deck, it wasn’t the final image that mattered to me, it was the experience of being there plus the joy of flexing my creative muscles to compose and execute compositions in an ever-moving landscape as it slid slowly by.  I was just shooting for the pure enjoyment, not for the images.   I will admit though that one of my “justifications” for letting myself go is that this repetitive practice of seeing/composing is exercising and building up my “creative muscles”, which is always a good thing!

Capture the Richness

When I go on longer or more exotic workshops, I make a concerted effort the document and capture the richness of the experience.  I do this through writing a daily journal of what I did, what I saw, how I felt, thoughts I had along with other smaller and subtler notes about the day.  For me, since this is my profession, I do it to provide rich content for blogs, articles, videos and all that.   But for you, or if I wasn’t doing this professionally, I still think it is so nice to capture notes daily about the journey you are on.

It’s easy to remember the big ticket events that you see during the workshop.  Those are indelible seared in to your brain.  But what about all the small stuff, the fleeting emotions, the subtle looks or passing thoughts that occurred to you during the day.  These are often lost as the days pass by and once you return home are lost for good.  Yet it is these smaller moments that add context, flavor, richness and connectivity with the big moments and your journey through them.

It’s easy to start a trip with good intentions that I’m going to sit down every day and write in the journal.  In fact, the first 2-3 days in Greenland the words flowed easily and I was eager to capture my thoughts.  However by day 4, weariness set in plus the never ending excitement of beautiful scenery and I struggled to make time to write.  In fact, for one days entry, it is just a list of bullet point thoughts that hope to fill in in a day or so.  I realized though that even with the bullet points about activities, sights, emotions and thoughts, I would still lose some of the “realistic” feeling of actual words and sentences being written out.  So from that day forward I doubled my effort to devote time to writing, typically at the end of the day as I lay in my bunk listening to the water lap against the hull.  Sure it meant it delayed my bedtime, but the effort for creating the content will be appreciated long after I’ve caught up on my sleep.

However it works for you, I encourage you to document your experience so your significant others and your future self can transport themselves to that magical place and time and experience it along with you.

Shared Journey

And the last of my insights from Greenland involve my traveling companions for this experience.  Whenever we are involved in a group activity such as a photo workshop, we often can’t pick who signs up and whether or not we’ll get along with them.  On this trip to Greenland, there were a few folks I knew, but half of the group I didn’t know and was not 100% of how well folks would meld together, especially on a boat in confined spaces for a week!  Thankfully, everyone got along wonderfully and we all bonded together, we came together as a little floating family and made what I hope are lasting friendships.

I started my photographic journey as a solitary photographer, preferring to explore and shoot by myself.  As I’ve grown and my business of working with groups has expanded, I’ve learned to enjoy the dynamics and camaraderie of groups on photo trips.  Don’t get me wrong, I still feel that I do my best work when I’m by myself as I can better connect with my surroundings and bring more emotion in to my photographs.  However, in a group, I enjoy the shared experiences, seeing through others eyes, and just the conversation and friendships that develop.

On an adventure trip such as this one, the bonds that can develop run much deeper than when on a normal type of workshop. It felt like we were off on an exploration, in a somewhat alien environment that we were not used to, seeing sights that boggled the mind (icebergs as big as office buildings) and living aboard our little capsule floating on the water and we were all in it together, for better or worse.

Having an amazing group of people who shared the same sense of adventure and wonder, who rolled with the unexpected that came our way and throughout each day had smiles on their faces and a willingness to enjoy each moment made a trip like this all the sweeter.  When you are fortunate enough to have a great group of people together on a journey, it makes the journey and experiences within so much sweeter!

So there ya go, a few of my insights from Greenland.  I know more will come to me as I begin to process all I saw and experienced on this trip.  It was a very unique experience, not something I normally do and because of that, the impacts of the trip and lessons learned are different and worth noting in my opinion.  I have a few thousand images to sort through, lots of video to cull through and cut together, plus pages and pages of rich content from my journal to polish up before publishing.  Those are treasures that will last for years to come.  Right now though, it is the memory of immersion in a creative space for 8 days, freedom and joy of shooting photographs just because I wanted to, and the good feelings of a shared experience with a great group of people making lifelong memories together.  These are intangibles, yet incredibly valuable and treasured moments of an amazing trip.

Stay tuned for a lot more content in the weeks and months to come.  I will have a special gallery on my website with finished images.