Waiting for...What?

   This is the season of Advent for those of us who follow a Christian path.  It is the season that implores us to be still and wait.  Those qualities are also two of my Four Be's of Contemplative Photography - Be Still, Be Present, Be Patient and Be Persistent.

   It is the anticipation of what you may find, when you are on location in some wonderful landscape, that makes you move quickly, trying to catch the fleeting light, worried you will miss the perfect photograph.  It is very hard to just be still and wait.  Just like the children counting down the days until Santa arrives...waiting is just plain hard!

   But it is the waiting, the trust that the image will present itself, that most clearly differentiates the contemplative photographer from any other except, perhaps, wild life photographers like Nick Brandt who must sit for hours waiting for his subjects to get use to him. (See my post about this wonderful photographer here.)
 
   What is it exactly that we, as contemplative photographers, are waiting for?  I can only speak of my personal advent.  As I walk through or sit still in a landscape it is the subtle whisperings I listen for.  Not with my ears but with my heart. It seems as if it exists just below the level of my conscious awareness.  Somehow, in someway that I am at a loss for words to describe, I feel a gentle tug that may turn me this way or that and then it is like a slowly dawning realization that this is what I must photograph.  This is what I came here to see.  I wait, patiently, for this to occur.  It doesn't happen 100% of the time but when it does I am always delighted and often surprised.

   So, what are you waiting for?