I worked hard for it, so it must be a great image!

Sunrise at Mesa Arch, View #6. Canyonlands NP, Utah, 2013

You planned for weeks…months even. Then you and your significant other packed up and drove the eight hours to some far away National Park. The two of you then spent the night in a cheap motel with a broken neon sign…a roach palace that apparently recycled their cigarette-burned sheets every three visitors, whether the sheets needed it or not. Strangely, you found an eight-inch steel nail resting atop the ancient, dusty TV console.

Continental breakfast? Ha! Of course not. In fact, you got up the next morning way too early for anything to be open–a 3 a.m. alarm. So you ate a few Fig Newtons. It was winter and the forecast said an overnight low of 4 degrees Farenheit, so you put on your long thermal underwear and three layers of heavy winter ski gear, thick gloves, winter boots…you were out the door with your camera gear by 3:30 a.m.

Then there was the long drive on a rocky-rough 4-wheel drive road–in the dark, with patches of snow, and steep Roadrunner-Coyote cliffs on each side…followed by an hour of bushwhacking by headlamp through brush, cactus and unfamiliar terrain. You got lost just as the first light of dawn told you that you needed to be there and set up already. Then (stroke of luck!) you found the route again. Your hands were freezing as you quickly set up the tripod to catch the first rays of a cold and distant plasmic meatball. After the first few shots, your hands went numb and your toes went there, too. You lost a lens cap. The remote didn’t work–battery dead. And so on…and on…and on…

But, you survived it all and got the shot, right?! Or did you???

Just because getting the shot was a harrowing, death-defying, epic sufferfest doesn’t necessarily mean that the image you walked away with was any good. There is no direct mathematical relationship between the difficulty of capturing the photograph and the quality of same.

MORAL: Learn to judge your images separately from whatever conditions or personal emotional state existed at the time you pressed the shutter release.

Understand that this is a very, very difficult thing to do (I certainly speak for myself here)–so, you may need to enlist the aid of that impartial judge who stayed back in the warmth of the roach palace and slept in until 10:00 a.m.

P.S. No, the above travel account is not an accurate description of what it took to get the posted image of Mesa Arch at sunrise…I will say, though, that my story does include at least 10% truth…I gar-on-tee it!