{"id":6807,"date":"2019-07-20T09:48:03","date_gmt":"2019-07-20T16:48:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.williamneill.com\/blog\/?p=6807"},"modified":"2019-07-20T13:56:50","modified_gmt":"2019-07-20T20:56:50","slug":"the-place-no-one-knew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.williamneill.com\/index.php\/2019\/07\/the-place-no-one-knew\/","title":{"rendered":"The Place No One Knew"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sunrise over Negit Island, Mono Lake, Eastern Sierra 1980<\/p><\/div>\n

We seek a renewed stirring of love for the Earth.<\/em>
\nWe shall urge that what man is capable of doing to the earth<\/em>
\nis not always what we ought to do, and we shall plead that all Americans, here, now,\u00a0<\/em>determine that a wide, spacious, untrammeled freedom shall remain in the midst of the American earth as living testimony that this generation, our own, had love for the next.<\/em>
\n\u00a0-David Brower in The Place No One Knew, 1963<\/em><\/p>\n

The Place No One Knew<\/h3>\n

\u00a9 2000 William Neill, originally published in Outdoor Photographer Magazine in 2000.<\/em><\/h3>\n

In 1963, the Sierra Club published a monumental book which features magnificent photographs of master landscape photographer Eliot Porter.\u00a0 Glen Canyon, in Utah and now buried under Lake Powell, was once a wild and transcendentally beautiful section of the Colorado River.\u00a0 Government plans to damn the river just downstream from Glen Canyon became widely known too late to stop the project.\u00a0 A sacred landscape was lost forever, the book a eulogy its demise. The concept behind the book The Place No One Knew<\/em><\/a> is a vital one for nature photographers to know.<\/p>\n

No one knew Glen Canyon.\u00a0 Years later, a dam plan was slated to be built in the Grand Canyon, but the fame of the park and public knowledge of the proposed dam helped stop the project.\u00a0 Had Glen Canyon been a national park, cherished by the nation as the Grand Canyon is, it might still be wild and free.\u00a0 The book relates a now-classic environmental moral:\u00a0 Be ever vigilant!<\/p>\n

This book\u2019s idea was to illustrate, in heartbreaking fashion, the need to continually defend wild places against development and destruction. The message is more relevant than ever before, a lesson vital to any photographer concerned with conservation.\u00a0 Awareness and appreciation of endangered places are essential before public concern can be raised and action taken. While most significant landscapes in our country are well-known, often-photographed, and reasonably well-protected, thousands of local nature preserves around us also deserve our collective photographic attention.\u00a0 Photographing local or lesser-known pieces of wildness can remind our viewers that beauty is found all around us both near and far.\u00a0 The moral of Glen Canyon applies not only to grand and famous landscapes.<\/p>\n

Our local woodlands, wetlands, ponds, streams, meadows are most vital to us on a daily basis.\u00a0 As we drive to work or maybe to the market, that glowing reflection on the neighborhood pond sparks a light in our day, often unconsciously.\u00a0 I witnessed much destruction of these little landscape niches in the suburbs of San Francisco and Washington, D.C. while growing up. The cumulative impact of thousands of small landscapes being devoured by progress can be surprisingly invisible.\u00a0 Stop, look around you and try to remember how your area looked five, ten or twenty years ago.\u00a0 One or two encroachments in the neighborhood may seem tolerable, but few stop to add up the total sum of the whittling of development into natural landscapes in every city around the country over the past 50 years.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t pretend I have the answers, but I do hope to encourage the reader to think about these matters. Consider what use your photographs may have for making sure your local wild places and critters are not unknown.\u00a0 Publicizing a local landscape could have the added advantage of promoting your artistic reputation or career, as well as making others aware of a place no one knew.<\/p>\n

When I first moved to Yosemite in 1977, I spent many weekends photographing nearby Mono Lake camping along the shore with not a soul in sight.\u00a0 Back then, the lake was not well known as either a photographic location or as an environmental issue.\u00a0 The water that naturally would normally flow into it from the adjacent Sierra Nevada mountains was being diverted to southern California.\u00a0 Since the lake has no other source of water, it began to dry up. The diversions were adversely impacting the bird populations that used the lake as a breeding site and a feeding stop along their migration path.<\/p>\n

Having a college degree in environmental studies, I always hoped to find ways to use my images to preserve wild places. After photographing Mono Lake for a few years, I took my slides to the Mono Lake Committee, the group active in publicizing Mono Lake\u2019s approaching death.\u00a0 After sharing my work with them, I learned that they wanted to use one of my images as a notecard.\u00a0 The image shown here was selected, becoming the first photograph I ever had published.\u00a0 I was thrilled, of course, and received in payment a bundle of cards for promotional use.\u00a0 I used the card successfully for years as a marketing tool sent to potential clients (including this magazine at its inception!).\u00a0 More importantly, my imagery made a small contribution to the successful effort to preserve Mono Lake by making more people aware of its stunning beauty and ecological importance.<\/p>\n

Sunrise over Negit Island<\/em> was made in 1980 with a 35mm film camera and a 300mm lens.\u00a0 I often use the 200mm to 300mm range focal length for landscapes because they allow me to compose images with more graphic qualities.\u00a0 I love the use of lines and shapes in my work. When we frame a landscape in our viewfinders, the scenes are generally more complex, and with the graphics being less apparent, options of how to design an image become less obvious.\u00a0 Try studying a potential scene to find its key shapes.\u00a0\u00a0 Do you see the u-shaped river of a glacial valley or the contrasting s-shape of a river against jagged mountain peaks?\u00a0 These shapes may provide the key to the strongest composition.<\/p>\n

My image here shows several shapes that complement each other.\u00a0 The lake reflects the sunrise sky in a striped pattern due to variable winds out on the water.\u00a0 Negit Island, a volcanic formation, pops out in its black silhouette against the surrounding pinks and purples.\u00a0 The receding desert mountains add depth and stature to the landscape.\u00a0 The fleeting clouds floated blissfully above, touched by the dawn light and then vanished soon after.<\/p>\n

Once a place no one knew, the lake remains alive, saved for now by court and governmental decree.\u00a0 Long live Mono Lake!\u00a0 Never forget Glen Canyon!<\/p>\n

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We seek a renewed stirring of love for the Earth. We shall urge that what man is capable of doing to the earth is not always what we ought to do, and we shall plead that all Americans, here, now,\u00a0determine… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-landscape-photography"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamneill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamneill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamneill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamneill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamneill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6807"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamneill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6822,"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamneill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6807\/revisions\/6822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamneill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamneill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamneill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}