On waiting for weather

The Pacific Northwest rarely hands you a photograph. It hands you a forecast, a window, and a long wait by the water.

Most of what I do isn’t shooting — it’s standing still. The frame is usually already there: the bend of the shore, the gap in the firs, the line where the fog meets the tide. What’s missing is the light, and light keeps its own schedule.

So I wait. I watch the sky decide. I let the cold settle in and the tripod go quiet, and somewhere in the hour before the rain the whole scene finally agrees with itself.

That’s the frame I keep — not because it was hard to find, but because it was worth waiting for.