Hiking is fun and so is taking photos
Over January I'm taking a photography class. My professor gives us complete control over what we choose to photograph, which is both a blessing (lots of options!) and a curse (I'm quite indecisive!). For this assignment, I decided I'd put all of my hiking gear to use since it is seeing absolutely no time outside in the cold South Dakota winter.
When I was in high school and went to visit my sister, she would have to force me to go on walks around her neighborhood. When the Fitbit became the newest phenomenon, she hopped on board and would do anything—pacing quickly around her apartment at 11:59 p.m. included—to get to her 10,000 steps for the day. I despised that Fitbit.
If you had told her when I was seventeen that twenty-year-old-me was one day going to hike over 40 miles around a mountain in four days with 40 pounds on her back, she would probably burst into a fit of laughter before calling you crazy. I probably would have called you crazy, too.
And I definitely called my boyfriend’s siblings crazy when I showed up in Montana last summer and they informed us that our first hike in Glacier National Park was going to be 16 miles--spoiler, it ended up being 19. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy hiking and being in the outdoors. The views on those 19 miles of death were absolutely stunning.
Three of the five of us hiking those 19 miles had DSLR cameras with us. There were lots of photos taken that day: photos of each other, photos of the grizzly bear we saw, photos of the mountains and lakes and trees surrounding us. There were even some attempts at photographing the solar eclipse that was happening that day.
But with all those photos taken, each and every one was about our surroundings and our place in them; the only time our hiking gear was featured was if it just so happened to be in the right place at the right time. So I started thinking about the hundreds and hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on the gear to go hiking.
A paycheck from my summer job gone in a few minutes adding packs and boots and sleeping bags and bear bins and moisture-wicking fabrics of every shape and size to my Amazon cart. All of these things that I’ve spent hours of my life working to afford and then hours more picking the perfect options and they are always outshone by the gorgeous glacier or mountain top in the background. I wanted to make my hiking gear feel as special as those mountains do when they’re posted on Facebook for all of my friends to see.
When I was in glacier last summer, it was in the middle of all of the forest fires. Many of the photos I took there have the ominous gloom of smoke in the background. And as sad as the fires were, I liked the idea of a dark background with something in the foreground standing out.
When I began photographing some of my gear, I quickly became infatuated with closeups of different parts of my pack--well, different parts of the four different packs that my boyfriend and I have. I decided to use bright light on the subject with the black background to feature hiking packs in a fashion similar to portrait photography.
By getting close up shots, I was able to appreciate my pack for its unique features--the mouthpiece of the bladder that has saved me from dehydration time and time again, the fabric that is stained from volcanic ash, the zipper that keeps my sleeping bag inside safe and sound, the pocket that is home to my rain jacket, the loose thread at the end of the seam. The small, intricate details on each inch of my pack--much of which I had never taken the time to look at let alone appreciate--made me view it in a new way. Grinnell Glacier and Mount Hood aren’t the only beautiful parts of the pictures of me hiking.
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