The Geologist's Eye

 A photographer might see a handsome scene, a place of pleasing color and form. A geologist, squinting into the same light, sees a story reaching back into a time so deep it is functionally unimaginable. The picture, for the geologist, is merely the final sentence in a very long paragraph.

The Grammar of the Land

To stand before a road cut in the Rockies is to stand before a library of stone. Where most see a wall of sliced rock, a geologist sees a narrative—a thrust fault here, an angular unconformity there. That unconformity, that tilted line where flat layers of shale lie upon the eroded stumps of ancient, vertical mountains, represents a gap in the story, a chapter—no, a whole volume—of a billion years torn out by the patient, insistent work of erosion. The geologist-photographer knows this. The knowledge informs the eye. The composition of the photograph is not a matter of simply arranging mountains in a frame; it is a matter of capturing the verb of the landscape—the bending, the breaking, the slow-motion collision of continents. The resulting image is not just a landscape; it is an argument, a thesis statement about the forces that have their way with the surface of the earth.

A Conversation with Time

The shutter clicks—a thousandth of a second. The rock it captures might be a piece of the Morrison Formation, one hundred and fifty million years old, a tomb of dinosaurs. Or perhaps it’s the Vishnu Schist at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, a rock that was already an old-timer when the first multicellular life was just getting its start in the sea. To a geologist, this isn't just trivia. It is the texture of reality. This sense of deep time, of seeing the present as an ephemeral skin on an ancient body, infuses the photograph with a specific kind of gravity. It is the difference between taking a picture of a pretty mountain and making a portrait of a being that has patiently sat for its likeness for two hundred million years.

The Behavior of Light on Stone

The photographer’s obsession is light. The geologist’s obsession is rock. The geologist-photographer understands the marriage of the two. They know, in a way that is less intuitive and more catalogued, how the low, warm light of a setting sun will be caught by the feldspar crystals in a granite batholith, making it glow from within. They know that a wet slate will absorb the light and offer a deep, satin sheen, while a porous sandstone will seem to drink the light, softening its texture. This is not guesswork. This is mineralogy. The periodic table becomes a color palette. The knowledge of how a rock was formed becomes a guide to how it will behave in the day’s last light, allowing the photographer to be in the right place when the land itself decides to perform.

I'm a geologist, I've learned the earth, and have the eye.

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