Stripping Away Labels in Northern Jackson, Wyoming

Cody Peak towers above a rural neighborhood in northern Jackosn, Wyoming.

I was driving home a couple of mornings ago and maybe it was the post I made a couple of weeks ago or maybe it was the foggy and moody conditions I was returning from shooting, but while driving down the same street I’ve driven down for over a year now, it looked different. Granted the weather probably had a good deal to do with it, but at the same time, something struck me and said to not let a shot like that get by. As I stated on the aforementioned post, it’s easy to get stuck in a habit of just looking at familiar sights and not taking the time to get out of your car and actually get the shot, something I’m working on fighting more often myself.

When driving home along Sagebrush Drive, Cody Peak always towers above those same cottonwood trees, but I think this time the weather was trying to give me a taste of my own medicine. I stopped my car, got out and looked at the same thing I see every day and all of a sudden it was a brand new sight. They weren’t the same cottonwood trees anymore. All of a sudden they were an arch above the road with an enormous mountain dwarfing them. This is the mentality I’m trying to get into more often around the same things I see every day.

In that post, I talked about stepping back for a second and seeing things in a new way. So how exactly does one do that? By stripping away all labels from whatever it is you’re looking at. It will help you enormously to not see familiar objects as the names that they’ve been given. In this example, this isn’t Sagebrush Drive that I drive down every day through the same cottonwood trees with Cody Peak of the Tetons in the background. This was an archway created by almost Tim Burton-esque shapes coated in white frost above a rural road in the dead of winter as gigantic peaks loomed in the background, reminding anyone who drove down that road where the real majesty of the landscape is.

By stripping away every label you know of a place, object or even person, the entire scene all of a sudden becomes brand new. Add to that weather patterns that are constantly changing and never repeating, and all of a sudden you’ve got a recipe to see everything for the first time, every day.

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