Bathtub rings in the desert

National Geographic
Las Vegas, NV
November 2018
This photo originally shared on Instagram

Just because you have a window seat doesn't mean you'll have a great view.

Sometimes you're on the wrong side of the plane, facing the sun. Or the plane you're on might have first taken flight right around the time Ronald Reagan was berating Mikhael Gorbachev to tear down that wall, so the plastic windows might be horribly scratched and foggy. Or the tight confines of your seat and an already-overloaded backpack mean you've left the DSLR at home and are shooting with a humble smartphone. Or you're just so freaking tired from all that travel - and all the life stuff that preceded it - that you can't see straight, let alone determine whether the scene really is in focus. Or maybe it's all of these factors conspiring against you.

Never mind all that. Because eventually the plane will turn away from the sun. Eventually you'll find a spot in the window that's just clear enough to see through, and you'll figure out the focus thing just enough to get a reasonable shot of whatever's out there. And then you'll fly over a primordial-looking sliver of the planet that simply makes your jaw drop.

I know shooting out the passenger window of a worn-at-the-edges Boeing 767-300 is hardly the epitome of fine photography, and the results here are meh.

But on this day, over the course of this trip, during this chapter of my life, it hasn't been about the results at all. The process is the thing these days. The act of holding a camera in your hand and thinking about the countless factors of composition and lighting as the world slides far beneath you. The hoops your brain jumps through as you decide what to shoot, how to shoot it, and what story you want that frame to tell. The feeling you get when you realize you've spent the better part of the past two hours doing nothing but this.

And the darkness that's been hanging over you is nowhere to be seen. For now, anyway.

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