When I lace up my running shoes at dawn and head out toward the Veluwe or into the flat polders around Utrecht, I am not initially looking for a picture. My feet find a rhythm on the dirt path, cold air fills my lungs, and for the first few kilometers, my thoughts tumble over each other like loose stones. Then, gradually, the noise recedes. Breathing settles into an even cadence. Only when that inner quiet arrives does the light outside begin to show itself clearly.
We often speak about photography as an objective act, as if the camera were simply a mechanical eye registering photons. But every time I pause by a cluster of birch trees or watch the damp mist lift off the grass, I know better. The camera does not choose the crop, my mood does. What we carry inside dictates where our eyes stop, which shadows we deepen, and which pale gleams of light we pursue.
The Inner Weather Directs the Shutter
On days when my head is restless, full of friction or unresolved questions, I find myself drawn to severe lines. My lens hunts down sharp thorns, jagged breaks in the bark, and sudden, hard edges where deep black cuts into bright morning glare. The impulse is almost physical, a need to let that tension out into the frame.
Yet on a morning when I have run twenty kilometers and reached that point of complete stillness, the world appears entirely different. I notice the soft, gray-blue diffusion hanging between pine boughs. I look for the gentle gradient where dawn warmth dissolves into cool morning shade. In the darkroom or behind the digital editing screen, that same state of mind holds the controls. I find myself pulling back the contrast, letting tones breathe, seeking a calm that mirrors my own pulse. You never record an isolated forest. You record your own presence inside it.
Stripping Away the Literal Object
This dialogue between emotion and technique is why I drifted toward abstract nature photography. When a photograph shows an ordinary oak tree with total literal sharpness, the conscious mind immediately labels it: oak tree, leaves, branches. The brain files it away and moves on.
When you introduce motion blur, or when you isolate texture and tone until the bark becomes an undulating wave of earthy ochre, something shifts. The label falls away. The viewer cannot immediately categorize what they see, so they are forced to feel it instead. Rhythm, balance, and the subtle interplay of shadow, what we in Holland love to call lichtspel, bypass the analytical intellect. The image speaks directly to memory and mood, offering an invitation rather than an inventory.
Standing Before the Masters
This transmission of feeling across distance is not something new to photography. It is the very ground upon which painting has stood for centuries. I remember walking through the museum in Amsterdam and stopping before Van Gogh’s Wheatfield under Thunderclouds. The canvas holds a massive expanse of dark, bruised blue above green earth that looks ready to break apart. Standing there, I was not merely observing pigments on linen. Vincent’s raw solitude, his anxious longing for peace, hit me in the chest with physical force. It brought an immediate chill to my skin.
A few rooms away, Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride creates the opposite sensation. The groom lays a hesitant, incredibly tender hand upon the bride’s dress, depicted with thick layers of golden impasto. That single gesture, held in quiet chiaroscuro, radiates such fragile warmth that you feel like an intruder on a private, sacred breath. Centuries separate us from those brushes, yet the human pulse within the paint remains entirely intact.
A Meeting Between Two Minds
Does the viewer experience the exact same emotion that I felt while shivering in the damp reeds at sunrise? Almost certainly not down to the exact degree. We do not transmit emotional data like a telegraph wire. Each person who looks at a print brings their own grief, their own private joys, and their own mornings along with them.
Instead of a duplicate, art creates an encounter. I leave an imprint of my stillness, my struggle, or my reverence in the exposure and the tone. Then someone else comes along, perhaps through a physical print on a gallery wall or a digital edition preserved on a ledger, and pauses. In that pause, their interior life meets mine halfway. A good piece of work does not demand that you feel what the artist felt. It simply clears away the everyday noise so you can feel anything at all. Mooi, when that happens. That is the only reason to pick up the camera again tomorrow.