STORM: Mountain Air

There is a huge difference between seeing a picture of a place and being there. I guess it took me an extremely long time to reach that conclusion because that seems pretty obvious but it was news to me. I was standing on top of a mountain, trying to capture the view with a picture so I could savor it later when my muscles didn't ache and I didn't have to pee and it wasn't hailing/sleeting/snowing/raining on me, and nothing could match the feeling of being there. Even a panoramic picture can't capture the experience of having that much open space around you in every direction.

I usually am at home, on a couch, and trying to edit pictures into coolness. Finally I had taken pictures that actually were cool and even had an adventure to match, but since mountain pictures are so naturally cool and easy to snap with a cellphone, they're so common. And that means that everyone has seen or taken mountain pictures at one point and now they've become pretty boring. Mine could not compare to any of the top ten Google image search results, so I didn't want to post yet another set of mundane mountain photography. You've seen that before.

And everyone in my generation can easily run it through a filter before posting it on Instagram.

Or a billion creative people around the world have already taken decent pictures and added text.

But these deserved better than any of the available options. I felt mountains under my feet and in my hair and in my lungs when I breathed in the icy mountain air. It felt uninspired to just throw up the unedited pictures because relatively they are nothing special. But being there was special and I wanted to communicate that. And that's how this happened.