Look the Other Way!

One piece of advice that an aspiring photographer will run across at some point is to look the other direction after making a photograph. One beautiful summer morning I arose early and trudged laboriously out into some sand dunes on the Oregon coast. The reward for my efforts was some fine, slightly muted, directional sunlight. I quickly (by my standards, but in fact pretty slowly relative to using a smaller camera) set up my 4x5 view camera and exposed a negative. I then turned around and made the image below, which far surpassed the first composition. I would amend the previously stated advice to "look the other way before you make your photograph, in case what is there is better than what you had intended to photograph!"