My Second-Favorite Dream Job
My dream job for many years was to be a National Geographic travel photographer. Which to a young photographer is what being a pro-baller…
My dream job for many years was to be a National Geographic travel photographer. Which to a young photographer is what being a pro-baller is to a high school varsity player.
As a high school kid, I would read up on my heroes, their experiences, and insights. I would learn from what they knew and shared. One day, reading Galen Rowell’s description of how he made Rainbow over the Potala Palace. I discovered what would be my second-favorite dream job.
As the story goes, Galen was tagging along with a large group in Tibet on an assignment. They were returning on a bus after a rainy day to their small hotel in Tibet. There was a rainbow in the sky, the Potala palace in the distance, and a warm meal waiting for the group inside their hotel.
Sometimes it’s the photograph-that-can-be that drives you. Galen grabbed his camera, a few rolls of film in his pocket and took off running. He envisioned an image of the rainbow aligning perfectly with the palace as though it were emanating from there. But the rainbow and the palace were far apart.
In his book, Mountain Light, he describes how he ran in the counter-intuitve direction (you must run away from it in order to get the rainbow to move “towards” the palace). Galen ran over a mile to make his image a reality. But rainbows are finicky things, and can dissapper at any moment, should the conditions change. So as he ran towards his image, every so often, he stopped and snapped a frame or two, then kept running, snapped again, and ran some more.
As he tells it, he had many more weeks on his assignment following this day, that by the time he got back stateside and shipped his film to National Geographic’s DC office for processing, he had forgotten all about that rainy evening. Until he got a phone call from his photography editor: “You got your rainbow!”
And as I read that story, I pictured the photography editor holding uncut rolls of film up against a long, bright light-table hanging on a wall, watching this rainbow and the Patola Palace starting far away, slowly converging frame after frame. I pictured all of the magnificent photographs the editors and the film processors must get to see that never made it to a printed page. I thought of how hard it must be to choose one when so each one must be so incredible.
And in that moment, as a young kid in high school, I thought to myself: after I’m done being a photographer for National Geographic, the most incredible job I could think of would be to process the film that graces their office.