I read a lot of Thoreau. Have for years. At the moment I am even working through all his journals …

Again and again I find myself underlining passages. (Always with a mechanical pencil and a ruler. That’s just how I roll.) And I can tell you: Thoreau demands a great deal of underlining.

This particular passage quoted here caught my attention because of the tendency I see all the time for photographers to feel that the only way they can capture something “beautiful” is by traveling to some fancy destination halfway around the world.

Not that travel is bad. (I plan to do more of it myself in the near future, in fact. And I will surely be carrying my camera with me.) But here’s the stone cold truth every serious photographer needs to confront at some point: If you can’t take a great photo within a block of your own home, you aren’t going to suddenly find yourself endowed with genius as you step off a plane in Tibet.

Great photographers — great artists — can find beauty everywhere.

Thoreau found all he really needed in Concord. (“I have traveled a good deal in Concord …”) His infrequent trips outside of Massachusetts brought him very little.

Admittedly, many great painters, great poets, great writers, and yes, great photographers have found joy and inspiration in traveling to far off places. But I would subscribe that it matters less where our feet take us, and more so what we bring along.

And our capacity for finding the beautiful is something we can nurture and delight in — wherever we might find ourselves.

All the more so when you factor Photoshop into the equation.

With Photoshop, you can take the humblest photos, hardly leaving the room you are sitting in now, and transform them into works of immense beauty, enchantment, mystery, drama.

Learn to find all these things in your everyday life. Train yourself to it.

Do that and your trips abroad shall turn up treasures the vacationing multitude can never hope to see.

– Sebastian