WHAT WAS IT LIKE? IT WAS F*CKING HOT.

I firmly believe that anyone who enjoys acting, the theater, or even just playing dress-up, would find international ADVENTURE TRAVEL to be the ultimate experience. When you submerge yourself in a different culture -- you can’t help it -- every second you are there, you’re imagining what it’s must be like to live that life, to be a person from that culture or country. You are wearing the pinnacle of all costumes; you are essentially wearing another person’s entire existence. You’re thinking, “Could I do this, for real? Could I really live like this? Could I ride a donkey or a camel to the market each day, or paddle a gondola every morning to get to where I needed to go?”

It’s exhilarating and educational (and sometimes even terrifying) all at once!

But I have to remind myself — Ryan, never confuse your experience of doing a challenging activity for a couple hours, by choice, with an understanding of what it must be like for someone to do that same thing out of necessity, day in, day out. I’m not saying it doesn’t often shed some light on another person’s way of life, and perhaps I leave with a better understanding than what I had before, of what all’s involved in doing a particular thing, but sometimes I think doing a dumb-downed version of something is more misleading than having never done it at all.

I remember in High School, at Arts Magnet, one day they had all us guys put on a Victorian corset, in order to gain a better understanding of how uncomfortable and constricting it must have been for the women of that era. But they messed up, they only had us wear them for the briefest of intervals, then we took them off; and for the rest of the day, all the guys went around telling everyone how exaggerated the claims were about corsets, that they “really weren’t all that bad.” I recall one friend of mine even saying that he quite enjoyed wearing it, it was actually pretty comfortable, and Victorian girls were just whiny bitches.

Yeah. That’s why the saying is “You never really know a person until you walk a mile in their shoes;” not, “You never know a person until you put on their shoes briefly, in an air-conditioned costume shop between 6th and 7th period, walk around in a circle, and then promptly take them off again.”

I honestly think they should have called us all back the next day, zipped us up in those corsets again, plus put the other 50 lbs of traditional Victorian lady-garb on us, then paraded us around in the hot 100-degree Texas sun for the next 8 hours. And then asked all of us how we felt about Victorian corsets.

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No matter how hard I try to get a leg up and photograph landscapes earlier in the season, when it’s still somewhat pleasant outside in Dallas, the unfortunate reality is that yards in North Texas aren’t ever really camera-ready until about mid summer. There are occasionally some exceptions, but for the most part, it simply takes that long for all the spring annuals to become established and really look their best. Sadly, this means I’m usually out trying to photograph these yards in temperatures that hover around 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Admittedly, I get to visit and film some truly magnificent yards, this much is true; but when people ask me about what So and So’s fabulous house was like… how beautiful it must have been and how much they wish they could have gotten to see it… What they’re essentially wanting me to tell them is how amazing it was.

And I’m not trying to be funny or surly, I swear, but I’ve basically had the same answer for about 10 years now. It doesn’t really matter how beautiful or fabulous the house and yard were, my answer is almost always, “It was hot.”

I’ll try to assuage my memories, try and remember a slightly better, more rose-colored version of things, at least for the purposes of conversation, but really when I look at a lot of my residential landscape photography, the memories that come flooding back are almost never of how breathtakingly beautiful or magical the place was, it’s always stuff like… “There’s that stupid black metal patio furniture that was so hot it scalded my skin every time I tried to move it… and there’s the yard that was so hot and humid my camera lens kept fogging up every few minutes… and there’s the house where I was so sweaty, the homeowner asked me if I’d fallen in her pool… and there’s the house where the sun was so blazingly hot that it baked a pile of dog shit right into the flagstone and I had to scrape it off with a knife… and there’s the yard where I became overheated and saw black spots in my vision after moving a bunch of porch pots…” The list goes on.

I am also used to people’s responses being something along the lines of, “Oh, Ryan, stop being so dramatic! I’m outside in the heat all the time, and it’s not all that bad as you make it seem!”

“Really. You’re outside working in the heat?” I’ll ask incredulously. “And it’s not that bad?!”

And then they will go on to tell me all sorts of stories of them outside in the heat, all of which involve them being in a pool. Or sunbathing next to a pool. Or walking from the house to the car.

Is it possible we were technically outside under the same sun, on the same days, and in the same heat? Technically, yes. But for a person to think they have a grasp on how hot it is to work outside in the scorching sun, all because they floated around in a pool for a couple hours, by choice, and did nothing more strenuous than sip a Diet Coke…

We are back to the corset scenario; or me thinking I know what it’s like to be an Alaskan ice fisherman, all because I did it for a few hours, for fun, on an excursion designed specifically for tourists and thrill seekers.

So, yeah, I stand by my original answer. For about 90% of the residential landscapes I’ve photographed, what was it like to be at that house?

I repeat: It was f*cking hot.

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HERE you can read about how I talked my mom into doing a Victorian-themed photoshoot (involving a big black multilayered hot-as-balls Victorian gown) in Texas, in August.