Postcards from the Creative Journey

The Decisive Landscape Moment

 

Days with scattered clouds are the best days to photograph. Having scattered clouds does a couple of things for a composition. First, it gives the sky something to do. Without puffy clouds, the sky is a blank tone. When I was photographing with a large format camera, a blank sky also was an invitation to dust, hair and anything else that would create a white squiggle on a print. Second and more important is that cloudy skies break up the foreground with patches of light and shadow which provide some differentiation in the foreground. Of course all this works only if you are in the right place and have your camera ready for “the decisive moment.” Partly cloudy days are filled with decisive moments and you have to be ready to take advantage of them.

It's Not That Bodie. But It's Still Bodie.

 

Wow! Let’s photograph Bodie! There are many iconic photographic destinations for photographers of the American West and Bodie, Claifornia is one of them. Landscape photographers flock to these sites and photograph them until they become clichés. We have seen lots of photographs of Bodie, California, Yosemite, Point Lobos, slot canyons, Mono Lake, and Zabriskie Point. Well, you probably haven’t seen a photograph from Bodie, Washington. Or what’s left of it. So, here it is. When I was getting this photo ready for my web site I thought, “Hmmm. Didn’t Wynn Bullock have a photograph that looked like this?” Mine isn’t as good as his, but I think that just about every one of my photographs isn’t as good as a Wynn Bullock photograph. But I continue to photograph and add a new photo every week to my blog. You can’t make a good photograph without making a photograph.

This Is a Good Place to Make a Picture

 

“Stop. This is a good place to make a picture.” That has to be one of my favorite expressions of my annual photo safaris. So it was this past August driving through the Cascade Mountains on our way to Idaho. We slammed on the brakes and pulled off to the side of the road. I pulled out my brand new little happy snap camera and made this wonderful photograph. Ten megapixels of RAW capture and a Leica lens in a camera just a little bit larger than a package of cigarettes. Five or six years ago I was carrying a fifteen pound tripod with an additional thirty five pounds of view camera paraphernalia in a heavy backpack. I would not have made this photograph then because it would have been too much trouble to set up the view camera in the rain. This year, I pulled the “noisy cricket” out of my pocket and made a nice photograph. I like it but it doesn’t feel like I did enough work to merit such a nice image.

Ghost Town Auto

 

It was one of those days in one of those places that just begged to be photographed. The light was absolutely perfect for the front of the building. The textures were numerous and very complimentary. The lettering on the façade commented on the location. The fact there were very few opportunities to make photographs on this side of the street, in fact very few accessible buildings anywhere in Burke(or what’s left of Burke), Idaho gives this photograph the honor of being a square peg. It’s a good photo with no other friends from that day to keep it company.

Off Kilter Looks Right

 

When I made the “By the River” folio (you have already passed it on my web site – go back and take a look at it, I can wait a bit. OK, thanks for checking it out.) my job was sitting in the passenger seat and scouting the river for places to photograph. I joked that we should also look at the other side of the road to see what faced the river. If there is something beautiful to look at, then it stands to reason that someone would probably build to take advantage of the view. How about an old, abandoned (maybe seldom used?) rustic cabin with weathered wood walls - another photographer magnet. One of the square pegs from that afternoon of cruising a river road. An additional square peg moment is my lack of rectification of this photograph. I tried to straighten and square up all the verticals and horizontals but it just didn’t look right. I think this old cabin needs to be a little bit off kilter to look right. And so it is.