Postcards from the Creative Journey

410 The Telling Detail

Door, Jones Cottage, Cary, NC

Conveying meaning from a photograph sometimes depends on how the photographer approaches the subject. This photograph is one a “telling detail.” How does one convey the age of a building? An establishing shot of the grounds does not tell as much as a detail of a simple doorknob. Age is measured through observation. Multiple layers of cracked and peeling paint hint at the age of the building that has been painted many, many times. The obvious antiquated door lock shows the safety of ages past needs the reinforcing of a modern deadbolt lock. The reflected light from the window shows the striations of the old glass window. A look at this door knob and lock tells you this building has many stories to tell about the people that have walked through this door.

This photo is from “Victorian Lady,” but did not make the final show at the Page Walker Arts and History Center.

409 Tomorrow Might Be The Day You Make Your Best Photograph

Sconce, Biltmore House

Noel Gallagher (formerly with the band Oasis) was interviewed in Rolling Stone Magazine. He was asked the question, “Is songwriting still as fun for you as when you started out?”

He replied, “Oh, yeah. I still think tomorrow might be the day that I write the greatest song of all time. It's like going fishing. The guitar is your fishing rod, and if I'm not fishing for that song, f***ing Bono will get it, and if he's not, Chris Martin will. And f*** those two guys, because they've got enough. We're all fishing in the same river, and it's cutthroat, baby.”

In less colorful language, the thought is clear. I often say, “I can’t wait to see what I do next,” because if you are an artist, you have to be constantly looking forward to creating. As an artist, you really can’t live in the past because all your new art is going to be made in your future. Don’t waste your time reliving past successes, practice your art every day or others will create “your” art instead of you.

408 Well, That Was Quick

Ceiling of the Basilica of The Sacred Heart, Notre Dame, In.

I was inspired to begin a project. There was no dreaming, planning and no consideration of plausible alternatives. It’s going to be plain work; straight up. No frills, nothing fancy, just a task to be completed.

This realization was puzzling. Normally my projects go through a number of stages before they reduce themselves to just plain work. My projects all pass through the following stages: anticipation, planning, uniformed optimism, the thrill of partial completion and the realization that all that stands between you and completion are details and hard work.

This one just started out, “You need to make photographs here.” I immediately understood why I needed to do the project. I know where and when I shall do this project. It is all execution from this point forward. I went through all the stages in about five seconds and quickly arrived at the details and hard work. Maybe it will come full circle and be a lot of fun when it is finished.

9/9/16 A Particular Place To Go

Port Townsend Boat Yard

Brooks and I have visited Port Townsend many times. We always drive by and through the Boatyard and always talked about how cool it would be to photograph in the yard and continued driving. We thought that today would be the time to actually get out of the vehicle and take our cameras out and actually photograph the goings on in the boatyard. Neither of us know much of anything about boats or boatyards but we decided to spend some time there photographing because we like to think we are photographers and know how to photograph.

The craic was good and so was the photography. If I lived in Port Townsend I would make a career out of photographing the restoration of these old wooden boats. Documenting the restoration of these boats could be a long term project. You know that if an owner has the money to restore a hundred year old wooden boat, they could afford to pay a photographer to document the complete restoration. Just sayin’.

 

9/8/16 No Particular Place To Go

Shannon Lake, WA.

(Obligatory Panoramic Photograph)

Back to Cruisin’ Fer Snaps in the Cascades, headed East out of Anacortes to see what we could see. (For those of you not familiar with the phrase “Cruisin’ Fer Snaps, it was a Fred Picker term for driving around where the object is to find something to photograph.) We have driven by Concrete, Washington many time without stopping to see what is there. No longer, gentle readers, we took the turn and explored the town of Concrete. Our curiosity about the name of the town was solved when we came upon a very tall concrete dam that created Shannon Lake. We drove around the lake and made a few obligatory photographs. As the Irish would say, “The craic was good,” but the photography wasn’t much to write about.

9/7/16 Just Takin' It Easy

Shacks, Bodie, CA. 2015

This is one of the photos I worked on today.

It's a vacation, you know, so I can take it easy. Whether I want to or not. The stress of travel, the dramatic change in weather and any other excuse I can think of caused me to come down with a cold and generally felt miserable today. Happily, the weather did not cooperate either, and it rained a goodly part of the day. We couldn't get out to photograph, but that's wasn't a big problem because I was able to pursue some other activities.

I was able to work on a couple of photography projects from last year's photo safari and was able to spend some time with Brooks' massive photo library. 

Tomorrow we head into the Cascades and see what there is to see and photograph. I expect we shall be doing that for both Thursday and Friday. 

9/6/16 Port Townsend

Me at Fort Worden

Photograph by Brooks Jensen

Today was a return trip to Fort Worden, near Port Townsend. Fort Worden provided the material for the Labyrinth Series of photographs. I have always thought about how to improve that body of work and to push it further beyond its current state. The images I collected today will be the raw materials for a new look into this project. 

Port Townsend is a Victorian Town that lost a lot of its population around the turn of the nineteenth century when Seattle became the important port in Puget Sound. Much of the downtown remained untouched for a very long time.  Some of it is still well preserved.

Port Townsend is noted for its free spirited people. I am reminded of a bumper sticker I saw last time I was in Port Townsend, "Port Townsend - We're all here because we're not all there."

We took the Ferry from Coupeville to Port Townsend and here's a view of what we saw on the way back. I couldn't get to my camera in time, so I pulled out the iPhone and made a happy snap.

The trip back to Anacortes was delayed about a half hour when a fog bank came through Deception Pass. We had to stop and photograph the land, sea and sky with some quickly moving fog.

9/5/16 Just Touristing Around

Last week the weatherman's predictions were for sunny skies and mild temperatures. Of course he was wrong. Weather prognostication is scientific, you know. Which means that it is a wild guess with some numbers. The actual weather is cloudy rainy and around 60F. I am used to 90F and sunny. I am suffering. But, I'm on vacation and am photographing. 

We hung out locally yesterday and cruised around Fildago Island. I made some touristy photos and hung out with Brooks where we decided on the future of Fine Art Photography. Technically, I'm getting the hang of working on Lightroom on the iPad mini. It's amazing. (Shout out to wife and daughters who said I would love the iPad when I started using it. 

Here are today's postcards from the Creative Journey.

Very small tide pool on the Beach at Washington Park.

Some of the San Juans from atop Mount Erie.

Rock and Tree, Washington Park

I had a Photography Professor who talked about going on vacation and making photographs that were nothing more than "high grade tourist." That's what today felt like. Kind of a here's what I saw where I was today type of thing. 

Tomorrow is supposed to be rainy, so we're heading out on an early ferry to revisit Port Townsend and Fort Worden. Just about all the photos will be made indoors, so we will be immune from the weather. I'm hoping there will still be some art there to be discovered.

9/4/16 Photographs, not Photography

We decided to make Sunday a lazy day and deal with photographs, not photography. Brooks and I spent the day just looking at each other's photographs from last year's photo safari of the Owens Valley, While Mountains, Yosemite and environs. While we photograph together a lot, we rarely have time to take look at each other's photographs during a safari. We both were happy about seeing each other's work and there were also a bunch of "why didn't I see that's?" And I photographed that in a completely different manner. 

We had a great time and I wound up printing some photographs on his big Epson printer. Big? How about a five image panoramic view of Mono Lake that's about four feet long? I also made four images from an afternoon at the ghost town of Bodie, California. I do believe that most the images I printed have been posted on the blog during last year's safari, but it get them into this blog post later today.

The big reason for the lazy day was a crab fest this afternoon. Book's brother-in-law, Eddy went crabbing on Saturday and caught a bunch of Dungeness Crabs. In order not to be late for this feast, we hung around and made it a lazy day

 

Well, wouldn't you hang around the house if you knew that a crab fest was in your future?

9/3/16 The Safari begins...

On the Road to Mount Baker

I used to enjoy travel, but not so much any more. Friday was about
eighteen hours of travel, with lots of lost time in between, laid over in
Chicago and Seattle. Finished off with a two hour bus ride from Seattle to
Burlington which was mostly lost in some form of semi-conscious
hallucigenic state. At least that was enjoyable. 

I wonder if the mobile blogging from my ifruit device will be any easier
this year. As I remember, I can post words in one document and photos in
another. We'll see how this does.

Also on the Road to Mount Baker. 

There are some things I really don't want to understand. I think this is one of them. 

Apparently, the world of ifruit and Typepad have learned to play well together in the past few years. I now can post pictures from my device and make blog posts simultaneously. This is a wonderful thing. 

Now that I have processed a few photos from the trip to Mount Baker I can share some photos from that little trip. 

Looking down a valley from the vistor's center. 

 

Another view from the visitor's center. Think 46F and rain at about 4500 feet above sea level and you wonder why I enjoy landscape photography. 

407 At Pavement’s End

The Photography Doesn't Begin Until The Pavement Ends.

I showed this happy snap as part of the 2015 photo safari blog, but I think it deserves another play. The sentiment is similar to my annual photo safaris. Our version of this platitude is “Photography doesn’t begin until the pavement ends.” When given the choice, we take the road less paved and hope it will make all the difference to our photographic lives.

The unpaved road means we are farther away from civilization and are less likely to have our landscape photographs mucked up with the detritus of a disposable society. Yes, you can photoshop a beer can out of the foreground, but isn’t it much nicer when it is not there at all?

The dirt road represents a dichotomy of experiences; it can be a new experience for those of us used to pavement and the old experience of something rustic and undomesticated. Less traveled means we can most likely find places with few people.

I look for locations where there is evidence of people, but they are not present at the moment. Most photographs of abandoned places seem to really stress the “abandoned” part that seems to say, “This place is empty because everyone is gone and not coming back,” rather than “No one is here right now, but we do have plans to return.”

With any luck I've started down some dirt road somewhere, camera and tripod at the ready. Of course, I'll share what's inspired me along this particular path.