When I got back to Vermont, this art-inspired mental explosion was compounded. My longing to participate in delicious resonant abstract composition was quickly satisfied. And beyond satisfied. I've spent a few sessions photographing melting ice on the forest floor, yesterday until I was quite exhausted from all the visualizing, bending, and squatting with my camera. I've always been drawn to this as a fertile ground of imagery. I spent a particularly long day in March of '06. This week is a pretty big session of it. As I go through the hundreds of images I'm exposing and see what works and what fails, I'm going back out to the woods to find more melting ice. This one is fresh from yesterday's session.

I don't know if this image will make it to print. I'll see how much I like it as time passes. The issue is that it will need a lot of hand work, repairing blown-out specular highlights. On the one hand the luminosity and depth of the image wouldn't have been possible without sunlight on the ice. On the other hand, the texture creates highlights that no digital camera sensor I've ever owned can handle. To print this, at least at a large size, I would have to repair thousands and thousands of single-pixel spots that show up as ugly squares. Maybe there's a trick to deal with this. I hope so.

Through it all there has been a skim of snow. One thing that has been catching my eye is the way the late-falling and blowing leaves settle on the crust and then melt down into it. Pretty cool.

I haven’t printed this yet, and it sure doesn’t work big on the screen. But I’ve had it as the background for the home screen on the ipad for some time now, and I just love it there. Hopefully it will come through well at this size and context too. (see blog post)

As a photographer, I usually don't mess with the orientation of images, and I only crop if it really helps. But I also like to support creative designers. In this case I'm glad the designer took liberties with the orientation of the image. My original is here. She rotated my horizontal by 90 degrees clockwise and fit the text into the curve. Success!

And then they used it again for the catalog cover. Upside down this time. But you know, it's better that way, maybe. The catalog cover is here:

This weeks post is a meditation on image size, among other things. I’m finding the iPad to be really helpful in giving a fresh view of images, and I think especially for images that should not be seen at a large size.

Photography is funny; on the one hand we’ve got a two dimensional image that need to live and die by what happens in that flat space. On the other hand, the image is tied to something we might see in the so called real world. And it does seem often that an image won’t work if represented larger than real life — but then again it can, and sometimes it’s better for it. But I’m finding that in looking through photos in Lightroom on the big and oh so beautiful monitor, that some look worse at that size and in that space than they do on the iPad. Of course I can give a long rant about trying to use the iPad for photography, when images are inconveniently de-coupled from the concept of files. It’s impossible to find the damn image to actually work with it or print it in full resolution or anything. What a pain!

Some of my images, for instance One Cow, Thirteen Hay Bales; Iceland, really are best at a huge size. That image is all about space, and it helps to really throw some real space into the mix. It should be a big print, about 40″ long. Postcards of Robert Motherwell paintings are a tragic misrepresentation. On the other hand, this image, also sort of about space, seems better when more intimate.
(speaking of space, it turns out that this image doesn’t work as well for me in a tighter frame. There’s something about the insect’s relationship to the space around it that is significant.

I’ll include this in my iPad images collection. If anyone wants an iPad resolution version of an image for a lock screen before I get it together to make an app, please email me.

The good gray tones, textures, a wild composition with strong lines — it has all the stuff I used to try to do. I’m not positive I like it, but I think I do. I know I’m not the same person who made those other photos back then with the big film camera, but there is some echo, some thread. Very mysterious.

It got me thinking more about photos as something we see differently with different modern viewing methods. It's a funny thing. While as a fine-photographer I have to take the print, or the possibility of a print, as the basic ground of what makes a "real photograph," I also have to consider the glowing computer monitor, which is really quite a different thing. And for some reason a smaller hand-held glowing screen is yet another thing altogether. I don't completely understand why.

I've been looking at a number of images as possible iPad-keepers, and it's interesting. There are certain qualities that make them work for these purposes, lock screen and home screen being quite different. They also need to work when suddenly cropped by an orientation shift. Very interesting.

I'm working on programming an iPad app to present my photos, and this gets me thinking I'll also need to create an app with images that make good home screen and lock screens for ipads and iphones, and make the app with possibility to get them to the camera roll or photo collection, so they could be used this way by any user of the app. Something interesting to think about, on the back burner.

We had a bit of snow last week, and I was out with my camera with my iPod on, making exposures in the fresh morning. After some uncannily good photographing-in-the-snow music, Bill Frisell, shuffle play on the ipod gave me a talk by Jack Kornfield. That, too was just right. He was talking about the way things are, in both mind and the world: Things arise, and then they go away. There is space, and then there is something happening in it or appearing in it, and then there is just space again.

When I was young, a real influence on my work, among many others, was Wassily Kandinsky. In some ways it might be hard to see any relationship in this image, and it’s something that only clicked for me when looking at his paintings in the Guggenheim in about 2005: his paintings are like mind. There is space, gap, peace, and then there is stuff happening within that. There is always some silence around any noise. I thought, “Those paintings are like meditating!” I don’t know if Kandinsky ever meditated as such, but it seems to me he knew about mind and energy.

Way back, just starting with photography, I really wanted my photos to be infused with the energy of the world, and there was the challenge to make that happen. I wanted the energy, but I didn’t understand about the space, and the dance between energy and space. I’ve always understood that there was some mysterious resonance between the way things appear, the way we feel, and that a two dimensional surface could be an interface to that resonance. That was the magic I wanted to tap into, to work that interface.

Now I think of it more as Chogyam Trungpa might describe it: Ordinary Magic. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world. And deeply magical. Our minds work this way, and the world works this way, and we are all mixed up together in it. It just goes along, the most ordinary thing, and the most profound thing.

This photo was not made in the new snow last week, but my experience and the audio track made me think of this image to post. The funny thing was that I was late for something when I stopped to expose this image a few years ago, my life moving wildly along the road, stopping for a stolen moment to trip the shutter. The other morning, taking time and enjoying some peace, I don’t think I got any photos with quite this quality. It’s funny, we can only be in the world as it presents itself, appreciate it as we can. Like the stream above, like the energy in a Kandinsky painting, like our minds and life, things arise, and then they change just like our thoughts and moods. There is stuff happening, and there is also a context for that, a bigger frame.

It’s really too bad to post this image so small. There’s all kinds of nice texture in the snow that gets lost, and the patterns of the shadows seem to get lost in jpeg compression artifacts, even though this is saved at a decent quality. Since I can’t post the whole image at a decent size, there is a detail at the site.

Just as last week's image was found in my catalog while looking for something else, this new image struck me for a second week in a row, while scrolling to get to another image, with an altogether different feeling and intention. But this was too good to pass by.

In fact I am working with some apples and pears and such in an ambitious little project that doesn't have much to do with the way this photo turned out. Grateful for the bit of focus on that, in that it gave me this.

Looking for something else entirely, I happened upon this image, which is an altogether different time and place and latitude from the trellis window girl in the last post. But also a child in an interesting space, with a trellis roof above, open to sky. This will definitely do for now!

So here's something more straight-from-the-camera, from this June, when the roses were in full bloom in this garden. There were thousands and thousands of roses blooming near here, but this photo instead is of light and space. I like the Escher-like paradox of some of the planes and spaces, as well as the other-wordly light.

If this were a print, I guess it would be a proof. I don't know for sure I've "got it" as far as the tone. It's been too long since I posted anything here, so this is going live now.

In spite of the time it took, it was really an amazing experience going through the scan of this 30 year old film. 30 years! How have I even been alive for that long, yet alone doing photography? There is something quite magical about film grain, something really only an old-time photographer would ever spend much time with these days. This image, scanned at high resolution, is full of compositions within compositions when the full scan is viewed at a full zoom level. So in spite of all the time, I enjoyed revisiting this image I used to print in the darkroom back in the silver days.

This is from the same spot as the last post, also in Cavendish, Vermont.

Once I saw a great horned owl fly through this gorge at dusk. I've never encountered another person there, though sometimes there are footprints in the snow.

I've been thinking of scanning and posting an old favorite of mine. I'd have to find and scan some 4x4 film, not such a big deal. And I want to do that anyway. But then I got caught up in looking at more recent images, and this very much reminds me of that other one.

This is from the same ice storm as that other image I posted, the stump and weeds.

I'll try to post that old favorite one next week. It hasn't been online since the 90s, and I can get a much better scan of it now.

To me it evokes baroque music, but also with the added sparkle of psychedelic electric guitar work, with some post-modern minimalism thrown in. There were times when Jerry Garcia would tease Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" during jams, but alas, that musical confluence was all too rare. Here we have it visually, at least in my mind.

On one hand, the colors are vibrant and electric, the environmental energy is dynamic and constantly fresh: moving from heavy gloominess to bright, crisp, sharp and thousands of shades between. And on the other hand, the plants are dying, the days are shortening, and we’re spending much more time indoors.

On one hand, this is one of the most clear manifestations of the changing of seasons, touching into the eternal cycle of life on our planet, a timeless quality. On the other hand, here in Vermont there are so many gardening and household chores to do, that it’s hard to find a moment to look up and pick up the camera. And that struggle starts after I manage to get away from my desk. Luckily (though not from the photographer’s perspective), work always seems to gear up at this time of year. It’s our constant human dilemma: existing in eternity, with the capacity to touch the timeless — but stuck in time and too busy to look up and notice.

So here, I found a bit of time to look, opened up, avoided cliche (I think) and made an image I like. This is literally in my backyard, our little pond reflecting our maple trees.

Since my last post I’ve had some amazing time and made some interesting exposures. I’ve traveled and done a long meditation retreat, with camera, in a beautiful place. Right now Vermont is bathed in soft golden light, and the maple trees are many shades of gold.

So, why post an image from California from a few years ago, of stark light and pastel colors? I don’t know. It’s been a circuitous route through lots of images. I accidentally stumbled upon an interesting composition of rocks by the Pacific Ocean. Somehow I ended up a few days after that rock that caught me, here.
I think maybe I’m trying to get distance from the visual and psychic world that I’m immersed in. The world here has been so rich, it’s hard to tell the world from my images from my emotions. They’re all blended together. California, a few years ago: this is an image, and it will stand or fall as such.

I don’t know why they shaded the plaster in pastel colors in those rectangles, which appear to have been doorways into another building.

This image was exposed just a few minutes before another strange image, here, an image strange and good in an entirely different way, as if exposed by a different strange photographer altogether.

I’ll give a little ancient and recent meta-info though.

I had been photographing only with a 4 x 5 view camera for years up to about this time. Then I bought a used and inexpensive twin lens reflex camera. I loved the fact that I could suddenly make images like the one above but still have quality that wasn’t a total compromise. Not as good as the 4 x 5, but a new world of possibilities. I also loved that the camera looked so funky and non-threatening, like something you’d find in your grandfather’s attic. Funky, stealthy, and retro. (Though something half the size of a toaster can only be called stealthy when compared to a view camera, and only by virtue of its non-threatening appearance).

The up to the minute context for this image is that I haven’t yet re-found the negative. I don’t know if it’s still buried after my most recent move, two years ago, or if it got mis-filed and buried in an earlier move, or independent of a move. “I’ll just tuck these really important negatives inside the dictionary, under “R” for Really Important. I’ll never forget that!”

So here, I scanned a silver print from the darkroom days. I’ve got a handful of silver silver prints of this image. I like it a lot. Since it wasn’t easy to print, I printed a handful while I was at it. I’m so glad at least I’ve got the prints, and hopefully soon I’ll have a nice high res scan of the negative too.

I think I sometimes pulled it off, and sometimes still do. These old big pieces of film that I haven't looked at for many years hit me with a little jolt sometimes, when I get a sense of that some-kind-of-energy trapped in the surface of the silver crystals. But this scanning project is a process just barely underway, and hampered by the same thing my life with sheet film always was -- how to find the thing I'm looking for?

The other thread in my thinking is continuing with my interest in the Ukiyo-e, "floating world" composition and aesthetic. I have one of those from last week, new, but I'm not positive it's good enough to go live.

Anyway, this new image, "dandelion with centurea" is from this spring/early summer. It's been haunting me a little bit, and I felt compelled to put it online. I like the way it shows the moment as a precarious dot in the space of time. The dandelion gone to seed is at the edge of what it has been, starting the wind-born journey to what it will be. It's moment is all but gone, yet clearly in focus, master of the moment. And moving into its own is the blue of the early summer garden flower, more than holding its own against the weed.

It's funny how this image came up this week. All week I've been spending time looking at Ukiyo-e prints. Ukiyo-e means "floating world," and everyone knows at least one of these images: Hokusai's Great Wave. Maybe we know a few more Hokusai images or Hiroshige's, or any number of the countless fantastic prints still available for viewing in museums, galleries and private collections. Also reproductions are available, and now with the magic of the indra-net, we can see thousands of them.

It's been too too hot, and work a bit slow. Taking time to cool down and look through Ukiyo-e images has been a beautiful thing this week, and they float in my mind through the day and as I lay down to sleep and wake up.

It's funny, even back when I only made black and white prints, many of the compositional techniques from this genre appealed to me -- and even before I saw very many of these prints. Really, so many elements of the genre have permeated my work all along before I even knew much about it: the heartbreaking beauty, the transience, incongruity and tension between elements, and a dynamic tension in the composition. There is a quality of image-as-poem that I've always aspired to. The Henri Cartier-Bresson attention to geometry in composition is a tie to the photographic medium, and the Ukiyo-e images also simulate a sense of a "decisive moment" like Cartier-Bresson -- though the woodblock carvers were far more free to work with their imagination instead of the far more restraining constraints of actual-moment that we photographers have to deal with.

Though I haven't seen a hot air balloon or a duck (rabbits, swallows, frogs, carp, and cats are common), I like to imagine this image above as a modern Floating-World print.

See the blog for a few thumbs of Ukiyo-e

On Friday when I went pearl diving, I came up with this. I like it a lot. Seeing it in black and white helped pull some of the things I like about photographs: subtlety of tone and texture, dynamic energy in the composition, a poignant pointing-out of the passing of time, the bubble-like nature of experience and existence. This is why I’m doing this work.

When I was in college, so busy and my mind full of thoughts and tasks in the transition to spring; I would look up while walking between classes and realize that the trees had leafed out. Suddenly it was spring, and I had barely noticed it had happened. I had missed so much while lost in thoughts. Of course, we're always in transition, and we barely notice it.

And so it is with peony season. The days have gotten longer, the birds have been singing. Iris have come and gone. We should have noticed enough to know that THIS would come, that the world would be so rich and lush, the days so long and full of light and color. If we're lucky it registers, we really notice; but the petals are already falling, the days already getting shorter. Look! And then it's already gone.

Remember the flowers, the passing of time, and the people in your life.

I was working there the other morning, with camera at hand, and it turns out that my best photos actually featured the weeds, with the flowers as backdrops.

It is a good perspective to have on Mind as well.

The following is a quote from Suzuki Roshi, from a dharma talk given in November of 1965:

“We say ‘pulling out the weed’. We make it nourishment of the plant. We pull the weed and bury the weed near the plant to make it nourishment of the plant. So even though you have some difficulty in your practice….even though you have some waves while you are sitting, those weeds itself will help you. So we should not be bothered by the weeds you have in your mind. We should be rather grateful to the weeds you have in your mind because eventually will enrich your practice.”

This fits my mood on coming back, one facet I'm glad to have resonating in me still -- the great spirit of animals on the land; hills and light; space and energy.

And thanks to Kate, my new bride, traveling through light, space, and energy with me, patient when I want to stop the car. She fills the world with light.

This was last Sunday, 7/29, in Hanover New Hampshire. Monks were in town to chant and meditate for peace. This was a procession of the sand from a sand mandala down to the river, with the hope that good wishes, good energy, and peace would spread through the river to the ocean, and to the whole world. I made a lot of exposures of the monks; tonight this is my favorite. It candidly shows their dignity and serenity.