Sunset Mist, Single Ice Hut, Post Pond, 2006

There are so many factors that drive my output. Maybe the least good one is, “It’s fresh.” I’m wary of those. For example this morning I spent some time with some covered-with-raindrops Lady’s Slippers in a bog near here. (Here’s a lady’s slipper photo from last year, and another one). I think I did better at the bog this year than last year, but better to wait.

Some things that have driven my output have been something like vision. One summer a few years ago I immersed myself in Ukiyo-e prints, and they filled my mind and colored the world. It’s hard to explain, but there was some kind of internal pressure to swim in that bright water. Another time when I was a young photographer I had something like a ringing clarity in my mind for a while in the spring. It was like a sparkle on things, and it really got me going in terms of photographing and trying to print that energy, that view.

But another less glamorous force behind output is quite simply technology, though that is rather a dull way to put it. Think of a musician with a new instrument. So for example when I studied with John Sexton at the Maine Workshops in the early 80s, he gave us Edward Weston’s formula for a developer using Amidol. It seemed to me to be a kind of more luminous look, though that might have been coincidence. It might be that I used it on a certain kind of image the first time, and then I looked for images with a similar tone to use more of it. So I bought some of that chemical from the Photographer’s Formulary (I wonder if they’re still in business?), and I used it on prints I wanted to make give that sort of luminous look. That chemical drove a vision and some excitement — maybe Edward Weston was inspired in a similar way…

This image was from a 2006 DSLR in weak light, and it was pretty noisy by any standards. But it is a raw file, and I just got a new raw processor, DxO Optics Pro. In this case that software really comes through on its promise to process out the noise while preserving the clarity of the image. It was tricky, but doable. I can not only save the image, but make it quite usable. I’m thinking of printing it for a show that will be loosely based on the theme of impermanence. And part of that show will have a series of this profile of hills, with various manifestations.

This print is available for sale here.

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