I’ve been putting together a lot of panoramas from files lately and finding a lot of gems I hardly knew I had.
I had tried putting this one together in the past, but somehow I didn’t have the chops to pull it off, or I couldn’t get my mind to visualize it properly. I thought it didn’t work. This time I think it really works!
This image is for sale and can be viewed in higher resolution here.
This summer foliage and water image strikes my fancy now, since it looks so cool and etherial. We’ve had a run of hot and muggy weather in Vermont in recent days that has been more of a feet-of-clay feeling. Moving the mind to a cooler place is an exercise that sometimes fights the body’s pull back to the too-solid experience of heavy hot air.
The exposure was so long ago that I can’t remember the specifics of that August evening. (I only know it is evening from the metadata in the file). Maybe it was hot then. And I guess in a way it is some measure of success of this image. While sometimes a photograph is successful because it is so clearly linked to a particular atmosphere and time in the so called real world, I also like it when the photo creates its own world, out of our normal experience of time. The time in the photo is not so clearly linked to any specifics except the foliage and atmosphere. That’s August, yes. August in the year forever.
This seems to be a good spot for making timeless photos, I see in retrospect, now that I don’t live so close to it anymore. Other successful images from more or less the same location:
As it seems to go sometimes, I was looking for another photo to post when I came across this. I don’t know why it was never posted or published before.
This was in the time when I was driving a lot, and a lot of that was between Lyme NH and Canaan NH. Both had great opportunities for Hay Bale Landscapes. Later in the summer I got inspired to make hay bale landscapes as a primary subject in a trip to Iceland, but at this point it was just the way things were sometimes. Sometimes the clouds and landscape came together, and it was while there were hay bales.
This uses the very subtle color shift available in an infrared image to tone the basically black and white print.
This print is available for sale here.
Here in deep winter, summer, sunlight, and cumulus clouds seem to hold appeal to me right now.
This was from Canaan New Hampshire, where I used to drive a lot. It’s a funny town, maybe a bit ramshackle around the edges and right though the middle, but also very beautiful. My wife lived there then, and the house she rented was probably in the most beautiful spot I ever had the luck to spend a lot of time. And that’s saying something, as I’ve been very very fortunate in that regard in my adult life.
In browsing through my not-yet-published collection in lightroom — photos that have made some kind of progress past raw camera data, but which nobody particularly has seen — this struck me. Why isn’t this one online? Here it is.
Besides all the rest of stuff I want to work on, I have a lot of good work with hay bales that wants to see the light of day, and then some of the transition of ice-to-spring camera work from the last couple of years I think will form something of a body of work.
Last summer I had a bit of time on my hands while in South Woodstock Vermont, and they were haying across the road from where I was. The sky was a mix of space, summer cumulus clouds, and some cirrus — of course in rapid flux. I made a fair number of exposures, but so far this is the only one I’ve come to publish, I think because of the combination of clouds and also the object in the foreground. It’s mundane, no doubt a bit of farm flotsam, but the way it looks like a bed-frame in that space causes a bit of a nice extra jolt. Since this was put together as a panorama from vertical exposures, it has nice high resolution.
I have some new winter work to publish, but oh, right now, for a sky with summer clouds and the smell of fresh cut hay. Right now we’ve got real cold and wind, like in the old days, and it’s too cold, even for me, to be out with a camera. Time in photography can be spent combing past exposures and photographing the ice on the inside of the windows in the morning.
This photo is for sale and can be viewed a bit larger at this link.
Well, it’s been a while since a new photo of the week has been published. The exhibit is down. It’s been a busy time.
One thing I’m up to now is reworking a lot of my images. Hint for photographers, but not for lazy photographers: always shoot raw. As algorithms to demosaic raw sensor data evolve faster than sensors, some high end modern raw processors will do a much better job of rendering images than when they were exposed, if they’re not brand new.
In that process, I’m sorting through the catalog and making piles and piles of work for myself; older images to redo, and new images to bring to light.
This is one that has been on the list for a long time. It’s one example of an image that makes me want to print everything and not show on computer screens. It’s better a bit quiet, and if a screen is bright and cranked up to quite-bright, this image is a bit too hot somehow. The energy is all wrong. I almost didn’t publish it a few times, seeing it that way on the laptop, but when things are calibrated, it’s good. I’m confident it will be a good print.
Maybe the best aspect of photography is saying YES to phenomenon and experience.
When I had to carry around sheet film, a limited supply of expensive stuff that then required time in the darkroom to process each sheet, it was a big commitment to say Yes to an exposure. There was pleasure, but also some torture in the decision. I figured that every hour I spent with the view camera meant several hours in the darkroom. Yes came with a high cost. A paradox of Yes is that in the physical sense, in the relative world, it is so often tied with a flip side that is a burden. Say yes to an ice cream cone, and you carry some extra fat on your waist. But then Yes on a mental level, yes to our life and experience, is liberation. Funny those two sides.
Easy or hard, It’s good to say yes to experience, to phenomena, whatever side of any spectrum it falls on. The world isn’t always pretty, our experience isn’t always happy. But the funny thing is that when we look closely at it and accept it, it’s interesting. It’s amazing. That Yes helps us get close to the core of our experience, our actual life, this actual world. The opposite is rejecting our experience, our situation, our world. It is like death creeping into our life. So I think even old age (or at least middle age as I can see from here) could have the bouncing wonder of a young child if we can stop rejecting what is, and say yes to it.
I don’t mean this to advocate tossing aside all discrimination. It’s part of the paradox. Connecting with the world and experiencing it profoundly requires not being aggressive toward it and rejecting it, but going hand in hand with that YES is increasing discrimination. The more deeply we go into experience the more important that discrimination is. Lugging that big box of sheet film holders was good for me as a photographer, even if there was less Yes. A very odd paradox.
It’s a blessing to see whatever is, to take it in and accept it without aggression or wishing the world were otherwise. But then we don’t want to eat a scorpion or walk in front of a bus, pick a fight. Tricky business.
So now with digital photography we can all say Yes all the time, which is nice, but at the price of less cultivation of our discernment. We still get to work on it. There are levels of it beyond the initial exposure. What do we keep? What do we show? What to print? (I’m thinking of this image for my upcoming show on Impermanence.)
I took some months to get to Yes with this photo to publish it, but I’m glad I’m here now.
Last week I mentioned that I had made several exposures on that stretch of road. Since I posted that, I went back there. With summer thunderheads moving in, sheep grazing, still maple leaves, I like the tension in this image of peace-with-intensity-and-change. It reminds me of meditating.
This image is available to view larger or purchase as a print here.
This is a spot where I’ve made a lot of exposures, in infrared as well as with visible light, especially this last spring. It’s a long walk, or a short trip on the electric bicycle. Though I’ve always been drawn to the spot, it’s hard to say what it is this spring that pulled me there so much. This is about a quarter mile and a few weeks separated from this image of Mt Ascutney. This one is looking north-ish, while the other one is across the road, a south view. It’s a good spot.
There were some times when the clouds were more dramatic, some panoramas that worked out well and included those clouds. I don’t know. For now, this is the one. Something about the light and the quality of the space. Yes.
This looks much better bigger on the web page.
This is an older image I’ve always wanted to move from the archive into the public light, and the upcoming show — for now based around presenting the truth of impermanence — is a good excuse to bring it forward and print it.
It’s a funny thing: infrared images are so good in lush places full of foliage. But I found that I made a lot of exposures when we were traveling in the California desert a few years ago. Somehow the crispness of the hills and clarity of light works well with infrared, and the bits of foliage that exist serve to bring an even greater luminosity to the image.
I may have said this before, but I’ve always like infrared photography not because it transforms reality into something stranger than it is, but rather because it shows almost more accurately sometimes, or at least provides another reasonable take on how we actually perceive it. “Normal” black and white photography may seldom ever be “normal” in that a colored lens in front of the black and white film or an interpretation of the red/green/blue balance when rendering it as black and white in photoshop will provide very different interpretations of the image. In any case my point is that each is an interpretation of the way landscape is rendered as image; we’ve just gotten more used to some standard views, and we consider them to be normal. But in what world does drab gray evoke the experience that foliage — living plant material — evokes in us. To me it is luminious, glowing with the light, never dead and drab, or seldom anyway.
So anyway, this is going into the mock-up of the coming show and then heading for the printer to see how it goes.
I think what I really like about this is the kind of open-ness that reminds me of the way I have become opened-up in my life. Some of conventional shells I shut myself into have been blown away by circumstance, or painstakingly peeled away by my own efforts, or just worn out. There are still walls left, but they’re not quite shutting out the world like they did before. Well, it’s not just that I feel like a ruin — it’s the sense of inside and outside being one. No subject, no object. Some days, some moments anyway. Some days all the walls are up, and the cheap carpeting is musty. Try to open the windows every day, at least.
This print is for sale here.