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№ 75 Posts

Wasted on me

Published March 8, 2008
Clallam Bay, October 2007

This still needs work, but it’s marginally better than the runaway crap of the overexposed, pyro streaked flarey negative I came away with. Right now I like the overblown drama of it because I rarely treat myself to such Wagnerian moods, but I’ll most likely tone it down in future versions. For now I’m enjoying the sky immensely, the converging wedges of the river and Bay and gravel bar fading into the slope of the Seiku headlands and the pale tendrils of the twilight storm…As long as I don’t look too closely at the trees…

What to do with those trees though. The pathetic wind-beaten tide-stunted spruces on the gravel bar. I have really failed them and they really were what I was after, what drew me to the scene primarily. When I was there they looked so defeated that they each seem to be leaning on the one in front, a cascading slump that really looked magnificently wasted in the gathering storm. An elegant if irrequisite surrender with still the whole night and indeed the whole winter ahead. Alas, here they just…clump.

Ah well. Overcompensate and hope for the best.

Scale issues

Published March 4, 2008
Rialto Beach, Mora, November 2007

If you get up early enough you get such places to yourself. I don’t know why being alone in such a place is important, but it is. You could hide an invading force in these beach logs, but still. It’s easy to get suckered into a pre-wheel mindset, a superficial loneliness that’s a matter of salt in the hair rather than the spirit, yet I get lost and baffled when I even think about it. My wife and I used to camp in such places. The sleep amongst the sounds of breakers and the siftings of cold fogs and mineral smell of salt air and wet basalt is something to be experienced. And relived; such that even inconvenience and rainy day grumpiness becomes a sweet memory.

I wonder if size every really leaves its mark here. The place is huge, but close in ways that altogether befuddling. I keep coming back up for the spectacle of the Pacific, the force entire. But it’s the smallness, the trees that are orderly even in their deadness, the gestures of sand and waves around buried logs, the blanket size patches of fog that I want to take home and print.

Drifting along the updrafts of these waters, buffered in fog like a kid in a big soft towel. Already half-gone wading in the tide. 15, 20 feet out and you are lost forever.

Bipod+tripod=?

Published March 2, 2008
Tongue Point, February 2008

I made a new tripod, and this craggy headland seemed a curious place to test it, over jagged basalt and rapidly rising tide. I have difficulty testing things simply, something needs to be at stake.

But the picture was hard to make for less obvious reasons. At first I liked the idea of an evolutionary tableau of amphibians emerging from the sea and facing the obstacle of stairs but I now think this appeals to me because of the reverse; a municipally-funded stairway into a treacherous primordial landscape; something on the order of This way to the spawning ooze. Use at your own risk. The spectacle is supplemented by the central hotspot suggesting a crucible of dawn, the clipping rock wall like a boundary of eras-

Irony shots, though… Whatever, bro!

I took the picture anyway.

The road away from Storm King

Published March 2, 2008
Lake Crescent, Olympic National Park, November 2007

Most weekends now I am spending scanning in prints and negatives. The digitization process takes a toll on the spirit of sloth, but only peripherally. I have honed a mild stupor for use when on the computer that’s relaxing on mornings after a particularly strenuous day of hiking. But it’s taking some doing to introduce any sort of productive workflow to it. But I can still drink a lot of coffee, and cycle mindlessly though my favorite spots on the web while the scanner is ticking and whirring.

Seeing a familiar print on a screen can bring mixed blessings. There is of course the immediacy of good LCD backlight, but still what’s missing is the remarkable range of a good silver print that seems to exist in it own spontaneous swale of otherwordly light. The silver seems to wink, a buckle perception.

Then there’s the niggle of its complete lack of the object. Digitization beggars the irony in a comical realm of a representation’s representation. There are no shiny bits to fondle and wax atavistic over, no apparent roots in the caves at Lascaux. I’d like to resist drawing parallels in evolution, but I will most likely succumb to the obvious abstractions of worth and possession that digitized notions like credit and online personae seem to fall under.

But posting this is a solemn commitment that I do have a print of this around here somewhere.

Flare, drama and a watery grave

Published March 2, 2008
Ruby Beach, February 2007

One of the most interesting things to me about B&W photography is the effective failure of flare. Contrast- and detail-wrecking casts, Dark Flare, Light Flare, tonal weakness at one end or the other. It’s necessary. It’s the weakness that seems to represent light the best but that doesn’t mean it was there. Ranging beyond a sliding tonal scale suggests backlash, a basic mechanical failure of the eye, a just-woken-up logic of impression and haze.

Perfection is polymorphically insensitive. Indeed, nothing is interesting without a touch of failure. And failure suggests perpetuity like success never can. There’s music in struggle, hollow brag with a treble of sadness, lingering in impressions if not body. You can’t kill the fool, only the sweet innocent dies.

On that note, probably the most interesting part of the image is a visual non-starter: tucked away in the salal behind the biggest of the driftlogs is a grave marker that reads Krystal, taken by the Sea 10/13/2003. God have mercy on the girl.

Mindless sentinel?

Published March 2, 2008
Ruby Beach, March 2008

So a family puts a red cooler down in this shot. A bulky man strolls through my field (er, it feels like mine at the moment) and oh yes he’s watching me too. Lenscap off, the darkslide pulled and extended to shade the sun like a half-caution in semaphore. It would’ve likely been a surreal scene if a third party had been there to observe it; antique photographer, modern family unit, and a desolate and blustery March sunset.

The great thing about long exposures is that there is compositional relief from the average white family with a big red cooler. Their vapors mingle with the blasted light here, nothing solid or insurmountable, and I don’t think the composition suffers for it but still my sympathies are with the rock. It seems turned away from the sea, concerned perhaps with more modest demarcations of time.

 

5×12

Published March 2, 2008
Ruby Beach, February 2007

Lately I can’t stop with the panoramas. I drive the 60+ miles to work and just keep going. Not wise, considering where the cost of film is going. But I do love that my job lets me do this. Lucky doesn’t even begin to describe it.

This month it’s still the shipwreck coast; specifically the stretch between Kalaloch and Ruby. I took this particular shot last year but I still head out here every chance I get. The sky loads up wet and heavy and the sea gasps and the sands glide out of the water with an agate flourish and my heart buckles. You can sit in the truck cab with the red zinger and the pop tarts (er- for energy) or labor down the bluffs with 50 pounds of gear and wonder how many more years can I stretch this out.

The 5×12 format is cinematic yet portable, like a viewing apparatus for Creation’s field agent; somehow only more so because the scene is rendered upside down and backwards on the ground glass. B&W converts everything to it’s essence, colors are purified perhaps. I’ll resist taking this too far because the mystery is half the fun, but suffice to say it’s an indescribable joy to see an image, the event of it, contained in a camera that you made. My actions are always quickened by a greedy haste to stuff everything I feel and see in my little box, like I’m trapping something rare and lively.

 

New or newer..

Published March 2, 2008
Ruby Beach, March 2008

In trying to justify to the amount of typical romantic isolation in my work, I’ve been glossing over a great deal of aesthetic introspection in order to feel new or fresh, but it’s pretty hollow, and I’m not really fooling anyone. The concept of new as it relates to the landscape is suspicious at best, but I do like the idea of these trees stumbling over themselves to get out of my purple romantic notions.