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№ 75 Posts

Mindless sentinel?

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

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..

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.