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.
