North of Factory Butte - Part 2

Things don’t always pan out the way you hope.  Especially when it comes to a creative endeavor.  SPOILER ALERT: you’ll find no flashes of brilliance in this blog post.  On the positive side, there are more photographs than the last one, and a lot fewer words!  So come join us at one of the most incredible landscapes we’ve come across.

This is part two of my thinking on landscape photography. I wish I could say that I’ve come up with some answers to my questions, but  that would be a stretch if not an outright lie.  Like so many things, the initial ideas come in a flood of thoughts and you seem to be moving forward at a neck-breaking pace and then suddenly you hit a mud pit and stop dead in your tracks.  At least that’s the way I felt with these ideas.

I decided to stick with the images from the bluff near Factory Butte because it’s such an alien landscape.  I hadn’t spent much time with them (probably wisely passing them by to do the initial blog posts of the trip because they will really suck you in) so I figured it was about time.  Plus we arrived at a very good time and the images seem to easily captivate the eye (or at least mine).

Also, by this part of the trip I was very much in my photography mode, able to respond to the landscape and keeping sufficient wits to vary the types of images I was making as well as the fields of view and framing.  Consequently, I had a variety of images to elect from even though the pounding wind eventually forced me to return to Beast for some respite.

So there were several “landscapes” to choose from.  The one below has those greater “landscape” qualities I discussed the last time, as well as some pleasant photographic qualities that seem to work.  To me, the snaky line leading from the bottom right, across the frame and then back to the right, plus the shadowed Ridgeline and the row of sculpted hills leads my eye to that silhouette of the dark rock formation to the right.  My eye doesn’t leave it for very long.  It’s a stunning black exclamation point in the middle of an open, lit landscape.

Anyway, as I worked my way through the images, I can’t say my thinking developed very much.  There were, of course, the typical type of landscape Images I make that are visually interesting, but really don’t go beyond what I discussed in the last post - an image of a thing.

And, of course, there were the types of images that seem to come natural to me.  If not abstractions of landscapes, then the landscapes within the landscapes.

While I can’t say I actually pulled out books to see what others had to say about landscapes (work has been very busy, fortunately), or even had a whole lot of time to simply sit down and think about it, the thoughts have been in my mind and, as is often the case, a topic of conversation with Ann.  One conversation was, unsurprisingly, helpful.

When I told Ann what I’d been writing about for the last blog post, we talked about landscapes.  And while she doesn’t like to talk about her work, she provided some rather good thoughts about mine.  Roughly paraphrasing her, she mentioned that my “landscapes” are, in some ways, simply a more complex type of graphic image than my abstractions or landscape details are (which tend to be very graphic).  She explained that all of my (good) images have this balanced, graphic quality that’s present in the forms of the landscape images I make. She said they’re really more graphic than a landscape environment as something to enter.

The more I think about it, the more I think she is right.  It does explain why my images are the way they are (I guess architecture design studio actually did impart some lasting benefit for me) and why they are different from Ann’s.  But it doesn’t really help get to (1) what really makes a landscape photograph a landscape photograph, and (2) how do I develop the ability to see that flow into an image that is so appealing to me (without the technique of getting really down low and close to a small rock with a super wide angle lens in order to have a significant foreground and a distorted sense of perspective that easily creates eye-candy photographs, which never leaves me satisfied when I do it because it’s not the way I see  [apologies for the near-rant])? I’m not so interested in tips and tricks (although I try them in order to understand them). I’m interested in seeing things - new things, the same things in different ways - and then making a photograph that expresses what I’m seeing and feeling.

But here is where I run up against the wall of present day circumstances.  To push things further, I really need to get out and actually photograph.  To try and make “landscape” photographs in different locations.  To attempt, fail, figure out why I might have failed, and to try again, and again, and again.  To start exploring my different thoughts in practice, not just in concept or even through developing images I’ve already made (which isn’t going to stop).  Unfortunately, we’ve got travel restrictions here in Portugal due to Covid-19 (and now pretty much everyone else does too), and we’re in a totally new environment, which is always difficult to photograph until you become familiar with it.  So exploring these ideas through the making of photographs will have to wait.  Hopefully we’ll be able to get started next year.

Until then, I’ll keep these thoughts in the back of my mind, keep working on old images, start scanning even older images (I’ve got some ideas for posts for that process) and simply keep trying to move my work forward in this time of Covid.  Like so many others.  That’s pretty much all one can do.