Printing the Image - The Tired of Looking at Iceland Images Edition
I’ll let you in on a little secret - I’m tired of looking at my Iceland photographs. As you can imagine, doing all the blog posts has required me to revisit all of my Iceland images . . . again, and again, and again . . . not only to select images I’m interested in working on, but for images that help tell a story. Henri Cartier-Bresson said, “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” In the digital age, that should probably be adjusted to say, “Your first 100,000 images are your worst.” I think I’m still within the 100,000 range, so the over 5,000 separate images (10,000 if you want to count the dng/jpg combinations of the same image as separate images) I took in Iceland are still some of my worst. At least I feel that way about them right now.
That’s why it should come as no surprise to anyone when, at the thought that we need to print some of our images (gotta keep the ink flowing in the printer), I opted out of Iceland images and looked back at images I made during our trip earlier last year to the US. I scrolled through them quickly and two jumped out at me calling for a bit of work and to be printed. Perhaps they caught my eye because they were both in the wide X-Pan format, but that’s as good a reason as any for selecting some images over others. With images in hand, I developed them and we were off to the races.
The first image was taken from the Alabama Hills looking towards the snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains near Mt. Whitney (I’m pretty sure these are of Lone Pine Peak and Mt. Langley). I think it was the heat of the sun making the snow off-gas fog, but there was a mist hanging at the top of the mountains I found fascinating. And while there were definitely winds disturbing the fog, the winds weren’t so great as to blow everything away, so the mist lingered
I have several traditional landscape images with these mountains as backgrounds, but I think this image is the most striking, capturing a process in nature within a landscape of rock that, in human time-frames, is relatively unchanging. Fortunately, the print captures the quality of the mist and the rock I was hoping for.
The second image is from what I think is one of the most interesting walls in Eugene. It’s the side of a building not far from the old law office (where I mooched some office space to work in while back on “vacation”). The wall, windows and garage doors are painted a variety of colors and are decaying in a way that can only be described as photographic. Japanese has a term for the appreciation of impermanence and the unique character that comes with wear over the years - Wabi-sabi. This wall has a lot of it.
I had passed by it several times this trip (I pass the wall on my 2-block walk to REI) and determined that it needed to be photographed in the morning, before the sun hit the wall. So when I brought my camera into the office one day, I took a morning break and spent a good half-hour having fun with different compositions along the entire wall. This is the one I felt like printing.
The print has a lovely quality to it. If you like these sorts of things!
Ann . . ., well she was too focused on the website upgrade to think about printing any images, so you’re stuck with just mine this time.
It was nice to get away from Iceland images for a bit . . . now back to the grind.