MEMORIES

As I mentioned in the new year’s post, I’ve been going through a lot of images lately, picking new images for the website and organizing them in different ways.  Occasionally, I’ll come across an image that makes me pause and with it usually comes a flood of memories and sometimes emotions.

Photographs have that quality to evoke emotions in ways few other things can.  Particularly images of people, pets and places you have loved.  There is a reason I have a picture of Hans as my phone log-in page.  Every time I pick up my phone I get to see him and it makes me feel good.  But sometimes photographs evoke other memories and they are just as provoking in other ways.  Especially if you love the process of making photographs the way I do, and that sense of discovery and of seeing and understanding nature that can come from it.  That’s what this image was.

The photograph came at the tail end of our Fall 2018 trip.  That was the trip to southern Utah that got interrupted by a hurricane.  Ok, it was the aftermath of a hurricane, but you really don’t want to be driving in the Utah outback muck when it is (or has been) raining heavily.  So we had to scrap the last 10 days of our plans and wing it to find photography opportunities.  

As a result, we took the long way home, swinging by the north part of Yosemite NP on the last leg of our trip.  We spent the night at a Forest Service campground just outside the East Gate, after they had stopped charging for overnight stays and a few days before they closed it down for the season.  It was cold.  We drove into Yosemite for a dawn shoot at Olmstead Point and made a few nice images there.  Afterwards, we backtracked a bit and eventually pulled alongside a creek to photograph.

There I found a nice rock shelf just off the side of the creek that had a small pool of water that had iced over.  I looked at the ice patterns and decided that I had a nice composition to work with.  So I set up my tripod to look straight down on it and mounted my camera.  I took my time with it, because that’s part of the pleasure of these types of images.  Suddenly, sunlight made its way through the trees onto the ice puddle.  The ice began to glow.  So I quickly made the first of my images.  Five of them.

And then I realized that ice was beginning to melt.  I started panicking.  When I started, the whole ice sheet had been white.  Within seconds, the white started disappearing.  I recomposed the image slightly to take advantage of a melting section, and then fired off four more images in rapid succession (with a 2 second timer in-between depressing the shutter), all the while watching the white area slowly disappearing.  After the four shots, I moved back over my camera to make sure I still had it framed right and that the image was properly focused.  In that time period I saw the sun melt the central white portion up to the first strong curve line in the ice.  I took five more images, and with each 2-second pause, the white portion creeped farther and farther up the ice, leaving the lower ice clear.

By the time that last sequence was done, I was no longer pleased with the image itself, so I stopped photographing and stepped away.  As I grabbed my tripod and swung it over to my camera bag, the small layer of ice collapsed into the rock and much below, gone forever.  

That is one of the joys of photography.  Not only are they reminders of incredible places that exist in the world, and of the incredible time you had when you were there, but they can also evoke the experience of making the image that is often so much more than the visit itself.  And when that is combined with the sense of careful looking and the learning that can flow from that process, it’s a wonderful memory.  

In the process of working on the new website, this image was only one of many that has done just that.