It was another printing weekend and, for once, Ann and I were able to take our time and make a variety of prints at a variety of sizes.  Ann focused on developing some images from more recent work, printing two images from our recent trip to the Japanese Gardens and one image taken earlier this year at the Painted Hills.  They were all lovely.  Me, well I did the opposite and went about as far back as I could go (at least digitally) and worked on some images I made in 2009.  The reasons why will be pretty obvious.

I recently played catch-up (yet again) on Bruce Percy’s recent blog posts.  One of the points he emphasized was the importance of returning to the same places again and again and again to photograph.  Not only do you gain a sense of intimacy and understanding of the place over time, it also forces you to work harder to create distinctive images and helps build the type of slow growth that is essential to improving one’s photography.  Well, if returning to the same key places time and time again is good, Ann and I had more of a good thing as an early start to the Memorial Day weekend.

One of the things I like about the blogging process is that sometimes while working on one post, another blog idea arises.  Occasionally, an idea comes to mind that invokes previous images I’ve made and I get to revisit old friends.  That’s what the paragraph about “following the light” did from the Light and Water blog post.  So let’s take a stroll down memory lane!

“I am the adventurer on a voyage of discovery, ready to receive fresh impressions, eager for fresh horizons, not in the spirit of a militant conqueror to impose myself or my ideas, but identify myself in, and unify with, whatever I am able to recognize as significantly part of me: the “me” of universal rhythms.”

“Anything that excites me, for any reason, I will photograph[.]” - Edward Weston

Ann wanted to get out for Mother’s Day, so who was I to deny her a trip?  But as seems to be the case this year, our initial best-laid plans fell flat.  I was hoping to give her an adventure photographing sand dunes, which she has been asking about for a while now.  Fortunately (well, unfortunately), I checked the State Parks website to find out that the sand dunes have been closed for the snowy plover nesting season.  Given they’re an endangered species, I forgave them for ruining my plans; but I still had to figure out a place to go.  We settled on the Santiam River near Opal Creek.

There’s a saying in the creative community that there is no such thing as being the first at anything - it’s all been done before!  No idea is so creative or original that no one has thought of it yet.  If it seems new or original, it’s just that you haven’t found the person who’s already thought of it and done it.  So it didn’t come as much of a surprise when the other morning, while reading The Flame of Recognition Edward Weston, by Nancy Newhall (an excellent book by the way), I came across her version of shooting the shooter.  Of course it was first published in 1965, when I was 5 years old!

Sometimes you look at a scene and you immediately have an image burned into your mind.  You know exactly where to set the tripod, what lens you need, and you make the image.  Then, if you’re smart, you start working the image.  Questioning whether you, indeed, knew exactly where to stand.  Should you have been lower, higher?  Closer, a bit further away?  Maybe a bit to the left, or right?  Did you have the right focal length lens?  Because, the thing is, you never really know whether you got the best image possible on that first crack at it.  Sometimes you do; more often than not, one of the latter images is even better!

I’ve joked in the past that if Yosemite is photography’s Mecca, then Point Lobos is its Medina.  That’s thanks, in large part, to Edward Weston.  Even more so than Ansel Adams, Edward Weston grabbed my attention in a way no other photographer had when I just started photographing.  That was until I saw the work of his son, Brett.  Both were masters of the art and both have influenced me in more ways than I’ll probably ever know.  So imagine my joy during our afternoon at Ona Beach when I saw forms that reminded me of . . . Point Lobos!

As seems to be the case all too often when we stay home, Ann and I wound up having a busy weekend so I had to struggle to carve out time to print, and Ann didn’t quite make it.  As it was, I wound up working on only one image.  And given we’d been to Seal Rock last weekend, I decided to find an older image from the beach we didn’t make it to last Sunday morning.

This edition of shooting the shooter comes from our trip back from the Painted Hills along the dirt-paved Bridge Creek/NE Gosner Roads.    We were out exploring and, in the grandest of all photographic traditions, stopping to photograph whenever we found something interesting.

Ok, this was actually our third adventure in April but I didn’t figure that the Japanese Garden trip would be the only one last month, and I liked the Juniper for a Day title so much I didn’t want to ruin it with the “Adventure” label, so here we are bestowing that title on our trip to the coast!  Trip #3 for the month!  Given that our initial thought had been to go there before the weather has us look eastward to the Painted Hills, I guess it’s appropriate we held off on the designation.

“Dawn is always tantalizing: the nature of light that one has wished for may never materialize yet another unlooked for image may emerge in front of one’s eyes.  That is one of the most wonderful things about landscape photography that is rarely discussed: the element of surprise can be as joyful as it can be in photojournalism.”