Today’s answer:  To learn, and then implement.

Ok, that’s the obvious answer.  But that was the answer from this week’s trip out to Sweet Creek Falls.  And the lesson comes from August’s photographer of the month - David Ward.

As this post goes live, Brandon is probably sitting around at the San Francisco airport waiting for his flight home to Lauren and Puck, which marks the official end to our August adventure.  We’ll get to that story later.  But since Brandon and I took a hike yesterday (not that kind of hike) and because I not only took some photographs while we were out, I printed some images once I got home, I figured I should do a printing the image post.  And since Brandon had suggested making the images I wound up printing, it’s properly Brandon’s Edition.

I’d mentioned in our July 2018 Adventure post that, even given the limits of photographing the Palouse from Steptoe Butte, I had a field day.  The contrast in textures, the low angle of the sun and my ability to get in close with the telephoto zoom I keep in my camera bag (oh why didn’t I run back to Beast and pull out the big gun?) allowed me to make a range of images.  At the time I wondered whether they were better color images, or actually black and white images.  In working with them, I realized that they were both, although they had to be developed differently.  Since I’ve never seen anyone show black and white images of the Palouse, I figured I’d show you my results.

My month studying John Sexton has ended, and it definitely had its rewards.  In Quiet Light he speaks of being compelled to photograph in that wonderful  light one finds pre-dawn and post-dusk light (the latter Ann and I must make more of an effort to take advantage of, despite the greater number of people that linger around after dark), but also speaks of “listening” to the landscape, and to the image one is developing.  And as Quiet Light explains, listening leads to seeing.  So as I stood there on the shore at Bandon in the pre-dawn light, unsure of what I should photograph, I listened and after a few minutes I saw, and started photographing.  Which leads to another installment of light and water. 

As I went through the images I’d made during our recent trip to the coast I noticed a definite pattern in my method of working.  It falls into a variation of “working the image” that I’d discussed before, so I thought it might be useful to discuss in a post.  Fortunately, there was a clean series of images that made a perfect example of what I was hoping to describe.

Ansel once said, based upon his training as a classical pianist, “Photographers don’t work hard enough!”  Oh, wait, wrong quote.  Yes, he did say that, but what I wanted to say was that he used to describe the making of the negative as the “score” and the print (or these days the developed image on your computer screen) the “performance.”  In my previous blog post, actually written two months ago, I couldn’t figure out why an image didn’t work.  Well, after a short chat with Ann, I found out that the problem wasn’t with the score, it was I had just really bombed the performance.

This is the companion post to, “Why does it work?”  Unfortunately, it’s the other way around.  In my reviewing of previous work from southern Utah in preparation for our trip this fall, I came across an image that has plenty of elements that should make it compelling.  But somehow it falls flat on its face.  The question is why?  One can learn from this type of failure so, as I said in the companion piece, “that has the makings of a great blog post!

It was time to print again this past weekend and for once I decided to print something from our most recent trip!

We woke up early the next morning refreshed from a good, cool, night’s sleep (Gee, it's amazing what a couple thousand feet of elevation can do to cool things off!).  After coffee and a light breakfast, we broke camp and headed down river to continue our exploration into these parts unknown.  What excited me the most was that I was going to get my first glimpse into Hell along our way to the day’s ultimate destination - the Painted Hills!

Since this trip was to be part business, part pleasure, and we wanted to maximize the latter, Ann took a half-day off on Wednesday and we drove like bats out of hell (let’s see how many hell analogies I can use in this series of posts) and drove from home to Spokane, Washington in a single afternoon/evening.  Actually, we stayed in Spokane Valley, but given the distances, Spokane is close enough.