This weekend is the Champions League final between Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspurs (yeah, 2 English teams).  I read an article the other day about Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool’s manager, who has managed to not win the last 6 finals he’s been in.  When asked if he thought he was unlucky and hoped number 7 would be lucky for him, his response was, if you look at it not as having lost 6 finals, but of being the best coach over the last decade to win semifinals to get to the finals, things look very different.  Well, this week I can’t figure out whether I’m lucky or unlucky.

Last weekend Ann and I had to make a trip up to Portland.  Of course, whenever we do, we try our best to get up early so we can swing by the Portland Japanese Garden during members hours for a bit of photography.  Spring is certainly in the air and not only was everything in bloom, the sun was up and out even before the gates opened!

I guess I didn’t fully cover the “Working the Subject” topic discussed in my last post.  After writing the story, I thought a bit more about the images and decided to take a bit of time to see how a couple of the images looked in black and white.  Thus, working the subject even more.  I think it was time well spent.

I’ve posted before about working an image - how one often has to struggle with different ways of photographing a subject before you’re able to get an image that really stands out.  There’s a somewhat similar but quite different aspect to our photography that comes in to play for Ann and me, and that’s working an subject.  If you’ve been reading the blog for some time, you’ll realize that we often return to the same locations and therefore the same subject - you’ll recognize the same rock or tree from our Japanese garden trips, or the same formations from our Yosemite trips.  There’s a learning process, an understanding that comes from returning to the same place and subject again and again that can’t be obtained in a single visit.  In part, that comes from photographing the same subject under a variety of conditions.  During our trip to Bandon, that idea was front and center for me.

On that first morning during our trip to Bandon it took Ann a long while to finally see a composition that really excited her.  Compositionally, it wasn’t easy and she had to really work the image - finding the right framing, what to include, what to exclude.  As it often does, it means moving forwards or, as in this case backwards, until everything is just right.  It takes time, focus, and decision making skills.  And sometimes, as you’ve finally figured out the right composition, a Jackass comes walking into your field of view! 

It’s been way too long since Ann and I have printed.  Fortunately, we didn’t have any issues such as clogged printer heads and were able to get right to printing after the printer took an unusually long period to warm up and go through its cleaning/maintenance cycle.  Ann decided to go with one of her recent Bandon images; me, I went with two - one from our recent Painted Hills trip, and an oldies composition that turned out splendidly!

Sometimes words fail me.  How does one pay one’s respects when words seem so inadequate to the task?  Everything I can think to say falls so terribly short of what I feel.

The next morning in Bandon was more of the same but different.  We still had heavy overcast skies (in fact, more than the previous day) and we decided to return to the same place.  However, it was warmer (we both had to strip off a layer of clothing that was needed the day before after only a hundred yards or so down the beach), it wasn’t rainy when we got there so we didn’t have to wait around at all, and best of all it wasn’t windy!  Plus, the tide started higher than we’d seen it the day before, but made its way ever lower than it had been the previous morning, so everything looked incredibly different!

It didn’t take too long for us to get antsy to get out again.  We’ve both been working hard and have had little free time to just do the things we’ve wanted to do (like not quite getting around to printing any photographs for the past . . . now 3 weeks).  Ann, as usual, posed the right questions.  (1) Where are we going to next? And (2) What do the tides look like the next couple of weekends?  A quick check of the tide app on my iPhone (Tide Graph) revealed that low-low tide would be around sunrise this past weekend - ideal tide conditions for a weekend in Bandon.

It’s unfortunate that I’ve been remiss in adding new postings, but the reason is plain - I’ve been running ragged simply taking care of things.  And that has not given me much opportunity for creative endeavors (which I hope will change this weekend with a trip to Bandon to take advantage of the low tides/full moon).  As part of my taking care of business, I’ve finally completed transferring my Lightroom images into Capture One.  Creative for me the past couple of weeks has been to periodically glance at images while they’re loading into Capture One, while I’m working on something else (like a brief to LUBA).  So for lack of something better to post, I leave you with one of the images that caught my eye!

Perhaps I should have titled this “photographing to see,” but to be honest, I’m not quite sure how to best describe it.  As you know, I’ve written a couple of posts about “working” an image - when you see something that strikes you and you keep working to make the best image of it that you can.  Sometimes this means (un)subtle shifts in camera placement or lens selection, sometimes it means moving around an object to finally realize what you see.  The thing about that process is that you see something first, and then you have to figure out how to photograph it.  But I’m talking of something slightly different here.  That is, you don’t see it until you start photographing it.  I love the sense of discovery and fascination I feel when I see things this way.

Two weekends ago Ann and I headed out to the Painted Hills for a long weekend.  It had been raining pretty much non-stop for a week, both here and at the Painted Hills, but the forecast was for partly cloudy skies with a chance of showers for a couple of days, so we decided to take a chance on getting some interesting conditions.  As luck would have it, we stayed dry . . . at least for the most part.

Our July adventure had me in an abstract frame of mind.  Blame it on studying Brett Weston that month, or on the photography gods, but I decided to visit my Painted Hills images in black and white much like I had the Palouse images.  I think I was smart to do so.

I’ve been pretty bad about transferring my library of images into Capture One catalogs.  In-between still dealing with the fall-out from our winter storm and flood of other things life has thrown our way, I stopped importing images into Capture One quite a while ago.  However, with the renewal of my Lightroom subscription coming next month, I decided I needed to at least get all of my images into Capture One before then and have started the importing process again.  The other day I was importing some images from 2015 and when I walked back into my office to begin the next import, the image I saw on the screen flashed the memory of making it in my mind and I saw what I needed to do to realize it on the screen.  I was supposed to start making dinner but . . . dinner could wait!

Last weekend Ann and I needed to do some printing.  Ann wasn’t sure which images she wanted to print,  so she asked me if I’d help her pick a couple.  Given she’s been working on a variety of images from our recent trips, there were several to pick from.  Pleased that she had been working a lot in black and white, and knowing that I’d been working on a couple of B&W images, I said, “Well, why don’t we narrow it down to just black and white this weekend.”  So that’s what we did!