I left the house this morning at eight o'clock. At 8:15 I made my first photograph. I made my last photograph at 4:25. I traveled 81 miles and made 88 exposures. What do these exposures have in common?
They all suck!
Okay, I'm being unfair to myself. I haven't even seen the prints yet, of course, and won't until tomorrow evening. Still, I'm certain that most of the photographs I made are quite poor. Toward the end of the day especially my compositions were reverting to the mindless point-and-shoot variety.
Earlier in the day I spent more time composing my images, and perhaps a few of them will please me. In particular, I'm curious to see a new photo of the pond willow, my first landscape photo of the day, a photo of a gravel road stretching up a hill, and an image of a cave behind the South Falls at Silver Creek.
I used a lot of film at Silver Creek, and most of that will have been wasted due to poor composition.
Highlights from my journey:
- I attempted to recompose this photograph. The tree in the photo has a cool shape; it appeals to me. The earlier photo isn't exactly as I'd like it, though, so I took another shot of it today. There were hundreds of birds around me as I worked, chirping and chattering and squawking. I was hoping some would roost in the tree, but it was not to be...
- When I stopped for gas in Mt. Angel, the station attendant was carrying a copy of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People in his pocket. That pleased and amused me.
- I drove past a nice pond up by Victor Point, so I turned around and parked in a patch of gravel. I grabbed my 105mm lens and hiked through a muddy field to get my shot. When I reached the best vantage point, I realized that I really needed my 50mm lens (or even my 20mm lens). They were both back at the car, a quarter of a mile away. Lesson learned.
- Also near victor point I spent about 45 minutes trying to frame a decent photograph of these rolling green hills, the sagging grey sky, and the two woods (one oak, one fir or pine) nearby. There's a decent photo there somewhere, but I don't think I got it. At one point the sun poked its head out, and the shadows of the trees on a nearby hill formed an interesting scene. I could have taken the shot from where I was standing, knowing that it wouldn't be exactly right and then just fixing it later in photoshop. I didn't do that. I ran back to the car and attempted to drive to a better vantage. When I got there, the shadows were gone. Lesson learned.
- Above Victor Point I stopped to photograph a gravel road that stretched back into the hills. While doing so I trespassed ever-so-slightly into a grass field. As I was composing my photograph, a man in a brown pickup pulled up. "Shit!" I thought to myself, "He's going to chew me out." "Hey," he said, "You should have been here yesterday. There was something like fifty elks out here yesterday." [he said elks -- he was Mexican, give him a break] Boy, was I relieved! Then he said, "You should drive up to the next gravel road and head back. There's a great view of the canyon there, and you can even see the river."
- So I drove up the next gravel road. While I was gathering my gear, another fellow pulled up. "Can I help you?" he asked. "Some guy in a brown pickup told me I could take photos back here," I said. "Well now, he doesn't own my land, does he?" said the new guy. "Shit!" I thought to myself, "He's going to chew me out." But he didn't. After he ascertained that I was a harmless photography student, he introduced himself as something-or-other Tallman, and he too suggested that I hike back into the canyon to take some photos. "The old homestead place is back there, and the mill, about a mile down the trail. You oughtta get pictures of that. But you wanna be careful of bear. A sow and her three cubs passed through here at the end of the summer. Also cats. I haven't seen any cougar lately, but they're around. And coyotes. You've been warned." I hiked the mile down to the spot he had indicated, but I didn't make any good photographs. I was too worried about bears. And cats. And coyotes. In fact, the longer I was down in the canyon, the more frightened I became. I convinced myself that every noise I heard was some predator anxious for a J.D. snack. I imagined Tallman finding my body, mauled, torn to pieces. As I took photos, I became more diligent about writing times and locations in my logbook (I keep a logbook recording all the details of each photo) in case this information would be useful to whomever found my body. I kept the lens cap off the camera as I walked so that I could snap a shot of whichever predator chose to eat me. Fortunately I didn't see any bears. Or cats. Or coyotes.
- At Silver Creek Falls State Park, I didn't have enough change to pay for a parking pass. A nice older woman working as a volunteer at the lodge gave me a free pass. Not that it mattered much. There were only three cars in the parking lot.
- I lugged all my gear down to the South Falls. (I learned my lesson at the pond.) All my gear, that is, except my umbrella and my lint-free cloth (for wiping lenses), not to mention a towel, which I hadn't considered part of my gear until my camera was soaking wet from the mist at the base of the falls. I was dumb enough to attempt several photos in the falls' spray. I was even dumber to try to change lenses in this misty mess. The equipment seemed to survive, though, and I spent two hours around the falls composing a series of poorly conceived photographs. After having spent two weeks learning to think small, learning to break scenes into photographable elements, I completely reverted my typical "must include every possible detail" style of photography. Grrr
Incidentally, when I post photographs to this site that were taken for this class, I am posting them untouched. I'm not modifying them in any way other than to resize them to take less space. Most other photos I post are cropped here and modified there, but the photos that I post from this class are exactly as I've taken them.
First Mac, then Jeremy, and now Nicole! Who's next?
On this day at foldedspace.org
2005 — The Power of the Internet Here is a plain and simple story of how the internet has changed my life.
2004 — More on Animal Intelligence An article about a parrot with a 1000-word vocabulary and the ability to communicate in English prompts me to contemplate the nature of animal intelligence and interspecies friendships. Again. I love this stuff.
2002 — Freezing The Event Log reveals that a mysterious i8042prt source is generating an event code 26.
JD,
I feel your pain on thinking that your own work sucks. I was always comparing my photos with Ansel's or Imogen Cunnigham's, or Edward Weston. It's not fair to yourself to do that when you didn't see the hundreds, probably thousands of exposures and prints that preceeded the one that made the glossy book on the coffeetable. For me I always enjoyed the composition aspect of photography and not the darkroom work but my dear sweet wife enjoyed (and excelled at) the darkroom stuff.