Postcards from the Creative Journey

798 Once Something Is Lost It Is Lost Forever.

A considerable number of my images deal with historical structures, obsolete objects and activities that have become known as living history. Preservation of the past is a key to unlocking why things they are the way they are today. We need to see the past the way it was to understand how far we have come. The enemies of this view of history are those that bulldoze the past instead of preserving it. I think of the Mayton house in my hometown of Cary, North Carolina.

The house was sawed in half and its original lot was left vacant.

 

It moved from its original location to a new spot.

It was laid on a new foundation for many years and then was bulldozed out of its misery. A fine example of what our town was like was destroyed. The saddest part of all is that the home’s original location remains an empty lot.

It is gone. It will never come back.

797 “Can you just stop being a photographer?” First Published 1/30/2020

“I have to wait until this car gets out of the way so I can make a nice photograph from this exact spot.” I say.

“Would you please let me know when you stop to make photographs, otherwise I am going to continue walking,” says the Missus.

I think this is how you know you’re a photographer because you just can’t turn it off. Even on the family vacation with a little happy snap camera it’s something that you just can’t give up. Ted Orland has a great quote, “Photograph is a verb.” Photographers are always photographing, even if they don’t have a camera. You are having a conversation with somebody and you change your position so you can see them in front of an uncluttered background. Items in your house are arranged as if they were a still life photograph. You walk down the street looking for compositions. You’re critiquing the photographs in billboard advertisements. You spy fellow photographers and do a quick gear critique. Do they have a good camera bag? Are there any accessories you would find useful? And then, if they’re making a photograph, your critique extends to their photographic form and the visualization of their selected composition.

You never tire of looking, composing, arranging, wondering if changing your position may improve your composition. Visual thinking and communicating are your stock in trade, so you really can’t stop being a photographer. Even when you are on vacation.

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This is a color photograph. The sky, street and buildings were all the color you see here. No fancy photoshop layer desaturation or anything else like that. It's just the way it looked.

796 Lessons Learned photo safari XXXV

Bandon Beach, nearing sunset.

Well, I've survived another Photo Safari and had a great time. While having great conversations and great photography I did actually learn a few things during this safari. It wouldn't be a safari if I didn't share them with you. Without further ado, the concentrated wisdom garnered from Photo Safari XXXV:

You can learn a lot about making photographs when you watch other people make photographs.

Don’t stand still. Setting up for one shot means you will ignore other opportunities that might be better than what you have already lined up.

Planning your image based on what you think will happen isn't a real good tactic. What happens if what you think will happen doesn't happen? You lose your "planned" shot and denied yourself something else that you could have done while you were waiting for something to happen that didn't.

The camera is not fooled. In the above photograph I was enamored by the light on the clouds. I was so zoned in on the clouds I completely missed the reflections of the clouds on the wet sands of the beach. I finally saw the reflections when I looked at the EVF of my camera. The camera saw it, I didn't. 

Your photographs get better the more time you spend with the subject of your photograph, be it person, place or thing.

There was not a single situation where I needed my camera to do something that it (or I) could not do. Modern cameras are remarkable machines. I was even able to make photographs while wearing a complete face covered motorcycle helmet while driving a dune buggy.

The complete flexibility of today’s cameras lets one have complete and total control over how the image is recorded by the camera. What I think is the completely wrong way to configure a camera might work better than the way I have mine configured. As Aunt Mary Catherine used to say, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

It still takes me a few days to get into full time photo mode when on Safari. Doesn’t matter how much photography I have been doing, it still takes a few days to get into full time photo mode.

Inspiration comes from the odd places. Watching the ATV riders on Saturday made Thursday’s ATV rental and dune photography a no brainer. Being able to remember, understand and apply past experiences to future plans can have a big influence on your photography.

Creativity means working within limitations to make your art. More constraints require more creativity.

There is always “good light.” Yes, the golden hours are nice, but you might wind up missing something really wonderful during the middle of the day.

795 Waiting and Remembering, First Posted 7/10/2016

Sometimes you have to wait until it’s the right time to make a photograph. Sometimes the wait is a very long time. This photograph was part of a multi-year project of photographing Victorian homes on Fort Vancouver’s Officer’s Row.

It didn’t start out as a multi-year project, but this project required a specific set of conditions which made it turn into a multi-year project. Sunny winter days in the Pacific Northwest really limited the number of opportunities for this series of photographs. Actually, the opportunities only existed on sunny winter weekends that I remembered I had a photography project to complete. That’s why there are very few of these photographs in the project. Sometimes, remembering you have a long term project is the challenge.

794 A Computer with a Lens

I have been tempted to acquire a new smart phone. My current phone is about five generations behind the current models so this late adopter might think it is about time to update. After careful consideration I am not inclined to jump into the “hamster wheel of progress” and upgrade. When I consider my smartphone needs, they are quite modest.

The latest “Computer with a Lens” is far more capable than what I have. The chief advantage of a new smartphone is that I would get a better lens for taking photographs. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me because I have a good camera. Maybe I will wait for Panasonic to add a telephone to their G85.

While I was writing this post, I received an email touting the latest version of a particular smartphone. How do they do that?

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This image was created with my trusty ol' smartphone. 

793 Photo Safari XXXV Day 10 Greetings from Arrakis!

Today we drove north between Coos Bay and Florence to photograph sand dunes. Forty years ago I just picked up my thirty plus pounds of view camera gear AND a tripod and scampered all over the dunes making photographs. For a gentleman of my vintage, this is no longer an enjoyable or viable method to photograph sand dunes. Our tactics needed updating .

Of course, we updated the classic view camera by using our new small, digital cameras. We updated our transportation on the dunes with the help of the good folks at Spinreel Dune Buggy and ATV Rentals. We rented a Polaris RZR XP1000 off road vehicle. After we were properly oriented, safety trained and helmeted we boarded our Mad Max Mobile and headed off to the southern reaches of the Tugman State Park sand dunes.

Photo Buddy Brooks Jensen ready to rock in our Mad Max Mobile.

The Inspiration from last Saturday’s ATV riders bore fruit. We had a great time negotiating the sand hills with power and style and made a few photographs along the way. Photographing in soft sand dunes for a couple of hours is something we could never do now because we no longer have the time or strength to do so. Hooray for technology.

The two hour rental was just about enough time to create some interesting photographs (I hope) of the dune area. As an extra added bonus  we had an absolute blast doing it. 

The Landscape is not pristine, but sometimes tire tracks add to the composition.

It looks like it might rain tomorrow. (Rain on the Oregon Coast? Really?) We’re just about at the end of things we want to do here, so we just might have a chill day to end this safari. 

Oh, and Safari XXXVI is already in the embryonic planning stages.

Trivia note: The Oregon Coast has numerous sand dunes between Bandon and Florence. These dunes served as the inspiration for Frank Herbert’s Dune series of novels. 

791 Photo Safari XXXV Day 8 Two Days in One!

Today was a crash day. We started out this morning trying to find some nearby dunes to photograph without having to drive miles up the coast. We were successful after a fashion and found some nice formations with pines and grasses to break up the monotony of sand. After lunch we crashed. We didn’t want to head further afield to chase some other photographic subjects and decided that some sushi for lunch, a grocery run and some downtime would be just the thing to finish off the day really, really early. 

Well, that didn’t work either, but that was OK. After some relaxation time and dinner we looked out the camper window and saw some nice puffy clouds on the horizon. With the sun setting just before 9:00 PM there was still time for some great sunset pictures over Bandon Beach. 

Off to the beach we went for our “second” day of photography.

We were not alone. As we arrived at the overlook for Face Rock, we saw what looked like the Normandy invasion of photographers. We found well over a dozen photographers on the beach, all set up with their tripods waiting for the perfect sunset photograph. I joined in and had a great deal of fun photographing the photographers waiting to photograph the sunset. 

Well, yes, I had to make some sunset photographs, too. Oh, and I never saw that bird flying between the two rocks. One of the big lessons photographers never quite seem to learn; that camera sees everything, not just what you want it to see. 

790- What Are You Photographing? First Published 12/18/2016

I’ve been working on a new project for the past few weeks. The North Carolina Museum of Art has an exhibit called, “Rolling Sculpture.” It is an exhibit of Automobiles influenced by Art Deco design principles. The exhibition catalog has beautiful “studio portraits” of the automobiles. The automobiles are flawlessly lit and the photographer did a marvelous job of portraying the likeness of the automobiles. It is exactly what is expected of an exhibition catalog photographed by a photographer was also an automobile racer.

I know my photographs will not look like the ones in the catalog, because I will have a restricted view and the museum favors spotlights instead of large soft boxes. More importantly, I will be approaching my subjects as sculptures not automobiles. The object of this project is to see the difference between my photographs of sculpture and the photographs of cars in the catalog. I think this is going to be one of those Fun Art projects.

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It was a great project. Here's a link to the Rolling Sculpture folio. This exhibit was so good I was able to include some images of the Bugatti Aerolithe in one of my Journal publications.

789 Photo Safari XXXV Day 7 A Day Long Affair

Yesterday had about fifteen hours of daylight. We spent about twelve of them exploring the Oregon Coast on our way to the Redwood Forests of Northern California. Many photographers (and golfers) think Bandon is a great location to photograph (and golf). Well, for photographers, Bandon is pretty much the northern end of the great Oregon Coast. The views are beautiful from many points on US 101. 

It was a good morning with the clouds and mist and sun cooperating to provide us some wonderful light on a beautiful part of the world. It took us a while to make it into the California Redwoods in the Jebediah Smith National Forest because the Oregon Coast is such a delight to photograph. When we got to the forest we had to switch gears from wide open spaces to something quite different. It is tough to photograph in the forest because the trees themselves are very tall, very wide and packed closely together. (I wondered how the first settlers made their way through the forests trying to settle this land.) For the most part the lighting is also difficult because of the contrast between bright sun and deep shadow. Most of my images are multiple exposures. I will need something better than photoshop express to see if I can be successful in bringing my imagination to reality. 

After spending some time in the redwoods, we wound our way out of the National Forest and followed the Smith River for a while. It is typical of the rivers we found in this part of the world. Roads that follow the river are sixty or seventy heavily forested feet below the river. Very rarely is there either a viewpoint or access to the river. Sometimes one can get lucky.

We made it home while there was still light in the sky and too tired to do much but crash after a day of good photography. 

788 Photo Safari XXXV Day 6 A Special Type of Landscape

As close to a birdie as I had all day. (Sigh)

Not a big photography day at all, but sometimes you just have to pull out the smartphone and make a happy snap or two. You can’t come to Bandon without playing golf. It’s like going to Pinehurst to play horseshoes. You suck it up, pay the money and enjoy the experience. 

That’s what I did Monday. Bandon Dunes is an links course. For those of you not familiar with golf, a links course is an oceanside course played on the rolling sandhills. Scotland, Ireland and England have many such courses. They are not prevalent in the USA. 

For someone who loves photography and golf as much as I do, no matter what happens, it’s a pretty good day. I can’t remember much about what I did on the course, but it was all about the experience. It was a good one.

 

787 Photo Safari XXXV Day Five - Rolling on the River(s)

Today (Sunday) we photographed the Coquille River where it flows into the Pacific Ocean. We decided to change directions and photograph upstream as far as we could go. We’ve always had luck photographing at the water’s edge so we decided to head up the Coquille. It started out pretty well.

We’ve managed to figure out the timing of the sky in the morning. There comes a few hours when the marine layer has pretty much burned off and before the clouds are completely burned off. We hit that time pretty well today. We had a nice foreground and a great sky. A good start to the day. That success didn’t follow through for the rest of the day. The river road moved away from the river and we didn’t have many more opportunities. Our second choice for the day, the Sixes River was also not a success. We could hear it from the road, but the drop off between the one lane road and the river bottom was at least fifty feet of densely packed timber. When we got to a spot where the road and river were at the same elevation, the river was too shallow to be interesting and the light was not pleasant.

That’s the way it is, sometimes. 

Since we were “in the neighborhood,” we drove back to Cape Blanco to see what it looked like without the fog of a couple of days ago. 

If you go back a couple of days, the monolith in the right corner barely shows up in one of the photographs. That image has its own qualities and this one has its own qualities. That's the beauty of art. The same place, different days, different moods. 

Looking north from Cape Blanco. It looked pretty darn good in the afternoon with no fog. 

Tomorrow (Monday) is not going to be an out and about photography day. Laundry in the morning and golf in the afternoon at Bandon Dunes for me. Brooks Jensen my photo buddy and unindicted co-conspirator is going to be busy creating content for his LensWork family of photographic publications. If we manage to get out late in the day for some casual photography it will be a bonus.

We're planning to make a day trip to the Redwood Forests and rent some ATVs for closer sand dune photography later this week. 

786 Safari XXXV Day Four; The Windshield, not the Bug.

We had to wait out a bit of rain in the morning, but we started out with the mist, heading north from Bandon to spend some time on the dunes. The initial scouting and exploring yielded little of consequence (see above), but it at least forced us to begin visualizing photographs. 

Things really got interesting when we stopped for some munchies at the Fred Meyer just north of Florence. While we were turning around in the parking lot behind the Fred Meyer, I saw it. We stopped, I jumped out of the truck camera in hand and found the first sand dune. A nice dune, clouds and shadows right there behind the parking lot of a Fred Meyer store.

You would think we're way out in the boonies, away from civilization, right? Ummm, no.

Primed by this initial success, we headed off to find some more dunes. We could not access the dunes we wanted to photograph (even though we did have a four wheel drive truck) because that part of the world is devoted to the world of ATV and OHV riding. 

Of course we had to stop and watch...and photograph...and be inspired

Inspired by the OHV riders we think it might be interesting to combine OHV rental with photography to get to where we want to photograph. We would be mixing art and fun. A good combination for later this week. 

Our final stop was the North Jetty of the Suislaw River in Florence. This was the place I was looking for. The dunes were not really huge, but they were interesting with flotsam and low growing trees and bushes. The clouds cooperated and a day’s wanderings were rewarded. 

Today, we head south instead of north to see what there is to see south of Bandon. We have talked about the Redwoods of Northern California but it's still a bit too early in the day to fully commit. With daylight lasting until well after 8 PM we are in no hurry on a lazy Sunday morning.

Monday will have little in the way of photography. It’s a day to take care of laundry, other chores and (hopefully) challenge one of the Bandon Dunes Golf courses.