Postcards from the Creative Journey

911 Day 8 On the Road Again

Whale Cove

Time to change locations. We worked over quite a bit of territory from Waldport south, so it’s time to move north. We wound up between Depoe Bay and Lincoln City. Along the way we drove over Yaquina Bay and I got a bird’s eye view of Rogue Brewing. It’s a pretty big operation. 

We set up camp and then went cruisin’ fer snaps. The weather was absolutely perfect, that is, if you like clear blue skies with no clouds. A great day for being outside is not necessarily a good day for photography.  That’s one of my two bad days for photography. The other day is a flat gray overcast day. My preference is to have some clouds in the sky, something to fill in the top third of a photograph. If that can’t happen, I would try to minimize the amount of sky in the image.

Sea Palms and surf at Rocky Creek Wayside

Here are a few images from yesterday that I didn't include in yesterday's post.

Rock Creek Beach

Dunes north of Florence

Cook's Chasm

Cook's Chasm

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It's the first of the month and that means I've published a new monthly edition of my Journal. It's located on my website and is available to download. It's a PDF publication and looks great on desktop or phone. Please stop by and see what's new. 

910 Day 7 ‘Twas a Day at the Beach

I wanted to find a beach we photographed on the first day to re-do a couple of images I didn’t get right. This was the type of image I wanted to do. An abstract, intimate landscape; the type of scene most everybody will walk over (or through).

When I got there this morning the only thing that was different was everything. A few years ago I did a project called “Temporary Landscapes” reflecting on the temporary nature of the land. Today, it was right in front of me. I was not able to re-do a couple of images but I began a new set of images of tide pools and seascapes.

Cove Beach

Bob Creek

Along the OCH

Bob Creek

At Cook's Chasm looking north

At Cook's Chasm

Thor's Well at Cook's Chasm

It was an absolutely wonderful day, puffy clouds, light wind and a comfortable temperatures. Tomorrow is moving day. We are leaving Waldport and moving north of Newport. Although it won't take all day, we might not be able to do have time to photograph. There are some more photographs made today that I will share on Wednesday.

909 Day Six - A Return to the Forest

I’m starting to get my vision in order. I can see just fine, but there is a definite difference between seeing and vision. Vision is seeing at a higher level where the relationship among the objects in front of us becomes apparent and we can position ourselves in a spot where the objects in front of us are harmoniously aligned. (Wow, was that pretentious or what?) 

Okay, things in front of me started to make sense yesterday - when it wasn’t raining. It’s taken longer than usual on this safari because I haven’t been exercising my photographic vision as much as I would like and Cascadia is much different than the wide open spaces of the desert southwest I photographed last fall. 

We ventured back into the rain forest and it made a bit more sense this time. Details were the order of the day. This little waterfall was not quite six feet tall.

I'm trying to figure out how to arrange multiple trees to show both the density of the trees and the amount of moss that covers them. The trees look to be more moss than tree. 

There is sunshine this Monday morning. How unusual and welcome.

907 Days Three, Four and Five: Rain on the Oregon Coast

Day three.  Slept in late because it was great sleeping weather. Brooks had to do some work to keep his business running and with on and off rain and gray leaden skies it was not a day when images were captured. The next two days promise a lot more rain so we already have contingency plans for making art work, not spending time out in the rain. It was a chance to process some images and take it easy in the camper. 

We got out on Day Four to try and photograph some more.  We covered some ground made nothing worthy of sharing. The terrain of Cascadia has me stymied in terms of finding something that will arrange itself into a resemblance of something more than the chaos of unfettered plant and tree life. Some of the land might be interesting in terms of a documentation of “survival of the fittest” plant forms, but I haven’t been able to see it. 

I am forced to try to photograph “what the scene gives me” rather than what I want to photograph. I haven’t been able to figure out what has been given to me. I’ve seen some really cool stuff, but I can’t seem to make sense of it. A plethora of “No Trespassing”, “Keep Out”, and “Private Property” signs have kept us on the paved roads and kept us from further explorations.

Day Five was at least passable. When rain is forecast it does not mean it is going to rain all the time everywhere. We dodged the rain today and when we couldn’t we geared up to keep dry. The Forecast called for Gale Warnings so we headed out for photographs of crashing waves and lots of spray in between squalls. We only had a few hours to collect images and that’s what we did until the gales showed up. 

Next week’s forecast promises a change from the constant rain. 

All these photographs were made between rain squalls before the gale. It was a good day for crashing surf photographs. 

And just for fun...

Road Trip, anyone?

908 We Know What We Like

We don't know what others like. Trying to figure out what appeals to people is a very difficult task.  I face this issue when assembling The Lipka Journal publication for my website. (What do you mean you haven’t seen it? When you’re finished here, click on the link to my website and check out the latest issue.) I try to include a variety of projects that might appeal to a wide variety of people. If there is only one type of image or project there is the risk the audience will love it or hate the single choice. To avoid that, I select different image suites to increase appeal. A variety of images increases the odds of everyone finding something they might like. Maybe.

At the opening of an exhibition, I always ask attendees to choose their favorite photograph. Very few times will there be a consensus. Everyone is different, everyone has a different favorite. It makes sense. The one I like the best is rarely the image that everyone else likes.

Life is like that. Give people a choice.

906 Day Two Spring Safari 2022

The Morning run. We decided to head up the Alsea River to see what we could see. Not much was the answer. The road tended to be anywhere from twenty to seventy feet above the river bed and was filled with the undergrowth, trees and moss that one would expect in the Coastal Range of Oregon. In short, we couldn’t see very much at all. While we are out here in the wide open American West, the landscape in the Coastal Range is very intimate because you just can’t see very far with the trees in the way. Later today, our plan is to revisit the creek we drove by yesterday from the opposite direction. Things do look different when you come from another direction. What we discovered on the trip back was that the better lighting for our side of the valley was on the morning run.

The lighting in the forests is very difficult to handle from a technical standpoint. A lot of backlighting and very high contrast sunlight fool the very smart exposure sensors of a digital camera. The color palette is a monochromatic green which also is giving me fits in processing the image files.

If one learns from their mistakes,we've had some really great learning over the last two days. 

905 Day One Spring Safari 2022

First full day. Started at Waldport and headed south stopping at every wayside, park, wide spot in the road on OCH (Oregon Coast Highway). I wandered down to several beaches and made some panoramic images from scenic overlooks. It was much better than high class tourist, but fell short of being soul changing art. We finally stopped this when we hit Florence. We stopped in Florence for a lunch we could eat at a campground. Satisfied with a burger in a bag, we headed north. We were decrying our lack of dirt road photography and just then we came on Fairview Mountain Road. It didn’t end at the Ocean and was not a paved road. Living our motto, “Photography begins when the pavement ends,” we headed down the road. 

We returned to OCH about three hours later. Brooks had hundreds of close up images of creating order out of the chaos of leaves and flowers. I came back with variations on a small waterfall that was not all that impressive. I was having trouble trying to figure out how to compose photographs out of the massive chaos of the rain-forests. They are fun to be in, but very difficult to photograph.

It was the first day. Not a bad way to get started. We haven’t figured out if there are going to be any overriding themes or compositions on this safari. About where I expect to be at the end of day one. 

904 Extremes in Landscape Photography First Published 8/27/2017

I used to Photograph By Wandering Around (PBWA). Fred Picker called it “cruisin’ for snaps.” Happy accidents put us in the right place at the right time to make nice photographs. The trouble with that method of photography is that we spent much more time driving around than photographing. That said, this tactic works well when you are in search of a single image and have a lot of time.

The opposite of cruisin’ for snaps is what I would call photography by appointment or less charitably, trophy hunting. The quest is to duplicate an image made by another photographer. I know photographers find a photograph they wish to make and research locations on the web. Using Google Maps they pinpoint the location and use various mobile apps to determine the “best” time to duplicate the photograph they found on the web. (See why it can be called trophy hunting?) The joy of discovery has been reduced to scheduling an appointment for a single image. With multiple locations, the journey becomes a photographic scavenger hunt. While it is exactly the opposite of the randomness of cruisin’ for snaps, it remains a quest for the single image.

We cruised and hunted for over a decade until we decided if we drove less and photographed more, we would probably get better images. We stopped cruising and established a base camp and began to photograph in one small area. The number and quality of photographs increased. We quickly blew by the obvious images and were able to get to the essence of the places we photographed. Single images became groups of images with a theme and we moved from single images to stories about the places we photographed.

903 The Disappointment of Completion Part II

After a great deal of thought and memory searching I think I came up with the "point of maximum joy" on the last Book Project. I think that point was achieved when I figured out the project was going to be a success. Success and joy came at the point when I knew that I had all the components partially assembled into the book that told the story I wanted to tell. That is also the time that I knew the only thing I had left to do on the project was a lot of work.

It's one of those contradictory things that the point of maximum joy occurs just before the realization that all there is left is a lot of hard work to make sure the project achieves the success you envision,

The point of maximum joy is also the most dangerous time of a project. It's that point at the end of joy and just before nothing but hard work. We fail to progress on the project because we want to hang on to the fun part of the project because no one wants to work, because work is not fun.

902 A Beautiful Moment First Published 12/3/2017

There is something magic about beauty that calms the mind and soul. One would think that we should have no shortage of beauty in art these days. If one is to believe the prophets of doom and apocalypse (also known as the nightly newscast), society teeters upon the brink of total collapse. As a respite from this countdown to the apocalypse shouldn’t we be creating beautiful things as an antidote to the dreadful things that enter into our homes via television?

I continue to think the beauty that surrounds us is being shortchanged because we are so fixated on seeing what is wrong, we don’t give beauty the time it deserves.

I don’t think there can be a shortage of images of beauty that calm us, make us stop and appreciate the world around us. Find something beautiful and create some art from that beautiful moment.

901 The Disappointment of Completion Part I

My most recent Blurb book arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. After looking at it I was not ecstatic. It’s not that there was something wrong the book. It was exactly as I envisioned the book and it had very nice printing. (Yay Blurb!) I guess that’s what disappointed me a bit. The arrival of the book was an anticlimax. Then I went back over my memories to try and figure out when the emotional high occurred.  That’s really strange. One would think that the high point of the project would be memorable. For this project, it wasn’t.

I’m going to have to think very hard about when the high point of the project actually occurred.

More next week. 

900 Random Thought from a Cranky Old Man, First Published 7/28/2013

Have you ever gone to a gallery, or happened upon a website where your first thought was, “That photograph is proof that not everything in front of a camera should be photographed.”

The effusive praise for all artistic efforts does not support the growth and advancement of art. We are told to praise all efforts to avoid damaging the fragile egos of the budding artists. We praise all results because all art is good and we cannot make a value judgment on whether art is “good” or not. Welcome to the endgame of these two misguided premises.

There are many things that should not be photographed, but left as cherished memories, or completely forgotten. The ability to judge between these two alternatives is missing from today’s artistic photographers. The key element of photographic education that is missing today is the ability to edit and discard work that is not worthy.