The Dawn of a Very Hot Day

Sunday dawned with the promise of yet another hot day on the East Coast, so I guess it made perfect sense to stand in the middle of a river! Actually it made no sense to my wife when I explained that I was going to be getting up at 3:30 AM (otherwise know in our house for the last 30 years as 0 dark thirty) to arrive at Great Falls National Park by 5AM. I too wondered somewhat why I had given in to the attraction of joining a Joe Rossbach led trek to the Potomac. Actually I knew why. Joe has taken over the last few years what I consider the most stunning images produced by anyone of this river, and I was anxious to see how he did it. I knew from the images that he went early and stayed late, and as we walked in the dark toward the river, I recalled that he must have stood in the middle of this river filled with very slick rocks. I use to do equally stupid things when I was younger, but now! -- what had I been thinking when I signed up for this.
All I can say is that it was worth it! But next time I will pick a cooler day - gads 99 degrees followed by a severe thunderstorm. I will also spend some time on a balance beam!

Processing these images also provided the opportunity to test a new piece of software. Unified Color has just released HDR Expose and, for my taste, it is the best HDR processor if you are after a natural look. Still more testing to do, but I am impressed.

Many of Life's Lesson Can be Learned on a River

Seemingly disasterous situations can - with skill and practice - be survived and even enjoyed.

But it does take practice.

And unfortunately you usually have to learn the lessons for yourself.

Sunday was a brutally hot day in the Washington area and by late afternoon I had to find some distraction while waiting for sunset at Great Falls National Park, and these kayakers provided it.

Homage to North by Northwest

There are some images that we create that seem to fascinate well beyond their intrinsic merit, however you measure that – your own evaluation, the approval of others, sales, etc. Sometimes, and I do not consider this a particularly good trait for a photographer, it is because it recalls to you, but not the viewer, the story beyond the image – the difficulty of getting the shot, the adventure surrounding the shot, what you intended, but did not, capture in the image. All of these things and more may be good for the story that the image conveys to you, but it is not conveyed to viewers of the image so, in my book, it is a failed photograph.

On the other hand, I recognize that I am drawn to images because they resonate in my head with other images that by their power have wrapped themselves around by visual DNA and keep drawing me back.  This set of images from a trip earlier this month to the Palouse is one such set of images that have lived in my head since 1959.

To my mind the greatest of Hitchcock’s thrillers was North by Northwest. In a classic chase scene Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is pursued  by a crop duster. Finally sprayed with pesticide he is forced out of his hiding place in a corn field, but (let me leave the end of this sequence for you to find out for yourself).

It is an interesting exercise to think of the images lurking in your visual DNA and to see if they are reflected in any of your photographs. Torture by a dentist (Marathon Man), ……..

Wanderlust and Photographers

I share with most of the photographers that I know a love of travel. In my case the love of travel came well before the love of photography. In the deep, dark past from which those of my generation came photography was a relatively expensive hobby that was mostly in the domain of adults. There was the family Kodak Brownie and if your were really lucky an Argus C3, but film and development remained expensive before the dawn of the age of Digital..

Fortunately as my opportunity to travel increased so did my income and my love of corrosive chemicals so photography and travel melded into one before the advent of digital.  Life, however, is full of paradoxes. Think about it. When you are young and your body is better able to tolerate strong drink, you cannot usually afford the good stuff. When you are older and better able to afford single malt scotch or that expensive, boutique Napa cabernet, you body – and wife - is far less tolerant. Much the same is true of photography. When body, free time and freedom from family obligations are greatest the expense of travel looms largest, as income increases free time decreases, family obligations increase and at some point the body finds travel more demanding that you remember it being.

I still travel, but it is clearly less than I would like and less than I have in the past. My bucket list keeps growing with  places and events that I would like to photograph even as I more inexorably  toward kicking that  bucket. 

On the other hand, I was reminded earlier this week that while the grass still looks greener and the seas bluer somewhere else, there remains much to excite the senses and to challenge my vision close at hand. On the spur of the moment I decided to head for Shenandoah National Park, less than 90 minutes away to take a look at how the fawns were doing at Big Meadow. And since the fawns are best at 0 dark thirty, there was the chance to catch the sunset over the Blue Ride Mountains the night before.

While the fawns were fewer than in previous years, the splendor of the Park was more than adequate compensation. Best of all was the reminder that rather than long for another photo adventure somewhere else, I should spend some time appreciating where I am and, as with this fawn, smell the flowers that are around me.

The Sensuous Landscape

There is much that attracts photographers to the Palouse – barns, loads of old cars, Steptoe Butte rising from the valley’s floor, Palouse Falls, wonderful light. For me, however, above all of those, even above the crazy crop dusters, it is the sensuous landscape. You can tell a photographer newly arrived to the Palouse by the silly smile they have across their face. It happens as you drive from the Spokane Airport toward Colfax. As you leave the evergreen forest that surround Spokane, suddenly you are face-to-face with the most amazing landscape that rolls, tucks and turns in on itself. In  the spring and early summer it is clothed in the soft nap of wheat, peas and alfalfa with the occasional vibrant blush of canola running down and across a ridge. The urge to pull off the road and to physically, or at least visually, caress these sensuous shapes is overwhelming. If you have travelled in Italy the visual reference to Tuscany immediately comes to mine. There are, however, difference some large and others small.  The Tuscan landscape has intimacy, the Palouse has the huge sky of the American West. Tuscan fields tend to be small  with walls, rocks and clearly wild places, while the Palouse fields are giant and seem to push its crops into crevices and angles where no thrasher or combine should be able to go. The Tuscan landscape has a sweetness of smell from the grapes, lavender and flowers that seem always immediately at hand.  Wheat in the Spring is clean and pure. As evening falls you are reminded on another difference. The abundant wines and savory meals of Tuscany find almost no echo Palouse. Subway sandwiches and Eddy’s Chinese restaurant speak to the tradition of the American homesteader where shared meals were on the farm not in the towns and not, as in Italy, a central cultural element.

If this is taken as selling the Palouse short, it is not. For the glory of the Palouse is in its landscape, light and the amazing productivity of its settlers and their descendents. A land first widely settled in the 1870’s still bears the mark of their act of creation, and is still capable of arousing all the senses.

The Barns of the Palouse

The round barns that were once spread across the Palouse have largely disappeared. They had, or so the oral tradition, says been the product of Russian emigrant farmers responding to the atavistic  urge to reconstruct familiar shapes from their or their families past. The one photographed here was constructed in 1904 by the maternal grandfather of the current owner. Remarkably it has been saved from ruin by the collective effort of the extended family that gathers each year for a week of shared work to patch, repair and strengthen this barn and save it from the collapse that has consumed most of these barns. Good fortune in that one of the sons of the current owner is an engineer, if you look carefully you can see his craft applied to attempt to arrest the structure from bowing. It is technically not perfectly round, being constructed, or so tradition has it, with twelve sides to reflect the twelve apostles of the Russian Orthodox tradition.

On a more photographic note, here I benefitted from the use of HDR to extend the golden hours of dawn and dusk when I prefer to photograph into the midday.  When you have great distance to cover and multiple subjects to photography, it is hard to throw away the bulk of the day and expect to cover a subject. This barn was really dark! And yet with HDR, images that just a few years ago would have required multiple lights can now be rendered in an interesting way.

As with most of America, the barns of the 19^th and 20^th century are disappearing from the Palouse. Agriculture machinery is getting larger, the family farm of a couple hundred acres has been replaced by farms of several thousand acres, farm labor – particularly that provided by large families – has disappeared and these barns are no longer efficient. It is hard to believe that my grandchildren will ever have their spirits lifted and their imaginations challenged by the prefabricated steel structures that have replaced these wooden castle of the American plains and valleys. The least we can do is to document them before they are gone.

There is Something About Old Cars and [Old] Guys

You go to one of the most sensuous landscapes in North America and you take photographs of old, abandoned, rusting cars and trucks - and crazy pilots flying crop dusters! This must be an [old] guy thing. Almost as remarkable is that this rich agricultural landscape seems to be littered with hundreds of abandoned vehicles and old farm equipment waiting for photographers to document it. On one farm I was able to count over 100 Chevys from the 40's and 50's lined up and rusting away. Who did this and why?
And it's a good thing that we are  documenting it as they are rusting away and unlike dinosaur bones will not be around for the future to dig up and reconstruct. I was struck, however, by the loving care with which many of these vehicles were placed to have a million dollar view. We humans should only hope that our descendents care so much about us.

These are processed using Aperture, PhotoMatix and a touch of Topaz Adjust.