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The year is almost over. It’s not though. I love Christmas and usually do a fair amount of shooting in december, but around thanksgiving I start thinking about next year…. Becasue this year is almost over. Though it’s not over yet. Almost. Not quite. Will be shortly.
I’ve been looking at random photos in my “2009″ folder, as I look back through the year I’m happy to say I was able to do a lot of things I wanted to do, go places, shoot things. I’m happy to say that overall, my photos have gotten better. But it seems my todo list left for next year is longer rather than shorter. Next year, I believe, if I take off the months of February, April, May, July, August, September and October… I may be able to shoot everything on my list, but something tells me that isn’t going to happen. Prioritization is in order. There are things, projects, that I want to try, new places I want to go, techniques that need tried and honed. It’s rather exciting really…
We’ve got a trip to Salmon at Christmas to see the family. Salmon is one of the most beautiful places in the world, so the camera is always handy, it’ll be a great no pressure photo trip and with that, 2009 will be over, done.
I’ve yet to plan anything major for 2010. Aside from a workshop myself and two friends, Johnny and David are organizing on January 16th, but beyond that it’s a blank page.
Speaking of blank pages, I am going to re-examine my website… I’m asking it to do so much, that I end up not doing enough with it. I hope to roll out some structure changes around the first of the year that will make it easier for me to share my work as well as my tech and personal content without doing three separate websites. I’m constantly getting email and face to face comments (or even by proxy) about the photos I choose to post here and I realize I need to post more. So many of my photos I want to post just sit on my hard drive waiting for a blog post I can associate with them. I cant guarantee anything, but I’m gonna try my best to post the photos and let them speak for themselves without thinking I’ve got to comment everything. Though, google sure prefers I write about them
I’ve said it more than once, I miss the darkroom. I’ve been wanting to pick up a new medium format camera and work black & white film again. I’d like to convert part of my studio into a darkroom and process the film myself, but considering my studio is really a bedroom and it’s already pulling double duty as my server/network room… It’s not gonna happen, though that didn’t stop me from looking around online at how much it cost me to get a medium format enlarger, or maybe a good medium format negative scanner. But putting a darkroom in my studio isn’t feasible. Hmm, the bathroom is pretty dark already… Though I doubt that’d receive a building permit from the wife.
I took this photo a couple weeks ago at Redfish lake, it was a test shot for a long exposure star trail photo. If you look REAL close, there is one star trail in this photo, but it was only a two or three minute test to get the mountains right and set a baseline for my exposure. Many of you have already seen my snow photos from this same trip, that storm popped over the mountains about 5 minutes after this was taken. Gotta love Idaho! The sun was over an hour past set, but twilight was back lighting the mountains, behind me a full moon was rising. I knew my window between dark enough for stars and the moon coming up to ruin the shot was going to be very short. I was hoping for a twenty minute star trail shot between the two, but the clouds gathering on the other side of the mountain wouldn’t cooperate. By the time I got back to camp the snow had started. This photo was much of the inspiration for the now infamous tweet I posted about ‘being done with color.’ I realize this photo won’t impress everyone, you might not even like it. But for me, this photo came alive in post and I instantly fell in love with it, can’t wait to get a metallic print of it. Do leave a comment here or on flickr to let me know what you think.
“apologies to my photo fans who like color. I’m tied of color, expect a month of black and white.”
Then I go out and take this photo…
I meant well, I really did. I love shooting black and white, there was a time that 99% of what I shot was black and white film, processed myself. These days I’m not sure I could tell a developer from a fixer, but still I miss the darkroom. In the past week or so it seems every photo I processed ended up black and white, or at least every photo I liked. After processing a photo which looked particularly good in black and white, to the point I instantly fell in love with it and want a canvas of it, I decided I was done with color… for a bit at least. I may post that photo next week, hopefully you’ll like it. Anyway, I publicly swore off color.
That is until we took Jasper on a walk on the greenbelt and stopped to play in the leaves. The sun was setting and one beam of light making it through the trees and hitting the ground below a beautiful sugar maple with deep red and orange leaves. Pulled out the 50 prime and got several great shots. I made mention of how great the colors looked with Jasper, and my wife mentioned that twitter post. You mean people actually read twitter? hmm. Maybe we’ll let this photo slide by. After all, does anything posted on twitter on the weekend actually count?
For the record, you will be seeing more black and white landscapes from me for the next few weeks. I have several I’d like to post.
Sometimes I hate writing about my photos. But the photo alone counts for 1000 words right? So this post is really 1062 words instead of 62 words. Beaver pond near Stanley, Idaho. Taken a few weeks ago while I was camped up there for a planned long exposure star trail night shot. That really looks like great weather for star photography… Right?
Jasper and I got the chance to spend some time in Stanley last weekend. I went up to take a chance on a planned photo. The weather did exactly what I expected it to, which meant I didn’t actually get the photo I wanted. I got the shot started but wasn’t able to complete it before the clouds rolled in. But, fresh snow is always good.
