I’d say this both fits in my “wildness” project and has a distinct whiff of Eliot Porter. Horsetails are one of the earliest vascular plants, far older than the dinosaurs, and are said to be pretty much impossible to dig out of your garden if they get established. I have no idea if they’re exotics here (Mercer Slough – more old Lake Washington lake bed). I hope not; I’ve always been fond of them.
For a change of pace from my recent color scraggly trees photos, here’s one from our third campsite in southeast Utah’s Grand Gulch. Yes, there are still some scraggly trees, but they’re small, right?
Another one from my “Wildness” project. This place was also once the bed of Lake Washington, now near the west end of the 520 floating bridge. I have lots and lots of photos of scraggly branches, and often they don’t turn out to be all that interesting. I think this one works in part because the log circle on the ground gives a strong sense of depth (aided by my using a wide-angle lens) that contrasts with the tendency of scraggly branches to look like a flat screen.
For a long time I’ve been looking for what Brooks Jensen (the publisher of LensWork) calls a project. A project is a coherent body of work. It provides structure that helps answer the ever-difficult but essential question, “What should I be photographing?” For this to work, it must be something that you care about enough to keep working on. What unites the photos into a project is up to you; it can be anything. (Whether it feels like a unified body of work to your audience is another question.)
Brooks argues that successful projects are more likely to emerge from one’s existing work than to be planned in advance. But, of course, it’s been irresistible to me to react to every new idea or successful image with, “Could this be a project?” Now, at last, I may have found one, and, as Brooks predicted, I discovered it while going through my archives. I’m provisionally calling it “Wildness,” though I mean something complicated by that. I’ve long been attracted to unkempt vegetation, but it’s difficult to articulate why. The goal of the project is to pursue that in a more focused way than I have been doing.
So far, by wildness I think I mean the insistence of the non-human occupants of the world to do things their own way. I do not mean wilderness. This photo was taken in Seattle, of an untidy corner of the UW campus, near the site of an old sawmill. It was the bottom of Lake Washington until people lowered the lake 100 years ago. Those trees showed up on their own. We could cut them down, but ones like them would reappear there or somewhere else. I find this hopeful.
We’re well into one of Earth’s occasional mass extinctions, apparently the first caused by a single species (us), but we’ll never be able to wipe out all life. Something will survive and spread. We might not like it; it might even be outright hostile towards things like us (think epidemics, invasive species, even bedbugs), but there will be something.
I’ve found over a dozen photos that I think fit this theme (and that I like), some of which I’ve already posted (for example). I’ll be posting more.
Any guesses? My only significant manipulations are to boost the overall contrast and saturation.
Give up? It’s a slightly blurred (1/5 second) close-up of a little creek. The fine white lines are moving sunny sparkles. To the eye the water was gray, but apparently not neutral gray, as revealed by increasing the saturation.
I like how it looks like an old abstract expressionist painting.
They’re starting to build the new State Route 520 floating bridge over Lake Washington. These old ramps will be gone, and probably the trees and ivy beside them. (Click for big.)
Another one from the Grand Gulch hike. This benefited a lot from a judicious crop, I think. The original version has a series of bold rock arch-like curves in the upper part that visually compete with the subtler layering you see here. Perhaps because of this I was unexcited about this photo until I tried the crop. Here’s the original:
Part of the last ruin we saw, in Grand Gulch across from the mouth of Kane Gulch. It’s been said many times before, but it’s amazing how these structures meld with the rock, as organic as a cliff swallow’s nest.
You may be wondering, “Wow, how’d he get that picture? It looks like he’s standing in the water.” Well, if you are thinking this, you’re right. I’m standing just upstream of these plants (probably willow shoots), with cold water rushing around my calves and into my boots, carefully watching the tripod to make sure the current doesn’t knock it over. This is a 30-second exposure (made possible by a ten-stop neutral-density filter), which smooths out the water. I wonder now how it would have looked with a shorter exposure – enough to convey motion, but not so much that it all goes silky smooth. What do you think? Do you feel the current, or is it so smooth that it looks static?
Detail of a worn deer vertebra we found when camping. Cropped square like this, I think it could make a good album cover.
