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Scenics
These were some of my best-sellers: images that you might see on post cards or calendars. These are the kind of photographs that are implied when people speak of "photo-realism" in other media. For me, they evoke both memories of places and the emotions I felt there.
Gitche Gumee Tributary
I spent a couple days in Neys Provincial Park, on the north shore of Lake Superior, in July of 1992. The first night there, we had a terrific thunderstorm, and the next morning I walked along the lake-shore with my camera.
Misty Morning Forest
Waking in the morning at a campsite on the foot of Pillar Mountain, Kodiak Island, I saw this vision of giant, ancient spruce trees and deep, lush moss.
Winter Horse
One of the roads out of Kodiak runs across a pass alongside Pyramid Mountain, then down into a vally the opens to the head of Anton Larsen Bay. The valley is small and bounded by slopes steep enough that horses can range freely.
Century Gone By
In Mason County, in the Texas Hill Country, a narrow dirt road runs along the north bank of the Llano River. Sometime in the late 19th century, a stone house was built on that road, and sometime in the 20th century it was abandoned to return to Nature.Abstractions and Contrivances
At times I felt myself pulled to an image simply because of its shape or color, or perhaps because if its potential to be shaped into something just a little outside the box of reality.
Frost Feathers
One deep-freeze, wintry morning I went out to start my truck and found bold patterns of frost on my windshield. The illumination is a mix of pre-dawn twilight and the sodium-vapor street lights on Lower Mill Bay Road, Kodiak.
Ice Patterns
Another sub-freezing image. Well, the 20 years in Alaska were the peak of my photography career. This was a pattern I found along the shore of the reservoir on the ridge of Pillar Mountain. As the water was drawn down for city use, the thin ice sagged and cracked in successive lines, roughly paralleling the edge of the water.
A Moon for Beryl
I was asked by a dear friend to produce a photograph that she could give her mother on her birthday. "Something with the moon or trees," she said. This image was partly found in nature (on the day of the first snowstorm of the season) and partly created in the camera.Found Fun
Photography has always been fun for me -- well, apart from some of the commercial work and wedding photography, it's fun. And even more fun than preserving a sense of place or some beauty too small or too ephemeral to be seen by most others, it was great fun to stumble upon the quirky humor of unknown strangers.
Shank's Mare
We had driven about as far out of town as you could go: past Pasagshak Bay and nearly to the end of the road at Fossil Beach, when we saw this construction. No clue why the tree had been cut down many years earlier. No idea why a shoe had been abandoned so far away from anything. And I really didn't want to guess what might have been going on in the mind of whoever put the two together and added the bone.
Irrigation System
Nobody sells a five-foot hose; it has to be custom-made. The fact that someone went to the trouble to make such a hose to water a spruce sapling rather than move the plant a few feet was amusing enough in itself. Add the fact that this building is at the end of the Chiniak Bay road, miles from anything other than a dense spruce forest. Then consider that this building was simply used for monitoring communications, staffed exclusively by engineers working solo on 12-hour shifts. Maybe that explains the rest of it.
The Nefarious Tree Crab
A bemusing sight early one morning-after. I was living in a house overlooking Monashka Bay, about a hundred feet above the high tide line. This is the sight that greeted me when I stumbled outside to see what the day might bring. I stood there staring at this for far too long, trying to connect my fragmentary memories of the night before with some plausible explanation for a king crab in a spruce tree.Family, Friends, and Pets
And, of course, another aspect of photography that's always been important to me, increasingly so as the years go by, is the collection of images of other lives that have intersected mine. More to come . . .
