Flowers and Views
Washington does have its bright sides. We finally got out for a good overnight ridge ramble west of here, in the William O. Douglas Wilderness. Views were excellent, flowers were good and poised to get better.
Connoisseurs of Washington landscapes will have to forgive me for indulging in straightforward photographic play for a while. I’m new here, and just beginning to build an actual relationship with these places.
Some entirely gratuitous and unremarkable pictures of Rainier and Adams at sunset. I assume my official Washington Photographer Certificate is now in the mail.
Rainier has such a dominant presence, even from a distance, it’s impossible to ignore, either in real life or in the viewfinder. If you don’t exclude it entirely, it pretty much has to be treated as a major element of the composition.
View towards Mt. Adams and the Goat Rocks:
It still feels like a foreign country to me up here after so many years in the southwest and the Rockies, but it is thoroughly beautiful!
Views from Dark Places
Sinking
Moving to Washington state has not been easy for me. After living in the beauty of Deep Springs Valley, almost any change would have been difficult, but nevertheless it feels like we have faced constant headwinds and disappointments since the day we chose to come here. This has been true for my photography as well. Washington was the last state in the west in which I had not lived, worked or spent significant time, but I felt that my experience in neighboring states and my decade-plus of serious photography would ease the transition. But honestly, I have been stunned by just how foreign Washington feels, even here east of the Cascades, and by how difficult it has been to feel any real connection to this landscape. I have felt voiceless up here and it has a times been intensely frustrating and depressing.
Inlet, Ice
During last winter and spring, I made a conscious decision to tackle my disconnection by attempting to make images with darker sides. Nature photography has a reputation, sometimes deserved, for offering only saccharine feel-good images of flowers and sunsets. I’ve always tried to look deeper in my work, but this year I’ve really leaned into expressing harsher emotions. I’ve been quite jealous of musicians’ ability to evoke frustration or sadness with just a few bars, as well as of painters’ option to assault a canvas with pigment in a physically expressive way. I can’t find a direct equivalent in photography, handling a camera angrily achieves nothing (if your experience is different I’d be interested in hearing about it!). Instead I’ve been doing lots of experimentation and searching for subject matter and compositions with harsher or more austere aesthetics and darker symbolism.
(I should probably add before going further: I’m alright. Frustrations certainly continue, but none of my personal friends reading this should feel any need to be alarmed or to intervene, though emails, phone calls and blog comments are always welcome and appreciated. And any artists who find that this resonates with them should be sure not to neglect getting any support and help they may need!)
Minimalism is always a promising approach to this sort of work.
Dormant
Seeing how minimal I could go:
Drifted
A more traditional landscape, but in a very minor key:
Winter Orchards
Winter is a natural season to work the dark side, but I found spring surprisingly productive in this regard too. Coming to the Northwest, even the to the rain shadow, was a huge change from the clean beauty of the desert, and the riotous growth certainly lends itself to tense, chaotic visuals and symbolism.
Glimpse
Underwater
Thicket
These two images in many ways epitomize my experience of the last eight months. Tangled, thwarted, patternless obstruction, nothing worthwhile visible on the other side. I tried these in black and white, but felt that treatment gave them an elegance I did not want, so I left them in muted, unattractive color.
Barrier
Choked
I’m know this kind of work is not to everyone’s taste, but I appreciate your looking: regularly scheduled programing of flowers and mountains will resume shortly. Have any of my readers attempted to wrestle with negative emotion through nature and landscape photography, either as creator or viewer? I’d be very curious to hear other people’s observations on the subject.
Alpine Terraces
Sigh…. I know, I’m not posting anything this year. Photography is rather on the back burner right now. I might have some odds and ends from Washington soon. But in the meantime, here’s one from the archives that I always meant to process but somehow never did. A friend was asking for Colorado backpacking suggestions, so I revisited this September trip in the San Juans. I miss mountains with colors and stripes!
Favorites of 2018
As is the tradition, here is my end-of-the-year collection of favorite images. This is now my tenth such collection – I suppose this photography hobby is working out!
January 2018 lunar eclipse setting over Sierra crest:
Lifting storm, Eastern Sierra:
Lizard on metal, Keene Wonder Mine, Death Valley National Park:
Sea light, Channel Islands National Park:
Kelp and ripples, Channel Islands National Park:
Rosy evening light over Santa Cruz Island, Channel Islands National Park:
Aspen in eroded tuff gullies, eastern Nevada:
Luminous haze on the Golden Gate Range, Basin and Range National Monument, Nevada:
Reflecting water, Deep Springs Lake playa, California:
Light beams over Panamint Valley, Death Valley National Park:
Precambriam fossil mud cracks, White Mountains, California:
Blooming indigo bush in monsoon rain, Deep Springs, California:
Dune and mountains, Kelso Basin, Mojave National Preserve, California:
2018 was a strange year for me, and a difficult one. Lots of plans were cancelled unexpectedly or failed to pan out. I really didn’t take many trips devoted to serious photography, but instead spent a lot of time on outings with family and friends or in casual rambling. Hanging over most of the year was the prospect and logistics of leaving the California desert and moving to Washington, a process which sapped much of my mental energy and inspiration.
Atmospheric haze was something of a theme for me this year. Even before skies across the American West filled with wildfire smoke, it seemed that I much of the best light I saw was filtered through a lot of soft and hazy air, challenging conditions in which to make images. During a two-week trip through Washington and Oregon in August in the thick of fire season, I barely saw blue sky at all, and scarcely a glimpse of a mountain.
Despite these challenges, I had my share of good moments. I took many fun hikes with friends, saw lots of really interesting fossils and geology, explored some new territory in eastern Nevada, took my son on four backpacks, and got to spend some time on Santa Cruz Island, a landscape I hadn’t visited since I was nine years old.
In 2019, my main hope is simply to explore Washington, particularly the Channeled Scablands and the North Cascades, and perhaps deepen my connection with landscapes in western Idaho and eastern Oregon where I’ve always wanted to spend more time.
It seems that many of my friends and acquaintances also found 2018 to be a challenging and unpleasant year. Here’s hoping that next year is an improvement for all of us! Happy New Year!
2018 Favorites: Eli
The annual collection for family and well-wishers: this year we managed four overnight backpacks, spent two nights on Santa Cruz Island, saw lots of fossils, built a 13-kilometer radius scale model of the solar system, repeated climbing camp with Sierra Mountain Guides, summited a Sierra 13-er and checked out Mojave National Preserve. Oh, and we moved to Washington.
Goodbye Deep Springs
Five years and four months since we arrived from New Mexico, the rodeo’s over. I’ll dearly miss the geology, the night skies, the quiet, the black toads, the mostly-dry lake that always feels like the center of the universe, the unpredictable flower blooms, the winter fog, the views. And I’ll miss many excellent students, staff and faculty at Deep Springs College. But it’s time to move on. By the time you read this, we’ll be headed north for Washington and new landscapes. Washington is the only remaining western state in which I have not either lived, worked or spent serious time. It’ll take time to settle in, but I’m looking forward to new terrain. At least we’ll be east of the Cascades and still in the rain shadow! In the mean time, I still have quite a backlog of desert images to share.
Happy Halloween
Happy Halloween from the flying mammals of the Frishmans’ garage!
In a few days, my family and I will be leaving Deep Springs and moving to central Washington. Today is our sixth and last Halloween in this beautiful desert valley. This place has provided some excellent spooky images over the last few years, and I’ll miss our ready access to bats, tarantulas, bristlecone gargoyles, dry bones and dead animal pits.
Bristlecones in the Light
My apologies for the lack of posting these recent months! Life events have kept me very busy, and honestly, not in much of a mood to make art. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel now and some major changes are coming to my life soon. For now, here’s a moment from summer among the ancient bristlecone pines of California’s White Mountains. Trees that have seen it all, bathing in the light….
Canyon of Color
Since we’re now coming up on a year since I backpacked the most colorful canyon in the Sierra Nevada, I really ought to post my remaining images! Skies were hazy with smoke, as is now to be expected, but the warmth of the haze worked fairly well with the colors of the folded rocks.
A wide view (please enlarge!):
This drainage is truly a unique and wonderful corner of the High Sierra!
Monsoon Gifts
To much delight, the monsoon season of 2018 has been strong. We needed it. Last winter simply didn’t happen and our high desert range was looking frighteningly brown and brittle by late June. Our usual late spring flower season also, unsurprisingly, failed to materialize. But in July, the southwest monsoon pattern kicked into gear with the strongest series of thunderstorms I’ve seen in this region. Our highway flash flooded twice, debris flows have afflicted the Sierra Nevada, many local backroads are still closed and will probably remain that way for a while. But the desert right now is beautifully green, and the indigo bush in particular has rallied for a wonderful out-of-season display of purple.
I drove around the valley a few days ago watching lightning on the mountains and the afternoon sun illuminating the falling rain. Between rain, wind and limited depth of field, these images are certainly rather impressionistic. I’ll have to see how they look in print. But the green, purple and wet is a welcome sight after months of brown and dry.
