I’ve been itching to get some outside time for quite a while now. Earlier this month I finally did. I’ve got this off road vehicle I built to bug out, but actually bugging out is harder than it sounds. Blocking off and planning the time away, prepping, packing, etc. And to really go somewhere remote, I need a travel buddy. Someone else with a truck to tag along. Safety in numbers and all that. Someone to pull you out of the ditch. Then coordinating a group trip becomes exponentially more difficult. So I picked a spot not that remote, not that far off the grid, yet up there. High Sierra. 9500 ft. give or take. A cold, crystalline lake surrounded by craggy peaks still blanketed in snow in early August. We’ve had a wet year. Somewhere I could go by myself for a few days. Not that I was completely alone, it’s a fairly popular spot for those with the means to get there. No, I’m not going to tell you exactly where it is. You can find it if you really want to. Or you can find your own piece of solitude and write your own story.
While wandering around with a camera, a couple few whiskies in me, I started noticing these stark dead trees here and there. I’m not much of a landscape photographer, but you know, when in Rome. I’d recently been to the Ansel Adams exhibition at the De Young museum in San Francisco, In Our Time. It had been a long time since I had seen master prints in person. Up close. Silver gelatin images created immaculately, and large. The texture of the paper, the wet inky blacks and fine silver grain. I was trying to explain to my date how colored filters are used in black and white photography. Red, yellow, orange. All used to darken their complimentary color. If you wanted a jet black sky, slap on a red number 8 filter. The cyan light of the sky gets blocked making a dramatic backdrop for clouds or in this case, the dead and weather bleached wood of a high Sierra pine. The twisted trunks really hook me. And yes, the sky is not blue, it’s cyan. I shot these with a Fuji xPro3, which lets you pre visualize with a number of simulated film and filter combinations. It’s pretty fun. Then processed the raw files in LightRoom, jamming down the red channel. Among other adjustments. Definitely not Ansel Adams with an 8x10 camera and a mule, but times change.
Oh, and up here, at night? No moon in the sky. Best stars I’ve see outside of Mona Kea on Hawaii. Light pollution is a sin. Everyone should see the sky like this. We are on a spaceship.
Lastly, I had a quick shoot with a new model, Isadora. She’s new to the Bay Area. She has a good energy and an effortless, natural beauty. I’ll definitely be shooting with her again. I’m continuing to figure out the new studio. I’m pretty happy with these. Good exposure and contrast with the tintypes. You’ll have to be a member to see it all. Click here and join. The plates are for sale. Write to me directly until I can get my shit together enough to actually build a store.
