Sometimes being a photographer is predatory. Searching for the right picture or being on the hunt for something to coalesce so that things will be just right can be a large part of what many of us do as photographers. Henri Cartier Bresson would speak about this as choreography, that the photographer needed to be like a dancer moving into position, waiting  for the right second, aggressively seeking his/her picture. This was  how his phrase, "the decisive moment" coined almost 100 years ago now, came to be. 

At 66 my decisive moment pictures might be referred to as  "sometime this century" but my relative slowness doesn't mean, however, I am not looking to frame things just so or to find the single instant when things come together to make a wonderful picture. Case in point:

Many of you know just where this is, at Gay Head (Aquinnah) on Martha's Vineyard. In the picture above I was just cruising, liking the light and the pink and blue color on the deck to the left. But what really caught my eye later was in the next frame:

Way back there in all that foliage there is something I thought extraordinary. I'll show you with a crop:

This single tree carving out an existence in this most extreme location, a cliff facing the ocean, battered and hanging on. It is exceptionally beautiful. But I can't use this picture and you probably know why. The crop compromises the quality of the image. (For those of you that don't get what that means it is simple: if you crop out much of the image to "zoom in" on one area, you are throwing away many pixels. Then when you print this now cropped image you are really enlarging the smaller area to make the same size print. You can see this even in the cropped image above, if you look closely. No way is the quality and sharpness going to be the same.)

So, what did I do? I started going back. I tried late morning:

This was a disaster of large proportions. 

I tried in the afternoon:

This was better, but still pretty flat. Each time I would go I would try everything I could think of in terms of framing:

I also learned that, if I zoomed in too much with the lens, I would isolate the tree but lose the location that made it special in the first place. There's an important lesson here for all of us: that by isolating the one thing we care about in a picture we may kill it. 

Time was running out. I was leaving the island soon, not to return again for weeks. I had a ferry reservation so had get this thing done and done soon. The day I left I packed up early and headed to the Aquinnah cliffs one more time to try it again.

This is the final result, which, as a print, is very wonderful and extremely satisfying for me:

Too much effort for too little result? Much ado about nothing? Perhaps for you, but not for me as this was what I was hunting for.

Like I said, "on the hunt".

I've used this before but the line "I've seen things" is what Rutger Hauer says before he says, "time to die" at the end of the movie Blade Runner. It's a great line.

On a slightly less dramatic level I have seen things this summer. And done things too. Four weeks in Iceland, a kayaking trip along the coast of Maine, a night on Monhegan Island twelve miles offshore, dinners at lobster pounds, hours working in the studio getting ready for a print viewing September 16 and 17 (which you are invited to. Go to: Studio), or home making prints, an autocross in New Hampshire which involves fast cars, traffic cones, a big parking lot and a lot of corner workers and its not over yet as I am back in Martha's Vineyard once again, with a camera in hand.

Actually, it's been an excellent time for me photographically lately on the Vineyard. Many of you know I've been coming here my whole life. It can be hard to photograph near your home and doubly hard to photograph in a place as beautiful as Martha's Vineyard. I seem to go through phases where I get some good work from it, then not so much and so on. Right now I am finding things that are interesting to photograph.

They are building a new fish pier on the island. This, of course, is a very big event and very contentious. Some think it shouldn't be at this location, some think it shouldn't be at all. Change is hard here. They debated for years about turning a 4 way intersection with stop signs into a roundabout. The roundabout won. They are very proud they have no stoplights on the island. No McDonald's either. Anyway, I've been photographing the fish pier in the early morning with a nine stop neutral density filter. What's that? It is a gray filer that goes over the front of your lens that restricts nine stops of light from coming through the lens. This means that, subsequently, the shutter has to remain open longer to compensate. This then smooths the water as the shutter is open, in this case for say, 45 seconds or so. Easy.

Yes, this is how most of the smooth water pictures are made. This is a first for me and you saw it here.

I've also been shooting other stuff while here, as I always do on the island:

Trees prevail. These are made pretty close to where I was shooting last spring and made a set of pictures called: Spring & Fall.

Late summer can be very lush. It is this year on the island as there's been enough rain. The two above are from what we old timers called Gay Head, now called Aquinnah. This is the big time tourist attraction at the tip of the island where the  clay cliffs are. For years I've gone up there and just sat at the top where all the tourists go to see the view:

Sitting there, waiting for the picture to come to me rather than needing to go to it to make it happen, I can remember sitting in this same place with a twin stroke Leica M3 and a 21 mm Summicron lens and 20 exposure Kodak black and white infrared film in the camera, doing exactly the same thing, oh.... 36 years ago. OMG! Long time ago.

This, of course, is one of the views they want to pose in front of when getting their picture taken, although maybe they wouldn't like the leaning over lighthouse so much. I have always liked to photograph people being photographed, particularly in touristy places.

There are times where life can seem like a series of adventures and my time on this planet since retiring from teaching in January 2012 has felt very much like just that. Life is good. Will it continue? I hope so. Will it involve photography? What do you think?

I've posted a new series on the site called : Spring & Fall. This is a body of work that I wrote about on my blog called New Way and New Way 2. In the New Way posts I was wrestling with a group of pictures in the making, trying to figure out if I had a new series, thinking through how to make them and so on. I am learning that the blog can serve as a kind of guide for me. A way to put something out as a test, to see if it has viability. Please understand, for me to post a series on the site, to give it that level of public exposure, I want to be firmly committed to it. As I've spent the last two weeks printing these pictures I find I am committed to the body of work.

"Spring & Fall" uses the two seasons as metaphors for early life and late life, life in ascendency and a life in decline, meaning my own. While I would argue that I am very much in this life, active, involved and astute, I cannot deny that more of my best work lies behind me than ahead. So, this series reflects on this fact. I have subtitled the series, "Sun" for the spring half and "Setting" for the fall part.

I refer you to the site for the full series: Spring & Fall

Spring

Fall

The work has several layers, several structures imposed upon it to give it definition and purpose. I don't believe I will destroy the series by giving you some of mine, but you may find others. Color for spring,  black and white for fall. I have been doing this for a while now, putting color and black and white pictures together in varying ways. This is strictly against the old rules but we are in a different world now and the old rules definitely no longer apply. If you've been following what I've been writing you know the title must be a metaphor for all the pictures in the series were made in the same two week period in May. It may be a stretch but it is one I have made and that is that the color aerial ones imply an "above" character, a flight above the ground, which is light, weightless, free and without limitation. The pictures imply freedom to go anywhere and do anything, which I associate with real youth. Whereas the black and white pictures I made on the ground, in fog, are firmly mired in the ground, without much of an ability to escape, to get out, to be free or, in fact, to go anywhere else. Pretty dire, right? But the black and white pictures are also a far more evolved and thought through group of photographs. This is another thing I associate with older people. They know more! And can understand subtlety and nuance that goes right by most young people. The two ways of photographing are so inherently different this too serves as a way to emphasize the speed, quickness and "flighty-ness" (sorry, I couldn't resist) verses the grounded, perhaps somber nature of the old, moving ponderously and with deliberation. 100 miles an hour skimming 500 feet above someplace verses walking around looking , thinking, analyzing, placing. Too much? You decide. But getting older is much like that. Ones aspirations may be great but ones ability to do things is increasingly severely limited. Why use the subtitles  "Sun" and "Setting"? To further indicate the path through the pictures and reinforce the actual title. As an aside, I have never wanted anything I have written as titles or as texts hanging along with my work in shows to be anything but clarification and this is true here with this series. I hate the texts in museums that hang next to the piece explaining, presumably to the clueless, what the work is all about. It seems condescending and overly educational. I will most likely write a blog about titles and what they can mean and what I believe is good practice for titles and what is not.  But suffice it to say here that the title for this work provides the key to the work. Important? Very.

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Fog. Yes, fog. That's what I worked with during several days of the two weeks I worked on this project. Fog, because it allowed me to work with the frame in a confining and reductive way and it alters the space.

If you try this way of working, this picking a place to shoot over and over again, try to pick something close to home or that you pass by every day. The benefit of having something very close by to where you are is enormous. My house is about 4 miles from Moshup Trail so I could be at home, take a look outside and be there in a few minutes.

In late spring/early summer the "up island" part of Martha's Vineyard is often  shrouded in fog. To be more accurate, it is really that this part of the island is in the clouds. The pictures of the area that I had surveyed from the air  were made in the early morning on a bright and cloudless day. I wanted the pictures made on the ground to be as different as I could make them, so chose to make them in low light with fog and in black and white:

When both ways of shooting here are considered, the aerials and then these from the ground, do you think this was effort to encompass the landscape I was shooting in a totality of coverage? To get at it in every way from every angle and every manner?

Not so much. It was an effort on my part to imbue the pictures made of the area with specificity of intent, to work with the location to mold it into what I wanted it to look like. Think for a moment about the staggering limitations of working within the idiom of landscape photography. There is tremendous history, lineage and countless careers built upon it. How does one extend the landscape rendered in photographs, move it and progress it while keeping it recognizable?

A primary motivator for a newly intermediate student of photography who seeks to be an artist is to find his/her "voice, a way to own their pictures. Easy enough; use a Holga  or a Lensbaby to blur them, do something abnormal to the tonal scale, color, print size or shape, point the camera in different ways, play with focus or shutter times, etc.While it may seem easy to do that, to "individualize" your pictures, most manipulated pictures don't provide a base from which the alterations were made. So, it seems important to me to work comparatively, meaning to give this "map"as in New Way (1) and then to show what I did with it (New Way 2).

The two above are just focus shift comparisons, perhaps difficult to see on a small display but of large importance when you see the prints which are 22 inches across.

So, does it work? Have I made pictures that convey something moodier and perhaps darker here, and has that effect been brought to the forefront more due to the aerials provided as a reference? Does this way of working make sense to you? And finally, will I do this in the future: make series pictures in this new comparative way? Can't say for sure, but probably. Wouldn't you?

Tech fact: I made the pictures in New Way 2 hand held in low light with the ISO set to 1600. They are entirely usable and excellent with very little noise. Amazing.

What if you wanted to photograph in a different way? What if you wanted to make pictures that spoke with concentration about varying interpretations and definitions from the same subject?  What if you wanted anyone looking at your work to realize it could be about it or it could be about what you did to it? What if you were in the same place for, say, a couple of weeks? More specifically, what if you assigned yourself to photograph along the same stretch of road again and again over that time period? What could happen through repetition? Could you break through to something far more significant? Or would you repeat that same material with minor variations ad nauseum? What would happen?

Well, I haven't been doing this approach that long, and have only worked in the same area for a two week period or so but I did establish a pretty strong foundation  by starting to shoot what I will show you from the air, then working to make pictures along the ground. It is an area on Martha's Vineyard called Moshup Trail and it is only a few miles long of road facing the south shore of the island. It is flat and mostly unbuilt upon. Perfect material for flat and boring landscape pictures. I wondered if I could transcend that. Let's take a look.

First up, I'll give you the aerials so that you can see the project's "foundation". I photographed in Aquinnah, very close to the tip of the island if Martha's Vineyard about a mile from the famous cliffs at Gay Head. These photographs are intended as a sort of survey of the area, the land and how it sits up against the beach and the ocean:

This big curve in the road is where the road has come out near the ocean from the interior of the island and parallels the shore. The area I was interested in starts here.

This is the south facing shore of the island with prevailing winds that are brutal in the winter so nothing can grow very high here. 

Although you can't park anywhere alongside the road and there is no access allowed with no trespassing signs, there are well worn sandy trails from the road down to the  beach.

In the image above you can see the the Moshup Trail road along the top of the frame. 

Okay, so that gives you the way the area looks. I made these pictures before I started making the pictures from the same area on the ground.

This plaque sits along the Moshup Trail road at the curve. Here's a blow up of the plaque:This simply states that the area is preserved as conservation lands, meaning nothing can be built on it.

Google Maps show us the area like so:Hopefully I've set this up to show you how the area looks from above as a kind of survey or a map. In the next post I will show you work I made when photographing along the same stretch of maybe a couple of miles of road while on the ground.

I have some newer friends on the island, and some of them are in the arts or into photography. It is challenging to bring these friends into my work as they don't have a long term history with it or me. One of them, a great guy named Sam, said one morning over coffee that I really ought to get into books as my series work would be perfect in book form. It took me a couple of days as he went off island, but when he returned, I gave him a copy of American Series, my black and white book from 2006. He now has stopped saying I should get into books. 

I am often asked if I am still into series work. My point is that yes I am, but that how I make series pictures and how they look has changed drastically. I would hate to think that the idiom hasn't changed for I try to grow as an artist. Earlier my series were pretty straightforward, pictures next to pictures, hinged or contrasted through a sequence, very often simply a walk through a neighborhood or a place, but often contained within a structure that was predetermined but relatively consistent. Same print size, same tonality in the prints, and so on. But more recently I can feel the form changing and growing, almost on its own, which is a little weird, but I am so far trusting it, allowing for things like black and white and color to coexist or for the pictures to be more about the thought contained in the work than about the place I am photographing. These new pictures take that track, to speak more about what I  chose to do to the things I was photographing within the context of still staying recognizable as place, an area, a couple of miles of flat land between a road and the ocean on an island. Love that! The ability to control the outcome by what we choose to include and deny. 

Next up New Way 2.