A WINTER COAST

Visit a place often enough, and the geometry becomes confounding. I wonder if the impact is the same for a casual observer of a photograph without the inertia of stored visual moments, and of known boundaries. In the fog things can appear new and placeless without the expected margins, highlighting form and giving even blind repetition a friendly nudge. Which gives the scene the impression of the rarely glimpsed, and the stumbled upon.

Details:
Creek and Shoreline
5×12 camera, Fujinon 250 WS

The waterfront trail in Port Angles runs alongside the old site of the Rayonier Mill, a gated, toxic wonderland with seep tendencies. Having qualified for the EPA’s Superfund program the site is being cleaned up, but the dilapidated guardhouse and busted security cameras stand in punitive memorial of the town’s industrial heritage…

Further down the trail, park benches are the somewhat more utilitarian memorials of the town’s patrons and, perhaps, civic leaders.

Details:
Memorial Bench, Port Angeles
5×12 camera, 183mm B&L Series V Protar

I think it will be a good year for storms. Just around town I’ve already seen encouraging festerings and festoonings on high, voluminous arrays dwarfing the highest surrounding peaks.

I love inclement weather, working in it, shooting it in. On some level it reminds me of being a kid bundling up and caroming through mudpuddles, snow banks or just piles of leaves. A down-stuffed buffer zone, cautiously impervious and wanting to test it. Even all grown up, what’s the worst that could happen? A tub and a whiskey after?

Details:
Hurricane Ridge from Ediz
5×12 camera, 183mm B&L Series V Protar

I feel my brain is still lagging behind my intent, so tired I be, but I did want to keep posting. Not sure if this is wise… I think I must be loosing some basic strings, because I’m feeling dumber than normal- I wonder if all the work and exercise is ratcheting up the testosterone or something and it’s blocking crucial beta waves. It’s fun to be manly, but it’s a hollow thrill, and the crash is predictable.

What’s happened?

Details:
Sticks, Stones and Sky
5×12 camera, 150 Emil Busch WA Aplanat

I’m pretty excited about Obama. The man is an inspiration. I haven’t felt this good after an election night in 12 years. Much as I have respected McCain in the past, he seems to surround himself with people who have some strange ideas about how to campaign. But his concession speech was truly heroic, generous and reminded me why I thought so highly of him in 2000.

But wasn’t yesterday torture…Work shut down early and I drove around and tried to avoid listening to early returns, looking for something to take a picture of. I ended up coming home and sizing paper for the weekend’s printing sessions. That quickly turned into drinking cheap beer and listening to early returns.  How many panels did CNN have? Holographic graphics, to-the-minute, on-demand interactive results county-to-county and state-to-state.. the technological evolution of punditry. It’s hard not to loathe such coverage even while you are glued to the set., hard not to bemoan the dispersion of information through gimmick and graphic while I need to know now -why  the hell aren’t they saying anything?

My wife must have heard me grinding me teeth because she said,
‘Try not to take the fun out of everything.’

Anyway.  Sorry about the ‘Dawn Horizon‘ shot.  It is but mere backlash of campaign rhetoric, and my sarcasm really is at a record low.

Details:
Spuce, Tongue Point
5×12 camera, 183mm B&L Series V Protar

I’m not so wild about the composition in this one, but the light is likely the best I’ve seen or captured. Interesting when the quality of light becomes more of a subject than the subject itself. Even more interesting is I shot this in August, when usually the light is bleached, harsh and altogether unrelenting.

Which makes for -what? the ninth consecutive month of winter?

Details:
Spruce, Tongue Point
5×12 camera, 183mm B&L Series V Protar

This is a sort of bridge to nowhere shot, though I wouldn’t dream of giving it so precious a name. It’s bad enough admitting that’s what I saw and felt at the time.

Visiting Clallam Bay is a mixed bag. It’s a profoundly depressed area with all the usual afflictions- meth labs, no industry and packs of feral cats roaming vacant lots. A maximum security prison sits atop the hill and surveys the Strait and Seiku headland like Elsinore. The only grocery store closed several years ago. But the local bar has three pool tables and there is an interesting new gallery down the street.

I sometimes feel like I should give these important social elements consideration, but political notions make me flounder horribly in thoughts of exploitation, intrusion and general brinkmanship.

The construction outfit I used to work for did the repairs to the bridge after a particularly hard winter, and also repairs to the prison roof. After work I would often come down to sit a spell before the drive home. Some autumn afternoons the fog, light and icy breezes mix for wonderfully ethereal lapses into nowhere.

Details:
Bridge, Clallam Bay
5×12 camera, 150mm Emil Busch WA Aplanat

A iconic shape of the Straits of Juan de Fuca is the serpentine form of a cormorant. On the road to Neah Bay cormorants augment the shoreline with their all but constant flightless gliding- they aren’t flightless birds but they do look it oftentimes, sitting atop pilings and stacks, wings open and trembling in the wind like a hope that they might someday rise.

I say this and my wife says, They don’t produce the oils like a typical seabird, she says. They’re just drying themselves.

But characteristically I cant get beyond the mythic self-assigned notions, and the birds retains their doomed poetic status in me feeble pea brain.

Although right off 112 it’s an awkward place to reach. The bluff is covered in lush vegetation most of the year, such that it’s difficult to see your footing. But in winter the vine maples and alder are bare and the horsetail recedes and it’s not too difficult to ease down using a culvert sock as a rope-assist of sorts.

I keep going back, not because I want to improve on this image, though that’s certainly possible. The proximity and sharp delineation of the spot have a dropping-off feel to them, the sounds of traffic close like voices at the door of the wardrobe. It’s nice to just sit and watch the utterly silent glyph-shaped birds as they unfold and try to conjure the ether.

Details:
Cormorants and Seastack, Bullman Beach
5×12 camera, 250mm Fujinon WS