A WINTER COAST

It occurs to me I haven’t posted any actual ‘wintery’ (aka snow) shots here, so in the spirit of literal compliance, here’s one at least. I’ll post some more if I can ever find them.

My scanner is down, so I’ve been raking the archives. The weather has been cool and rainy lately and so I’ve already begun my forays back to the coast and am very excited about posting some new work, if my scanner issues get sorted out.

Details:
Snow, Alders
5×12 camera, 250mm fujinon WS

“And God prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah…

If you get the chance, see Orson Welles deliver Mapple’s sermon in Moby Dick. I don’t know why this slightly dazed picture reminds me of the parable, except of course for a dazed Jonah ‘vomited out on dry land, ears like two seashells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean‘. The eyes of the rock almost like a vicarious warning before falling back to the sea. It has a hum of a rung bell, a periphery of destination where familiar icons do not reign.

I guess I am here to see the ocean at it’s most ceaseless, the sum of all apportioned time amid such perdurable fantasy of symbol and motif, and the actual leviathan of the cosmos in weight and liquid and light, and to see the infinite reach exactly this far now, if never beyond.

‘Oh Father, mortal or immortal, here I die. I have driven to be thine, more than to be this world’s or mine own, yet this is nothing I leave eternity to Thee. For what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?‘

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Details:
Ruby Beach
5×12 camera, Xenar 300mm

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