Inside / Outside an image

Winter time has never been a time when images please me. Oh!  I love the romantic idea of trudging off into snowy fields and forests, breathing in the sharp clarity of vision, with a camera and enough provisions to keep me alive till I  might manage to slog back to the car.  I love that idea!  I just hate the act of it!.

This winter has been different any than other I recall.   As my friend Branson Reynolds says:   "The colors are there.  The trick is to enhance them in your mind before you snap the shuttter."  www.bransonreynolds.com 

 Snow light can be quite subtle while conditions can simultaneously be quite brutal.   Dense white-out conditions, cold thick fogs hovering over the landscape.  Sparse trees. clusters of scrub oak, sage,  grasses, and rabbit ears sticking through  pristine snow.   And the fences! Gotta love those fences!    Steve Immel  is a Taos, NM based artist who recently had a showing at the Open Shutter.  Steve,  I think, imagines the world as being desolate, lonely space with a hint of quietude.  Thats what I see.   The image of 4 fence posts sticking through the cold endless snow, the fields themselves a multitude of subtle - subtle variations in color in shadow in shape and in the mind's eye.   The ephiphany came after seeing his work as I walked the dog and imagined seeing myself standing in one of his photographs looking both around deeper into that reality and at the same time looking out of the frame at the world of eyes and eye's peering in at me.  

This image above was pre-visualized.  I  I saw this shot in the mind's eye of being compressed by the tele-photo and composed it as though it was.  Then I waited for the right conditions to arise as I knew they would and when they did.  I was there for it.

Technically speaking I over exposed the hell out of it - exposure which I am sure would blow most histogram-displays right off the charts.  But then, I tend to over-expose just about everything as if both eye and my camera need to absorb as much light as possible and still record whats essential.  What can be latter processed for consumption of some sort down the road.

doc rob