Category: Photography

Though Iceland has about eighty-seven thousand hundred waterfalls–enough that you glaze over at a certain point–Gullfoss is the tourist heavyweight. It’s impressive and huge. But everyone photographs it and comes away with the same general shots. I thought I’d try my 9-stop neutral density filter. This was taken in broad daylight and is a 75-second exposure.

The story now is not of blustery explosion but of a beautiful desolation caused by veritable storm fronts of billowing ash. Ash everywhere. In my socks. In David’s eyes. In the air filter of our rental car. Black and deceptively gorgeous, the ash, when airborne, brought visibility on roads down to near zero and is going to make me blow black snot for some time to come.

Flying over Greenland on a fight to Europe: not unusual. Not unusual, even, to see curious, remote, ice-scarred landscapes. But I was looking at this scene through my three windows in seat 2F (I’m convinced: best seat on the entire plane, an IcelandAir 757W) for some time before something made my scalp feel kind of funny.

It never got dark on our flight. We skirted the very edge of the curved track of sunlight across the planet. These mountains slipped below us at a time difficult to pinpoint, but it must have been something around three in the morning locally. OK, so picture this.

I was sitting on the starboard side of a plane flying roughly east. Thus, I was looking out of a window on the right side of the aircraft: looking south. Note the direction of the shadows! I’d been awake a long time and I was confused and time was loopy, but I was pretty sure of the various cardinal directions. The sun was coming from the north. How could that be?

David, slumming it back in 17F, was noticing the same thing. He was busy discussing the vagaries of BitTorrent with his young, Norwegian seatmates. One of them, Wilhelm (the first Wilhelm I’ve ever heard of who wasn’t also a Kaiser), was taking five iPads back to the mother country. They were all spellbound.

Later, David and I put our heads together and figured it out. We were far enough north that the sun, on the other side of the planet, was spilling over the top of the North Pole.

Everything in the past month or so has been intensely back-to-back. Work (invigorating but consuming), travel (invigorating but consuming), human companionship and family obligations (invigorating but consuming; think “cooking for 12″ and you’ll get the idea). I just got back from Chicago, a 4-day weekend with my mom and sister as part of celebrating Mom’s 60th birthday (back in January). It was a totally great way to spend Mother’s Day.

Weather, however, was a bit on the grim side. This shot was taken toward duskiness from the 96th floor of the Hancock Tower. I am always amazed by one singular thing in the Midwest: the water in Lake Michigan is always so jewel-toned and breathtaking.

I chose not to correct for the window reflection in the top right; that’s mostly laziness.

Found a brief breath of free time to go out to the (Columbia River) Gorge this weekend to see some friends at their very, very nifty place in Lyle, Washington. Blustery and dramatic weather. Wildflowers. It was a good time. Except, perhaps, for poor John, who had to endure such torture!

I’m going to skip to the chase: I left my camera, a Canon 5D Mark II, and a Canon USM 17-40mm lens under seat 1A of Horizon flight 2609 PDX -> OAK yesterday. I’m busily trying to expand my professional and technical horizons at DrupalCon San Francisco at the moment, but I’m dolorously heartsick.

I have all sorts of good excuses about how this happened: bulkhead seating, my camera getting separated from the rest of my carry-on items by a helpful flight attendant named Cliff, a good conversation partner/someone I know next to me in 1B. But still. I feel like a daft moron.

Photo of Canon EOS 5D by Thomas Hawk

It was Sunday today and I went for a hike with David and my mother-in-law, Cathy, to Oso Flaco Lake and then on to the seashore here on the Central Coast of California. Oso Flaco Lake is spring-fed and outflows in a robust channel to the ocean. The stream-channel-outflow-thing has tremendous velocity and changes course in front of your eyes, eroding micro-cliffs of sand and curving tighter and then looser again.

The Daily Shoot assignment for March 17: Grab your camera and walk 2 minutes in any direction. Stop. Find a photo worth making from where you stopped and post it.

This was challenging. The place I ended up two minutes into my morning foot commute to work that day was wretched: the low brick wall near an abandoned, grimy building owned by the city. An area rife with graffiti and trash, but without any of the strange intrigue that such areas sometimes have. Just ugly.

I tried photographing it to capture the bleakness. But it just looked like a sad dirty wall and some sad dirty sidewalk. I tried looking up, but just got, yawn, some bare tree branches and telephone wires. Again, yawn.

It wasn’t until I kneeled next to the wall, crawled in close, and really looked that I saw that there were small plant-lings growing here. Unfurling. Happily being plants. And I was satisfied.

I think that this is a great exercise. The timed, pseudo-random photographing. Dadaism would be proud.

The Oregonian recently used a photo of mine, on the front page, without permission. Was this an accident caused by staff stretched too thin in a failing publishing industry? Or ignorance of how to find digital content, legally, to use commercially? The situation has been rectified with an apology and offer of compensation, but leaves me concerned that this might be happening more often than I’d like to think.

Help me choose which of these photos from last weekend I should make a nice print of for the parents of this lovely young lady (my goddaughter). I’ll print and frame the winning photograph.

Choose from attentive and realistic, gleeful, LOG POND WITH FISH!!! or weird/blurry but cute.