Happy New Year!
I love a deadline. The turn of the calendar is just a silly construct we all buy into, but still it gets us every time. I mean, really, the difference between December 31 and January 1 is the same as the difference between April 3 and 4. But still, unlike April 4, January 1 has some extra weight to it. A bit of gravitas. A reminder that we are all marking time, and that time is not an infinite resource … much as we may try to fool ourselves into thinking it is.
So when the annual marker rolled around this year I took that as a kick in the pants to start cleaning up all the clutter around here. Some of the galleries were getting bloated, others were getting cobwebs, and there was no room to display the new knick knacks I’ve been collecting this year. I was tempted to just throw everything out (again!) and start over, but I’ve been down that rabbit hole before and I know it just ends up back at the same place. So instead I satisfied myself by rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and bringing a few more out from storage.
Golden Canyon from Zabriskie Point at sunrise, Death Valley N.P. Fuji GFX 50R, 45mm, f/11, 1/2 sec., ISO 160
Mid-year update: I reorganized and relabeled parts of my website in June 2022, so many of the links below may no longer work. It’s on my list to fix when i find the time. :-)
Devil’s Garden, Grand Staircase Escalante N.M., Fuji GFX 50R, 45mm, f/9, 1/100, ISO 500
I started by moving some of the “furniture” around. The Places and Fresh galleries were getting crowded, so I created a new page, “Road Trips,” to hold all the galleries of images made closer to home. [Well, that didn’t last long. I re-organized the website again, and now you can find those images in the Near & Far galleries.] I seeded that with a couple new galleries of images from recent trips I took to Death Valley and to the Grand Staircase Escalante N.M. (with stops in Nevada and Arizona along the way), and then moved some of the older galleries there as well. Road Trips is where you’ll now find (a hopefully steadier stream of) images from my wanderings around the Bay Area and the rest of California, as well as journeys a bit farther afield. Anywhere I can, or do, reach by car will eventually find a home here.
Meanwhile, there’s now a lot more room to breathe over on the Places Far page, which now hosts galleries of images made much further from home. In the coming months I’ll be adding photographs from past trips that still haven’t found their way off my hard drive. Bangkok, Oaxaca, Cambodia [<- Hey, I actually did these two!] and Canada are just a few of the locations that I hope to virtually revisit and add to those galleries in the near future.
Caliente, NV. Fuji GFX 50R, 30mm, f/9, 1/400, ISO 500
The Fresh page is a bit less cluttered as well, and will be the primary home for current projects I’m working on. You’ll find images from my Fallen series over there, along with photographs from the vegetables I’ve grown in my Garden or cooked in my Kitchen. Additions to the Spider Project will live there too, alongside a new gallery, “Roadside Attractions,” that I added to showcase faded and deteriorating bits of commercial architecture that always seem to grab my attention as I’m driving down the road (apologies to Tom Robbins for the title). My Flower gallery moved over there too, mostly because I had nowhere else to put it and, hey, the Flowers I photograph are usually pretty Fresh anyway (‘cept for the dead ones that is.). I’ve got some other projects on my radar too, and as those come to fruition you’ll hopefully start seeing some other galleries living the Fresh life too.
Fallen Cottonwood, Burr Trail, Utah, Fuji GFX 50R, 120mm, f/20, 1/4 ISO 250
Banjo Bill’s C.G., Sedona, AZ. Fuji GFX 50R, 200mm, f/11, 1.4sec., ISO 100
The Impressions page has expanded a bit, and is the new home for galleries of images of flowing and reflected water. My Horizons series still lives there, along with other Impressionistic images I’ve made using blur, soft focus, camera movement and other techniques.
The Streets and Snapshots pages are still around, and mostly unchanged, though I have managed to sprinkle a few recent images into the galleries over there. I hope to be better this year in consistently adding new images to those and the other galleries on this site. (Wait, was that a resolution? Careful. The best laid plans …)
There’s still a lot more to do around here. There are images from other trips and shoots still waiting to be looked at. The slideshow on my home page hasn’t been updated in months. Some of the older galleries could be culled and cleaned up. And overall I want to provide a more consistent, cohesive look for the website, and be more selective about which images I choose to post, and which I will just enjoy myself. That, however, is a much longer discussion and process, and one I am not quite ready to start yet.
There is still time for all that. And you know what they say about perfection being the enemy of the good. At least this is a start.
Maybe by the time next January rolls around I’ll be done. But don’t bet on it.
Oak Creek, Sedona, AZ. Fuji GFX 50R, 200mm, f/8, 1/50, ISO 200