With our cold snap the sky is a featureless pewter gray, unusual for us. Usually even our overcast skies are full of layers and gradation. This one looks like a midwestern sky, a single cloud spreading for a thousand miles and pregnant with snow.
What this meant is that Green Lake looked different than I’d ever seen it. The water on the south shore was dead calm, and the bare branches were etched against a soft, textureless reflection of the sky. Typically I gravitate to the denser, chaotic places here. Today the simplicity of the scene drew me in. I made a different kind of photograph than is usual for me.
It was sub-freezing and I was trying to walk quickly to stay warm. But then, a glimpse of a promising patch drew me to the shore, and I would stop and work a small area. I talk about this kind of photography as visceral. I feel it in my body when the photograph is closing in. There is a dual sense of both meditative connection with the landscape, and an anticipatory excitement over the richness of possibility all around me. When I find an area that feels this way, I tend to shoot with small variations in a given spot. It is like using the camera as a sensing element, finding out what is warm or cool by responding with a decision that this moment, over all other moments, is the one, and then feeling what that felt like. Often the first or the last image of such a series is the one that is most whole. The intervening ones sometimes get polluted with self-consciousness about the composition. The first one is the moment that pulled me toward it initially, and my conscious mind didn’t have a chance yet to interfere. The last one is the summation, the letting go shot, everything is in the mix that is going to be, and I’m less invested.
Results here.
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