photo test

I used to be obsessed with photography, starting in my teens. I took workshops with Ansel Adams, Paul Caponigro, Aaron Siskind, Minor White, all while still in high school. I lived and breathed large-format black and white photography, majored in it in college, taught it, and after about a dozen years, burnt out. The muse just said, "This has been a great party 'n' all, but I gotta go."

Suddenly, on a trip to Vancouver last December, with a small, junky digital camera borrowed as an afterthought at the last minute, it all came back. The passion of the hunter. So after thirty-five years, I bought myself a new camera and joined the ranks of the digital, shooting color, which I have a tenuous relationship to. My new routine is to grab the camera as I go out the door in the late afternoon to take the dog girls for our romp in the fields of a deserted army base nearby.

The last few nights I've been taking photos while driving home, too. The roads are so little-traveled that I can stop and snap for several minutes without any cars behind me. The dogs think I'm nuts, but what else is new.

The we go home, they get their daily egg, and I spend the rest of the evening unwrapping presents, or at least that's what it feels like. I download the photos and start playing with them, sometimes doing little but saving for the web, sometimes experimenting wildly for hours to bring out forms or colors in different ways.

Let's see if I can post them here using a Mac. I have some on flickr, but I want to drop them where I can write.