While at home this past February, Juli and I spent a couple afternoons wandering through the woods surrounding my folks’s house, since, sans auto, we were a little stranded in the cultural island that is Portola Valley. But, shit, what do you need to have a good time but a camera and a sunny day? Not much, I think.
I’ve made a gallery of the first and second sets. I will add a third set to it as soon as I get around to tidying it up.
Portola Valley Gallery – February, 2009
Here are some of my favorites.
I’ve been playing around with extracting as much texture and color from these sorts of photos without making them look like you would expect. I tend to err on the dark side, if indeed I am erring at all. I am interested in coaxing unearthly colors and feelings from totally earthly subject matter. I don’t know if I am being successful or not. Maybe I’m not taking these things far enough. I don’t know. Regardless, I’ve never been opposed to just making pretty pictures. That’s really all I do with my photography. I’m not exploring the human condition or documenting news or shooting edgy fashion spreads. I just want to capture the world in front of me and present it to people the way I see it, the way it makes me feel. I definitely feel like I’m getting better at doing just that, but that I have a long way to go.
My development experiments continue. I feel good about this slightly-off, slightly-too-dark thing I’ve been doing for the last few sets. I feel good about my progress with the local adjustment tools. Next up is making convincing black and whites. I always feel like making black and whites from my color photos is kind of cheating, in a way. Maybe I’m just so afflicted with demo love for the colors I see in the original RAW files (which are actually black and white) that I can’t bring myself to throw them out and work only in gray. I played with the black and white thing a little on the Richmond photos, but that was a cop out since the photos I made black and white were of the underside of a concrete overpass—essentially black and white already. Lame. I need to learn to see in black and white, what to bring from a color negative into a black and white world, and how to compose for a monochromatic universe. I think it will help my photography overall, color or black and white. Look for that, probably in the set after the next Metric System party.
