AMAZING MYSELF

Terlingua Creek, Big Bend National Park, Texas 1987

Stay with me here....I know I have talked about my wonderful new scanner a number of times, but I continue to be amazed by what it is revealing about me and my early color vision. This image had been forgotten until this morning when during my methodical scanning year-by-year of these 20-year-old color negs, its turn came to be scanned. There are two things amazing (at least to me): 1) remembering that I would photograph any and everything in those days. If it looked interesting, I would point my trusty 4x5 Wista at it and make an exposure. God, how I miss that innocence that was so natural for me when color still held mystery because of its newness. Not newness as a medium, but newness to me. 2) rediscovering images somewhat lost to me because of never being able to make the sort of expressive prints I wanted. I plop them on the scanner and they open like a revelation on my screen in Photoshop. It's like I am seeing the image for the first time when I had the dark cloth over my head. That shear thrill of discovery of the realization of your visual senses. Does it get any better than this? I recall something I read (I think it was Fredrick Sommer who said it -- and I paraphrase here): try to make your photograph so that the viewer will have some measure of what you felt when making the image. I am now the viewer and I'm feeling a greal deal of what I felt when I made the image. (For those who may interested, the original format in which this image was shot was with my 240mm f/9 Fujinon A on my Wista 4x5 field camera fitted with a Horseman 6x12cm roll film back. Film is 120 Kodak CP-100 processed in my JOBO. Side note: my Wista is one of the very earliest one's in this country, serial number is 0023.)