It has been nearly two months since I updated my blog, for a variety of reasons, none of which are terribly good ones. Laziness is perhaps my best excuse, although I have been photographing so much and producing a lot of new work, so that it is hard to point a finger at myself and say that I am lazy. Perhaps I am lazy at writing, for that I have to plead guilty. In any event, the fruits of my efforts are now visible in my site update today with a host of new images that can be found under the New Work section of the web site.
My travels took me to a variety of places, most notably Death Valley and Zion National Parks. I have found that January travel is a wonderful to experience the National Parks, with a striking absence of the typical Summer crowds. Both Death Valley and Zion were relatively empty, and I could go almost anywhere and pretty much have the landscape to myself. It has become one of my favorite times to travel in this country, and I will certainly continue to do so for the next few years. Upcoming is a trip back to Utah and a park that I have only briefly explored in the past, Capitol Reef. It is a beautiful area that I have very few photographs from, most of which are black and white from my large format days, which are now looking quite dated.
In looking through a number of my books of black and white photos from some of the greatest masters, it has struck me how limiting that form of photography was and how much photography has changed since the introduction of digital photography. So many aspects of photography that now seem simple were absolutely impossible back then, so that the imagery one sees in these older books often falls flat. Also, the quality of the imagery, at least in my mind, has improved dramatically in many ways, not only technically, but expressively. The technological improvement heralded by digital photography has truly enabled photographers to express themselves in ways that were not conceivable in the film days. One can only wonder what the future holds in this respect. The one issue, however, that digital does raise is preservation. Because of the fleeting nature of digital storage and the constantly changing way that we do store these pictures, it seems essential that prints be made so that there is always a hard copy available to be shared. Without the print, a digital image may not be available a few years down the line, especially if its creator is no longer around to move it along the constantly evolving storage pathway. This will remain an important consideration for some time to come.
