Tag Archives: Forest

The December Solstice

The Changeling

The Changeling – As the nights became longer and the darkness thicker, she could feel the transformation beginning to take place deep in her bones. The December solstice was approaching, and her inner animal was becoming restless.

The December Solstice

I love this time of year. I am sitting in my office watching it snow and snow, big fluffy flakes. I think I will probably take tomorrow off just to go snowboarding. As the saying goes: no work or friends on a powder day. I live in the mountains of Colorado, and this is really the most magical time to be here. All of the branches of the trees in town are delicately wrapped with lights that twinkle and glow. Red ribbons, wreaths and evergreen garlands drape the light posts, and people are gathering to be joyous and merry. There are parties, food, and drinks, old friends come home, and the town seems quainter than usual. Yesterday, I saw a postman stopped on his route to enjoy a cup of something, looking suspiciously alcoholic, with friends who were lingering on a street corner. Things will get delivered, but now friendship is the only real priority.

In the Northern hemisphere, tonight will be the longest night of the year, the December solstice. Tonight, will also be a new moon. This is a powerful combination of pure darkness and new beginnings. For the next six months things will only get lighter each day. The change is exponential, in that the difference between light and dark grows faster in the spring and fall than the summer and the winter. This is due to the elliptical nature of the earth’s course around the sun. In the southern hemisphere tonight will be the longest day of the year, and holiday parties are more associated with trips to the beach than going skiing. But, I am in the north, and I am feeling the power of this night. The darkness already begins to fall and twilight shadows are creeping at four in the afternoon. I saved this image to release tonight, even thought it has been complete for weeks. I have been waiting for the magic.

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This image is about transformation, about becoming your truest self. It is about contracting and expanding, about the binaries of our inner worlds, about a truth that only you know. From the darkness comes light, and with that all things are reborn. This is why we make our resolutions at this time of the year, as we feel the potential within ourselves for transformation. This is the time to take on new projects, to let creativity flow, to share with friends and family, to feel the divinity of our universe. It is also the time to linger, to give thanks, and most of all to luxuriate in the darkness and dream.

 

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The House of One Hundred Years of Solitude

In mid August, I headed down to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to visit with my old friend Marela Zacarias.  Marela grew up around Mexico City but currently resides in New York City; she was on a trip to visit family and I was invited to tag along.  The house we stayed at has been in her family for generations.  This beautiful compound is a bit like Marquez’s House of a Hundred Years of Solitude.  It is built on a large sloping hillside that is terraced and ends in a deep barranca below.  Each level accommodates different areas including gardens, swings, walkways, and swimming pools, all in various states of repair.

There is a special magic to a place like this, a place where there are echoes of parties long since past, children grown up, and a future yet to come.  One can imagine golden era Hollywood starlets, flirting under the canopy of lush trees, limbs embracing each other like lovers. If you listen carefully you can hear the sounds of children squealing in delight as they dash down the waterslide, crashing into the grotto like swimming pool.  Here and there are the shadows of gardens being taken back by the jungle, gardens that must have grown abundant tropical flowers.  The past is present, but there is also a great deal of promise, as slowly the structures are being reinforced against a climate that loves to decay anything in its grasp.  Who knows what mysteries will unfold or what tails of love will transpire.

On a trip to the local artisans market, I purchased a small handmade, papier-mâché tiger mask.  As I have previously discussed, I am trying to incorporate some different costumes and props into my images.  One of the things I have always liked about working with long exposures is the anonymity, as my face is usually blurred and unrecognizable.  I think that this allows my viewers to place themselves into the images.  Now that I am fequently working in full daylight, using my neutral density filter, I find that I am more recognizable and a masking is a great solution.  In the past, I created a lot of images dealing with issues of masking, whether through makeup, costumes or just personal identity.  I feel like this is an interesting integration between work that is old and new.

Chiang Mai, Thailand

It has been a really long time since I have done any personal work. It feels so strange not to be working with Aloyse.  I really wish that she had been here tonight. There are just some things that work better when there are two people.  I had to resort to putting the camera remote trigger between my teeth, and well that really didn’t help, so I didn’t get some of the shots I had imagined.

This image is my homage, to not only the golden Buddhist temples I have been visiting here in Thailand, but also to the temple gong that wakes me up every morning at 5am.  I have never been able to sit still and meditate; I have no discipline in that area of my life whatsoever.  I often dream, even make resolutions to start meditating… but nope, it never happens.  So, when that gong starts going off, I snuggle deeper under the covers and smile to myself, thinking of all the wonderful monks on their way to enlightenment, and here I lie, completely content with my suffering, warm in bed.  It’s a silly, delicious moment that I have come to savor in the wee hours of my jet-lagged sleep.  This image is me and my monkey mind… never settling down.

Second night at the farm


After a rough early morning, the work we did last night was far more successful.  First we shot at dusk out in the field, while the light was falling, and it seemed like we just did more of the same.  I was staring to worry.  There are not too many successful images from that shoot and the storytelling aspects are really not there.  Not to mention that when I looked at the photos this morning I saw that we had irreparably bad exposures.  When shooting this type of image you have to push your iso a bit and then you risk a serious degradation of the images when you try to fix them up in post.  The blacks block up and there really isn’t much information there.  It’s a tough balance between iso and f-stop, either you get blocky blacks or you loose depth of field and focus.

We started by playing on a large grassy earthen mound on the edge of the field, women in white lined up on top.  I was having issues with my remote properly triggering my timer, so while the light was good we really were not able to get the best images.  Once I finally gave up and hand triggered the timer we had basically lost our light.  We tried a few dancing poses in the field, but the sky was still too bright and we could not seem to coordinate our movements.  It looked really stiff and uninspired, again with bad exposures.  I was beginning to worry, that we were really not going to get anything out of this trip.

Finally, after a few mishaps, we acquired two kerosene lanterns and were able to use those as our light source.  This was the inspiration we needed.  We headed out to the field and were able to shoot three different scenes.  The first is a goddess dance around a fire, the second is a bringing of the light, and the third takes place at the edge of the forest, a mysterious encounter.  I am quite happy with this work.  I only wish we had more nights to work out here.

Old Green Farm

Last night Aloyse Blair and I headed out to the forest on her fathers beautiful farm in New Jersey.  Sunrise was at 5:30am, so we had a 4am wake up call and were out in the forest by 4:20.  We had scoped out the forest the day before and found a few sights that we thought would make good locations. Finding them in the dark was actually easier than we thought, avoiding the poison ivy as we went.

We ran into a few problems right off.  First, I need to get an actual tripod for this work, using my Gorilla Pod just does not give me the flexibility I need to get the shots I want.  Some of our locations really didn’t look very good without the elevation a tripod would have provided.  Second, there is currently no moon and the forest was so devoid of ambient light that it was almost impossible to get anything done with out using alternate light sources.  Tonight we are going to take some old kerosene lanterns out into the forest with us, which should provide an interesting light source and potential creative aspect to the images.  Third, as usual, I really need to figure out the best ways to deal with focus issues, between focusing in the dark and being able to stop down the camera.  I feel some of these shots might have been quite successful if they had been in focus.  As the sun came up we were eventually able to use the dawn light, but it felt rushed, and to be honest, a bit uninspired. Aloyse and I have been doing this type of work for years now and it is easy to fall back on what we know.  I am hoping over the next few weeks we will be able to really push things to the next level.

Given the absolute darkness, I felt very rusty out there and unsure of what I wanted to accomplish.  I am working on exploring the aspects of location and self, but I am still having a tough time deciding what this means.  I feel pretty confident in my ability to create strong images technically, but establishing solid content is proving to be more difficult.  I need to spend more time on the ‘who, what, where, why, when,’ aspect of this project.  Part of the beauty of these images lies in the spontaneity, but I also really need to get out there and be able to direct the scenes.  Thankfully, Aloyse has a great natural feel for this type of performance work and we were able to get something accomplished before the sun rose.

After all was said and done these were the strongest images from last night.   I personally feel the last image works best, but I include all so that you can compare and see how the project comes along over the next few months.