5D

in the shasta valley

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in-the-shasta-valley

This is an older image, shot in November 2007 in the Shasta valley in Northern California, in the heart of Siskiyou County. This area is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been on the planet, and it’s a place that calms and centers me. (As I write this, even thinking of being there is calming.)

I’ve ridden and driven quite a bit through the mountains there; it’s a desolate, sparsely populated area of unparalleled beauty. And the people in Siskiyou County are wonderful. They might not be the richest or the most cosmopolitan–hardscrabble is a good word for many of the people I’ve met there–but they’re damn good folks, among the most welcoming I’ve met in this country (the cows are pretty decent too, which is a tale for another day). Maybe it’s because it’s the home of the mythical State of Jefferson (a concept I can get behind), but I can tell you that the temperature drops 40 degrees once you drop from Siskiyou into Humboldt County, and it’s all because of the people.

On this absolutely gorgeous fall day, I was driving back from San Francisco, with an array of cameras in the car: my Canon 5D digital camera and lenses, a vintage Polaroid SX-70 plenty of film, a Mamiya 7II medium-format film camera and a vintage Voightlander 35mm rangefinder. I also had an odd creation, a lens sawed off of a plastic Holga camera that just barely fit on my 5D. This hack job focused poorly, with plenty of lens aberration, and had the tendency to fall off the camera if I moved too quickly. On this day, however, the combination of dreamy focus, plastic and the Shasta valley on a fall afternoon had a magic that worked. I’ve played with this image a couple of times over the years, but haven’t quite loved the results. The advancements in the latest version of Lightroom’s raw processor made me come back to it, and I spent a little bit of time there and in Perfect Effects to come up with a version I really like.

It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, with its plastic feel and lack of focus, but it brings me back to a place that I just love to be. Peace.

where is this?

sauvie fog {3}

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sauvie-channel

I keep coming back to the set of images shot along the Columbia River, off of Sauvie Island, in January. They have been represented here on the blog twice so far: in Sauvie Island Fog and Sauvie Fog {alt}. They sit in the ‘working pix’ area of my library, and I regularly play with different versions from that day, trying to find the best representation of what I felt out there.

I like the vertical representation of the first image (Sauvie Island Fog) I posted, and I wish I hadn’t posted the {alt} version. I’m not sure that the version posted here is better than that first one, but I have returned to this one enough that I was compelled to work on it. There really isn’t a lot of image processing; it was mostly dust spotting, which was a result of grabbing the older camera and not paying attention to the sensor beforehand. I did look at a panoramic-style crop across the middle of the photo, but it felt extreme, and I tossed it.

What’s interesting when I look at the group of images in my library, there’s a tranquility in nearly all of them that was present on the day I was there. This one, which doesn’t have the (lovely) detail or color from the grasses along the riverbank, does have a more timeless quality and feel to me, and one that I like.

The next step will be to print them, and see which ones hold up better there. My gut tells me that it will be this one, but I never know until I get to the print.