garrison beau scott

Having a guide when out taking photos can be a duel edged sword. Especially for someone like myself who likes to shoot in a particular way, discovering things on more of a karmic pace as opposed to the “You gotta see this place…” type of discovery. I once lugged a studio 4×5 up a mountain on the assurances of one such guide that the photography would be stunning. I didn’t shoot one sheet of film, not even a polaroid.

When I visited North Adams on a picture taking trip, and my host and his partner volunteered to take me around based on descriptions of what I was looking for, I was at first very hesitant, but I accepted the kind offer. I told Joe the things I was hoping to photograph and off we went in search of them.

My fears were quickly put to rest within the first minutes even though our initial destination was the town dump. And then every stop thereafter Joe delivered a great location for taking snaps.

It was our last stop however, that yielded this image. Joe had suggested an old factory and drove us across town so I could see it. I’m sure it would have been great had it not been for the fence and razor wire. But across the street from the factory was this scene. The arch over the river (for lack of a better term) was what caught my eye, and everything else just kind of fell in place.

The thing about walking around with a Holga at dusk, sans tripod, is that if you want to get a shot off, you’re pretty much left with two options. Hand held, or under-exposed.

Well, there’s a third option, and that’s the one I usually go with. Cross your fingers and hope for the best. I feel that’s what I got here. Had I properly exposed this, I think some of the drama would have been missed, and the headlights from the cars would have been blurred. Normally I try to compose the lights out of the shot, or wait for them to disappear completely. Here I tried to compose them out, but with the Holga and the parallax error built in, what I thought I was getting and what I actually got, were two different things.

I think the lights make the shot, and had I a tri-pod, a better sense of what was going to be on film, or anything different than what I had when I tripped the shutter, this shot would have come out much different. Chalk another one up to a lucky break.

Back to my trip to California this past April/May. Most of my time riding the cruiser was during earlier hours when coffee was just as important of a quest as snaps. But this day I went out twice and this time, all that I cared about was the light. Magic hour light. Shadow stretching, blue deepening, golden, delicious, light.

But of course light is nothing much until it finds something to strike.

Another one of those scenes that just explode with visual sweetness for me and my camera. With all that is going on here, this was as simple as point and shoot.

With the few remaining weeks I had left while living in San Francisco, before the move East to Boston, I made sure to take whatever time I had to snap up a few remaining shots. This is the kind of scene I live to photograph. Something I can spot from a block away as interesting, but it isn’t until I get close enough to scope it out do I really begin to understand what the shot will be.

Not to over-dramatize things, but with a scene like this I guess I feel like a sculptor looking at a chunk of marble, walking around it to find the lines that will ultimately form the finished image.