garrison beau scott

I have just returned from a glorious weekend celebrating the wedding of one of my brothers. We spent an amazing few days in the Rhinebeck Valley in upstate New York and it couldn’t have been any more blissful. Seeing old friends and joining them in passing on our dear boy to the girl of his dreams was truly an incredible way of basking in the glow of the days.

So I come home to find that I’ve been “published” by f/stop magazine in their current online issue devoted to lo*fi photography. There was also a competition for a featured portfolio which, alas I didn’t win, but I did make honorable mention. Maybe the only time I’ve been honorable. And they went ahead and used nine of my Holga snaps.

All in all it was a pretty decent past few days. Here’s one of the nine I submitted that I’ve yet to post here.

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.

I’ve always gotten off on composition, especially the kind that covers the entire frame, corner to corner. Eliminating any horizon, or referring points in the scene opens up so many things to an interpretation different from that of the photographer. My feeling is that when you compose for corner to corner, you allow for simple elements like line and shadow, rivets and rust to take on an added importance that wouldn’t exist if they were competing with the sky.

Geometry. It used to be that the mere mention of it would send me straight to the fetal position. Now, I almost seek it out.