Enriched by autumn rains, parts of the prairie stayed wide awake well into October.
It was a pleasure to be out & about, except the light was too often flat and dull.
The rains subsided. The sun shone bright. Long light pierced through fading woods.
More visitors stopped by.
The air turned chill, yet a few things held on.
Day by day, the light sank.
Then it was all but gone.
We got four inches of rain during October. An unusual amount, but it'd been dry for so long the water was welcome.
Then it turned unexpectedly nice. Late autumn prairie blooms held on. Some few even seemed to start afresh.
A pair of visitors stopped by.
How long they stayed I can't say. It's safe to assume they've flown from these parts by today.
Near the end of October, change accelerated. Light grew longer.
Autumn piled on.
At times the light fell near perfect. Then life on the prairie was revealed in high relief.
After shooting my last film in November 2012, I'd no intention of making the transition to digital capture.
Screw learning curves, I thought. There'd been a lot of those over the years.
I was well and truly done, with decades of photographic pursuit behind me. A closed book, both literally and figuratively.
Surprisingly perhaps, at the time I was pretty well content with that. Personally transformative and creatively productive as it was, the Superior Odyssey flat wore me out.
It was only later that I thought to continue doing what I'd learned to do so well. What'd been an integral part of me, since nearly fifty years ago when Heather brought a cheap Topcon back from Europe, and I promptly stole that from her.
Which theft led me here.
Being rendered technically obsolete three times and survived, the digital learning curve didn't frighten me. And I'd learned to bend that curve to my will, not the other way around.
Damned glad today I persevered. My maternal Gogebic Range roots played their long game to my advantage, credit where credit's due.
The intense saturation of digital capture took some getting used to. It makes Kodachrome in all its translucent glory look like wispy memory rather than vivid real life.
The crazy intense digital detail wasn't entirely dissimilar to shooting large format transparency film @ f64, only with limited depth of field.
Happily, the work's gone back to being natively backlit, so there's that.
Truth is, digital capture's not at all similar to film. It's an entirely new medium for an express new age laden with new expectations. Though some of those adhere to old structures regardless, old habits die hard.
At least until the next shooter wielding singular vision and some later generation of magic wand comes along and shatters the old rules for good.
Again. And then again, to the very last.
What digital files lack in authenticity and nuance they make up for in raw, retrievable information piled incredibly high.
Memory not simply recorded, but creatively unleashed.
By the end I knew film's limitations so well that I'd probably never have even tried to capture this on it.
Yet all these years after film's death I waved my magic wand and voila, here it is:
Damned glad I wasn't truly done, back then. Or now.
Today it seems likely I'll stay a recorder of light and moment until the moment light itself plays out for me.
The singular advantage of photographing abandoned architecture is that it doesn't move. So I didn't often shoot landscape with the Linhof.
But sometimes, real life becomes stone still. Occasionally, I grabbed the opportunity.
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| Gogebic County, 4x5 Ektachrome 100 |
While the Toy Canon enabled me to blog my Superior adventures in more or less real time, the Mamiya emboldened the entire gig and the rest of today's images are lifted from that batch.
A couple hundred sheets of large format film isn't a lot, and that's all there was left. Over fourteen straight months of fieldwork, I struck more than ten times that many exposures on 120mm transparency.
I was, in a word, profligate.
Much of that work was pure scenic, no decaying human construct need apply.
It'd been a long time since I'd thrown film willy-nilly through great gear. Years and years.
At the end, the finite supply of 4x5 transparencies was far too precious to risk expanding my horizons.
But 120mm film stock was still plentiful on the market, it proved easy to carry and when not otherwise crawling around abandoned basements or other such with the Linhof, at arbitrary moments I let the Mamiya fly.
And it took the greater world in.
The Mamiya proved a remarkably dependable tool. Had I paired one with the Linhof ten years prior, it might've altered my creative trajectory.
As is, I'm just happy I became an enthusiastic medium format shooter in the nick of time.
Turned out, simply covering my ass paid unexpected dividends.
Be prepared, the Boy Scouts like to say.
Indeed.
Today is the autumnal equinox, when pagans and scientists are in agreement.
Don't tell either that the world turns just the same, with or without them.
This year on the prairie, the sound of leaves in the breeze already has a brittle edge. Cicadas are intermittent. On overcast days like today, crickets rule.
A decade ago in the northwoods, the autumn season was robust.
Were I born in a different time and had the Toy Canon (or these days just your average phone), I suppose I'd have more snapshots.
But I didn't, so those from the fourteen straight months spent exploring the land I love best are about it.
From here they sure look like good years to me.
My emergency backup ended up a casual pursuit. It was convenient. Near weightless. A simple reflex, not a thought.
Hadn't much considered the results, until now. For sure, I'd never try to get a fine art print from any of these these.
The technical term would be crappy.
But fine art printing's no longer at issue. Lucky me, eh?
Time flies.
And with it flows the life giving light.
People say the light is long or short, warm or cold. Almost always it's somewhere between. Occasionally in near perfect light, it's everything at once.
What's not to love about Superior autumn?
For the last few months, the northlands day has steadily shrunk.
Some take autumn for being warm and rich. Nostalgic, even. And they hold the sublime light in their hearts like living, breathing memory.
Transitional light is all that good stuff, sometimes. When not otherwise in your face chilly and blowing low.
Depends on the day.
The Toy Canon's been gone a long time now. I don't mourn its passing.
On the prairie as in the northwoods, countdown to winter solstice began in June. That just means we're about halfway there, pagans and scientists both.
Happy autumnal equinox.
#equinox
