Considering Our Place
With the Covid-19 lockdown, I thought I would have lots of time to work through old photos and dramatically update my website. Six weeks in and I have only managed to update and finalize a single gallery - Ricketts Glen! Maybe I need to stop watching Netflix and Amazon Prime - I love documentaries but I may have overdosed on them - and some were definitely questionable choices (Tiger King anyone?).
I chose Ricketts Glen as the starting point for working through my older image files that had not yet been edited. Since restarting my passion for photography in 2000, I have been to Ricketts Glen more than twenty-five times for full day photo hikes. I love everything about the place and I never grow tired of going there. So it was a natural place to start. I was certain I had already reviewed, selected and published the best images over the years. But several older ones caught my eye and made me stop. I published them to a work area to “live with them” for a few days to see if they still seemed worthy of publishing to my website - and they did! One of the images is from 2007 - thirteen years ago as I write this! Hopefully you enjoy these as much as I do! You can see the new additions from the archive here on the Ricketts Glen gallery page.
One of the images I rediscovered is the one at the top of this page. I made this image several years ago and as I reviewed it last week, it immediately grabbed me - perhaps because of the situation we now find ourselves in. We are forced to isolate ourselves from other people and it’s become clear that we don’t have the level of control over the world that we sometimes think we do. The small lone figure - the gesture - isolated against the vast backdrop of nature seemed to explain something of what we are experiencing today.
I hope everyone is doing well and I hope that soon this blog will show great landscape photos from far away places with no mention of viruses!