If you absolutely have to get from point A to point B with minimum hassle the superhighways serve a purpose, but I always hate driving on them. My wife and I are Colorado residents but nowadays we spend winters in Florida. The trip between points is roughly 2,000 miles and we have to drive it because we’re always carrying a load of stuff. What we normally do is break the trip into six days of roughly 300+ miles a day and drive the back roads, usually far off the freeways. The result is an American version of what you’ve described, with interesting lunches in small towns where all the locals look you over and size you up when you walk in, and pictures of the sort I’ve attached. If you were to go as a photographer, the requirement to look outward instead of inward might make the trip a new beginning and might even enhance the lovely memories you speak of.
Best regards,
[attachment=14092:De_Funiak_Springs.jpg] [attachment=14091:Bar.jpg]
Russ, didn´t intend to be rude, but simply missed this post!
Your last sentence has a sort of irony to it: all those trips were also attempts to build up photo stock. However, as they were done in a manner that I thought might get them into libraries, they serve no purpose for me today. Now, my interests in photography are not really part of the commercial world, but probably totally self-centred.
However, what´s also happening to me is that I am realising more and more that photography doesn´t always depend on going somewhere else; it could, if it´s a particular type of landscape or motif that is driving your search, but my own search right now is in the creation of colour patterns (with paint) which I then shoot on digital and mess about with in PS, ending up with something not always close to the original painting. But the original acts as a negative, if you will, or an outline; or even a throw of the dice, if you feel unkind!
An exciting development of this (for me), happened over the past two days. I was sitting on the terrace at home and thought I saw a butterfly having a rest. I bent down to see why it was so motionless, blew at it, and it just slid sideways. Dead. It looked so delicate lying there, so I thought I´d incorporate it into one of my paint jobs. I picked it up and put it in the office. This morning, I started to scrape the old paint off the board I use as canvas, prior to spraying on some primer. As I scraped the old away, it struck me that the mess that was making might actually provide a much better foil to the delicacy of the butterfly, so I scraped no further and, sticking the corpse onto the board, took a few shots.
These were intended to be a vertical final print. So help me, the instant that the image came up on the monitor, everything changed!
Rather than a vertical shot of a butterly sitting on swatches of distressed paint, when seen as a horizontal, the thing shrieked bayou, boat and, finally, Charon´s Ferry! So that´s how it´s going down.
Once I have it looking a bit more as I want it to, I´ll stick up a little jpeg here.
Which leads me to ask a further question of myself: is that art, photography or just divine intervention?
Referring to your other post and the pic of the aircraft; don´t feel bad, that´s a much better ´plane than my car is a car!
Rob C