Out of Spring, into Summer

My my my, May May May, you've long been my favorite month and this time you certainly did not disappoint.

It was not as nice for the poor folks of Moore, Oklahoma.  And the giant twister that ripped a line through that city.  Listening to the news reports, I found myself mesmerized by the tragedy; and how a tragedy in the center of the country was consumed by the rest of the country...  And I made a photograph about that (which includes a soundtrack, if you take a look and listen here):

A trash can in a park overflowing with bags of dog waste after a long weekend:

This one is from last autumn, but I just got around to scanning it:

I've been shooting a lot of medium format lately, and thinking about shooting even more.  This summer I'll be traveling with just a digital camera and a medium format camera; my first time in a long while not dragging a large format monster around with me.  I'm not sure what I'm doing with it yet, which is a lovely feeling.  Taking a break from working in typologies.  Sometimes when I'm composing squares, I go back to my photographic roots, especially when photographing vines and forests:

I took a lot of landscapes while in transit, moving landscapes...

Maryland Landscapes:

Ohio Landscapes:

He has very bad allergies that make many Baltimore residents nervous...

Michelle got married...

Make way for goslings...  Driving and photographing with a 400mm lens is tough work, and Matt says people aren't meant to multi-task:

What I saw while everyone else was looking up:

Glowing tree after a night in the darkroom...

I got a pinhole lens for my digital camera, which has been amusing...

Empty pedestals: 

And the pinhole even resulted in a self-portrait, because I look better when blurry:

Matches dangling off the table in the morning, from last night's cigarette:

Conor and Katelyn moved north, right when I'm about to move south, like U-Hauls crossing in the night...

Caged Curator:

Yellow stripes:

Now Obsolete:

Medium format rejects:

School's out for summer!

Return to Oz.

So, lately I've been trying to make something of my photographic archives.  Piecing together the past ten years of shooting and writing and thinking into an odd puzzle that I'm currently calling Untitled Re:Iterations.  Though it has a ways to go.  I'm getting pretty close to the bottom of my photographic archive...

Today I'm posting a bunch of photos I took about ten years ago, when I visited Australia and New Zealand for a bit more than three months.  It was the first time I really traveled abroad.  And it was on that trip that I decided I wanted to try to make taking pictures my life.  It was just me and a backpack.  One of the more simple and romantic eras of my life...  Some of the black-and-white work has been on my website for a while, but I also shot color for the first time, and carried a digital point and shoot, that I never did anything with.

I took these two pictures during a week at Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of AU:  

This photo was in the Barossa Vallery; I love how slide film gets over exposed:

I think this was in Gregory National Park... Back in the Northern Territory:

Fjordland National Park in Southwestern New Zealand:

A cave on the way to the peak of Mount Bartle Frere, Queensland:

The cave where Jeff and I sought shelter from a storm, in the Blue Mountains, NSW:

Katherine Gorge, NT:

Bowerbird bower in Gregory National Park, NT:

The reason I went to Australia was to work with a biologist studying Fairy Wrens, but that job didn't pan out.  Fairy Wrens are awesome birds though.  And extremely feisty.  They'd often attack the mirrors and windshields of the research vehicles:

Kakadu at sunset:

Echidna in South Australia:

Kea, parrots endemic to New Zealand:

Mammals:

Water cycle series:

One of the few digital photos I took during my year in Boston when I was too busy falling in love with 4x5 to pay much attention to point-and-shoot:

Somewhere in South Australia...

Somewhere in the Northern Territory...  (self-portrait)

One day when I felt like I was on the edge of the world:

Jeff asked me to photograph this for him, in the woods near where his house burnt down:

So that's me and my camera ten years ago.  It was fun.