Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Girl crossing, car turning - Santa Fe

A day trip to Santa Fe for our daughters and their friend who is staying with us … but I have had enough of Santa Fe for this year, at least photographically speaking; so what to point the camera at? Two years ago, in the same location, I experimented with extreme over exposure and out of focus; I liked the results then so I try that again today. I need to use more shots; the technique is unpredictable especially when you are not looking through the viewfinder! If people see a camera to your eye they either avoid getting in your way (the opposite of what you want) or just avoid being photographed (understandable). Holding the camera down from your face solves the problem but makes framing a little hit or miss.

I think I am going to love this image; it grows on me with each look. There is a hint of a Bronte character, standing on the moors looking into the distance, thinking of unrequited love. In fact the girl is crossing the road with a car turning in the opposite direction, it’s turn signal luckily caught in the moment. The camera was to my eye for this one; she is walking away and unaware of my presence.

South Fork Fire smoke and sunset

A photograph taken yesterday posted early in the day today; cheating a little on my plan to post an image from each day of our vacation but I am not sure whether I will be using the camera today since we will be attending the Taos Pueblo Corn Dance celebration and photography of this religious event is, understandably, not permitted.

The buildings of the pueblo are one of the most amazing sights in North America but I am not entirely comfortable when I visit, no more than I would be walking around a neighbor’s home as an uninvited guest while the owner sat at their kitchen table. The tribe benefits from the money that tourists bring but it must be irksome to have so many strangers wandering through your back yard; a yard that has belonged to your people for a thousand years, been violently taken, and returned only recently and partially. I am awed, honored, humbled and embarrassed when I enter the pueblo.

The photograph, made last night from the road south of Taos, illustrates the scale of the lightening started South Fork Fire burning in the mountains above Abiquiu. It is this smoke that has brought haze to the skies across north eastern New Mexico for the last two weeks, modifying my expectations for the type of images I might collect. Forest fires are a fact of life in the south west states but, like so much else in this colossal landscape, come as a surprise to a modern city dweller. Urbanites expect their inconvenient disasters to be cleaned up quickly, only the bureaucratic disruption of road work lasts weeks or months in the city. The South Fork Fire is a mostly natural event from which the landscape will recover but the drift of the smoke reminds me of the unnatural plumes of another type drifting wider and wider in the Gulf of Mexico; the lumpy haze of that “event” may not be cleaned up in my lifetime and perhaps not in my children’s lifetime either. $2.80 a gallon is not the full price of the fuel for our Austin to Taos drive, the real price has not yet been billed.

Fresh hay, Arroyo Seco

In some way that I cannot fully explain, I believe that this photograph will come to be the single image that I would select if asked to choose one photograph to represent this year’s New Mexico visit. And our stay is not even half way through yet.

The freshly stacked, still green, hay contains the young summer. The farming is non-intensive, like the town. The light is clear and bright. All in the presence of the mountains and the sky. I watched the hay being cut from our rental house; the stack sits just a block away.

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The South Fork Fire stills burns in the Santa Fe National Forest; now 14,300 acres and only 45% contained. However, the prevailing wind over the wildfire has turned more towards the east taking the smoke over Santa Fe rather than Taos. New Mexico blues have returned to the landscape and my camera responded by seeking the horizon for the first time since arriving in Roswell a week ago.

Tenacious grass, Rio Grande near Taos Junction - there has been too much brown in recent posts so here's a change

At the back of my mind when we were planning our return to the Taos area this summer was the presence of a master digital printer in Arroyo Seco. As it turned out, the house we rented is just three blocks from his worksop and gallery. Almost the first thing that I did when we arrived in town was to call in and see if it might be possible to get some advice on digital workflows and print preparation. To my surprise and great pleasure, Jack Leustig was more than willing and this morning he was kind enough to allow me to sit with him for an hour or more in what amounted to a one-on-one Photoshop master class.

A long time photographer and filmmaker himself, Jack has been using Photoshop since its first release and was developing images digitally many years before the term “Photoshopped” entered popular vocabulary as a verb. In the mid 90s he worked with and learned ink jet printing at Nash Editions, the pioneer of fine art ink jet printing founded by the musician Graham Nash. As soon as Epson released the Stylus Pro 9600 printer in 2002, making archival quality fine art printing truly economic and practical, Jack Leustig Imaging (JLI) was open for business.

I have long known that I have not been getting everything that I could from Photoshop. I had a workflow that was adequate for this web site and for a handful of 12×18 prints on my Epson Stylus Photo 2200 printer. But “adequate” is not “exceptional” and I want my prints to be exceptional. My Photoshop knowledge gained more in 10 minutes, watching over Jack Leustig’s shoulder as he worked an an image for another client, than it had in years. The longer session this morning added a whole new bag of tips and techniques. One lesson won’t turn me into a master printer but I am certain it will help to raise the level of my work; I am itching to get back to Austin and put it into practice.

Of course I won’t be buying a 44″ Epson 9900 for my personal use. When I need to print something larger than 13×19 you can be sure that I will be uploading the files that I have prepared to Jack Leustig Imaging for output on their suite of printers, safe in the knowledge that they won’t let me do something stupid and will be able fix my mistakes. If you need any kind of high quality fine art printing work done, I can heartily recommend JLI; I have seen their work up close.

A big thank you to Jack and Liz for their welcome, patience and instruction.

Conduit Blank or Windy Day at the Beach

It has been a lazy day: much reading of books (Stieg Larson’s excellant “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) and little effort on getting away from the house or finding photographs. Consequently there is only a narrow choice of images for today’s post; more truthfully, this power junction box on the the side of the Taos Cow was the only choice. Looked at quickly it might be an impressionist painting of a beach on a windy day.

Tomorrow we will be more energetic and adventurous, heading down into the Rio Grande gorge. The weather is promising to be more interesting over the coming week too with storm chances rising each day. A 30% chance of rain in northern New Mexico means a 60% chance of interesting skies to photograph somewhere around your horizon – you may not get wet where you are standing but you will have a panorama view of the thunderheads elsewhere.

How many times must you be told, Taos

While some clouds did gather over the mountains this afternoon, offering hope for the days to come, there was no storm development and no rain to clean the sky of smoke haze from the distant South Fork Fire. So again, I have no photographs of sweeping New Mexico landscapes or dramatic storm skies to offer but that’s not an altogether bad thing. Instead of looking to the horizon I must instead find smaller landscapes at my feet, ones that I might have overlooked if weather and wildfire had not intervened.

The physical geography of our street surfaces read much like that of our broader countryside. The weather produces the same fractal patterns in miniature on the tarmac that you find in grand scale in satellite views of the canyons of the Colorado and the deltas of the Mississippi. As with all contemporary landscapes, the natural patterns of earth movement and erosion are modified and overlaid with a human archeology of changing population and politics. Three times or more this road has been painted and repainted with rephrased parking restrictions but each has been eroded by weather, time and the growing indifference of those for whom the message was intended.

As I walked away from this spot, Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” found it’s way out of the door of a nearby bar: “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s” he sang. Apparently, live versions of the lyric have been updated over the decades just as these yellow lines have been repainted; now the words have settled at “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 21st century” which should last a little longer than the previous three versions. Mother Nature is still on the run, especially today in the Golf of Mexico, and we still don’t get her message. Perhaps the best we can console ourselves with is that ultimately she will give up on warnings and just throw us off; the fractal cracks and weeds will erase us and new dinosaurs will arise to the throne to take our place.