Snatching the Colors Off the Desert

Posted on May 28, 2007 in Photography

It has always been about pixels except in the old days — when we sloshed coated papers in silver nitrate solutions that purpled our skin and no one could be called a photographer who didn’t develop her/his own film — we called it grain. So there I was, last week, being retrograde, traipsing about the canyon country of South Utah carrying my Nikon 8008, once the cutting edge of its time and now an interesting dinosaur except for the fact that the body of Nikon’s new line of digitals accept the lenses as Nikons always have since the F2. My 8008, the camera I bought to last forever. And to prove its continuing utility, before I left I bought four rolls of Kodak 200. Yes, it was off to slick rock and sand carrying a legacy of precision optical equipment.

I am a rebel. My forebear is not [[Ansel Adams]] who turned out pictures that the common man would love, something like this except not as filling:

So far, the not very intense voting declares that that is the best picture I took on the trip. The rest of them received a zero (no votes at all) and I have to attribute it to the fact that I am more the spawn of [[Edward Weston]] or [[Imogen Cunningham]]. I like abstracts, such as this which I think is the best photo that I snapped last week:

I turn my head and I see things. The problem with last week is that I had to keep my head close to the ground lest I see more than I had film to record. That’s the nicety of the digital age: the grain has gotten good and as a result you can click away more than the days when film took so much more room than a flash card and held so much less. Yet I did allow my eyes to wander from the necessities, the shots that had to be recorded for the hiking reports or family albums.

Oh, the Nikon was so sweet, so precise, so clear. It delivered on my abstracts and it delivered on my more banal shots:

So I am looking forward to the big change, when I put down the money I’ve been saving for a the body of a D80, gutted of its lens, waiting for the focuser of light just like Frankenstein’s golem waited for its brain. I have the old sophisticated tubes of equipment: all I need is the magic box. When I get that, I intend to go down to the sea again and seek the lacework in the sand.

Lynn thinks we might be able to visit southern Utah again this fall. I anticipate slot canyons, white domes, and streams fading in the sand. Pixels is what we call grain now a days. Oh, I know that my old paraphenalia and new image maker will snatch the colors off the desert, let me keep the sand specks in a sack meant for jewels.

[tags]photography,Southern Utah[/tags]