photographs
Sep. 22nd, 2003 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jfbThere are three kinds of things that catch my eye from the road.
The first is the vastness of nature. I love open plains, open sea, rolling green hills, the patterns of light and dark that late-day sun makes out of the folds and curves of mountains and foothills. Honestly, I love how the sheer size of the land makes our individual failings irrelevant.
The second, similar in scale but psychologically undermining the first, is evidence of immense human systems. Electrical towers, rows of agriculture, wind turbines lining the crest of a hill, the interstate highway system, even the construction of prefabricated housing developments thrills me a little. As an environmentalist I'm horrified by most of these things, but as a humanist--and as someone who can take hours working out the details of a few lines of program code, or writing a three-minute pop song--I'm awed by them. I've been known to gasp at my first sight of a particularly elegant freeway interchange.
I don't know how to photograph either of these things. My photos of deserts stretching off to a distant mountain range always look like a big shrub in the foreground with only a sliver of sand representing the thing that actually inspired me. And my photos of electrical towers, well, they look like electrical towers. Even I say "So what?" when I look at them later. And it doesn't help that most of my photos, on this trip, are taken, without sighting, from behind the bug-spattered and semi-reflective windows of a speeding car.
The third category is signage. I'm drawn by design sometimes, but more often by unusual phrases or funny errors. I can photograph these, because there's nothing photographic about it: The pictures exist solely to document that a thing existed and I saw it.
Still, when one travels, one must have pictures. So I've put up a Yahoo gallery of the first week. (Click on "the big trip".) I apologize for the few photos that are sideways--I don't have time to figure out how to fix that right now. I don't apologize for the rest of them.
I'm about at my quota for free photo posting at Yahoo; anyone got an idea for next week's batch? Ease of setup and upload is paramount--I don't have time to mess with scripts right now.
The first is the vastness of nature. I love open plains, open sea, rolling green hills, the patterns of light and dark that late-day sun makes out of the folds and curves of mountains and foothills. Honestly, I love how the sheer size of the land makes our individual failings irrelevant.
The second, similar in scale but psychologically undermining the first, is evidence of immense human systems. Electrical towers, rows of agriculture, wind turbines lining the crest of a hill, the interstate highway system, even the construction of prefabricated housing developments thrills me a little. As an environmentalist I'm horrified by most of these things, but as a humanist--and as someone who can take hours working out the details of a few lines of program code, or writing a three-minute pop song--I'm awed by them. I've been known to gasp at my first sight of a particularly elegant freeway interchange.
I don't know how to photograph either of these things. My photos of deserts stretching off to a distant mountain range always look like a big shrub in the foreground with only a sliver of sand representing the thing that actually inspired me. And my photos of electrical towers, well, they look like electrical towers. Even I say "So what?" when I look at them later. And it doesn't help that most of my photos, on this trip, are taken, without sighting, from behind the bug-spattered and semi-reflective windows of a speeding car.
The third category is signage. I'm drawn by design sometimes, but more often by unusual phrases or funny errors. I can photograph these, because there's nothing photographic about it: The pictures exist solely to document that a thing existed and I saw it.
Still, when one travels, one must have pictures. So I've put up a Yahoo gallery of the first week. (Click on "the big trip".) I apologize for the few photos that are sideways--I don't have time to figure out how to fix that right now. I don't apologize for the rest of them.
I'm about at my quota for free photo posting at Yahoo; anyone got an idea for next week's batch? Ease of setup and upload is paramount--I don't have time to mess with scripts right now.
