On New Year's Eve in 2020, I walked across the street from my home to the Carpenter Dam site on the Fox River in Illinois. I was in the midst of a traumatic divorce and this was the way to get back to my center. The goal was to finally capture image that were sharp enough to be able to polish up in post so that they were worth of submitting to art shows and PPA Merit Image Review. I have one merit image from that day and several other images that have either place in a show or was accepted as a juried exhibit. Well I found another one from that same day! This is "Wings Through Shadow". Many of my gull images start with the "Wings..." name.
Posted in The Wild Photographer
2
This hit me. I have a handful of sketchbook pages from specific bad days that I can't look at without remembering exactly where I was sitting, what the light was doing. The fact that you went back to the river to get your center and then kept finding keepers in that batch years later says something about what we're actually capturing when we're working through something. Your gull work seems like it has real consistency, the Wings naming convention makes me think you've built a whole body around these moments.
Yes! It also didn’t occur to me until years later when I figured out the meaning of it all!