Living on the Side of the Road

With this photo, I finally feel like I’m getting somewhere with the medium format camera. Click on it and give it a good look. I think it’s got some Rousseau vibes. If I were an entirely different person I could AI in a tiger and there you’d have it.

But as is, I think it represents a milestone in my retirement plan, which is to make and sell beautiful photos. I have no problem selling out, but am not sure if I am entirely capable. I may go where Ansel Adams went, but not sure my heart can entirely be in it, and that tends to show.

Ideally, I’d like to find beautiful images in places where nobody else is looking. Like here, a nondescript little stand of trees between a corn field and a soybean field on the side of a back country road. The flowers you see are considered weeds and mass quantities of poisons have been deployed to kill them in the surrounding fields. And that is not an old growth forest or one that has been in any way curated. Just new growth with whatever naturally sprang up. So the image is not just about beauty, it’s about unnoticed beauty, and beauty under constant attack, yet finding a way to emerge and show itself in the early morning light.

The black and white version’s not bad either. I’ll just have to restrain myself from doing the blue or the red.