Years ago I used to only pull the camera out when I was in the woods. Now the whole world shows up as interesting. Case in point, recently I arrived at my hotel in Seattle late in the evening, a little out of synch with what day it was. In the morning I was heading to a workshop on the Olympic Peninsula. I took a shower to wash off the travel, and that’s when I heard and felt loud booms, like muffled explosions. Once at the window I realized what day it was, and started to make photographs of the celebration.

In recent years my mind works differently when making a photograph.  Sure, I still react to the beauty in front of me, but more than before I react to what is in me, brought forward and alive by what is in front of me.  A couple months ago I was along the Big Sur coast of California.  My buddy, Richard Newman, and I are making a dvd.  That’s another story I want to talk about, but at this particular moment we were watching fog come into and envelope the coast.  It turned a day of details and clarity into a day of simple lines, gentle edges.  I thought about how fog is one of several weather elements that can tug at our emotions.  Depending on where you are (in life, right now!), it can surround you with different feelings, perhaps loneliness or solitude.  At that moment I felt peaceful and still.  The surreal bliss of being alone and feeling alive.

It is as if I now let go of the quick reaction – snap the pretty picture – and connect intuitively to what is going on inside.

I am paraphrasing Mike Mills of The Buffalo Outdoor Center in Ponca, Arkansas.  And I am substituting photography for canoeing.  One of the disasters for photography has been The Weather Channel.  Without a doubt.  Case 1:  Buffalo River a month ago.  We were set to float the Buffalo, ten of us.  But someone logged on to the internet connection in the lodge, and The Doom and Gloom folks said we should start building an ark.  Long story short I floated the river alone in a kayak. There was a perfect, light spritz of mist on and off throughout the day, fog settled into the river, colors glowed, and the river was mine.  No doom and gloom.  Case #2:  Anywhere I teach.  People actually check the weather from Seattle ten days before their trip to Santa Fe or Maine, and start to pre-stress about the storm, heat, wind, monsoons, tsunami from thousands of miles away.  How crazy is that?  They actually e-mail me with questions about what to do about this upcoming tragedy.  I conducted a little study over the last two years.  Pretty official actually.  I showed my photographic prints at about twenty outdoor art shows across the U.S.  My little booth was set up on the streets of Chicago, Fort Worth, Minneapolis, Houston. San Francisco, Ann Arbor, and elsewhere.  There were times when I worried that all my work, sitting in a little booth on the streets outside, would be too vulnerable.  Weather happens.  Rain and high winds can destroy your booth as well as keep the public away.   At night from my hotel room, nine hours to go, I would check The Doom and Gloom Channel.  So here’s the truth: These folks were wrong about the forecast more than half the time.  Yup.  Not even 50/50.  Imagine being wrong that much in your job.

I talked with Mike the day I floated the river.  He says his business takes a huge hit when people believe these inaccurate forecasts.  And I see people, already focused on fear, holding on to one more thing to worry about, and as a result, missing experiences.  Go.

I realized I had been staring at the koi in the pond for a long time. They were swimming back and forth very slowly, almost hypnotically.  Around and around in a little outdoor Hawaiian pool.  And as I watched them, lulled by their gently swishes of movement, they transformed into orange paintbrushes.

A visit of a just a minute would not have revealed this.  I needed to hang out and see the rhythm.  I needed to lose the koi and find paintbrushes. 

Some days I find myself looking for natural filters in order to make photographs into the sun. Laying on my stomach I peered out and focused on distant petals while the nearby petals were so close to the lens they became ethereal washes of pink, orange, and yellow.  Shifting my position left-right and up-down allowed me the ability to bring in certain colors, let go of others, and lead the eye where I wanted it to go.

I unrolled my sleeping bag under a giant white pine, a lone sentinal on the granite promontory where I had pulled up my canoe a few hours earlier. As I sat with a steaming cup of tea, warming my hands around the metal, looking out across Lake Richie, I could see several more old giants scattered around the lake, their branches creating distinctive silhouettes against the early evening sky. I could tell they were white pines, yet each seemed so different from the others — one with its crown blown off, another filled with limbs all the way down to the forest canopy, a third looking sparse, an old lightning bolt scarring its entire length. Tonight I would sleep under one of these great trees.

As evening changed to night I took the canoe out onto the lake one more time. The day’s paddle had been difficult, with strong, cold winds blowing down from the Canadian Shield. I had been pushed around a lot, feeling as if every stroke I made barely pulled me ahead of the wind’s easy efforts to set me back. But now the wind had vanished. Along with the sun, it disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

I leaned back against the stern and lazily poked around the shore. The full moon had set hours earlier, and now the sky was brilliant with stars. Starlight so bright I cast a faint shadow moving across the water. Cold and clear, the essence of a North Woods autumn night. I tried to lift paddle-fulls of reflected liquid starlight, then pour them back in. Or swirl starlight together, a rippling of white reflection in the dark lake. 

Back under the pine, I bundled up in wool and stuffed myself into the bag. Sleep, I thought, would come easily after another full day of exploring. I lay looking up into the dark forms of branches, dreamily wondering whether, if I could get to the lowest branch some twenty feet up, I could then connect the branches with steps all the way to the top. Somewhere in my climbing fantasy, I started to drift off. I seemed to enter a dreamland where I heard . . . geese. Lots of geese flying through my lazy dream, sleep just about winning the battle over wakefulness. But not so fast! I opened my eyes and thought, “I do hear geese.”

Over my head, over the white pine, up against the sky, flocks of geese were flying south. Today’s cold wind, which had created my own personal struggle, was the heralding call to send these geese on their annual journey south. They flew over, and then there was silence. I listened hard. The silence was enormous. Reaching my ears out, straining to listen, I had to still the loudest sound, my own quiet breaths. I heard more, like a distant train whistle. I couldn’t tell if my mind was making up the sound, but no, it got louder. This time, looking up through the branches, I saw individual stars being blacked out as the geese passed beneath them. I couldn’t see the birds themselves; I could only hear goose music and see vanishing stars. I spent the entire night listening to geese. Thousands of geese, slipping south through the night sky.

an excerpt from One Thousand Moons, Eddie’s book of images and essays. © Eddie Soloway

Richard Benson’s new book, The Printed Picture (published in 2008 by The Museum of Modern Art, New York), is a thorough and fascinating read on the history of the print and printing processes. In a chapter on “Where do we go from here?”, in a section on calibration, he offers, “This is a terrible thing.  Artists have always placed technique on a lesser level than visceral impulse; when they don’t they become craftsmen instead. The line between these two activities is soft and blurry, but the great technical prowess of the finest artists never obscures the fact that their work is valued because their craft carries something far more interesting than the craft itself. A work of art expresses the wisdom of the artist and the craft is the mechanism that brings this wisdom to physical form. . .”

Many of my images aim to convey a sense of place.  One long term project about place is unique in that it speaks not to a specific location, but to a common meeting of sky and water, where ever they come together.  My series, “Gentle Edges”, celebrates the subtle line where sky and water join.  Taken not as vast landscapes, these intimate glimpses focus on the delicate and the sublime.