#10 Series

#10 format

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude. Friedrich Nietzsche

What I call the #10 format is in a ratio of  4:9.25. It is the first format I started working in when I switched to digital. If I got a picture I particularly liked, I shared it by making a card. I had a bunch of extra #10 envelopes and I started making the cards to just fit.

I printed the cards on watercolor paper because it was the easier than standard photographic paper to write on the back. Being cards, I first saw the images as prints when they were small – 4″x9.25″- but,  for reasons that I don’t think about very much, most of them lend themselves to being enlarged. I usually print these images at 12 inches by 27.75 inches however I have printed several of them at 48 inches wide.

Many of these shots are landscapes, nevertheless, I do not consider myself a landscape photographer as such. I photograph a large number of landscapes because I spend a good deal of my time in the landscape (for lack of a better definition).

For all that, often I am overwhelmed by the landscape. I love being in it, almost feeling as much as seeing it. Sometimes, it feels as if the front of my head is gone and the place just  pours in – directly into my being – bypassing my eyes. It often seems impossible to capture that breadth and power. To look at the sea or El Capitan printed on a piece of paper seems such a pale impression of the complete experience and I often resort to details using them as picture haikus.

I have collected art and rocks and various plants for a long time and I look at photography the same way: I don’t make the images – they are there and I just find them. For instance, the Abbotts Lagoon series is about the patterns where the stream water meets the seawater edge. They change every day and stay the same every day.

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