Jim Kramer dropped me an email yesterday when I couldn’t act on it (which I’ll expand upon shortly) with a bunch of photos, and as he noted, they had been taken exactly 12 years earlier on December 31st, 2005. You might recognize the one above, or at least the bridge therein, as the same one I featured a couple weeks back as a Sunday slide entry. Had I known which date I’d taken that one, I could have posted it as yesterday’s Sunday slide and done a little “12 years ago today” thing because we all know how fascinating and meaningful such things are.
Except– … wait. Something isn’t right here. If you use that link [why aren’t you clicking on these right away dammit? Why do you think I go through all the effort to provide them?] you’ll notice that they’re definitely different times of the year. Which confuses me, because I was positive, up until only minutes ago (of course, everything is ‘only minutes ago’ unless it’s ‘only seconds ago,’) that we’d only made one trip out there. I’m pretty proud of my ability to remember trips and shooting locales, and this is certainly a distinct area, but Jim has managed to collapse this whole worldview and make me question my sanity. So yeah, happy new year to you too you little bastard.
Now, I know I’d gone back once since then without him, only to find the entire area closed off and posted with signs long before the bridge – or so I remember, but who the hell knows now? Someone’s probably going to show up with pics from last year showing me partying out on the island with Tom Cruise or something…
Meanwhile, have a few more of his images.
During this trip, I was doing a little B&W work, and have not only those negatives, I have a few scans of them on my computer. And yes, unlike the slides and negatives, those scans have an origin date like the timestamps on Jim’s digital images – but those origin dates only reflect when I did the scan, which could have been some time after I actually took the frames. I know (I think?) I scanned a few of the monochrome images very soon afterward because I had an immediate use for them, but I had no reason then to check the date, because of course I took them all at the same time. Shit anyway.
One of the more notable traits of some of the rocks in the river, southeast of the bridge, was their curious nature: sharp-edged and quite hard, apparently, but seemingly shaped by the water with some very fluid curves to them. I remember (or not) being suspicious of their shapes, not really believing the water had done that, yet not being sure what was responsible for it. But while there, I got the fartistic image (I believe) at right that I’ve used here before. And I’m almost positive that the very spot was virtually right behind me in the pic below that Jim took without my express permission or knowledge. I’m pretty sure that the camera (a Canon Pro 90 IS, my first digital) is braced against my knee for a slow exposure to capture the running water, and is one of at least two bodies that I had with me, another being the Elan IIe loaded with monochrome film. I would have believed that I had one more with me, the EOS 3 loaded with slide film, but of course that’s a huge question now isn’t it?
I could recognize the viewfinder of the Pro 90 IS in the image above, but also have the photo at left of Jim himself taken during that outing, where I used the flip-out LCD panel to do a very low angle shot from beneath a mushroom, aiming up at Jim. Whether he actually snapped a frame during this time or just posed obligingly I’m not sure, naturally. I am, in fact, including this photo just to get back at Jim a little bit because of what he did to me here. Ha! Didn’t remember me taking this photo, did you Jim? Ha!
And yes, we both tended to look a little eccentric while out shooting – Jim in camo, and me with my beltpacks. Neither one of us gives a shit; it’s about functionality and comfort, not style. Suck it, Taylor Swift.
But anyway, since it’s pretty clear at this point that I’m not going to get to the upcoming post while it’s still the first of the year, have a happy and prosperous and joyful and whatever-the-hell new year, which is distinctly different from yesterday because Julius Caesar, who couldn’t put things on the astronomical solstice or anything where it would make sense. Regardless, I encourage good things to happen in a completely worthless but perhaps still emotionally meaningful manner. Cheers!