What do we do with all those photos?
On travels, weekend adventures, commutes, and just around the house, I often grab the convenient personal computing device (aka iphone) and point its image capture device (aka camera) at something visually interesting. Those photos get automatically uploaded to the cloud via iCloud and Dropbox (and probably other services I have forgotten to disable) to be saved as bits of data forever. I do quite often pull up recent photographs for reference in conversation, occasionally I dig through the archive to use in a lecture, and I organize archival images from big trips and studio reviews. But many just sit there in the catalog, feeding on electrons, waiting.
In a recent fit of procrastination, I was searching for some image to drop into a lecture for a bit more personal touch and got sidetracked organizing a year or more backlog of uncategorized images. I came across a few pictures from a short trip up to New Paltz that Lauren and I took last April to get a few hikes in and see my friend Kira. The rushing water and magical rock rift jumped out quickly to trigger my memories of the weekend, but this foggy treeline was completely foreign. I think it's a nice image (with a little cropping and levels adjustments) but I cannot for the life of me remember seeing this or taking a picture of it. The day was warm and very muggy with spring moisture rising from the ground, we were on the road early for breakfast and to beat the heat of the day, but nothing about this fog. Fun, something unexpected, something to explore without an emotional context, but also something I know I must have seen and reacted to.
I think I will make it into my desktop for a while, and maybe play with layering it with some of the other highlights from the trip.
The thawing Catskills had the river flowing strong. The sound was overwhelming in the ravines and brought a deep heavy meditative rhythm to the hike.
We came across this massive rock outcropping riven in two by the slow creep of water and the subsequent invasion of tree roots. The moss and lichen provided a majestic contrast to the wet grey stone, so much so that I decided to play around with the image and practice my giffing in Photoshop.
Voyage onward!