The Second Day of December

On winter woodlands and other shenanigans

Canon 5D Mk1 + Canon 50/1.8

I remembered about the snow tax. Snow tax, for the uninitiated, is the increased effort required to walk through any decent quantity of snow. It’s especially tiring when you’re walking uphill in the snow. It always reminds me of that Thoreau quote from the essay Winter Walk. In it he says, “Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.” If you Google “snow tax” you probably won’t find anything. I don’t think this is a real term, I just made it up while walking up the hill and exclaiming, “Ah, I forgot about the snow tax.” Feel free to use it, my gift to you.

The photos here were all made on a short walk in a local park close to town, all shot on the ancient Canon 5D Mk1 with Canon’s cheapest 50mm, the 50/1.8. It’s a fun setup that can get you ready and rolling for not a lot of outlay.

Suddenly, Winter...

Snow and photographs, etc..

Just a few days ago I feel like I was laughing at the idea of Big Mountain opening on December 4th, but if the webcams are anything to go by I might be eating crow on that one. To be fair there wasn’t a flake of snow anywhere except in the tips of the high country and the temperatures had been exceedingly mild. But, as my grandpa says about living in Montana, “It’s never boring.” So, here we are. I usually tend to struggle with shooting anything in the winter, but we’re off to a bangin’ start so far. I can’t seem to put the camera down.

Part of this may also be that I’ve been making it a habit to grab the camera more often than not, which is a new thing. You’re more likely to photograph things if you’ve got a camera in your hand than if it’s sitting on a shelf somewhere, who knew. I think I always felt like having a camera on me regularly might turn me in to one of those idiots who is aloof and absorbed in to “tHe ArT” or whatever, but in some ways having a camera on you almost makes you more present in the moments in which you live.

A thought that’s been on my mind lately is the idea that photography as a medium is fundamentally a practice of paying attention. Unlike painting, for example, most photography has as its medium the given world. And so the task of the photographer is to see, and to respond to the call of the world in the form of photographs. Shout out to my coworker for spurring this train of thought in a discussion about music as an art form, by the way. All this to expand on that idea that the presence of a camera comes with a certain perspectival shift that brings our attention to a sharper point.

The photos you’re seeing here are a mix of 5D and 6D photographs. I’m not going to tell you what was shot with what. Maybe you can tell, maybe you can’t. I tend to think you can’t. I will say having shot the two back to back, the 6D is the better camera to shoot with, but the files from the 5D still win. Anyway, here’s a fun photo of Ruckus to take us out.

On Home and Biscuits and Gravy

What makes a home?

I woke up this morning at 7:30 to a text message from my grandfather that simply read, “Biscuits and gravy at 8:45” So, with an offer like that on the table I responded with, “Count me in” and proceeded to get ready to head over to their house to participate in some delicious breakfast. I decided to grab the 5D on the way out the door to show them and to take some photos around the exterior of the house before breakfast. I did not photograph the exterior of the house at all, really. But I did take some time after eating breakfast to walk around the inside of the house with the camera.

Canon 5D Mk1 + Canon 50/1.8

This house has always been an important place to me. Growing up I would often spend summers here with my grandparents and in many ways it was a place that always felt more like home than my own home back in Washington. It took me a long time to realize that what I loved and what felt so special about this place was the unconditional love of my grandparents but that’s a whole other story. We can do the psychoanalysis in another post. But whatever the mechanism, this place has always felt deeply special to me. It’s changed a lot over the years but it felt nice to go around and photograph places within the house that have some deep emotional resonance. It’s maybe one of those Ship of Theseus problems, in a way. The house has changed, parts of it are no longer what they used to be, but at some level it’s still the same, still somehow tied to deep core memories, and it was nice to try and get a piece of that in photographs.