Photos Are Done – Hurricane Ridge

Ah. That feels good. The 48 photos that chronicle Twelve Months at Hurricane Ridge have been selected, polished, and uploaded. And, no, you can’t see them yet (at least for those reading this on the day I finished. The photos are done, but there are words to write and a book to produce. Your patience is appreciated.

My Olympic Peninsula series will be different from my Whidbey Island series which was different from my Cascades series.

The Cascade series was three books, Twelve Months at Barclay Lake, Twelve Months at Lake Valhalla, and Twelve Months at Merritt Lake. I wanted to chronicle Nature, but one lake wouldn’t be right. Barclay is in a near-temperate rain forest. Valhalla is on the Cascade’s ridge, which puts it high enough to be frozen more than thawed. Merritt is on the dry side, where forest fire smoke was something to not ignore.

The Cascade series was written, not a photo essay. Each chapter was a separate month, so each chapter was headed by a black & white photo from a 1-Meg camera. I was surprised that people asked for prints. OK. I guess I’ll sell those, too.

The Whidbey series happened because I moved to Whidbey Island. Islands are defined by their shorelines, which I am drawn to. But, I’d just been encouraged by friends and a New York Times best-selling author to publish my book about how I retired at 38. (Dream. Invest. Live.) OK. I wasn’t going to write two books at once, so I bought a camera and started taking photos. Eventually, that became ten years of photo essays that took fifteen years to finish. 

For Whidbey, I made photo books, and I also became more professional by accident (and with help from Joe.) Folks liked the photos enough to make them pay for themselves. Getting into a gallery helped. (Thanks, Windy.) 

Welcome to what has become a habit. I don’t see as many places as when I was young, but I enjoy really getting to know a place for a year, and then moving on the next year.

Twelve Months at Hurricane Ridge will be a photo essay, and I hope to get into a gallery again, but photos can benefit from words. Subtleties get lost, otherwise. So, now that I know which photos they’ll see, I’ll wrap some words around the book and each chapter. Time to get writing.

I don’t aim for postcard photos. Tourists and more-determined professionals do them well. I concentrate on a place for a year. Sunny Saturdays in August happen. Golden light at sunrise and sunset happens, too. But, I include foggy Wednesdays. I include those kinds of days when locals visit because they enjoy the place, the nature, and sometimes the serenity.

My photos are polished because smudges happen in Nature. I crop in the camera, but that also means that panoramas are missed as I keep the chip’s aspect ratio in frame. There is some brightness and contrast adjustment, but they are few.

My next step is to write the words. Non-trivial, and yet, I won’t begrudge the opportunity to express what I feel. 

After the words comes the book build. The photos will be grouped into months, but the specific order must be decided. Horizontal / Vertical / Horizontal / Vertical or Horizontal / Vertical / Horizontal / Vertical? There’s a longer term task where what I do now will matter then.

But for now, a break. I’m partway through my first draft of my third book in my sci-fi trilogy (Firewatcher, Fire Race of the Exodus/Genesis series). My tall-ship screenplay is done, but I’ve been told that I underplay how I sell a true-life story of a fourteen-year old boy in 1876. And, I’m visiting the site of the next Twelve Month series, the next of potentially several books. And then there’s the blogs and the talks and trying to sneak in some relaxation of fun. It’s life, and life is material. Thanks for that.