Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition is to place two concepts, characters, ideas, or places near each other to contrast them.

While I was in Iceland I searched for natural settings to capture the beauty of this majestic and isolated land.  I traveled the coastline and ventured into the central mountain areas in search of interesting subjects.  While traveling on the far eastern coastline I came into the small town of Djupivogur.  I stumbled on to the artwork called Eggin i Gleovik, "The eggs of Merry Bay".  The artwork consist of 34 eggs on pedestals, each one representing a bird species that live in the area.   As I walked around these sculptures I came to appreciate how they were placed to contrast with the surrounding landscape of water, mountains, and sky.   It is always a challenge to find new and interesting things to photograph as a landscape photographer.  It takes hours of planning and many miles of travel to find locations of interest.  Sometimes they just appear as these sculptures did while I was pursuing other types of subjects.

https://beiceland.is/the-eggs-of-merry-bay

Man in the street

I picked up my first point and shoot digital camera in 2008.  It was a Canon G10.  I used it for street photography along with my more trusted film camera.  I was in San Miguel de Allende Mexico that year and found myself using the little digital camera to capture the fast moving street scenes of that colorful city.  Although I continued to use film as my primary platform for photography until 2011, I was slowing finding myself making the shift to total digital.  Now after nearly five years of working with digital I can respect the unique properties that each format brings to photography.  When I view my black and white prints made with large format film I have an appreciation for the fine detail and tonal separation that was capable with the darkroom process.  A gelatin silver print when made correctly has a unique quality that almost appears to emit light from the print surface.  The hardest obstacle for me to overcome when first starting my digital process, was not being able to touch the image as I was working on it.  The simple fact that my image was locked behind a piece of glass of the monitor was very disturbing to me.  The darkroom has a tactile aspect to it with the handling of the film and paper, and was a critical part of the emotional involvement throughout creative process of making the fine print.  The absences of this relationship to the image is something that I still struggle with at times when trying to determine my approach to how I feel about a subject, and working towards the finished print.  Digital imaging has allowed me to continue photographing as I get older with light weight camera gear and the computer replacing the strenuous work of my darkroom.