I thought that perhaps Paradise would be coming back to life ten months after I was here the first time, two months after the Camp Fire. It is one year since the firestorm destroyed the town. To be clear, there are signs of renewal, some buildings are going up, some residents have returned, but the sheer scale of the job at hand is so huge, the destruction so extensive that real progress will need to be measured in decades, not months.

This being California where it is hot in the summer, many homes had pools. In an odd irony, they often remain, owners perhaps hoping to rebuild:

I am at the end of 1 1/2 weeks on Martha's Vineyard. House guests, great food, a three day Nor'easter, some work on the place and a few efforts at making pictures, as I have been on my own for the past four days. Back to the mainland tomorrow.

If you remember, last spring while here, I worked at Philbin Beach, where a stream was running down into the ocean, especially after it rained. 

Some New Work

That stream this time, six months later, was not running down to the sea, but I found another one today, closer towards the clay cliffs:

It was wild. The wind was coming from on shore so it whipped the water right off the top of the breaking waves.

There is a walkway to the beach from the parking lot at Philbin that is irresistible:

This isn't a camera review, but I did want to mention that I have been photographing with the Sony A7r mk IV this time here on the island and I am finding it really wonderful to work with. This is a far more mature and refined tool than the two previous versions. Mostly I am using the  24-105mm f4 lens.

Edgartown

My friend Gail Hill was down from Toronto. Gail's a wonderful artist:

And, you know, she's right.

I will miss the Vineyard until I return in the spring.

This will finish the series I've been writing on the photographs I made in June of the wheat fields of the Palouse in Eastern Washington.

I am pleased to report that the portfolio is almost complete and that it just needs a few more reprints and a final edit to be ready to present.

If you would like to see the prints you can come to my studio to see them. Email me at: nrantoul@comcast.net

This is a small thing, but big if you are a printer and make portfolios. My prints in this series are on Red River San Gabriel Baryta paper in 17 x 25 inches. Archival Methods makes portfolio boxes, among other things. They now make a 17 x 25-inch drop-front box, seen here and also a 17 x 25-inch folio case. This is good news for those of us that like to use this slightly larger paper over the more standard 17 x 22-inch size. As a benefit, the DSLR full-frame fits this size paper better as well.

The last few days in Washington followed the already familiar pattern of getting up, driving, photographing, driving, photographing, on and on.

The latter part of Day 9 I started working in Pullman and this carried over to the next morning, which was my last:

These connect to a project I did in 2009 called Mallchitecture (here).

2011 Yuma Palms Mall, AZ

Rhode Island, 2009

I finished the trip with a few hours photographing the greenhouses at the University of Washington campus in Pullman:

That concludes this four-part series. I have been photographing in the area for 25 years, with trips every year or two. Am I finished? Hard to say. I feel like maybe I am, but in a year or two the Palouse will pull at me, just as it has many times  before. It is a peculiar place, charming and very beautiful. The area has purity and honesty to it in a world so lacking in integrity and so perverse as to be defeating at times. 

If you go, you could take a workshop, as there are several. Personally, I would hate that, being carted along to "choice spots" by a guide. I like the freedom to choose my places, my own time of day and time of year. 

This is the second in a series of posts about some new pictures I made in Washington in June.

They are here.

By Day 3 I was in a groove. Get up and go shoot. Simple enough. I made good work over the next couple of days.

I was there to make pictures of the rolling wheat fields and that's exactly what I was getting at the end of each day.

The type of rental car is important as I spend all day in it, schlepping equipment in and out of it in an endless succession of setups and tear downs, day in and day out. This time it was a Kia Soul, a little box of a car that was perfect: great visibility, fun to drive and no fear about getting stuck or centered on back farm roads:

By Day 4 I was feeling as though I had begun to accomplish what I was there for.

I wasn't finished or completed by any means but I could afford to try some different approaches and stretch the principles a little. Hence this; the "Wheat Suite" as I call it, the effort to distill the work by photographing one area extensively

In this sub group there are 14 pictures, all made from the same vantage point. 

We play such a "selectivity" game as landscape photographers. What we choose to include in the frame verses what we exclude makes all the difference. Using a couple of longer lenses I varied how much was in and how much was out, longer for more        distance with more compression of the visual space. For much of my career I never used longer focal length lenses. Most view camera work doesn't use anything very long. It wasn't until I started working digitally in about 2006 that they came into play.  I was working on the Cabela's project (here) and I needed more reach to get at the taxidermy displays.

This one was a long reach across the store's showroom floor, compressing the mannequins into the same space as the taxidermy mountain in the background. This picture is one of the reasons I find photography so rewarding. 

By Day 4 I also started working with other subjects in the Palouse. This is rare as I usually stay mostly on topic. But some things just hit me and the acute islolation

of something like this corrugated barn, with the light modeling it so perfectly just stood out.  

Next up? We will continue with this series looking at the remaining days I had left to photograph and I will include some of the aerials I made on Day 5.

Your comments always welcome: Neal's Email

Apologies for this blog going into some printer tech. Last week I wrote that my 9900 died and the Epson p9000 was on order. 

A few days later it was delivered by truck, slid on its pallette onto the loading dock at my  building, unpacked, assembled and rolled onto the freight elevator and up to my floor, rolled down the hallway into my studio and into its place, exactly where the old one was.

Epson p9000

I plugged it in and hooked it up, turned it on, fed it the startup inks, did a nozzle check and head alignment, updated to the newer Black version of the ColorByte Image print RIP software I use and then went to open it and a prompt came up that I needed the newest OS for my Mac. 

Uh oh.

This is a partial confession and not stated as an excuse but I have been busy with shows and new work. What I had was 2 large libraries still sitting in Apple's now ancient Aperture with 88000 files. Before updating I had to migrate these  to Lightroom or they might be lost, over 4 years of photographic output. 

Apple no longer supports Aperture. I could very easily just loose all those files with the new OS. A brief early morning session with Caleb Cole, my go to for all things Lightroom and I started the transfer. Four days later I had successfully migrated 88000 files to Lightroom.

Once I updated my OS to Mojave, which took a hour or so, I then was able to open Image Print Black. 

Yesterday I made my  first print with the new printer:

Here's a comparison from the six year  old Epson 9900 which was not able to clear its head in the yellow ink range:

where, clearly, it was firing on all cylinders  with yellow ink.

I will now work to reprint and finish printing the new Wheat portfolio, imagery made in June.