Quiet Mornings

I spent a long stretch of last winter at my parents' house on the Olympic Peninsula, between assignments. The house is at the edge of a stand of cedar and hemlock that runs more or less unbroken to the national forest a mile inland. Most mornings the fog comes up off the strait around six and burns off by ten. There is a twenty-minute window after sunrise when the light is at its most useful — bright enough to expose, soft enough that everything inside the forest reads.

I went out almost every morning for the four months I was there. The walks were short, sometimes only fifteen minutes from the back door. I carried one camera, one lens, and a single roll of film. The whole exercise was about restraint — I wanted to see what would happen if I shot the same small piece of forest, again and again, on the same path, in different fog. The answer turned out to be: a lot of things.

The pictures here are five of the forty-two that I kept from the winter. The full series is going to be a small accordion-fold zine, hand-printed at a press in Olympia, and limited to two hundred copies. If you would like one, write to the address at the bottom of the page. The price will be twenty-five dollars.

I think there is a useful idea in this kind of project. Most landscape photography rewards travel — you go somewhere remarkable and you photograph it. The opposite practice is at least as interesting and almost nobody does it. Stay in one place long enough and you start to see it. Most of the frames in this set came on mornings when I almost decided not to go out.

Filed under landscape · part of Quiet Mornings.