Welcome back to my look into the past: March 2014. When I perused my photo archive for the images I made this month 10 years ago, I was surprised by two things. First, I had actually gone to quite a few locations and created just over 250 pictures (which, for me, is a lot!). Second, hardly any of those images have aged all that well. In fact, there are only two photographs that I think still stand the test of time. At first, I was a little disappointed by that. Then, I realized the lack of quality images wasn’t so much because they were not quality images. I certainly thought they were at that time. Rather, over the last 10 years, I had been subconsciously raising my standards for quality as my skill as a photographer increased. There’s no need for me to be disappointed about that.
The first image is one I never would have imagined I would have made. It is simply an image of mud that had dried and cracked. I found this as I wandered along the edge of the Buffalo National River one morning. What caught my attention was the texture that was created as the mud dried and the shapes and lines that formed by the cracks. What amazes me even now is that I recognized the photographic opportunity I saw and created a nice image from it. I never would have thought I would find a photographic subject in something as mundane as dried, cracked mud. But, I learned a valuable lesson from this: If something piques my interest, investigate it, study it, spend some time with it. You never know what you might find.
The second image is from a trip I made to the banks of the Arkansas River at Dardanelle, Arkansas. During a work trip earlier during the week, I saw hundreds of pelicans floating down the river from the dam. They would float downriver a couple of hundred yards, take off and fly back toward the dam, crash into the water, and start the whole process again. It was interesting to watch and, frankly, pretty entertaining. The following Saturday, I headed back to the river with the intention of photographing those silly pelicans. I don’t do much wildlife or bird photography, and my results from the trip generally reflected that, but this image, which I just recently discovered in my library, was one of my successful ones as the pelican, in full flight, skims the surface of the river.
I hope you enjoyed this look back to March 2014, and I look forward to seeing you again next month.