Scenery
Montezuma’s Dream
Sunset at Playa Montezuma
One of the best things of seeing a new place is the sense of wonderment you get when you see something. Something that is commonplace to those people that see it more than a few times will obviously give the newcomer a different feel. I’m not stating a secret. This is pretty common knowledge. But what I think about when I try to capture the image of that moment in time, is the communication of that same emotion I feel at the time. It’s my philosophy that a photographer’s goal in life is to learn all the skills/techniques possible to best communicate an emotion through the visual image. I want my viewer to feel what I felt when I saw the scene I’m taking or notice the same things.
This image taken in Playa Montezuma in Costa Rica is about 76% there. I think I was able to capture the blending of waves and clouds into the same horizon to give that sense of the eternal renewal…one just becomes the other endlessly. I also tried to set the tone of the image as dreamlike, as if you were just about to enter the next phase of reality. I think there were a few things I could have done to make the shot that much better but you sometimes play roulette with slide film and a manual camera. I shot this using Fuji Velvia 50ASA film on my Leica M6 TTL with a 35mm F2 Summicron lens.
Buddha in the air
I think buddha would have smoked a kush.
I captured an image while on a vacation to Tagaytay, Philippines. It’s a wonderful place, an island in a lake that is basically the crater of a volcano. There was a lookout point way up on the edge of this crater that looked out onto this phenomenal place where this Buddha statue was perched, overlooking the view. It isn’t so much the Buddha statue that attracted my eye to this scene, but the way the clouds seemed to surround the head of the Buddha as I stood on that particular angle. I used Fuji Velvia 50ASA film with a polarizing filter on my Nikon F3HP with my 85mm F1.4 AIS manual lens. I wanted to capture the detail of the cloud, the deep blue of the sky and the image itself. It overwhelmed me with a sense of peace and laughter at the same time.
