MorseBlog

Prologue I remember well the smoke rising off the mountain in the late afternoon summer. Silver surplus war bombers circling and banking against the rock of the mountain spewing long tails of gore, their dyed slurry of fire retardant. They remain in my mind small and insignificant against the plume of smoke, the mountain, the sky, and the landscape of my hometown. From our front deck we had the perfect view to watch the Mt Elden fire as it started as a small plume of smoke at the base and then watched in distress as it advanced up the dry rocky face of the mountain. By night fall it had covered most of the visible face of the mountain and Flagstaff was able to watch with uneasy fascination as old conifers a hundred feet or more tall burst into flame and flared like a struck match before dying out as quickly as they flared into the brief consumption of all that was green and needed for life. What we didn’t understand was the worse was out of sight north of the town and along the easte...

My wife and went to visit my dad (and son) again this last summer. My dad lives on Lake Pend Oreille  in the summer. It is a beautiful location but I have struggled to see how to really capture it. It is mostly forests, water and sky. A complicating factor seems to be that it is surrounded by mountains and so the morning and evening light is very limited. So I have limited myself to a few interesting 'intimate scenes' and others I have to been satisfied with. Being a holiday with family also limits me to times that don't disrupt planned activities. Dinner is the most intrusive with respect to photography as the evening is most likely to provide the best light at times. In my series of posts on The Glory of Our West . There is one photo of the lake taken in the late 1940's.  Pend Oreille Lake FRED BOND, Los Angeles. 4x5 Speed Graphic camera; 7-1/8" B&L. convertible protar lens; Harrison C-1/8 filter; Kodachrome film, daylight type; 1/5 second at f:25. Bril...

Lith of the old tugboat. Mamiya C220 65mm lens. Ilford HP5+. Ilford LC29 Film Dev On the shores of Lake Pend Oreille in northern Idaho is the wreck of an old wooden boat. Small and stout it looks to have had a long and industrious past. Patched and renovated what likely started out as a steamboat it now has the stripped block of a V-8 engine. It sits abruptly on the shore and still exhibits a look of earnest determination even there upon the rocks and installed among the trees. It has been there as far back as the 1960's (probably much earlier) slowly rotting away. While visiting my father we strolled down the road and found it there alongside the road. I took a number of photos and later when I bought some 16x20 Fotospeed lith paper I thought it would make a good subject to try it out on. The paper I bought was used so the 10 sheets had been reduced to 5 full size and an 8x10 off-cut section. Determined to conserve it I cut the 8x10 into four 4x5 pieces for testing. Lat...