Arizona Treks

Yesterdays post included a photo from the trip to Gold King on Sunday.  We had a conversation about that photo last night at the meetup and I though it might be interesting to some of the readers to see how that came about and where it went from there.

 Usually when I make a negative there is a clear vision in my head of what that will look like on paper.  The scans rarely look like the final vision but the silver print is usually close.  But sometimes, it just doesn't quite work out to be that simple.  This is one of those that just didn't quite work out but IMO is better than the original vision.

The blacksmith shop at Gold King faces East and gets nice full sun in the morning.  When we arrived I wanted to talk to the blacksmith but he was not there, however, the sun was there and was lighting the anvil but not the interior of the shop.  The original photo included a larger portion of the shop than was shown in the photo yesterday.

That is the un-adjusted photo as shot.  I typically do try to make negatives that can be printed in many different ways.  That allows some exploration in printing that sometimes yields some very interesting prints.  So, the original concept was to include the larger view but to darken all but the anvil to create feeling of loneliness or solitude.  That attempt is here.

I like this but 2 things are just not gonna work.  The white and shiny things in the background would require too much burning to be practical and I felt the composition was simply not as strong as I thought it would be. So:

Cropping the full scene down to make the anvil much more prominent made the composition much stronger and I could see the original feeling I got from the scene coming through clearly here, but not wuite enough yet.

This is a close approximation of the final silver print that was made yesterday.  The background printed as about Zone 2 1/2, more detail than just texture, but not full detail.  The anvil considerable ( 2 - 3 zones) lighter to make it very prominent and to emphasize the fact that it is idle.  I am quite pleased with it but will probably try a couple more things today to hopefully improve it.  

Once it was printed I worked through several names, several had 3 words, but I wanted a simple but strong name for the photo, that became "Silence".  Thus a new print that I will show is born.