bastrop
"....no longer by the circumstances themselves, but my mandate to assess them." marina keegan
trying to write about this weekend had me crossing out line after line in my notebook. trying to articulate how this weekend was refreshing, how time alone, how time with old friends, how time with a new friend, all converged to make for a weekend the was hectic but also the most relaxing i've had in a while. so that is all, and i need to remind myself that sometimes that is all there has to be.
"we only take pictures of the things we are afraid to lose." i read this a while back on somebody's instagram and really identified with it. up until that point i could never really define why i took the photographs i did, i probably would have classified myself as a "landscape photographer". and while it's true that i do take some landscape pictures, i take them because of what i'm feeling that moment, standing there with my wife seeing something new for the first time.
kneeling down in a field of flowers trying to take some pictures for this post taylor asked me "what's wrong", i answered "i don't like any of these pictures, but i'm not really sure what i'm hoping for." here i was taking a technically great photo in the early morning sunlight and it just didn't feel right to me, it was no fun, there was no emotion involved. it wasn't until we climbed up a hay bale that i really started snapping away.
there are times i'll go somewhere without taylor, camera in tow, and not take a single picture. not necessarily because i'm having a bad time, but because my heart is just not there. and if i don't want to take pictures of what i'm looking at why would anyone even want to see them?
all of the photos you see on america y'all were taken because i was feeling something at the exact moment i clicked the shutter, feeling something that i never want to forget.
shot on : thirteen year old kodak elite chrome slide film
we returned to bastrop state park a mere five months after our first visit and the regrowth is amazing and abundant. even in the heat of the texas summer new growth is flourishing and flora is beginning to carpet the ground. although the park is slowly making a come back, the charred loblolly pines standing tall above the forest floor still serve as a stark reminder of the devastation that occurred during the wildfire of two thousand and eleven.
shot on: fuji superia 400
rollin' down the highway headed to our new home in austin smoke filled the evening sky, offering an oddly beautiful sunset tinged with sadness and destruction. helicopters in the sky, firetrucks lining the backroads, make shift churches set up offering some respite for those battling the blazes, these were our first images of texas. it was labor day weekend of 2011 and while we were ready to start our new life in austin the worst wildfire in the states history was raging a few towns over. the hardest hit was bastrop and for the first time since moving to texas we went to the state park there this past weekend. a year and a half later the damage caused by the fires is still very real and very evident.
