A Morning Walk

Digital original

A definite side-effect of spending so much time teaching photography is that I now spend much more time photographing casually, either during the photographic workshops I teach, or just to create more material for my classes. On this particular afternoon, I was leading a field-trip for a 10-week photo course, an exercise more focused on helping the students work through the process of working with their cameras than making stunning images. All the same, it is quite surprising to me how easy it is to make strong images if one is just open to the possibilities.

Digital original

The field-trip was spent walking along the side of the Petiticodiac River in Moncton, though my eye was not drawn to the landscape but rather to the new bridge across the river and the rusted, discarded remains of the old span. I  have always had a fascination with abandoned and ruined architecture, and these spaces had everything I look for in a visual abstract.

Digital infrared original

Over the morning, I vacillated between grand, sweeping images of the underside of the new bridge, and close up details of the paint peeling off of old rusted pilings. In some ways, such images are sketches, designed to keep the eye nimble and open to varied possibilities visually, but regardless the results have an edge to them that really draws me in; a thread that runs through all my images is present in these as well.