Forgive me if I’ve run this one before. I have three or four pictures that are my personal favorites out of the 25,000 or so that I’ve taken and stored and this is one of them.
I wish I could say it was a shot that I was completely conscious in making from the first moment I lifted the camera in this direction all the way through post-processing, but I honestly didn’t realize what I had until I was working through that morning’s images a week or so later. I was fascinated by the abandoned train track in a state park along with lower Susquehanna River, mind you, so I had some sense that images of it might reflect what I was seeing that day.
I was also about as cold as I’ve ever been: it was just after dawn in December and it was in the upper teens Fahrenheit. I just had a shirt, sweat shirt and hoodie on, no gloves or hat. So I was also taking shots quickly and moving along the river bank briskly—no tripod, not doing a lot of contemplating.
It was a period of time where I was really exploring the region, taking off one day a week or so for 2-4 hour drives, mostly towards Central Pennsylvania or down the I-95 corridor, though I also rambled through South Jersey towards the shore. I’d often take off before dawn and turn back around 10am. This trip was only a week after I’d had a fantastic, almost spiritually intense walk through the woods about two hours northeast of the Susquehanna where I’d done a lot of blurring work with longer hand-held exposures that also produced a few of my favorite images, and it was about a week before I decided to shave my head and do some self-portraiture of the outcome.
I can’t really actively think my way back into the frame of mind I was in—I don’t even think I knew consciously that I was seeing the world well and understanding the camera more intuitively. I couldn’t decide tomorrow to be that way again even if I wanted to, not in the same way. Things just go right, now and again, even if arriving at such a point took some form of conscious effort.
Sometimes you’re on the tracks to a good destination, but of course, trains also come to the end of the line.