Homage

My Urban Homage to one of my favorite images by Alain Briot, Playa Reflections:


Albuquerque has a lot of these drainage ditches. This is just a trickle, I've seen this ditch, which is about 3' deep, nearly full of fast moving water. I liked the continuation of the ditch curvature in the clouds.

Technically it's not great. This was taken with a 2 stop GND, which wasn't enough. It just cries out for double RAW processing, but I was just playing with it in Lightroom.

Yes, Aaron,

You have a good eye!

This would be an interesting site to return to when there's more water. Especially at the same time of day. I like the picture and the way you have the sunset reflected in the canal water.

I'd keep this place on your mind when it next rains!

Asher

Aaron Strasburg said:

My Urban Homage to one of my favorite images by Alain Briot, Playa Reflections: ...

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As soon as I saw this image, the opening lines from Wordsworth's well-known poem, "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" popped into my head. I can't help taking the liberty to quote them here, since this is one of my favorite pieces of literature, and your capture of the drainage ditch, Aaron, seems to match with it so well, for me:

"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light, ..."

Albuquerque has a lot of these drainage ditches. This is just a trickle, I've seen this ditch, which is about 3' deep, nearly full of fast moving water. I liked the continuation of the ditch curvature in the clouds.

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Oh, I did too. And its eye-catching slant down the center of the picture.

Technically it's not great. This was taken with a 2 stop GND, which wasn't enough. It just cries out for double RAW processing, but I was just playing with it in Lightroom.

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I enjoy the vision. Looking forward to more images of the drainage ditch, or ditches, from you. Like Asher, I'd enjoy seeing one filled with rushing water--and for my own preference, at dawn or at sunset.

Mary

Thank you both for the compliments. I had a few other shots that day, not just of the ditch, but this seemed to be the most interesting and appealing.

This park isn't even half a mile from my house, and I actually noticed tonight that there was a similar trickle of water tonight but the clouds were not as interesting. Lots of people talk about luck not being a factor, and without a doubt one makes a lot of luck through hard work and being out there, but no matter how hard I've tried I haven't been able to get those clouds to line up again.

I would like to get some shots of that ditch with more water, but being a storm drain it doesn't happen that often here in the desert. Getting it with good light's even trickier, but I will definitely keep an eye out.

What I really want to do is get some similar shots of the Rio Grande. I've shot some but haven't yet gotten the right light yet. All it takes is time. Sigh.

Aaron Strasburg said:

This park isn't even half a mile from my house, and I actually noticed tonight that there was a similar trickle of water tonight but the clouds were not as interesting. Lots of people talk about luck not being a factor, and without a doubt one makes a lot of luck through hard work and being out there, but no matter how hard I've tried I haven't been able to get those clouds to line up again.

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I know. So much really is the luck to be in the right place at the right moment. It's like that tag of Don Lashier's, "Chance favors the prepared mind." Or, one might amend it to "the prepared person."

What I really want to do is get some similar shots of the Rio Grande. I've shot some but haven't yet gotten the right light yet. All it takes is time. Sigh.

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The Rio Grande! Now that I look forward to seeing from you very much, also.

On my one trip to the U.S. West, my husband and I stayed in a motel downtown where the Rio Grande flowed practically beside the door. (My cousin--when we called her from there thought that we were in an unsafe part of town. But it was quiet there and we lucked out to be safe. Clean and comfortable for a budget rental. And with the Rio Grande practically at the door in downtown Albuquerque, how could we resist?)

My memory is that I could almost have stepped across it. This was June, 1989. Maybe it was a dry year? Anyway, its width at that point astonished me, who had only seen it many miles nearer its mouth at the McAllen, TX-Reynosa, Mexico bridge.

And I remember the current as being quite swift, compared to the wide brown water seen at the border in the Texas Rio Grande Valley.

I hope that chance and light help you capture an Albuquerque view of it one of these days.

Mary

Mary,

Your image is an interesting take on mine. The first one I see that openly points out the inspiration for the image. Thank you.

Playa reflections is a very interesting image from my perspective regarding how I created it. I kept thinking of Robert Frost's poem "The Path less Travelled" when I made it. Not sure why.

Alain Briot said:

Mary,

Your image is an interesting take on mine. The first one I see that openly points out the inspiration for the image. Thank you.

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Oh, Alain, I wish that "take" were indeed mine! But it's by Aaron Strasbourg, to whom I was only responding with a comment.

Playa reflections is a very interesting image from my perspective regarding how I created it. I kept thinking of Robert Frost's poem "The Path less Travelled" when I made it. Not sure why

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Yes. I know this poem. I can see--having read your essays at Luminous Landscape--how much meaning it would have for you. I'm taking the liberty of putting the last two stanzas here. The poem's formal title is "The Road Not Taken."
Quoting Robert Frost, beginning with the first line of the poem and then continuing to the two final stanzas:
"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, ...

"And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

It is so wonderful when a great poet and a great photographer come together.

Mary

It's funny that "The Path Less Traveled" should come up, as I was recently thinking about that and quoting a bit to my wife. The sense of space in Alain's image is amazing to me. I've lived in NM for over 20yrs now, but in the city. It may be that Albuquerque is situated in a valley, but the land feels more open when I return to Nebraska for harvest. Even there, though, you don't get the clarity Alain captured in Death Valley, especially around harvest when there is so much dust in the air.

I was trying to capture that in my image, as well as the reflection of the sky in the water. I'd made the (unfortunate) decision to take only my 28-70 to the park. The 10-22 would have been a better choice, but I'm almost afraid of that lens. Live and learn.

I'll be keeping an eye on the sky this evening. If it looks promising I'll have to make a trek to the river.

I will look for a shot of the Rio Grande in the city. It may not match Mary's recollections, as it tends to be rather slow and muddy here as well. You could walk across it most of the year without water over your waist. Up north it's much wilder but by the time it reaches Albuquerque has been tamed by too many dams.

I guess when I slept by the Rio Grande in downtown Albuquerque it must have been a dry year, without too much sediment accumulating in its waters there. Also, my best view of it was at twilight and at dawn--the water so still that there were lovely reflections in it--and when you lifted your eyes, you could see the beautiful purple-appearing mountains to the west, against the evening sky.

Mary

Not terribly interesting, but this is the Rio Grande near the north end of Albuquerque last March. It had been a dry winter so this is actually low for that time of the year. Now is lower yet, even though we've caught up to our normal rainfall. This area narrows down to a small channel, so it looks like quite a bit of water. And I don't have the faintest idea what that piece of iron in the middle is.



Dusk, a little crop and color temp correction in ACR.

Blue Rio Grande at Albuquerque

Not terribly interesting, but this is the Rio Grande near the north end of Albuquerque last March.

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On the contrary, extremely interesting to me. For the subtle range of colors alone, before talking of anything else about it: from the blues in the river to the browns and violets of the bank.

It had been a dry winter so this is actually low for that time of the year. Now is lower yet, even though we've caught up to our normal rainfall. This area narrows down to a small channel, so it looks like quite a bit of water.

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It does look like a proper river, indeed. Undammed, so to speak.

And I don't have the faintest idea what that piece of iron in the middle is.

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For me, the piece of iron in the center is the making of the picture. Something to draw the eye, as one floats in the magical colors.

Dusk, a little crop and color temp correction in ACR.

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And so beautiful to me.

I like the shadow from the bank on the upper right. And, although the violet shades in the dry brush in front of the line of trees make my eye linger, it is with a sense of completion that I look on up and see the blue sky through the bare trees, matching the serene blue of the water below the sky. Pictorially, the water in the foreground, but I have come to inhabit the scene and by now it is three-dimensional to me.

I haven't yet been able to define it in my mind, Aaron, but for me there is an identifiable commonality in all the three works you've shown at OPF these past few days.

I would almost, I think, recognize something done by you anywhere now. In the same way that I know immediately, "It's Mozart!" or "It's Bach!"--even in a piece I happen to catch, half-paying attention on NPR or the Classical Arts TV channel, and have never heard before.

I am so pleased to have seen this take of the Rio Grande in the north part of Albuquerque, in March, after a dry winter.

The shadows that streak the water give me a sense of the flowing currents. And the subtle violet tones on the far bank--at least on my monitor--remind me of the purple shades that I saw on the mountains which ring Albuquerque in 1989.

It's an image of great interest to me, indeed.

Mary

Homage, revisited

I walked over to the ditch again in a light rain, knowing there was a little water and some interesting clouds. What I didn't realize was that there was a pretty good storm coming. Not quite soon enough to have much light left, but there was some serious lightning so I wouldn't have been able to stay out anyway.

There was also rain to the east, so I thought I might get some more water but it didn't really cooperate.

A couple of pics, more here.




20D, EF-S 10-22, 2 stop GND. Absolutely no postprocessing other than rotate and crop in Lightroom then exporting to jpg (maybe later). We didn't end up with a lot of rain from that storm, but further west probably did.

Aaron