Author Archives:
Important Photos – Misty Dawn
There are times when you intuitively hone into an idea, and only later put your understanding into words. For years I worked on a series, “Gentle Edges”. It was a celebration of the beautiful line where sky and water met. Living in the high mountain deserts of New Mexico, it was a slow growing project, [...]
Important Photos – Spring
Last May I was asked to teach “A Natural Eye” for The Cuyahoga Valley Photographic Society. They are sitting smack in the middle of a photographic gold mine, The Cuyahoga Valley National Park, just south of Cleveland. I seldom have time to make my own photographs during a workshop, and turn that part of me [...]
Important Photo – My Son in an Alley
It is possible that the most important roll of film I ever shot was of my son in an alley, at midnight, in Avignon, France. Important because it was about family, images from that roll ended up holding weight in the ultimate viewing space of any artist, the refrigerator, but it was also an important [...]
Turn Your Bad Photographs into Great Paintings
Two years ago, during a long delay at London’s Heathrow Airport, I spent a couple hours in a very large magazine store. The selection of photography magazines from across Europe surprised me, and also gave me something to focus on during the delay. One headline on a digital photo issue grabbed my attention. It proclaimed, [...]
Important Photos – Mushroom
In earlier days I worked with an earth education organization that was trying to do vital and different work in helping kids and adults build life long relationships with, and understandings about, the planet. It was good stuff, and as you might imagine, it was pushed away by mainstream education. At the end of those [...]
Important Photos – Iris
Breakthroughs and moments of clarity are precious. “Aha” moments can catapult us further in our art and our understanding, and yet they can be elusive and infrequent. We wonder “How come mine don’t look like that?”, and sometimes look in the wrong direction, like towards software. Truth be told, a commitment to the journey is [...]
Inspiration in Amsterdam
I head to museums hoping for insights and ideas, to be shaken or enlightened. Sometimes I find solace in pretty art, and sometimes I leave riveted with the unexpected, perhaps challenged to think way outside my box. That’s what happened a few weeks ago in Amsterdam. I had booked a night and a day on [...]
Someone Has to Look at All That
Ten thousand. That’s what got me listening. I was in a workshop, during a break, and a group of students were chatting in the corner. Someone said he had been on a winter photo tour to Yellowstone National Park recently, and in four days, shot three thousand photographs. Okay, I think it was at that [...]
Announcing . . . A Natural Eye DVD
We will be shipping my new dvd on December 11th. 100 minutes featuring the key ideas in the Natural Eye workshop, plus ten photo adventures in the field, reflections on the photographic journey, and fundamental skills. For more information, and to learn about the special offer good through the 11th, go to: http://www.eddiesoloway.com
On The Road: Barstow, 9-11-09
Open the truck door and it’s like being paddled into a pizza oven – with outlet stores. Why would anyone stop in Barstow? Vegas crossroads – a maze of eighteen wheelers refueling – cell phone talking/texting Starbucks clutching LA exiters – God, it’s 11pm and everyone’s wired – I’ve dropped into an over-heated circuit board [...]
On The Road: Hotel View
Years ago I used to only pull the camera out when I was in the woods. Now the whole world shows up as interesting. Case in point, recently I arrived at my hotel in Seattle late in the evening, a little out of synch with what day it was. In the morning I was heading [...]
Seeing “Foggy Beach”
In recent years my mind works differently when making a photograph. Sure, I still react to the beauty in front of me, but more than before I react to what is in me, brought forward and alive by what is in front of me. A couple months ago I was along the Big Sur coast [...]
The Doom and Gloom Channel
I am paraphrasing Mike Mills of The Buffalo Outdoor Center in Ponca, Arkansas. And I am substituting photography for canoeing. One of the disasters for photography has been The Weather Channel. Without a doubt. Case 1: Buffalo River a month ago. We were set to float the Buffalo, ten of us. But someone logged on [...]
Seeing “Koi Paintbrush”
I realized I had been staring at the koi in the pond for a long time. They were swimming back and forth very slowly, almost hypnotically. Around and around in a little outdoor Hawaiian pool. And as I watched them, lulled by their gently swishes of movement, they transformed into orange paintbrushes. A visit of [...]
Seeing “Texas Flowers”
Some days I find myself looking for natural filters in order to make photographs into the sun. Laying on my stomach I peered out and focused on distant petals while the nearby petals were so close to the lens they became ethereal washes of pink, orange, and yellow. Shifting my position left-right and up-down allowed [...]
I unrolled my sleeping bag under a giant white pine . . .
I unrolled my sleeping bag under a giant white pine, a lone sentinal on the granite promontory where I had pulled up my canoe a few hours earlier. As I sat with a steaming cup of tea, warming my hands around the metal, looking out across Lake Richie, I could see several more old giants [...]
Re-connecting to Instinct
Richard Benson’s new book, The Printed Picture (published in 2008 by The Museum of Modern Art, New York), is a thorough and fascinating read on the history of the print and printing processes. In a chapter on “Where do we go from here?”, in a section on calibration, he offers, “This is a terrible thing. [...]
I am thinking about the meal that lasted all night in Tuscany.
I am thinking about the meal that lasted all night in Tuscany. In one way or another my Italian friends talked about food the whole evening–what we would prepare, sensual memories of what they had eaten the night before, lots of stories about food, plenty of passionate moans, constant nibbling while cooking, no shortage of [...]
Seeing “Windy Night”
I have learned to let go of any expectations when I set out to see and possibly make a photograph. A few years ago I arrived on Nantucket Island with ideas of images filled with sea grasses, waves, and sunset light. Soon after the weather quickly turned into a wild, windy, and wet storm. The island was [...]
Stretching Perception
In the autumn of 2007 I visited the work of Masao Yamamoto at The Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California. I had seen his little jewels before, but never in an exhibition. The prints were perhaps an inch by an inch and a half. One wall might have but one print. Another had a [...]
The old man told me there was a cave . . .
The old man told me that there was a cave a few days by canoe down the river. “It’s a big cave, the kids will love it, but it’s hidden by the woods. The only way you can tell it’s there is from the creek that flows out of it down to the river. Good, [...]
Seeing “Maples, Birch, and Rock”
One of my challenges is to convey the essence of a place, a season, a time of day, or a moment. Over the years I have swung between showing the big picture and coming in close to show the details, and for the moment enjoy what I think of as an intimate, intermediate landscape. In [...]
One particularly calm evening . . .
One particularly calm evening, I took the canoe out onto Lake Superior. This lake, which holds one-tenth of all the fresh water in the world, is not to be messed with. The wrecks of numerous ships, big ships, lay well-preserved deep below the surface. For the past five days, northeasterlies had prevented me from taking [...]
Seeing “Golden Pool”.
“Golden Pool” was a pivotal image in what was to become a long journey looking for and creating images based around reflections. Walking along a stream in western Maine I bent down and saw the water sing with gold. It was one of those “aha!” moments where I learned that by moving all around – [...]
Which wolf do you feed?
Journalist Bill Moyers tells a Cherokee story about a tribal elder telling a story to his grandson about a battle he was waging inside himself between two wolves. An evil wolf full of anger, envy, ego, guilt, and all the characteristics that describe evil. And a good wolf, full of joy, purity, love, humility, truth, [...]
Brainstorming what the blog should be about while circling above Denver.
I have been thinking a lot about what I can contribute with a blog. And I have been taking note of what I want to stay away from. I want to tell stories. Stories about art and making art. Stories of my own about the nature of experience and experiencing nature. Profound stories from other [...]