The ability to "take a good picture" provides a basis for professional photography, but there is much more to both the work and business, especially if there's interest in fine art production, which may call for an uncanny sensibility as regards subject--flowers, however sweet, also sunsets and pets may be lovely but less than compelling as collectibles.
Antietam 1861
On the way into tax season, I felt I had one weak spot in the array that has become Communicating Arts -- Photography: the ability to produce archival, first-rate prints. That's about to be solved with HP Vivera inks and Hahnemühle fine art paper, probably one with a heavy pearl finish.
Spending is always the easy part.
More challenging, and this over years, has been the search for a subject project, a quest that bumps right quick into family politics, lifestyle choices, and intellectual temperament; that calls for budget, logistics (do-ability), and scheduling; and one, not least important, that has the want of larger purpose and definite ends.
For a while there, I thought it would be nude women!
Just kidding.
In point of fact, Antietam 1861, so I shall call it, addresses the interest in conflict established in and around Oppenheim Arts & Letters and provides opportunity for meditation over time as well as unique expression.
"The Road to Roulette Farm", above, is the road down which a portion of the Army of the Potomac moved to pry Confederate forces out of the sunken road, an eroded pass between fields that here lies about 50 yards behind the photographer.
The Union advance failed head-on.
Instead, after numerous charges, the discovery of a position on higher ground, this according to Bruce Catton (This Hallowed Ground) provided an angle to "enfilade" (essentially, to spray bullets down the length, near to far) the Confederate line.
So thick were the ranks of dead and injured left lying in the sunken road in the wake of the Confederate retreat that it got its now popular name, "Bloody Lane."
In the days and weeks following the battle at Antietam, some 700 soldiers were buried on Roulette Farm.
Above, the view back toward "Bloody Lane"--what you are looking at is the top of a tall statue honoring the 132 Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry on the near side of the sunken road and a tree that had been planted on the berm of the far side of the same.
It will take some time yet to complete my Antietam folio, but I could not ask for a better subject, a more certain approach, or technology, from recording through printing, for building it. Each print will become an elegy, and there will not be very many completed prints of any one image.
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