Some Belated Sharing

At times, I find myself looking back at images I’ve taken earlier. Recently, I was reviewing photographs from 2019, seeking candidates for inclusion in my annual book of favourites. Often, these are pictures I did not include in earlier blogs, perhaps underestimating their merit relative to other photos chosen at the time.

Today I’m posting two pictures from a photo shoot last April in Jerome, Arizona. I didn’t publish a post specific to this trip, but I did include a couple of shots in a post labelled No Particular Theme. At the time, I concluded I didn’t have sufficient good pictures from that trip to create a post about Jerome.

I’m reconsidering that now, having found two photographs that will go in the Portfolio 2019 book. And, I’m choosing to share them today in this blog posting.

Both images were taken in the hills near Jerome. In this first instance, I’ve captured a rain shower moving in across the desert landscape. In most landscape photographs, I try to include clouds in the sky as a complement to the subject of the photo. In this rare instance, I chose the raincloud as my prime subject. The foreground and background in this case are intended to complement the cloud. At first look, 8 months ago I didn’t find the result very appealing. That was before I did some sculpting of the raincloud to make it better stand out. The cloud is now clearly the dominant subject; not so with the earlier version. The foreboding darkness of the cloud and the better detail of the falling rain have more clearly defined what this photograph is about.

I took this next photograph facing in the opposite direction, eastward toward the Town of Jerome (You can see it centre-left). The subject of this photograph is the abandoned mine and the switchback, hauling road descending the mountain. I considered a more close-in shot and of course that gives better detail of the mine, but at the expense of some interesting terrain in the foreground and some dramatic clouds.

It’s important to have specific subject in mind in a photograph. Every picture tells a story and it should be evident to the viewer what the image is intended to convey. I hope that absent the captions, it’s possible for you to do that.