Archives for December 2020

Yes, it is getting old. I promise no more in 2020.

I didn’t think I’d go for #8. I had previously sorted, retouched, exported, labeled, and organized all of the photographs for this book (not mention getting my sorry ass into the airplane and actually taking the photos) almost a year ago. The thing is, it is hard to do a book about the villages in which Catalan and French people live, publish it in English, and expect anything to happen. Upon further research, translation is not cheap. For that matter, I’d really need it in Catalan, Spanish, and French, and, while I am at it, I would be writing the text in English, so might as well throw that in too. Then I got the brilliant idea: why not go light on the text and just be done with it? But how do I find three translators? Will they get it done in time for this fanciful little goal of mine to get it on Amazon before December 31, 2020?

Happily, the translators were available and delivered quickly, something unusual when someone is located anywhere near the Mediterranean Sea…

The story behind the book is somewhat interesting. As is readily evident, I generally like to keep people out of my images. While many do not like that, I point to Ansel Adams, who did the same, and he is considered one of the American forefathers of photography. So, phooey…people are not needed. Anyway, after so much time in the air above La Cerdanya, I couldn’t help but be drawn to the artistic arrangement of the villages below, many of which looked drastically different one from another, though each equally as interesting.

Eventually, I got the idea to do a book on the subject, but it was only after having completed the flights in Cerdanya. What I mean is that I was not actively taking village photographs intended for a book; I decided after having a massive pile of images collected that I wanted to do a village book. That meant sorting through well over 100,000 images. I am pleased that I may have only missed a small handful of villages, or if one wants to debate the point, none at all.

While it may seem a tad uncouth to be blogging so soon after the last post, the fact is that I am in the middle of a craze to get the announcements out for my 2020 books (before 12/31, for self-imposed reasons). Number 7 for the year has been squeezed through the birth canal. It is a monument to the illustrious rocky features of northern Catalunya that graced the pages of this blog for an extended period of time.

Standing proudly over the Alt Berguedà and La Cerdanya, Serra del Cadí, Serra del Moixeró, and Pedraforca are massive rock features, unusually gnarly and vertiginous, and they captivated my attention for quite a while. With the Mediterranean roughly 60 miles to the east, deserts to the southwest, and pure Pyrenean alpine climate to the north, there was always something going on in this collision of weather zones. It was a baptism in a new method of flying, to revisit the same place in different conditions, many of those marginal or what would previously be considered dangerous.

If there is one lesson that I learned from this production, it is not to make a favorite subject wait. The result is that much has to be discarded for favor of the constraints of attention spans and the publishing process, which means that, if I could do it over again, I would have come out with something a few years ago and found a way to keep the conversation going.

As lockdown in early 2020 got started, I set my mind to doing something I usually do not: submitting to an art prize. Normally I avoid these kinds of things, as the chances of getting selected are extremely small, and the workload is disproportionately high, which means it is basically for suckers, except for the one person that wins. For some reason that I do not understand now, I actually thought I had a reasonable chance, which caused me to set aside the calloused views that have developed over the years dealing with the art and publishing world. Suffice it to say that merit is a very small part of why things get published or selected and much of it has to do with hard to quantify things such as how cranky the person is making the decision at the time. While I can lose count of the quantity of people that feel that my stuff belongs in the prestigious art museums of the world, it doesn’t do anything to get it there, unless the mysterious powers that be permit it and, so far, they have not been in the mood to explain the mysteries of their moods.

Knowing those realities as a backdrop, I still had hope. Then I got carried away, and I had to ask myself how I’d react if I did not win. Then my enterprising brilliance entered into play, and I decided that I would just make the submission a book. That way, I couldn’t lose. Well, lose I did – not a winner, not a finalist, “but we encourage you to submit again next year.” Any feedback as to why that is the case? No. 33,000 words and 100 image submissions later….nothing, well, except for the prospect of a book.

I then wrote an honest yet cynical introduction, packaged the whole thing up, and then realized, disappointment aside, that I have put together a) the third most text heavy work to date and b) the most varied and comprehensive representation of my work yet in existence. Every other book has been focused on something much more narrow, whereas this one is complete open season on what I thought was best across the board.

Prior to this whole art prize nonsense, I had someone review my work and note that my books “do not explain what the images are.” I pointed out that they are labeled, with precision, as to the subject and location, and he said, “But it still doesn’t tell me anything about it. You’re telling me all this background about the image as I review it. It should be in the book.” With “My Struggle,” I put it in the book. After failing to be selected as a finalist, I exchanged a conversation with an art professional, in particular the person that recommended submitting to the prize, and she said, “Perhaps next time you shouldn’t say so much.”

For whatever it is worth, this is book #6 for 2020, so I have broken my record, which turned out to be quite a struggle.

I have often wondered if there is a hormonal cycle that I am unaware of that influences my propensity to pick a fight with the sky. Weather had been straight out the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania playbook (gray and bleak). It was forecast to clear, had not yet, and my wife and I had made dinner arrangements (to the extent it is possible in spite of a mountain of rules) with friends. Ever averse to the idea of fixing a time on anything that would interfere with flying, I now found this dinner engagement to be a thorn in my side, as intuition said the clouds would clear. I would have preferred to go up after mountain snows, versus waiting until they got tired days later.

As I previewed web cams, weather models, and satellite shots, I had the view that the clouds would dry up pretty quickly. I saddled up the flying gear, did a flight briefing, scurried to the airport, and fired up the airplane, noting broken overcast to the west, overcast overhead, and some soup to the east. By the time operating temps were in the green, things were at minimum adequate VFR below the clouds. Full power and off we go….

By the time I got to 6,000 feet, there was an adequate hole in the clouds. The overcast deck was also pretty thin, perhaps 500 feet thick at most in that spot. The next logical question is: what if the hole closes? I left with full fuel and had confirmation that a number of airports were in range and had VFR access. The issue would not be CFIT or VFR into IMC, it would be a wife who would demand some form of penance as I then would have to ride a train back, while missing dinner.

It turns out, none of that drama was necessary. I scooted around for 30 minutes in the islands in the sky, found a bigger hole, dropped down, landed, and by the time I got home, cloud coverage had reduced to 50%. We made it to dinner on time.

As for the proposed hormone cycle, some days I pick a fight with the sky, other days I don’t even notice that it is there. I am eternally curious as to what I see and what is going on, though the difference between a fat, lazy, inertia-inducing shrug and a battle cry that results in a flight remains unknown.

700 feet above the airport on climb out. Such is the Alps.

The hole, between Flendruz and Château-d’Oex.

Massif du Vanil Noir.

The airport….

Knife edge…

Above Sparenmoos.

Rinderberg.

Approaching the hole.

Descending through it. 

Left hand downwind for runway 26, looking right.

Wispile. About to turn left hand base 26, looking out the right.

Left hand base 26, looking left. The hole, now growing, is visible down valley.

One may wonder why I am blogging so much these days, and why so many book releases are taking place. For reasons that I cannot recall, it came to my attention that the maximum number of titles that I have released in one calendar year is five. That happened twice, and with this email, has now happened for a third time. Never one to leave an autistic goal alone, I decided to go for it and break the record, logically settling on six titles to get it done. While that will likely be met, and possibly exceeded, I ran into another self-created issue: I have a personal view that I “cannot” post two book release posts in a row. For some inexplicable reason, I feel that readers would rather get more of my transcendent, venomous bitterness sandwiched in between, lest they feel that they are being “sold to.” So, the only answer to these seemingly nonsensical rules is to speed up the posts a bit, which will invariably irk someone else into unsubscribing.

“Abstractions of the Alps” is a response to a lesson I learned with my Spanish creative exploits: it is silly to wait until the flights are done to release books about them. There is simply too much beauty, too many adventures, too many stories, and literally, too much of a good thing, to wait so long to put something together. If I were to do a book on, say, “The Alps,” I would wait years and end up not publishing the overwhelming majority of my images. I do not see what purpose that serves.

Thus, this book is basically a collection of things that I find pretty in the Alps, thus far. I did not restrict myself to a geographic list or claim for it to be the “best of” anything in particular. It is variety, beauty, comprehensive coverage, aesthetic appeal, the unusual, the expected, and the unexpected. It is frankly whatever I wanted to put together, which, well, in this crazy year of 2020, why not?