White door on red
More meets the eye than white on red.
With hinges mismatched and tacked askew, bailing wire in the hasp supplanted by a pivoting metal strap, redundant still with a simple wooden toggle, how many ways is this door secured, albeit crooked, to the fraying fabric of its old red barn? A mossy brow of rusted flashing guards the white-planked frame top.
Hollow logs between barn and ground suggest a move sometime distant past, whole sills and beams and timbers rolling in a stately waltz across the farm meadow. Why? Where? Who knows?
© 2010 Duncan Dwelle
Whale's eye not
© 2009 Duncan Dwelle
Frost on aging angles
© 2008 Duncan Dwelle
Graton barn
Nature knows neither bounds nor limits to color, texture, and form.
Long before the hand of man traced his mind's eye across a blackened cave wall, every hue and shade imaginable had been splashed boldly on nature's canvas for a hundred million years or more.
Now man's work, so recently carved from trunk and cliff, returns gently from whence it came - beam and plank to humus soil, hinge and nail to flaked mineral rust.
© 2006 Duncan Dwelle
Green grain
on redwood shed© 2008 Duncan Dwelle
Harlequin hinges
Is this just a door? Or is it barn art, from the knowing eye and loving hand of a farmer/painter who sees more than splintered wood and bent nails? You be the judge.
Seldom do we see an old farm building showing such ravages of age along with the tender care of ownership. No such barns and outbuildings have economic justification. Most will disappear, to the farmers’ regret, within this decade into heaps of blackberry bushes or ashes of a local fire department’s practice burn.
Yet surrender is clearly not yet the fate of this startlingly crisp and delicious juxtaposition of bold white on faded red.
© 2010 Duncan Dwelle
Petersen barn in summer
Each week of the year, each hour of the day, each minute of fog or storm or sun, transforms, for the attentive viewer, everything the eye receives.
Each transformation brings its trademarks - its ephemeral yet unmistakable indications, in shade and shadow, glisten and glare, of where and when the light is falling, and from whence it has come to rest.
This old barn, clinging to its sagging skeleton, echoes the slope of pastured hilltops holding back a scrim of summer fog blushing with barely hidden blue. The verdant guardian oaks have reached their peak summer foliage. Tall meadows of newly browned grass are bent under full heads of seed.
No shadows; all is dry but not yet withered. This is mid-day coastal summer!
© 2006 Duncan Dwelle
Hinge on faded red
© 2009 Duncan Dwelle
Barn in field of mustard
Ten minutes after sunrise, a field of spring mustard flushes brilliantly in flat rays streaking across the Sonoma Valley. Direct sun penetrates the barn’s loft for no more than three minutes, briefly illuminating hundred year old beams and rafters.
While the ridge still stands straight and seemingly intact, slanting doors and loose planks reveal the structure’s arthritic age. A year later, winter storms will have torn away half of the metal roof, leaving old barn bones exposed to unaccustomed weather.
This site on Arnold Road, midway between the western hills and meandering Sonoma creek, endures a constant contest between coastal fog and inland sun. Such struggle ennobles living vines of rich Sonoma wines but destines the long dead fir and redwood of a nineteenth century barn to periodic renewal – or certain demise.
© 2007 Duncan Dwelle
Hen house number one
© 2008 Duncan Dwelle
Lichen forest with fly
© 2007 Duncan Dwelle
Cow barn
© 2008 Duncan Dwelle
Thistle glyphs
© 2009 Duncan Dwelle
Barn with wings
© 2007 Duncan Dwelle
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Sunrise (minus one)
"What light through yonder window breaks?"
A soft palette of dawn streaming over the shoulder of Sonoma Mountain brushes Shakespeare's immortal words gently across the face of faded plank siding.
Some near-forgotten farmer crafted this hen house to shelter helter-skelter flocks from foxes and frost.
No doubt he spent not a moment considering how, seventy years on, the subtle hues of mold, old paint, and wind-etched grain would find a place to hang in the halls of Nature's museum.
© 2008 Duncan Dwelle
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Sunrise (plus one)
Less than three minutes later, a blinding furnace of direct sun has climbed relentlessly over the mountain brow, slashing that same silvered siding with newborn tones of brilliant orange.
All subtlety is forsaken, shaken off till sunset shadows recast these boards in tones blue and shimmering gray.
The human brain, a marvelously inventive deceiver, fools the eye to see the same. But look side-by-side and see the truth: photography is "painting with light", and the no brush is bigger than the sun's.
© 2008 Duncan Dwelle
Broken back
and slumping shouldersShades of powdered cocoa reflect so strongly in the late afternoon sun that this barn evoked in me the scent of fresh baked cake.
I waited nearly two hours for the last direct rays of a bright Autumn day. In the final seconds before gleam climbed off a strip of foreground grass, the near wall’s outward thrust fell into dramatic relief.
As is plain from the broken ridge pole and collapsing roof, this nineteenth century barn may not stand another decade. The door has splintered; soil and weeds drifting down the hill have pinned its foot; outward bending thrust adds a tipsy tilt.
Gravity and time will soon reclaim to the land planks and timbers which once grew from it. Long after nothing remains here but a mounded blackberry patch, friends of the Dehlinger Winery on School Hill Road will remember the distinctive colors and broken form of this simple barn.
© 2008 Duncan Dwelle
Red shed shedding yellow
Is it red paint under yellow lichen or the other way around?
Van Gogh could have left this scene wiping his brushes dry from one of his signature hay stack paintings. But the artist here was merely time facing North in a damp hay field.
© 2010 Duncan Dwelle
Glowing with age
© 2008 Duncan Dwelle
Petersen barn in spring
© 2006 Duncan Dwelle
Rolling door detail
© 2009 Duncan Dwelle
Cattle chute
Gathering storm over south Asia
© 2009 Duncan Dwelle
Burbank barn
© 2007 Duncan Dwelle
Long knot
© 2009 Duncan Dwelle
Barn below Mt. Tam
© 2009 Duncan Dwelle
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I shot all of these images within fifty miles of my home in Marin County, California, typically making several visits, at varying times of day and year, to each photo site to assess seasonal changes, light, and color.
All of these images were shot on 4"x5" transparency film in a traditional large format camera. I choose this medium because, most importantly, properly used large format film delivers quality which is at least ten times beyond the reach of digital techniques outside the studio. Colors are richer, contrast is more nuanced, detail is staggeringly sharp when compared to digital technologies of 2010.
In addition, I enjoy the process of (with credit to Ansel Adams) "making an image", rather than "taking a picture". Just as I gave up skiing for snow boarding, at age 49, for the joy of starting over from scratch, in the same way I have taken great pleasure in learning the tactile, mechanical, un-automatic, and thoroughly thoughtful process of traditional film photography.
That is not to say that my images are limited in any way by obsolescence of equipment or process. Large format lenses, for example, even those which are sixty or seventy years old, are generally so much sharper than top quality SLR lenses that there is little basis for comparison. The flexibility of the bellows-based large format camera enables a skilled photographer to capture more accurate perspective and more depth of field than the laws of physics make possible in an SLR. And 4"x5" film records tens to hundreds of times more information, at the precision of molecules rather than pixels, than even the newest 25mpx Canon or Nikon digital camera.
One's approach with a large format camera is radically different from that which is most often used with a digital, or was used by professionals in 35mm film for more than fifty years. Seldom is there hurry, always much thought with large film. Since execution of a
single shot may take from two minutes to several hours, emphasis is on quality, not quantity. I usually shoot no more than three or four sheets of film per outing.
My goal with every shot is to make the film represent as closely as I can exactly what I saw (or thought I saw, or my brain visualized) at that moment. I use no filters to enhance color or repaint the scene. I do occasionally use a bright cloth or other reflector to supplement light on details; this is necessary because film has less than 1/10,000 the capacity of the human eye to accommodate a range of light levels from dark to bright.
Once exposed, film is a chemical carrier whose properties are precisely understood. While the number of developing labs is rapidly shrinking, the science of film processing is well established and evolves slowly. I send my film to a premier lab and get back consistently what I send out: poorly exposed, carelessly handled, unaesthetically composed, or - occasionally - a candidate image. Sometimes the result is quite pleasantly surprising, as in the strong blue shifts which film takes on from cool sky or long exposure (see blue notes).
After many sessions of ruthlessly eliminating dozens of transparencies on the light table, I select images which I feel are worthy of printing. Film which survives my initial elimination is scanned into digital files of 500MB to 1GB each. In the scanning process we calibrate each digital image to match its original film without any adjustment or manipulation in software to enhance the outcome.
After multiple screenings, most of those scanned images meet my standards for composition, color, and clarity. From those which make the grade I have printed one, two, or three of each on archival fine arts materials, from thirty to sixty inches wide. The images you see here, having been tremendously compacted for the web, cannot convey the impact of my prints you might see in person.