When I started working in earnest on this project, I started with the images. With over 45,000 images on my hard drive, there’s a lot to sort through. I have my favorites – the images that I come back to again and again when I need a background for a business card or something to hang on my wall or an example of what my photography is like. I started with my favorite images, but I began to realize that my favorites weren’t necessarily going to translate well into quilts that build on the skills I have. Let me explain using an example.
One of my favorite images from Acadia is a night shot that I took in September 2014 from a pull-out on Park Loop Road. It was an accident – I was doing 30-second exposures of the Milky Way, and I had framed it with an evergreen tree in the foreground that was completely black, which made the Milky Way behind it stand out. One of the dangers of long exposures is that, in a camera’s world, 30 seconds is a LONG time. A lot can happen in 30 seconds, especially out in nature. A plane or a boat comes out of nowhere and now you’ve got a light trail across some otherwise dark piece of sky or water. Or, as in this case, a car drives by. I was trying to time my pictures such that I wouldn’t get the headlights or taillights from cars passing on Park Loop Road behind me. But…a lot can happen in 30 seconds.
In this case, I had the camera set to do a 30-second exposure. Once I pressed the shutter button, there was nothing I could do to close the shutter and end the shot. I waited until a car had passed behind me and, hearing no other cars coming, pressed the shutter button. About five seconds later, a car came around the bend, and its headlights shone onto the tree I was using to frame the sky. You know, that tree I wanted to be black. Oh well. So much for that shot. But the car didn’t just pass behind me and continue on its way. It passed me, then stopped and backed into the pull-out where I was standing. All of a sudden, during the 30-second exposure, I not only had white headlights shining on the tree from behind me to the left, but I also had bright red brake lights shining on the tree from behind me to my right. Let’s just say that it was a good thing that the camera wasn’t recording audio. I cursed up a storm. I was 100% sure that shot was a complete loss. So I kept going, and I did end up getting shots exactly like I wanted them – the Milky Way in the distance over the water, framed by completely black trees in the foreground. They’re nice images. They would be perfectly adequate…if I hadn’t gotten that one shot with the white and red lights on that tree.
This photo has become one of my favorites from that night. It’s an interesting image with a good story behind it, and it was a total accident. It was one of the first images I thought of when I started looking through my photos for quilt ideas. It’s also one of the first images I rejected. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even have to look at it to reject it. Someone who has a lot more patience than I do and is eager to work with little fiddly bits of fabric would have a field day with this image. I am not that person. The image is too detailed to really do well in quilt format, at least for me. If I had better thread painting skills and was interested in figuring out how to faithfully recreate stars and the nebulousness of the Milky Way, this would be an awesome quilt. Maybe someday, but I honestly wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.
