Since my job as a survey tech involves a lot of time spent sitting in the passenger seat as well as walking outdoors, I am fortunate enough to be able to constantly scan my surroundings for future photo opportunities. For me, the best way to remember places to return to is to write them down in my field book and/or notes app in my phone. As simple as it is, writing down locations and specific time frames gets me so excited for future adventures with my camera! It also just gets my creative brain rolling. I’ve been taking these kind of notes for as long as I’ve been making photographs (10 years this year!) and I ironically still have places that I haven’t checked off the list..
It has proven to be an endless hunt, if you will.
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A few weeks ago, a coworker and I were on an early morning drive to help stake out some property corners in a small Northern California town by the name of Arbuckle: a ghost-town that is only a 20 minute drive west of my hometown of Yuba City. When we were approaching the one exit for the town, I noticed that there were these old, abandoned railroad/telegraph poles for miles along Old Highway 99 (adjacent with I-5: the highway we were driving on at the time) with wires hanging from them. My eyes lit up as I knew that I needed to come back out on this road at sundown..
On the evening I decided to check them out, the light felt just right and was exactly what I had imagined, which I have to admit is quite rare with planned photographs..
The location below is in a nearby area (closer to the town of Meridian, just outside of Sutter, CA). The same coworker and I were taking State Route 45 back into Woodland to our office one day and I happened to look up at the right time as I noticed a very small chapel down a dirt road to the right. I asked my coworker about it as we continued making our way down the state route. He told me a little bit about the chapel and asked if I wanted him to turn around so that I could check it out. But for some reason, I told him that wasn’t necessary and instead I wrote the location down in my field book.
Fast forward to Christmas weekend up in Yuba (visiting the in-laws and my dad) and I knew I had to make the short drive out there to check it out. It was well worth it and quite spooky to be honest!
As I was drafting this entry, I came to the realization that a majority of my work would not even exist if it weren’t for these so-called foto-notes..
The second and third photos are really special. In the second, I love how my preference for horizons being straight was disregarded when I saw that the pole itself was perfectly vertical. It definitely works better like that. And the minimalism of the third shot is just beautiful.