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Charles Judson
Many amateur photographers, me among them, can't say for sure why they make landscape photographs, spending illogical amounts of energy and money on something strongly felt but not well articulated. I am uncertain but I know I enjoy the experience of being in natural places where felt photographs originate as well as the studio time turning an idea at shutter-button press into a finished photograph with feeling, a sense of the place. It seems that for me the Place is the thing. I'm retired from a technical career and have dabbled in a number of types of photography over the last 50 years but nothing revs my engine like getting out into the natural world, with camera or not. With is definitely better. I live in Sebastopol, a small town in Northern California.
Near my home is a protected wetland, the Laguna de Santa Rosa. It's a lovely place, accessible year-round by a network of trails but in winter the water rises into flood and becomes very wide, the trees are now leafless, and the feeling there changes from something verdant green to something else, just blacks, whites, and greys.
Around sunrise on a foggy winter morning the place is moody, quiet, magical even, and nothing moves except the waterfowl. It is easy to forget that civiliasation is not far away. These photographs were taken within a quarter mile of each other on such mornings.
