Storm Damage

 The photos in my recent post Untitled are from just south of my home, where a huge windstorm caused widespread forest damage.  They’re photos of a salvage harvest – picking the fallen trees off the ground, taking down the hopelessly damaged standing trees, and preparing the area for replanting.  I’d made a number of satisfying photos in that stand of trees before the storm, and since then I’ve tried several times to take persuasive photos of the carnage after the storm.  Every time I try, I come back thinking that this time I’ve gotten something good, and every time the stuff I thought would be great turns out to be dreck.

Part of the difficulty is that it’s a daunting photographic problem, both visually and practically.  What was once a nice, beautiful stand of Douglas Fir was turned into a jumbled, random, tangled mess of trees that were very large.  It’s not just that it’s hard to move around in the mess, it’s that it’s downright dangerous.  That seemed to leave trying to photograph it from the edge, and everything I tried along those lines was just more photos of tangled mess.  I tried getting higher, I tried to isolate things and focus on details.  Nothing seemed to work.

The whole thing is just very frustrating on so many levels.