Author: JH

I think that one of two things will happen once you spend too much time high up in the mountains: (1) you start to write books on weirdly elevated topics, such as the “Übermensch.” Or, (2), you start making sketches of yourself. Either will lead to great fame and/or insanity.

These two at an altitude of about 9.000 feet. Visibility was significantly less than the images indicate — a blessing, since it made the scenery even more interesting. Then a rainstorm hit, and we took cover in a cave built in World War I.

Since we used a cable car to get up the mountain and started from the summit, the entire trip took less than four hours. Time and again, it surprises me how little you get done in the city within such a timeframe, and how much can happen outdoors.

Back in the Dolomites, if only for a few days. The plan is to continue with my Mountain Project. I know what I’m looking for, and I won’t take many photos — I’ll just be looking for the few images that I have in mind as additions to the existing project. The above scene struck me as having a kind of “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” (1941) tonal range. Never mind that it was early in the afternoon. Usually I’m not after a lot of tonal range, unlike zone system master Ansel Adams. But I took a few frames anyway, and this one is likely to be part of the project.

The second image is one of those I am looking for. Lucky, since this vista literally existed only for seconds. Had I been at any other spot in what was a two-mile stretch of rock, the image would not have worked. Otherwise, my mind is on the sketches I’ve been doing for a couple of months now. I’m going to post the sketches once I have a significant body of work, which may take a couple more weeks, perhaps a few months. But I like what I was told recently by someone who already saw what’s coming: that somehow the sketches inform the latest photographs.