History in Images
Digital Photos of Northern Berkshire
By: Jane Hudson - 11/04/2006
I am taking pictures of aspects of the land in the Northern Berkshires as a way to identify a quality I am experiencing as a newcomer to the area. Clearly, there have been many interpretations of the glories of the mountain landscape, and I too wish to touch on some of that same awe-inspiring, almost transcendent quality that's embodied here.
At the same time, I do not wish to present the land as picturesque, as if were lying out there waiting to entertain us. Instead I am hoping to capture the embedded power in it, the dark places where it cannot be fully revealed, but where it still expresses something of its original integrity.
I use a sepia tint to bring up a sense of history, or more specifically, a memory that lingers through photo technology wherein early landscape photography might have depicted similar images in a more unmediated time. I also use vintage frames to further enhance that sense of a time gone past, but whose fragments continue to be available to us in the present.
Technically, I am using a 4 mega-pixel Canon Elf camera, a Macintosh PowerBook, and Adobe Photoshop. I also print and frame all my own images.