The Narrative Image

Imagine this. Suppose you have a growing collection of photographs and you need to make a portfolio that would be representative of your best work. Or say someone asked you to make a ‘coffee table book’. How would you pick the ‘best’ images? I can’t figure out how to do it. Inevitably, when ‘other’ people look at a given collection of photos, they always pick out favorites for reasons that can only be described as mysterious, questionable or ….just wrong. It goes way beyond the obvious to suggest that we all have personal preferences. Photos are seldom just artistic compositions – they are really more like snippets of memory. Most of us simply aren’t trained to subjugate our memories and the emotions they trigger for the sake of judging a picture by something as abstract as strong compositional design elements. Note to self: Maybe a good narrative image is one that combines snippets of memory with design elements to better preserve the emotional content of the…umm…sorry – ...

Monkey-cam had been monitoring the internet for weather reports and once he saw the little smiling sun symbols in the weekend boxes, he began begging in earnest for another chance to see Cooper Spur before the onset of serious snow. Regular viewers may recall that Monkey-cam was in the process of testing some boundaries and chose our last Cooper Spur expedition as the scene for acting out his new found sense of independence. I kept suggesting lower altitude hikes because I was pretty sure the last weather front had deposited snow down to the 4000 ft. level, but when I got an email from Mr. Lloyd (of Long Shadow Photography - www.longshadowphoto.com ) reporting that the road to Cloud Cap was still open, I relented and started rounding up the hiking gear. Mt. Hood as seen from the Parkdale Ranger Station where you can’t get forest parking permits on Sunday because they’re closed. It’s a fairly long drive from Portland to Mt. Hood so I was glad to have Monkey-cam’s company. We tried to ca...