here come the miles

T minus 12 hours till I hit the road good and hard. Phone charger, toothbrush, towel. I'm sure I've forgotten something, but it doesn't matter.

I went out to the Smokies Friday morning as a little warm-up and so I could get my annual National Parks pass. I waited just past Newfound Gap for the sun to crest the mountains and peek through the heavy clouds, but it never quite made it.

Halfway up to Clingman's Dome I saw a couple other photographers on a narrow pull-off, overlooking the sea of clouds that I had just emerged from. They were a couple of older guys from Seymour, bantering about  f-stops and previous sunrises. One of them told me that this year set the record high for Clingman's Dome at a blistering 73 degrees.

The women in the giftshop of the Sugarlands visitor center had no shortage of advice when they learned what I was buying the annual pass for. "I go to Rocky Mountain National Park every year," said one. "Don't bother with Wall Drug in South Dakota," said the other, "Overrated!"

Duly noted.

"I like the shadows in this one," etc...

Been perusing my high school and college artworks (I use this term loosely), and... well...

Funny how the stuff I put the most effort into and processed the shit out of now make me nauseous, while many pieces that I completely overlooked or discarded now give me hope for poor high school Daniel.

I think I've come to understand that this is to be expected and I will constantly be looking back at old work and fighting the urge to kill it with fire and spears. I don't know quite how long the embarrassment window is, but I sorely miss the journals and doodles of my youth (particularly one schematic of a dormant volcano/airplane hangar complete with lava tube runways).

At any rate, here's some originally overlooked stuff I'm not entirely ashamed of:
(I resisted the urge to do some photoshop tweaking on less-than-stellar images)

Love me some squares.

Cliche verre photogram technique. Paint on glass exposed onto photo paper.
Should've experimented more with it.

Holga print with custom-made negative holder.

Holga print with custom-made negative holder.
Kinda digging the simplicity in this one.

From my ever-so-brief foray into printmaking. Linoleum cut print.
I don't even know what I made this for.

Crossroads 2011 is not a real thing. I think.
Working on layers/masking in photoshop maybe?

This image caused me a lot of strife.
"Oh, Daniel, this is so morbid."
"Oh, Daniel, is this one about death too?"
"Oh, Daniel, I see that death motif coming up again."
I just liked the textures. Jeez.

Entered this one for a logo contest. Didn't win.
Maybe they should get a better URL.

Probably should've majored in Trespassing. 

Turns out I'm kind of a one-trick pony with the whole "abandoned stuff" theme.
Not even a very original trick to begin with. Rip Van Winkle's Plymouth.

Fall color.

Big South Fork. 

Twin Arches loop trail. 

Totally beats Gatlinburg traffic.

Jeff contemplating the longest spider web.

black is the new black.

Well I'd say it's about time for my photo website's hiatus to come to an end. In a recent burst of ambition and lack of anything else to do, I've been working on revamping the old website that's been sitting around, un-updated for the past 9 months or so. Here are some screenshots of the new site, which should be up and running in the next couple weeks (hopefully):












Kinda hard to see, but it's pretty minimal, with a simple menu up top and a rotating gallery teaser slideshow on the home page. Also decided to make the full spectrum shift from the stark white of the old site to a black and gray scheme.












Here's a sample of one of the gallery pages, with expandable thumbnails.












And here's the ever-awkward-and-narcissistic "About" page. I'm gonna break down and upgrade to a yearly package, which will give me my own domain name (www.danielaisenbrey.com), and remove all the Wix.com branding from the site. I really like Wix for the creative control you have over everything. If you want an easy-to-design flash website for anything you should check them out. Keep your eyes peeled for the launch of the new site!

The sun also rises. In case you were wondering.

3:30AM is a disgusting time. Regardless of whether you're still up or getting up. In my case it was the latter. My alarm went off, inflicting severe psychological trauma, but I managed to crawl out of bed, jam in my contacts, lace up my boots, double-check my camera gear, and set off towards the Smokies.

Every once and awhile, when I can muster up the discipline, I try to make it out to the Park to catch the sunrise. Provided I don't have work that day and can recuperate with a lengthy nap. So the plan for this morning was to drive the hour and a half through blissfully empty Sevierville/Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg and up to Clingman's Dome, from where you can hike a moderate 2 miles to Andrew's Bald, a grassy peak at the end of a ridge-line.

The ascent to Newfound Gap on 441 was a harrowing, fog-shrouded adventure, but I did make it to a nearly deserted parking lot at Clingman's Dome, where the wind was driving endless fog banks over the mountain and making 60F feel a lot colder. If there's a recurring theme to my pre-dawn excursions, it's that I always underestimate how cold it'll be, but luckily I had a blanket in the back of the car and fashioned it into an impromptu poncho before hitting the trail.

I clicked on my headlamp, and the first thing it illuminated was a sign on the trailhead marker warning of "aggressive bear activity" in the area. Just what you want to read before setting off into the darkness where every shadow becomes a snarling maw and every startled bird sounds an awful lot like a charging death-machine. To add inconvenience to paranoia, the first mile of the trail is pretty much a creek bed, littered with slick ankle-breakers and mud.

I arrived at the bald around 6:15, with dawn threatening to break, so I hurried and scouted out its eastern side for a good vantage point, but the best I could find was a gap in the skeletal limbs of a blighted tree. Oh well, I should probably do better research on visibility next time. I shot for an hour or so, then headed back up the trail a little disappointed.

Maybe 5 minutes later I stopped to try to identify a strange clucking that was emanating from the woods to my right, when a partridge waddled onto the path about 5 feet in front of me. It didn't seem phased by me at all, and continued its promenade across the trail and back into the woods. If the fowl hadn't made me pause, I wouldn't have noticed the spectacular beams of sunlight shooting between the trees and gotten some of my favorite images of the trip. This too seems to follow the pattern of my sunrise outings in that I usually find the best subjects on the way back to the car after I've "given up".

By the time I made it back up to the parking lot, tourists were beginning to file in, probably to make the half mile trek to the Clingman's Dome observation tower only to find panoramic views of the inside of a cloud. I stopped at Smoky Mountain Knife Works in Sevierville on the way home and bought a tantalizingly cheap Mora Craftline because it just looked so darn utilitarian.

Now I'm gonna go catch up on this sleep deficit. Anybody down for sun-up tomorrow??

Good news for my lungs. And photos.

Guess who doesn't have tuberculosis? This guy.

Had to get tested for working at Beardsley Community Farm and handling "produce intended for human consumption". Ironic since they used to call TB "consumption" back in the day. At any rate, the TB skin test is one of the grosser things I've experienced lately. They take a tiny syringe and inject it just beneath the surface of the skin on your forearm, and inflate a penny-sized bubble under your skin. Gross.

In other news, I went by Thompson Photo here in Knoxville when I got back from the roadtrip and picked up my processed 120 film. I was really excited to see how it turned out since I'd never used this camera before and never used color medium format film.

They're all square-format, 6x6cm negatives, and I had them scan them onto a CD for me, so I won't be sure of the quality of the negatives until I get something printed. I was pretty pleased with them overall, even though there were light-leaks on a few frames and the color seems a bit off.

I may try to get the next roll cross-processed, meaning have it processed in the chemicals intended for a different type of film. From what I've seen, cross-processed color negative film (what I have currently) comes out with lots of red/orange shading to it and can be a pretty cool effect.

I'll probably try some dual-exposure stuff too, now that I'm more comfortable with the camera and film, so look out for that in the future. I have one roll of film from the roadtrip that I'll probably just have processed normally.