Today my friend and I Darren, who is also my former college teacher, went photographing around the sloughs west of Rexburg today. It was really good to get out there again after two years down in Utah, as well as good to talk and photograph with my old friend (you can read his blog post about the trip here).
While in college at BYU Idaho, I spent a lot of time photographing the sloughs and the landscape west of Rexburg, and I really grew to love it out there, and it became another “home away from home” to me. I loved all the little oases out in the middle of the dry sage brush, teaming with thick vines and shrubs, and beautiful cottonwoods lining the banks of the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, Teton River and the many sloughs surrounding the Menan Buttes.
So it was like returning home for me today.
Here are a few digital snaps of what we saw:
I photographed this same part of the Texas Slough in the winter of 2004, right after I got my 5×7 (which was one of the very first photographs I made with it). The 4×5 isn’t quite as wide, but that’s ok. I kind of like having the cottonwoods in the center be a little more dominant in the frame.
While I was setting the camera up for the previous photograph, I swung the camera a little to the left, and like what I saw (I really am torn between the two):
I’ve been looking at Lee Friedlander a lot lately, and saw these trees, and thought of some of his photographs of Central Park, so here is my Friedlander-esque photograph:
The last place we stopped at was a little warm water slough between Ashton and St. Anthony. The light at that point of the day was unlike any other I’ve ever seen. The clouds in the sky were blue on the northern and eastern horizon, and warm and yellow to the west, which was casting that color onto the snow. It was gorgeous, and the photos don’t really do it justice.
