Today’s images come from Saturday afternoon when the rainfall still seemed novel and refreshing.  Although, to be honest, I never really tired of the weather even when we embarked on day three of constant rain.  In fact, I actually grew impressed with its perseverance.  It just kept coming.  By early Saturday morning though, the banks of the Poudre River had become swollen and flooded.  All of the shots were taken from the passenger side of the car.  I know, I know, that’s super lazy of me.  But wait, I have an excuse: I didn’t want the camera to get wet, now did I?  I had to stay in the safety of the car to protect the camera.  At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Whenever I drive somewhere special just to photograph, I always feel like a bit of a fraud.  Don’t ask me why, I did it plenty of times in college.  But somewhere along the way, I began thinking that to be authentic, the photograph had to be taken in the course of everyday life.  You only photographed a new setting if you happened to find yourself in one.  That’s really a pretty lame mindset though.  Some of my favorite photographers, like Robert Parke-Harrison or Aaron Rose, go to some impressive lengths to create the photographs that comprise their work.  And I show it to my students and tell them that it’s okay to care about your work that much.  It’s okay to go to great measures and invest time and energy in something you care about.  You can craft entire miniature worlds and photograph them if you feel you need to.  I forget that lesson sometimes, I guess.  And when I remember, like now, that fifteen minutes we went out of our way to take today’s images seems like a minor detail.