JOURNAL
Striving to experience new landscapes by traveling far and near; rediscovering them when writing about them, with new eyes.
These Fragments I Have Shored: St. Augustine and Vilano in Ghostlier Demarcations of Infrared.
In a Florida summer, an infrared camera turns a Fort Mose boardwalk into a winter wonderland — foliage burning snow-bright, skies drained to black — a season that does not exist, built entirely from the heat at hand. This is a black-and-white infrared photo essay from St. Augustine and Vilano Beach, made with a Phase One IQ3 100MP Achromatic back on a Cambo WRS-1600 technical camera with a B+W 830 (093) infrared filter — a system that records deep near-infrared light no living eye can hold. Low tide clears a path to the ruins of the old Vilano Bridge — I call it St. Augustine's Parthenon. A modern bridge now sweeps across the Tolomato River, and on the shore beneath it a solitary figure keeps her vigil in a three-second long exposure. Back in the oldest city in the USA, the Medici-inspired stone lions of the Bridge of Lions keep watch over the Matanzas tide, and the Castillo de San Marcos stands stoic. It has endured by yielding, outlasting the concrete that cracks. Entropy is pervasive, and the photograph is a fragment shored against it.
Fürstenzug & Alchemy
I used Cambo WRS 1600 with Hasselblad CFV100C to make multiple images to create a stitched panorama of Furstenzug in Dresden, the world’s largest porcelein art display. The Stallhof, once the medieval venue for jousting tournaments and chivalric competitions within Dresden's Royal Palace grounds, now serves as a cultural event space nestled between the Johanneum and the Long Arcade. Its exterior wall facing Schlossplatz bears the magnificent Fürstenzug, a 101-meter panoramic mural chronicling the Wettin dynasty's centuries of Saxon rule through a grand cavalcade of mounted figures. Artist Wilhelm Walther originally created this monumental tribute between 1872 and 1876 using the sgraffito technique to commemorate the Wettin family's 800-year legacy, but deterioration from Dresden's harsh weather necessitated an innovative solution. From 1904 to 1907, craftsmen painstakingly recreated the entire composition using over 24,000 Meissen porcelain tiles, immortalizing not only the 35 Saxon nobles, princes, and monarchs but also 59 accompanying figures representing scholars, artists, tradespeople, and common folk who shaped the region's history.
Morning Ambience
In the early light of St. Augustine, photographers find two opportunities — radiant illumination and serene, empty streets — and two challenges: taming contrast and keeping verticals true. Both can be mastered with intention — through thoughtful exposure, the Zone System, combining a digital back with high dynamic range, like Hasselblad CFV100C and the precision of a technical camera like a Cambo WRS 1600.
The calm face of the water asked me for a kiss.
Nestled along the northeastern coast of Florida, Talbot Island State Park harbors a hauntingly beautiful boneyard beach. Visitors would find the famed stretch of shoreline— a stark and mesmerizing landscape strewn with the arboreal remains that the relentless Atlantic has sculpted over the years to create a ghostly forest of fallen oak and cedar trees. These weathered sentinels, once proud giants of the maritime forest, now lie scattered across the beach like the discarded bones of mythical creatures.