a .poetic encounter

Exactly ten years ago, to the day, I spent a few weeks with a good friend and his family in Grand Lake, Colorado. We had a cabin at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, from where he and I (we met each other during a photography course at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography) ventured out into the wilderness with our cameras to shoot whatever we encountered.

This was an early morning. It was foggy and chilly. I can’t remember why we split up, but I ended up alone on the other side of a field, with this line of trees on the opposite side. I sat really quietly there, not really knowing what to expect, or what to see. Or if I would see anything at all. I remember wondering why I was sitting there alone. Why we split up. Never a smart move in the wilderness. Every snap of wood, rustle of trees, whispering of leaves… It could be a squirrel. But it might just as well be a mountain lion or a bear. So why I was sitting there alone… that was actually sheer stupidity. But alas… I live to tell the story.

I have to admit, apart from what happened later, that just sitting there by myself, in the middle of nowhere, in such a vast natural, unpredictable area, was both exciting and extremely soothing. Poetic, almost. The fog on the tree line, the sounds… I would probably do this again, in spite of the sheer stupidity. Not only because it made me realize (once again) that we are so small on this planet. We are so insignificant, yet we leave such a devastating trail behind…

Then all of a sudden a piece of wood snapped. I won’t deny, I got slightly anxious. The sound came from the tree line I was looking at. I was sitting upwind (at least in my sheer stupidity I had kept that in mind), so my scent would not carry there and would not chase away or attract anything (hopefully). I was sitting quite far out, but after some more minutes of anticipation out of the fog comes this fantastic, majestic elk. I was so captured by the moment, that I initially forgot to keep my camera at the ready. It was a beautiful moment. Right in line with that poetic moment I described before.

When I got my head back in the present I shot a number of pictures. When I processed the images later, I wished I could’ve been closer to get a clearer image of the elk, but the longer I thought about it, the more I stepped off that. These two images with the elk in its natural habitat, recorded, for me at least, those emotions I felt, the poetic moment of it coming out of the fog, of it strutting along the tree line and looking towards me as if it knew I was sitting there. Any closer would’ve lost that view.

I was drawn to the black and white version for the longest time, but now that I’m revisiting this moment, and these photos, I don’t think the colour versions are all that bad after all. The header image, and the image below are the “fairly” straight out of camera NEFs. I only adjusted the exposure slightly and upped the contrast a bit.