The Emerald Isle
Back on the saddle again. I’m like Rip Van Wrinkle when semesters end - I wake up and return to the life I had before chasing shots. Things have changed during my slumber, though.
I downloaded a few Adobe updates and watched some videos on Photoshop and the generative AI features it offers now. It can completely change a photo and make any garbage image look stellar with a few prompts, and it makes me wonder if there's still reason to go into the field for photography. There are so many interesting things out there waiting to be uncovered though, and I can’t resist the temptation to find them. Sometimes the journey itself warrants the excursion, and not the photographic result.
I’m told that the best beach combing on Kodiak is after a good north eastern storm. There’s usually two tides per day, but the day I arrived there’s only one since the 2nd fell on 12:01am the following day.
One tide ebbs and flows though there is a timelessness to the ocean, and it laps at the land in the same manner it did when the first animals emerged from it and formed bones to walk with. Phytoplankton and oceanic microorganisms settle on the floor and aggregate into minerals as the land reconstitutes itself. We're riding waves of earth that move in geologic time. I’ll fall asleep again soon and slumber in the next semester, and for a bit longer when my time is over. But these tides will keep coming. I ought to carve my name onto the blank slate of a tombstone and stand it up outside my window as my own form of memento mori, and find inspiration in it’s inscription to not waste the time I have left.
