The Nightmare Tree

It’s Sunday morning and I need to take my cameras and go shoot something, anything.  I keep telling myself that it’s practice for my Kodak Medalist II camera, which I’m need to make this camera really work. Now let’s see if it can handle the toughest film in my arsenal – the wonky, gritty, angry Ukrainian Svema film.

I rolled a pack of Svema 32 onto a 620 spool and took a walk, Medalist in tow.

It was a cold, wet Sunday morning.  Perhaps there’s something in this weather that can get me a decent picture.  Maybe there’s something in the Svema film that can produce a photo that speaks to my soul.

And I came to this tree.

A leafless, bloomless, branch-gnarled tree in the middle of a field of brown-gold overgrowth.

Yeah. Let’s see if i can get a good shot of this.

And maybe I did.

With this Svema 32 film, I turned what would be a simple photo of a tree in a field, and made it a violent barrage of angular, jutting branches and stalks.  It’s reaching out from the black-grey ground, searching for souls to capture in its prickly twigs.

You think you can find an Instagram filter that can achieve this effect?  Keep looking.  This is pure, unadulterated emotion.  An emotion that straddles the line between insomnia and dreamtime.  An emotion that is equal parts fear and failure.

If I take photos like this now… hopefully it means I can put these images in my camera and not in my mind.

It’s tough now.

That’s why I have these cameras.

I need to use them to get my emotions out of my body and into something physical and tangible.

I need to control my equipment – my film cameras and my digital gear – and try to get the pain out of my body with every shutter press, with every photo scan, with every picture crop, with every extraction into a fully functional and viewable and developable construct.

I’m sure someone once said that you have to go through seven circles of darkness to reach the light.

Someone should have told him that those are very long circles to travel through.