The Photograph
The 33rd Alain Briot Print of the Month photograph is titled Round Rock Clouds .

Round Rock is located near Chinle and I went there regularly when we lived in Canyon de Chelly. Unfortunately, without clouds Round Rock is, well, not much more than a rock on the horizon. A nice rock, but a rock nevertheless.

I was fortunate to be there on a cloudy day in my early attempts to photograph it. Unfortunately, all I had at the time was a 35mm camera and I just couldn't do it justice. It took me seven additional years until the same weather situation, more or less, occurred again in front of me. It isn't exactly like the first opportunity I had -it never is- but it is pretty darn good alright, as some people would say.

The fact is that clouds are necessary at times, with certain scenes and certain compositions, to take the image to the next level, to turn a nice scene into an image that lifts the soul. In a way, this image is uncommon in the context of my work, because I rarely feature that much sky in an image, even when there are clouds in the sky. In fact, there is just the minimum amount of land in this photograph. Less than that, and it will just be clouds. But, take out the land and you don't have a photograph of Round Rock. You just have a cloudscape.

As is often the case, it is a matter of how much and how little, a matter of balance.

As an aside, I have to mention that photographing moving clouds with 4x5 is quite challenging because you cannot see through the viewfinder once a film is inserted in the camera. Therefore, you have to make an educated guess about where the clouds are exactly, and of course you are never quite right. So what I did was shoot slightly wider than I wanted the composition to be, to make sure I had some room to work with, then crop the image ever so slightly when I worked on the final image. As it turns out, the image is slightly longer than the regular 4x5 ratio because I felt that this best expressed how the scene felt to me. In a large print, the movement in the clouds is absolutely stunning and so are the details near the horizon.

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This photograph is available matted, or matted and framed in a Mahogany Finish Frame. Below is a sample of the moulding. The mat is white, archival Bainbridge. Mounting is with hinged archival tape. All materials used are archival.

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