Maine: Intimate Landscapes

Last night I processed five photos from my trip to Maine last September. I took some uninterrupted time to look at photos from the workshop that I had not picked during the first round of processing. Trying to see them more attentively, to see if there were important things I’d missed. And there were. A lot of them.

I credit Kai Hornung, whose wonderful introductory talk at Out Of Chicago Live 2026 (which I missed in February) I finally started watching this weekend. I watched just the first third of that talk and have been hearing “seek resonance, not reaction” in my head ever since.

The photos are “right” in that they make me feel the way I felt when I witnessed them. They just feel proper to me. I hope some of them also resonate with you, too.

Back Cove in Portland, watching the birds and the sunrise on the mud flats at low tide. I love watching the light changing across the water interposed between the darker ridges.

On this day of our workshop, it poured rain literally all day long, so hard we had to eat lunch in the vehicles. On one of our ventures out I found this brilliant sumac in fall colors on the edge of a dark and gloomy patch of forest and it just asked to be photographed.

The herring gull plus the wet rocks reflecting the stormy sky along a rocky beach stood out to me on another rainy day.

Another gull hunting at low tide in Back Cove. There was a lot of cloud cover and little sun in this shot so black and white felt more suited to show the pattern of small ridges and pools.

An ICM (intentional camera movement) photograph of the edge of a forest in Scarborough. The light coming in at the top of the tree canopy is just showing here. Looked like a painting to me, then and now.

When I finished working on these, I backed up from my standing desk to look at them and then went outside to walk around and watch the sunset and recover a bit. I felt kind of like I’d gotten away with something. It was weird, yes.

Eventually I went down a rabbit hole looking at handmade accordion books and thinking how my nature photos might look great in one of those if I could learn to make them and my husband came out to find me…