It makes me very happy to see my blog slowly but surely populating again with mostly personal projects! This most recent one is one of which I am quite proud. Not so much in the actual end result of the photos, as in the intent with which I set out to take them. Too often, over the past seven years, it seemed as though I actively rejected the thought of taking my camera on trips with me - opting to reserve my creative energy for the photos I took during my work-week. All the while hearing the voices of past photography professors saying “don’t ever give up on your personal work”. We’ve had some rocky times in our relationship - photography and I, but my recent attitude towards surrender, acceptance, and non-striving has me trying one last time to make peace with my initial resistance.
Now without further ado, here are three panoramic views of the stunning Crater Lake in Crater Lake National Park. Each taken from a slightly different angle at a different time of the day.
This lake was unlike any other lake I had visited in my life thus far. It had an air of mystery attached to it, and a somewhat unsettling energy that was palpable. Multiple times, while gazing for extended amounts of time out over its impossibly blue waters, I found myself drawn a little too close to the edge. My cousin Hailey (my travel companion on this trip) echoed my feelings, and we shared feelings of almost missing the lake and needing to see it again after only turning a corner where it was no longer in view.
Although the entire park is essentially based around this one lake, there are countless ways to view and interpret each point in your travels around its circle. I found, as I have in the past, that while I enjoy the broad, grand perspective as much as the next person, I do particularly revel in honing in on the tiniest of details. An example of this being the brave little ground squirrel who posed for quite a long time for me on this rock. Don’t worry, I did not feed it.
Bright, bold color was something that quite obviously stood out to me at this park. The bluest of blues and the limiest of greens permeated this otherworldly landscape, and it was almost too easy to capture it within the eye of my camera’s lens. One of my favorite parts of this trip was finding out that I could fill my water bottle with the water from Crater Lake without any worry about filtering. The lake is fed only by rainfall and snowmelt, so it is completely potable and tastes amazing! On the green end of the spectrum, I also learned that the lichen growing on the trees that I captured here on Wizard Island (the little island at the lake’s interior) provides excellent air quality.
I will forever remember the many “faces” of Crater Lake, and forever appreciate the beauty of this wonderfully preserved piece of wild country. And to close on the personal note I opened with, I’ll remember it as the first trip that brought me back to being in the moment while also capturing the beauty of the adventures within my own life - two things I at one point believed could not coexist.
