USA Trip - Favorite Photo
During my trip across the country, I took almost 2400 photos. I posted over 300 in this blog. There are many photos that I love from the trip, but this is my absolute favorite. In this post, I will share why this photo means so much to me. I hope you all find it interesting. This is a long post, but it is not so much a post about a photo but a post about me and the trip.
Because this photo is meaningful to me in so many ways, it is difficult to know where to start. So to make matters simple, I will start with the classic who, what, where, when, and how.
The "who" is me. I am the photographer, I am the bicyclist, and I am also the only person around for miles. This is my experience in the moment and no one else's. I believe that I rode about half of the trip by myself, and this was one of those moments. While other riders slip in and out of my story, my bike and my camera were always with me, my constant companions. To capture the heart of my journey in a single photo, it had to be just me, the bicycle, the camera, and the land.
The "what" is the road. If I am picking a single photo as a favorite from this trip, it has to include the road. The road was always present, all 3410 miles of it. For most of the trip, there were so many miles remaining that the road in front of me felt infinite. Even a single day's ride was too much to hold in my mind. Instead, each day was broken up into multiple segments, like the dashed line. I would not look at how many dashes there were in front of me, or how far away they still were. Instead, I would focus on the next one, a visible obtainable goal.
The "where" is on US 64 about 6 miles into Oklahoma from the western boarder with New Mexico. One week of the six week trip was spent in Oklahoma. Entering Oklahoma marked the beginning of the middle of our trip. This point in a long journey can often be the hardest. The excitement of the start has long since worn off, but one has not even reached the halfway point. The thrill of completion seems impossibly far in the future. To love the journey is to love the middle, not just the start and the end. I loved this trip in its entirety. There was never one time when I though, "Why am I doing this?" There was beauty around me every day.
The "when" is October 8th at 9:35 AM central time, Day 20 of the trip. Less specifically, but more importantly, this was the day I rode 100 miles in just under 3 hours and 52 minutes, bettering my fastest century by almost an hour. The title for my Day 20 blog was "Can you say crazy fast?" For me, whenever I see this photo, I will remember that for one day, I could fly on a bike. That ride was special. I will never again have such a perfect day for riding that fast for that long.
The "how" was riding directly in the center of the road, holding the camera between my aerobars, framing the picture using the LCD screen, all while riding at over 25 miles per hour. Most of the photos from the trip I took while riding my bike. I have a little bag on my top tube which stores my camera. While riding, I unzip the bag, slip my right wrist through the strap, turn on my camera, set the program mode, zoom to the level I want, then take some photos. Not surprisingly, many of these photos do not come out well, but I have become much more adept at shooting while riding over the past few years.
Each of the who, what, where, when, and how of this photo hold unique meaning for me that is central to my trip. When I look at this photo, they will be present in my mind, layers of richness that another observer of this photo will not experience. But I also love this image strictly on its own terms, in ways that others may also appreciate.
I love how the image is simultaneously so symmetrical but not. The sky is the top half of the image, but its color is a gradient, deepest blue in the upper left, whiter towards the ground, but whitest in the upper right due to the sun hidden out of the frame. The left and right side of road both are similar triangles of similar colors, but the right side is crop land and the left prairie. Tiny but different signs of technology appear on both sides of the road, with telephone poles on the left and the irrigation system on the right.
I love the textures of the photo. I can stare at the road and sense how it feels. It is a good road in that there are no major cracks or any potholes, but after a while, its rough surface will make a rider's hands tingle from vibrations. In a car, the road will be smooth, but there will be a distinct road hum from the tires. The corn crop stands tall, with the tips giving the edge of the horizon an indistinct feel compared to the prairie horizon. The grasses by the side of the road are bent over from the tailwind, their movement giving them a soft subtle blur. The sky, completely cloudless, but of changing color.
I love the dashed lines heading apparently infinitely into the distance. How many dashes can be made out? I can make out 10 for sure, but after that it feels more like my imagination is deciding which pixel is the start or end.
I love the color palate and the subtle variations: the blue and white of the sky, the yellowish stalks shifting to green leaves and back to the yellowish tips on the corn, the white tips of the roadside grasses.
And finally, I think this photo captures an essential part of Oklahoma: the plains, the crops, the prairie, and the sense that it goes on forever.
Thanks for reading. I would love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to send me an email, text, post a comment, etc.