Here's an image of mine from way back, September 2011. It was featured in 2012 as the 1st place prize winner of a local contest and served as the cover image for the Asheville tourism website around that time. https://www.exploreasheville.com/
The image is one of the lower waterfalls on The Dark Prong mountain stream, which I've visited periodically for intense sunrise-to-sunset adventure-meditations every year since 2009. I've been working on my project showcasing the stream in image/video form for nearly 10 years now; this image falls about 3 years in on that timeline. Maybe I'll release a polished project in time for the 10 year mark... I have so many hundreds of gigabytes of footage from hundreds of adventures up The Dark Prong.
Flipping through the hundreds of thousands of images I've made over the last 10 years is a strange kind of meditation, involving vivid flashbacks that trigger recollections of past dreams, struggles, intense adventures and former mindsets that seem absolutely foreign/unattainable to me at present. I am here now, and I can never be who I was before or find my way back to the places that shaped me. But sorting through my old images, I relive it for a moment. I can realize on a deeper level who I am and who I've been.
That reminds me-- I have a broken hard drive that served as storage for everything digital that I created during a 5 year period. Image, video, writings, all on a 320gb drive-- which was bigger than it sounds now 8 years ago. If I could recover the data from that drive, it would be quite an intense trip to sort through the images, art, writings that I birthed during the most intense psychological growth period of my life.
I don't know if I'll ever finish my Dark Prong project, and I don't know if I'll ever recover all the intense feeling stored on that hard drive.
That was a weird direction to take what was supposed to be a simple caption on an old waterfall image, but now, if only for a moment, I'm just slightly more aware of where I am now, and where I've been.
Steepshot