Salmon Ruin sits above the San Juan River between Farmington and Bloomfield, New Mexico. Draw a line between Pueblo Alto in Chaco Canyon and Aztec Ruin further north, and Salmon will be on it.
The Salmon family ranched here during the early 1900s. While the Salmons found the location ideal for ranching, the Anasazi discovered that the San Juan River eroded away parts of the pueblo.
The Salmon family sold the ranch property to San Juan County, who preserved it and eventually hired Cynthia Irwin-Williams to excavate it in the 1970s.
Paul F. Reed edited Chaco’s Northern Prodigies (University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2008), a collection of papers on Salmon Ruin’s archeology. The book has a good description of the Ruin’s likely history and anthropological issues of Pueblo construction, residence and abandonment in the San Juan area. It’s much more reader-friendly than many other books written by archaelologists / anthropologists.
I used Canon’s 24mm f/3.5L TS-E lens for most of the pictures, and did exposure, white balance and contrast adjustment in Lightroom 2.4 afterward. Some of the images were shot with Zeiss’ 25mm f/2.8 Biogon T* ZM and Leica’s 35mm f/2 Summicrom-M ASPH. I could also have used a half-ND filter, sometimes called a grad filter.
You don’t need fancy Leica glass to capture quality images of ruins, but a tilt-shift lens keeps parallel lines parallel. I consider a TS-E or PC lens a must for any architectural images.
Mark: I’ve been to Salmon at least a half-dozen times, yet your pictures make me see things I’ve never seen before. How do you do that? I’m a word guy, not a picture/photography guy, and I’m always impressed when a good photograph captures something that, were I to describe it in words, might get rather philosophical or dreamy.
I appreciate your photos and your blog. Keep it up, man, keep it up.
–Jeff (@AnasaziStories on Twitter)
Jeff – thanks for appreciating the blog and pictures. Photographic creativity comes from 40 years of capturing images. It’s like anything else – learn the vocabulary well enough to mess around in it.
Start with basic rules of composition – things like avoiding bullseye subject placement, placing picture elements in thirds across the frame, getting the eyes sharp – and figure out when you can break them. Look at really good photography often, and apply what you see to your own work.
Some of it might come from years of classical piano training followed by songwriting and stage performance in rock bands, and at least a little came from a career designing analog chips in Silicon Valley. Combine creativity with discipline and a good photograph might come out.
You probably have some of the same elements in your life to make you a good writer.
Thanks again, Jeff. There’s more coming…
Howdy – brilliant piece, you now have a follower. ;>
I appreciate your wordpress theme, wherever do you down load it from?
WordPress theme is one of the defaults, with photographs and links added via hand-coded HTML.