I’ve spent most of my adult life photographing people in connection to all sorts of matters and events. And while I’ve enjoyed all of it, nothing really beats being alone out in Big Bend and photographing what is tantamount to the beauty of silence.
Of course, photographing silence is a subjective description. But the total absence of human activity—or rather the sound of human activity—lends an added depth to the visual delight in this land of diverse extremes.
I walked down to the Rio Grande River—the very border of the United States and Mexico—and captured the above photograph of what I was hearing.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35.1 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 13 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.