The thing about this kind of image is that it's timeless and dated all at once. These surroundings - the river and geese and rocks and mountains and sky are nearly eternal. It looks much like it has for the last few centuries. De Tocqueville travelled America in the 1850's and passed by this part of the Hudson. What he saw would be familiar to me. But this image - in its precise digital detail was possible in its specific form only quite recently. Colour film is relatively new. Recent enough that there are people walking around whose only images of infancy exist in black and white (if at all). Even when cameras where common, photos were still more rare than now. We didn't snap pictures of every damn thing we saw. Film was kind of expensive. And if you left the house with a single roll of film in your camera you were more selective. You tended to take just one or two shots of each highlight, in case something more spectacular came along later. Looking back over my youth and adolescence, the number of images that exists is finite and actually pretty limited. Now, that has changed. Every time I go for a run by the Hudson I notice the river and the sky and the mountains and nearly always take at least one picture. In another age, an artist would paint the scene or a writer would describe it. Does this endless flood of imagery we devote to our surroundings increase our appreciation for it or diminish it? Are we jaded or in a perpetual state of awe? All of us constantly composing our Odes to Grecian Urns every hour...