I’m in Asheville, NC, for the next several days, and I’ve already ascertained that the internet connection at my hotel is spotty and unreliable. Posting may be patchy to non-existent.
I will endeavour to take a bunch of photographs worth sharing with you—eventually anyway.
A Year Ago: This is Why
I really don’t expect anyone else to get it, but pictures like this are one big reason that I love to photograph…
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This was another case of me interrupting a perfectly lovely conversation at dinner. (Sorry, Steve!) Really, it’s a bad habit.
I started out with a vertical composition, because I liked the soft reflection of the glassware in the tabletop. But the background was distracting and the light was wrong. I ended up focusing on the stem of the glass. Something about it was compelling to me, I thought maybe it was the the distorted reflections.
It wasn’t until I got this image up on the screen back at my desk that I fell in love with the colors. And it wasn’t until I saw it big that I realized that what was catching my eye was not the symmetry of the internal reflections, but the jagged lightning course of the flaw, barely visible but fatal to the stem.
I wonder how long it will be before it fails.
A Year Ago: Making Something New
Nothing jolts me out of the doldrums faster than learning how to make something…
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See that one seagull with its tail-feathers pointed into the wind?
That’s me.
A Year Ago: Time for a Change
There was a moment when it seemed possible that Spring had actually arrived…
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Sometimes what’s called for is something completely different. Like, oh I don’t know, a travel poster graphic.
A Year Ago: Chess King
The poker-player in me admires the guys (and they’re pretty much always guys) who hustle chess in public parks…
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We have reached the apogee of Spring early this year. The normal parabolic curve of quickening, leafing, and flowering has seemingly become exponential, rocketing to (perhaps) an early flame-out.
This picture is from the earliest days of the season, before the crazy warmth and the explosive growth. This quiet beginning, with only the smallest hints of color and tentative beginnings is much more what we are accustomed to. In its modesty and secret working, it has an intense beauty of its own.
That Muse, she one impatient bitch.
There I am, enjoying an interesting conversation with dear friends, after a delightful meal. Minding my own business, you could say. My eye wanders to the back corner of the dining room. The early evening sun, not quite setting yet, is filtering through two rooms, catching on a vase, silhouetting some dried branches, and casting signficant shadows on a yellow sponge-painted wall.
Everything flies out of my head except the need to make the picture now, now, now.
I mumble “excuse me” and rush into the living room, fumble out my camera and wedge myself into the corner between the table and the piano, where the light is already changing, already fleeting. The sun is moving into the trees, the shadows have shifted. The vision is already blurred.
The settings in my camera are, as usual, all wrong for this shot. I have to change the ISO. I’ve got no depth of field. I make three exposures just because at this point, why not?
And just like that, the light is gone. Two minutes, at most.
Little known fact: there is no Greek Muse of painting—or by extension, photography. The visual arts weren’t considered dignified enough to get a Muse assigned to them. We’re just a bunch of cheap illusionists, appealing to the baser senses and instincts, apparently.
So I guess it’s wrong of me to blame my socially deviant behavior on a Muse. I have to take sole responsibility for my wayward impulses.
(Hmm. Maybe I can find another excuse.)
Oh wait. I think maybe I was just born this way.
To be open is to be vulnerable. To be seen is to face the prospect of being judged. To be transparent is to surrender the sleights and feints that distract and obscure the messy, human, magnificent truth.
To do these things willingly, to openly be who and how and what you are, requires tremendous strength and will and clarity. It is not natural to us to make ourselves radically visible. It requires a degree of self-knowledge and self-acceptance that rarely come without the experience of struggle and pain, and never without love. It demands the death of a constructed self, the cracking and removal of protective shell, the sloughing of camouflage from body, mind, and spirit. There will be consequences.
This is freedom. This is life. This is resurrection.
Alleluia!
I don’t have anything new for you today, but I recommend you have a look at these wonderful sand drawings by Andres Amador. The mind boggles at the attention to detail and precision under time-pressure that are required to make these works of art.
A Year Ago: A Simple Landscape
We emerged from more classic swamp territory to this broad green vista…
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